The Senate this week has voted positively, and bi-partisanly on two proposals which, taken together, suggest that a kind of insanity has taken over Congress.
First, it voted to uphold a resolution introduced by Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden, that would divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions. There would be a Shiite region, a Sunni region, and a Kurdish region. The measure passed by a whopping 75-23 vote. Thankfully, the resolution is nonbinding. This means it has no force, but the vote is such a capitulation to the ethnic/sectarian rivalry that has consumed Iraq since the United States invasion that it essentially says, ‘Fine, you guys want to fight, we’ll separate you.’ And it essentially means: ‘You are no longer a united nation. You are now three tribes who cannot be trusted to live together.’ Of course, the fact that Sunni and Shia lived side by side, intermingled and intermarried, and generally prided themselves on being simply Iraqis before the United States destroyed their country and created sectarianism, is not mentioned in the resolution.
Be that as it may, our first question should be, "Who benefits?" As far as I can see, the plan would benefit mainly Israel. For from the very beginning, the chief instigator of the American attack on Iraq, and its chief beneficiary, was Israel. This was because Israel feared Iraq more than any other neighbor as a powerful Arab nation. And Israel has made clear over many many years that the one thing it will not abide is a powerful nation, other than itself, in the Middle East. To split Iraq into three separate regions, therefore, fits Israel’s overall design perfectly. Divide and conquer is and always has been its chief strategy. And of course, dividing and conquering is also the classic strategy of every empire, including the current American one.
That Israel cannot abide a powerful neighbor is also behind the second move in this week’s Senatorial clown show—-the move on Wednesday approving the nonbinding resolution to make U.S. policy one that "combats, contains, and rolls back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies." The measure was proposed by the reigning war mongers in the Senate, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. The Senate approved the measure by an equally large 76-22 majority.
And again we must ask, are these people mad? This is precisely the type of resolution that can be interpreted by our current Bomber-in-Chief as the authority he needs to launch the pre-emptive attack on Iran that many have been predicting.
And again, it is Israel which stands to benefit—-at least in the short run. For once again, we have a nation, Iran, which has grown powerful because of the ongoing American fiasco in Iraq, and which now can be characterized as a direct threat to Israel’s existence (an Israel, it should be noted, armed to the teeth with hundreds of nuclear weapons and no inspections because it simply refused to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty). Democrat (at least putatively) Lieberman and Republican Kyl, and increasingly the Bush Administration, not to mention the Israeli government, have been propagandizing about that "growing nuclear threat" for months now. And the accusations resemble nothing so much as the similarly dire warnings about Iraqi nuclear threats to the U.S. and its "allies" (i.e. Israel) before the bloody American invasion in 2003.
The truth of the matter is that no one has yet produced a shred of actionable evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons, or arming Iraqis, or planning to invade Israel. If anyone had such evidence, it surely would have been produced before now. The whole thing is preposterous. Not to mention dangerous. As Senator Jim Webb of Virginia said on Wednesday in his statement opposing the resolution:
"This proposal … is Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream. It’s not a prescription for success. At best, it’s a deliberate attempt to divert attention from a failed diplomatic policy. At worst, it could be read as a back-door method of … gaining congressional validation for action without one hearing or without serious debate."
In other words, another invasion, to divert attention from the first one, could seem reasonable to the madmen in the White House. Now, with the Senate unable to agree on any way forward in Iraq, it apparently seems reasonable to no less than 76 Senators as well. Nevermind that an attack on Iran could ignite a regional holocaust. Nevermind that Iran is a sovereign nation, with a democratically elected president (one more legitimately elected than our own.) Nevermind that Iranian forces have invaded no one, attacked no one, whereas the United States is knee-deep in an illegal invasion and occupation that has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destroyed a country. The Senate, including dozens of Democrats, overwhelmingly approved the measure.
A Senate gone mad. How else can one interpret such psychotic dithering while Rome burns?
Lawrence DiStasi
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Monday, September 17, 2007
Monstrosity II
Though not exactly identical to what I had in mind with "Monstrosity I," the new book by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, also evokes the idea of the monstrous. This is especially true when one focuses on the source of the idea—-the shock treatments that were once the darling of the psychology establishment. The idea was simple: electroshocking a patient’s brain could so reconfigure the mental apparatus that whole areas of memory were wiped out. The intent was to regress the patient to a pre-verbal state where he or she might no longer control speech, or sometimes even excretory functions. The confused mental connections thought to be responsible for the mental illness were thereby wiped clean, and a new, better adaptation to the real world could take its place. This, at least, was the theory.
Even left to mental institutions, this was bad enough. The problem, as Klein points out, is that electroshock theory deeply impressed the dean of modern economics, Milton Friedman. Friedman’s economic vision, therefore, integrated the idea of shock treatment, only in this case, applied to whole economic systems. As Klein points out (see "The Shock Doctrine," London Guardian, 9/8/07, reprinted on commondreams.org), in one of his key essays Friedman noted that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change." The way to cure the economic system of its insane notions of state control and welfare, therefore, was through shocks, either natural or man-made. Hence, natural disasters like Katrina, wars, terror attacks like 9/11, and so on could so shock a population that it would regress to childlike dependency and be amenable to harsh economic manipulations it would otherwise reject. Though Friedman argued to President Nixon for the shock to be applied to the United States, the President knew that it would lose him elections. So Nixon outsourced the experimental treatment to Chile. Once the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown, the coup-leader General Pinochet could administer the shock treatment. And he did. State-owned enterprises were privatized, American corporate giants were allowed to buy up the country’s assets, and Pinochet administered more persuasive shock via arrests, torture, and the wholesale murder of his opponents.
In more recent times, Klein argues, the shock treatment has formed the core of the George W. Bush presidency. The attack on the World Trade Center did the initial softening of the population. In its wake Bush was able to impose the type of draconian measures that Americans would have rejected in less terrifying times. More specifically, the unprovoked war on Iraq was to make that long-suffering nation the main demonstration project. ‘Shock and Awe’ terror bombing began the treatment. The looting of the country followed, with American troops simply standing by while a 4,000-year-old civlization was destroyed. This was quite OK for the Bushies: all that history was akin to the noxious delusions that schizophrenics carry in their brains, and which are better off being shocked away. Paul Bremer’s provisional authority then extended the process—-wiping out the entire civil service and military systems via de-Baathification, and ringing in the new free-market utopia with his announcement that Iraq was "open for business" to multinational corporations. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be killed in the process, that thousands of recalcitrants who objected would be subjected to even greater "shock treatment" in places like Abu Ghraib, that an entire national and cultural heritage would be burned and bombed out of existence, seemed not to matter.
Now we can see why, in their recent testimony before Congress, General Petraeus and especially Ambassador Crocker kept repeating the same mantra: this is a difficult and complex undertaking; we are bringing a new nation into being. This seemed, on the surface, just another instance of Bush Aministration hubris and propaganda, meant to blame everything wrong in Iraq on 35 years of Saddam Hussein. With Klein’s insight, however, as well as her further example of the ethnic cleansing going on in New Orleans after the "fortuitous" shock of Hurricane Katrina, we can see that it is much more. These zealots actually believe that they can wipe out an entire people’s way of life and being, and replace it with their beloved free-market (predicated, of course, on the notion that U.S. corporate insiders get special access in picking the new nation’s low-hanging economic fruit.) These boys in white coats actually believe they can remake the entire world if only the world can be sufficiently diverted with pap about democracy and freedom while the shocks are administered.
It is as monstrous an idea as any that economists and politicians have ever conceived—-and that includes the Nazis, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, and acknowledged monsters like Idi Amin. Moreso. Because in the past, the aim of monsters like Idi Amin was simply to intimidate those who might resist their control, or plunder. Now, with our modern monsters, the aim is to shock the world (or make use of natural shocks like Katrina) sufficiently to regress it to a drooling state of abject infantilism, and remake it as a globe full of mindless, manipulable consumers celebrating the bread and circuses that enslave them. Sadly, it seems that at least in the United States, the job is already well on its way.
Lawrence DiStasi
Even left to mental institutions, this was bad enough. The problem, as Klein points out, is that electroshock theory deeply impressed the dean of modern economics, Milton Friedman. Friedman’s economic vision, therefore, integrated the idea of shock treatment, only in this case, applied to whole economic systems. As Klein points out (see "The Shock Doctrine," London Guardian, 9/8/07, reprinted on commondreams.org), in one of his key essays Friedman noted that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change." The way to cure the economic system of its insane notions of state control and welfare, therefore, was through shocks, either natural or man-made. Hence, natural disasters like Katrina, wars, terror attacks like 9/11, and so on could so shock a population that it would regress to childlike dependency and be amenable to harsh economic manipulations it would otherwise reject. Though Friedman argued to President Nixon for the shock to be applied to the United States, the President knew that it would lose him elections. So Nixon outsourced the experimental treatment to Chile. Once the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown, the coup-leader General Pinochet could administer the shock treatment. And he did. State-owned enterprises were privatized, American corporate giants were allowed to buy up the country’s assets, and Pinochet administered more persuasive shock via arrests, torture, and the wholesale murder of his opponents.
In more recent times, Klein argues, the shock treatment has formed the core of the George W. Bush presidency. The attack on the World Trade Center did the initial softening of the population. In its wake Bush was able to impose the type of draconian measures that Americans would have rejected in less terrifying times. More specifically, the unprovoked war on Iraq was to make that long-suffering nation the main demonstration project. ‘Shock and Awe’ terror bombing began the treatment. The looting of the country followed, with American troops simply standing by while a 4,000-year-old civlization was destroyed. This was quite OK for the Bushies: all that history was akin to the noxious delusions that schizophrenics carry in their brains, and which are better off being shocked away. Paul Bremer’s provisional authority then extended the process—-wiping out the entire civil service and military systems via de-Baathification, and ringing in the new free-market utopia with his announcement that Iraq was "open for business" to multinational corporations. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be killed in the process, that thousands of recalcitrants who objected would be subjected to even greater "shock treatment" in places like Abu Ghraib, that an entire national and cultural heritage would be burned and bombed out of existence, seemed not to matter.
Now we can see why, in their recent testimony before Congress, General Petraeus and especially Ambassador Crocker kept repeating the same mantra: this is a difficult and complex undertaking; we are bringing a new nation into being. This seemed, on the surface, just another instance of Bush Aministration hubris and propaganda, meant to blame everything wrong in Iraq on 35 years of Saddam Hussein. With Klein’s insight, however, as well as her further example of the ethnic cleansing going on in New Orleans after the "fortuitous" shock of Hurricane Katrina, we can see that it is much more. These zealots actually believe that they can wipe out an entire people’s way of life and being, and replace it with their beloved free-market (predicated, of course, on the notion that U.S. corporate insiders get special access in picking the new nation’s low-hanging economic fruit.) These boys in white coats actually believe they can remake the entire world if only the world can be sufficiently diverted with pap about democracy and freedom while the shocks are administered.
It is as monstrous an idea as any that economists and politicians have ever conceived—-and that includes the Nazis, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, and acknowledged monsters like Idi Amin. Moreso. Because in the past, the aim of monsters like Idi Amin was simply to intimidate those who might resist their control, or plunder. Now, with our modern monsters, the aim is to shock the world (or make use of natural shocks like Katrina) sufficiently to regress it to a drooling state of abject infantilism, and remake it as a globe full of mindless, manipulable consumers celebrating the bread and circuses that enslave them. Sadly, it seems that at least in the United States, the job is already well on its way.
Lawrence DiStasi
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Goodbye Alberto
When Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez resigned recently, he said something that may have endeared him, as usual, to his master—George W. Bush—but should go down in history as perhaps one of the cheapest shots ever taken by a disgraced public official. Trying to persuade us how proud he was to have risen so high, even in the face of his public fall, Gonzalez said something like:
"My worst day as Attorney General was better than my father’s best day."
We were to fill in the blanks. Gonzalez, a Hispanic American, had risen from the lower classes to emerge as trusted counselor and all-around gofer to George W. Bush, first in Texas when Bush was governor, and then in the White House where he served as general counsel to the President, and then as Attorney General.
It is a saga that rings with all the music of the great American success story. Anyone can rise from humble origins, and Gonzalez had been born in a town outside Houston actually called Humble, Texas. His father, whose best day, "Fredo" assured us, never even approached his son’s worst day, had been a construction worker. Somehow he managed to provide Alberto with a good enough life to send him to Harvard Law School (after a stint at the Air Force Academy, which, like his master, he left before incurring any serious service obligations.) From there, it was up up and away for the Hispanic lawyer.
But let’s go back to the comment. 'Even my worst day was better than any day my father ever had.' What are we to think of a man who says that? Does he mean that the work he did—being George W. Bush’s chief ass-kisser and enabler, the author of Bush policies legitimizing torture and the greatest curtailment of American civil liberties since the Civil War—was more noble and worthy than any construction work his father ever did or could do? Is this what he meant? Or that his work at the Department of Justice in politicizing the American system of justice to skew it towards U.S. Attorneys who could corrupt the voting system, was more noble than his father’s work with his hands?
It is actually a far more revealing comment than Alberto could have intended. For what it bares for the world to see are the smarmy morals and Snopes-like allegiances that motivate this man. Far from respecting a hard-working father, Alberto sneers at his entire life as a life without merit. A life whose best day couldn’t even approach the worst day the son ever had. And we must assume that the son meant to include the recent weeks and months of utter humiliation as he was forced to testify before Congress to his utter incompetence, his utter inability to run what is arguably the most crucial department in the entire government, his utter failure to understand that justice in America means more than fixing things so that the boss can spit upon, fart upon, trample upon justice if he so chooses. Because he is the boss. He is the kingpin. He is the President, and he can do no wrong. This is what Alberto Gonzalez means by the glory that attended to even his worst day. The glory that attends to being George W. Bush’s ass-sniffing lapdog.
And all we can say in response to his public slur upon his father’s memory is that the man is a traitor at heart. A traitor to his father. A traitor to his ethnicity. A traitor to his people. A traitor to his class. A traitor who saw, early on, the opportunity that could arise from the willingness to endure any shame, betray any relative, enact any charade to demonstrate undying loyalty to one’s betters. And to enact it right through some of the most shameful public humiliation in recent memory.
Alas, poor Alberto. The fall of a sycophant is always both delicious, and sad. And in your case and your poor father’s, it is doubly delicious, and doubly sad.
Lawrence DiStasi
"My worst day as Attorney General was better than my father’s best day."
We were to fill in the blanks. Gonzalez, a Hispanic American, had risen from the lower classes to emerge as trusted counselor and all-around gofer to George W. Bush, first in Texas when Bush was governor, and then in the White House where he served as general counsel to the President, and then as Attorney General.
It is a saga that rings with all the music of the great American success story. Anyone can rise from humble origins, and Gonzalez had been born in a town outside Houston actually called Humble, Texas. His father, whose best day, "Fredo" assured us, never even approached his son’s worst day, had been a construction worker. Somehow he managed to provide Alberto with a good enough life to send him to Harvard Law School (after a stint at the Air Force Academy, which, like his master, he left before incurring any serious service obligations.) From there, it was up up and away for the Hispanic lawyer.
But let’s go back to the comment. 'Even my worst day was better than any day my father ever had.' What are we to think of a man who says that? Does he mean that the work he did—being George W. Bush’s chief ass-kisser and enabler, the author of Bush policies legitimizing torture and the greatest curtailment of American civil liberties since the Civil War—was more noble and worthy than any construction work his father ever did or could do? Is this what he meant? Or that his work at the Department of Justice in politicizing the American system of justice to skew it towards U.S. Attorneys who could corrupt the voting system, was more noble than his father’s work with his hands?
It is actually a far more revealing comment than Alberto could have intended. For what it bares for the world to see are the smarmy morals and Snopes-like allegiances that motivate this man. Far from respecting a hard-working father, Alberto sneers at his entire life as a life without merit. A life whose best day couldn’t even approach the worst day the son ever had. And we must assume that the son meant to include the recent weeks and months of utter humiliation as he was forced to testify before Congress to his utter incompetence, his utter inability to run what is arguably the most crucial department in the entire government, his utter failure to understand that justice in America means more than fixing things so that the boss can spit upon, fart upon, trample upon justice if he so chooses. Because he is the boss. He is the kingpin. He is the President, and he can do no wrong. This is what Alberto Gonzalez means by the glory that attended to even his worst day. The glory that attends to being George W. Bush’s ass-sniffing lapdog.
And all we can say in response to his public slur upon his father’s memory is that the man is a traitor at heart. A traitor to his father. A traitor to his ethnicity. A traitor to his people. A traitor to his class. A traitor who saw, early on, the opportunity that could arise from the willingness to endure any shame, betray any relative, enact any charade to demonstrate undying loyalty to one’s betters. And to enact it right through some of the most shameful public humiliation in recent memory.
Alas, poor Alberto. The fall of a sycophant is always both delicious, and sad. And in your case and your poor father’s, it is doubly delicious, and doubly sad.
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Cosmic Crimes
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about crimes for which there is no parallel, and thereby no adequate punishment. How do you punish someone for genocide? What is the punishment to fit the crime of the Holocaust?
But in truth, the punishment was really only an afterthought. What I’m stewing over is the cosmic nature of our current crimes themselves. I’ll address only three: the crime of governments that refuse to properly address global warming; the crime of George W. Bush in invading a country, Iraq, which had done nothing to the U.S.; and the crime of U.S. agribusiness in not just poisoning the soil, but also in imposing its several other practices which assault the very basis of life.
Let’s look at agribusiness first. Since roughly the end of World War II, chemical companies have promoted industrial-scale farming with horrific consequences for the food supply, and for the topsoil upon which all life depends. Huge machinery that requires special breeds of vegetables (like tomatoes with hard skins and delayed ripening schedules) that can survive the assault of automatic picking machines is only the beginning. Allied with these monsters are the pesticides that have been piled in increasing tonnages onto crops to combat the ever-evolving bugs and molds and fungi that feed upon them (about 400 gallons of gasoline per year per citizen--17% of our national energy use—goes to agriculture, with more than 1/4 of all farming energy going into synthetic fertilizers [see Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, p. 5]) The problem is that these poisons are lethal not just to the bugs, but to us as well. And though the chemical companies and our FDA have assured us that these poisons are benign, the truth is that our rivers, our groundwater, our oceans, and our soil are all becoming more and more lethal to life. The worst part may be the latest chapter in this war. Now, seed companies like Monsanto and DuPont have produced genetically modified varieties of crops whose chief advantage inheres in a gene that makes them "Roundup-ready." Corn, soybeans and canola with the new gene implanted can withstand what would otherwise be lethal doses of the pesticide Roundup. Mostly hybrids, these plants do not reproduce from their own seed. And so dependent upon pesticides have farmers become that most cannot survive without buying new GM seed each year from Monsanto (those who try to use seed from Monsanto crops are sued).
Manipulating life in this way, making seed a patented commodity rather than the basic mechanism of life itself (six companies now control 98% of all seeds), is a cosmic crime. Alarmingly, it is matched in the farm-animal world as well. Farm animals no longer reproduce on their own. Artificial insemination does the job. As Barbara Kingsolver points out in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the ability to reproduce has been bred out of most farm animals, particularly fowl. So, when she tried to get even her heritage-breed turkey hens to lay eggs, and then sit on them to incubate them, the hens were mystified and had no idea what to do. "Normal" turkeys, of course, never even get the chance to breed; for one thing, they’re so top-heavy from big-breast genes that they can hardly stand up. Kingsolver sums it up this way:
The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. (p. 322)
To my mind, this is putting it mildly. The corporate way of breeding farm animals—the cruelty involved in raising chickens, cattle, and other animals, the arrogance involved in seizing animal reproduction and molding it to the lust for profit—amounts to a cosmic crime. In a real way, this arrogance regarding the most fundamental acts of any form of life, eating and reproducing, leads inevitably to all other cosmic crimes.
The next crime is easily stated. The nation of Iraq had nothing whatever to do with the assault on the Twin Towers on 9/11. No Iraqis were among the hijackers. No link between the hijackers and Iraq has ever been found. And yet, the Bush administration consistently tries to link Iraq with this event in order to justify its war of aggression. Attacking a defenseless nation is an international crime, but it’s not quite cosmic. What makes the fiasco in Iraq cosmic in its criminality are the catastrophic impacts upon the Iraqi people. Even before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Iraq was a nation reeling from a dozen years of brutal sanctions that even Madelyn Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State under Clinton, admitted had resulted in the deaths of upwards of 500,000 Iraqi children. These child deaths directly followed the embargo on hospital equipment and all other materials that would allow Iraq to repair its infrastructure devastated by American bombing in 1992. Water treatment plants could not be repaired. The result, in a country that prior to 1992 had boasted of the highest standard of living and education levels in all the Middle East, was a reversion to Stone-Age conditions. Then in 2003 the U.S. invaded again. The death toll since then has been estimated at upwards of 600,000 Iraqis, with over 2 million Iraqis fleeing their country and another 2 to 3 million displaced within the country. This in a population of only 26 million. To call this anything but a war crime is pure propaganda. Add to it the devastation that will follow forever from the uranium-tipped munitions our forces have spread throughout that sorry country, not to mention the destruction of a wealth of art and artifacts testifying to the very birth of civilization, and you have a cosmic crime. It should be borne in mind, incidentally, that the United States is the only nation ever to drop a nuclear weapon on civilians, its sanctimonious hectoring of nations like Iran and Iraq for even considering the development of such weapons notwithstanding. U.S. hypocrisy is itself cosmic.
Cosmic crime number three: global warming. It has taken me a long time to view Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Even after all that has been written and said about it, however, its effect is still shattering. While the whole world and each one of us shares responsibility for the carbon released into the atmosphere, the criminality enters only when a nation not only refuses to do anything about it, but works night and day to confuse the public by ridiculing and undermining the scientific evidence. What more needs to be said? The Bush Administration chiefly, but every single member of the U.S. Congress which collectively colluded in refusing to sign the Kyoto Treaty as well, is guilty of a cosmic crime. This is not simply a crime against an individual committed by a criminal looking to feed a drug habit. This is not "mere" murder, or even the murder of 3,000 innocent civilians in the 9/11 attack. This is the murder of an entire planet, of that planet’s life-support system. The data visually attested to by Gore’s film was shocking, infuriating, conclusive. The planet’s ice is melting. The water upon which billions depend is in jeopardy. The climate upon which life itself depends is changing, has changed in clearly measurable ways. To fiddle while the planet burns is a crime. It is the ultimate cosmic crime.
And yet. We tolerate an administration which concerns itself more with the sex habits of teenagers than with the melting of the planet. We tolerate an administration which the record shows has consistently lied about this issue, has consistenly suppressed and distorted the information upon which the public depends to make a decision. We tolerate world leaders who refuse to address the greatest challenge to life humans have ever faced. The cosmic crime is theirs. But, in the end, it is also ours. For we sit in our comfortable living rooms allowing ourselves to be "entertained" by cosmic crap on our flat-screen TVs, our ever more powerful music-and-video-downloading computers, our Ipod-delivered "personal" music, rather than attend to the crisis threatening our very existence as a species.
How else to describe such crimes other than to say they are cosmic, they are terminal, and as such may be the last ones we will ever be allowed to commit.
Lawrence DiStasi
But in truth, the punishment was really only an afterthought. What I’m stewing over is the cosmic nature of our current crimes themselves. I’ll address only three: the crime of governments that refuse to properly address global warming; the crime of George W. Bush in invading a country, Iraq, which had done nothing to the U.S.; and the crime of U.S. agribusiness in not just poisoning the soil, but also in imposing its several other practices which assault the very basis of life.
Let’s look at agribusiness first. Since roughly the end of World War II, chemical companies have promoted industrial-scale farming with horrific consequences for the food supply, and for the topsoil upon which all life depends. Huge machinery that requires special breeds of vegetables (like tomatoes with hard skins and delayed ripening schedules) that can survive the assault of automatic picking machines is only the beginning. Allied with these monsters are the pesticides that have been piled in increasing tonnages onto crops to combat the ever-evolving bugs and molds and fungi that feed upon them (about 400 gallons of gasoline per year per citizen--17% of our national energy use—goes to agriculture, with more than 1/4 of all farming energy going into synthetic fertilizers [see Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, p. 5]) The problem is that these poisons are lethal not just to the bugs, but to us as well. And though the chemical companies and our FDA have assured us that these poisons are benign, the truth is that our rivers, our groundwater, our oceans, and our soil are all becoming more and more lethal to life. The worst part may be the latest chapter in this war. Now, seed companies like Monsanto and DuPont have produced genetically modified varieties of crops whose chief advantage inheres in a gene that makes them "Roundup-ready." Corn, soybeans and canola with the new gene implanted can withstand what would otherwise be lethal doses of the pesticide Roundup. Mostly hybrids, these plants do not reproduce from their own seed. And so dependent upon pesticides have farmers become that most cannot survive without buying new GM seed each year from Monsanto (those who try to use seed from Monsanto crops are sued).
Manipulating life in this way, making seed a patented commodity rather than the basic mechanism of life itself (six companies now control 98% of all seeds), is a cosmic crime. Alarmingly, it is matched in the farm-animal world as well. Farm animals no longer reproduce on their own. Artificial insemination does the job. As Barbara Kingsolver points out in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the ability to reproduce has been bred out of most farm animals, particularly fowl. So, when she tried to get even her heritage-breed turkey hens to lay eggs, and then sit on them to incubate them, the hens were mystified and had no idea what to do. "Normal" turkeys, of course, never even get the chance to breed; for one thing, they’re so top-heavy from big-breast genes that they can hardly stand up. Kingsolver sums it up this way:
The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. (p. 322)
To my mind, this is putting it mildly. The corporate way of breeding farm animals—the cruelty involved in raising chickens, cattle, and other animals, the arrogance involved in seizing animal reproduction and molding it to the lust for profit—amounts to a cosmic crime. In a real way, this arrogance regarding the most fundamental acts of any form of life, eating and reproducing, leads inevitably to all other cosmic crimes.
The next crime is easily stated. The nation of Iraq had nothing whatever to do with the assault on the Twin Towers on 9/11. No Iraqis were among the hijackers. No link between the hijackers and Iraq has ever been found. And yet, the Bush administration consistently tries to link Iraq with this event in order to justify its war of aggression. Attacking a defenseless nation is an international crime, but it’s not quite cosmic. What makes the fiasco in Iraq cosmic in its criminality are the catastrophic impacts upon the Iraqi people. Even before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Iraq was a nation reeling from a dozen years of brutal sanctions that even Madelyn Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State under Clinton, admitted had resulted in the deaths of upwards of 500,000 Iraqi children. These child deaths directly followed the embargo on hospital equipment and all other materials that would allow Iraq to repair its infrastructure devastated by American bombing in 1992. Water treatment plants could not be repaired. The result, in a country that prior to 1992 had boasted of the highest standard of living and education levels in all the Middle East, was a reversion to Stone-Age conditions. Then in 2003 the U.S. invaded again. The death toll since then has been estimated at upwards of 600,000 Iraqis, with over 2 million Iraqis fleeing their country and another 2 to 3 million displaced within the country. This in a population of only 26 million. To call this anything but a war crime is pure propaganda. Add to it the devastation that will follow forever from the uranium-tipped munitions our forces have spread throughout that sorry country, not to mention the destruction of a wealth of art and artifacts testifying to the very birth of civilization, and you have a cosmic crime. It should be borne in mind, incidentally, that the United States is the only nation ever to drop a nuclear weapon on civilians, its sanctimonious hectoring of nations like Iran and Iraq for even considering the development of such weapons notwithstanding. U.S. hypocrisy is itself cosmic.
Cosmic crime number three: global warming. It has taken me a long time to view Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Even after all that has been written and said about it, however, its effect is still shattering. While the whole world and each one of us shares responsibility for the carbon released into the atmosphere, the criminality enters only when a nation not only refuses to do anything about it, but works night and day to confuse the public by ridiculing and undermining the scientific evidence. What more needs to be said? The Bush Administration chiefly, but every single member of the U.S. Congress which collectively colluded in refusing to sign the Kyoto Treaty as well, is guilty of a cosmic crime. This is not simply a crime against an individual committed by a criminal looking to feed a drug habit. This is not "mere" murder, or even the murder of 3,000 innocent civilians in the 9/11 attack. This is the murder of an entire planet, of that planet’s life-support system. The data visually attested to by Gore’s film was shocking, infuriating, conclusive. The planet’s ice is melting. The water upon which billions depend is in jeopardy. The climate upon which life itself depends is changing, has changed in clearly measurable ways. To fiddle while the planet burns is a crime. It is the ultimate cosmic crime.
And yet. We tolerate an administration which concerns itself more with the sex habits of teenagers than with the melting of the planet. We tolerate an administration which the record shows has consistently lied about this issue, has consistenly suppressed and distorted the information upon which the public depends to make a decision. We tolerate world leaders who refuse to address the greatest challenge to life humans have ever faced. The cosmic crime is theirs. But, in the end, it is also ours. For we sit in our comfortable living rooms allowing ourselves to be "entertained" by cosmic crap on our flat-screen TVs, our ever more powerful music-and-video-downloading computers, our Ipod-delivered "personal" music, rather than attend to the crisis threatening our very existence as a species.
How else to describe such crimes other than to say they are cosmic, they are terminal, and as such may be the last ones we will ever be allowed to commit.
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, August 19, 2007
What Free Market?
Don’t you just love these Wall Streeters, these high-flying hedgers?
When they’re raking in billions in mortgage skullduggery, and a booming housing market makes them look like geniuses, they praise the system to the skies. Capitalism has proved its superiority. The Free Market is the system nature intended. Which is why Americans must never let socialism in any form sneak into our way of life: neither as socialized medicine, nor as handouts to the poor. Free Market medicine must be allowed to work. Though some may suffer from a "correction" here and there, this is the only medicine that ever has, or ever will produce a cure. It must be swallowed.
But then the housing market goes bad. People start to default on payments. "Subprime" loans are suddenly in the toilet, increasingly joined there by everyone, including the banks themselves. No one, not even the big boys, can get credit.
"Help," they cry. "The government must help. The Fed must help." And of course the government does, pouring billions of new currency into the system. And the Fed goes it one better, cutting interest rates despite its recent warnings about the dangers of inflation. And Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief, singing hosannas in the highest:
"The system works,"they crow. Look how we’re rebounding.
Excuse me? The system works? By bailing out the fools who pushed credit on everything with a pulse able to sign its name? By rewarding those who committed the unpardonable crime in capitalism—taking high-stakes, stupid risks? Isn’t capitalism supposed to punish precisely this kind of failure? Isn’t that what the free market is about—correcting by ruthless pruning every venture that does not turn a profit?
Well yes, but that’s when the mistakes are made by the lower classes. By the poor. By the underprivileged. When the gaffes are made by the ruling classes, however, by the brokers and bankers and CEO’s, well that’s a different story. Then the government is obliged to step in and save the system. Save those who run the system. Save those who game the system, but whose gaming is sanctioned because after all, they are the important ones, the prominent ones, the ones who own the ones who make the laws.
It is to laugh. It is to puke. It is to make one want to blow the house down, and the entire population out of its stupor. The system is rigged, folks. And all the rosy talk about free markets and our capitalist way of life—it’s all designed to keep the rubes running on the treadmill for as long as possible, while the money boys rake in the cash and salt it away in anticipation of what they know (because they’re doing all the stealing) must be the inevitable collapse.
Free market? More like a free-for-all. As long as you’re on the inside with your fingers in the till, that is.
Lawrence DiStasi
When they’re raking in billions in mortgage skullduggery, and a booming housing market makes them look like geniuses, they praise the system to the skies. Capitalism has proved its superiority. The Free Market is the system nature intended. Which is why Americans must never let socialism in any form sneak into our way of life: neither as socialized medicine, nor as handouts to the poor. Free Market medicine must be allowed to work. Though some may suffer from a "correction" here and there, this is the only medicine that ever has, or ever will produce a cure. It must be swallowed.
But then the housing market goes bad. People start to default on payments. "Subprime" loans are suddenly in the toilet, increasingly joined there by everyone, including the banks themselves. No one, not even the big boys, can get credit.
"Help," they cry. "The government must help. The Fed must help." And of course the government does, pouring billions of new currency into the system. And the Fed goes it one better, cutting interest rates despite its recent warnings about the dangers of inflation. And Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief, singing hosannas in the highest:
"The system works,"they crow. Look how we’re rebounding.
Excuse me? The system works? By bailing out the fools who pushed credit on everything with a pulse able to sign its name? By rewarding those who committed the unpardonable crime in capitalism—taking high-stakes, stupid risks? Isn’t capitalism supposed to punish precisely this kind of failure? Isn’t that what the free market is about—correcting by ruthless pruning every venture that does not turn a profit?
Well yes, but that’s when the mistakes are made by the lower classes. By the poor. By the underprivileged. When the gaffes are made by the ruling classes, however, by the brokers and bankers and CEO’s, well that’s a different story. Then the government is obliged to step in and save the system. Save those who run the system. Save those who game the system, but whose gaming is sanctioned because after all, they are the important ones, the prominent ones, the ones who own the ones who make the laws.
It is to laugh. It is to puke. It is to make one want to blow the house down, and the entire population out of its stupor. The system is rigged, folks. And all the rosy talk about free markets and our capitalist way of life—it’s all designed to keep the rubes running on the treadmill for as long as possible, while the money boys rake in the cash and salt it away in anticipation of what they know (because they’re doing all the stealing) must be the inevitable collapse.
Free market? More like a free-for-all. As long as you’re on the inside with your fingers in the till, that is.
Lawrence DiStasi
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Hard-Wired for Empathy
The dominant notion of modern economics, and hence of life itself, is that humans are basically selfish beings, interested only in advancing their own welfare. Even if altruism were to be granted, so this theory goes, it can be reduced to the same selfish dynamic: we help others only if we expect something in return, or to prop up our egos by telling ourselves how generous we are. The metaphor which sums up this attitude is the "Selfish Gene," first proposed by Richard Dawkins. To wit, we are run by our genes, and genes are designed only to reproduce more of themselves than other, competing genes. Advancing ourselves economically, usually at the expense of other competitors, is critical to this genetic race.
What follows from this is the alleged primacy of certain attitudes that benefit us in this race. Most prominent is the ability/need to ignore the welfare or feelings of others who may be affected by our striving for self-advancement. Be it businessmen who run companies or politicians who run governments, the direct effects which include killing or maiming or poisoning large numbers of people as well as the environment itself, all can comfort themselves by knowing that this is as it should be, must be. Everyone is required to look out for number one. To feel for those who may be hurt by one’s drive for dominance is to cripple one’s ability to thrive or even survive.
Since at least the Reagan era, and going back to the social Darwinists, all of this has become so self-evident as to need no proof or argument. It’s just the way it is. Just the way we are. Economics proves that we are economic beings.
Recently, however, studies by animal biologists and the results of brain imaging have begun to demonstrate that this view is partial at best, and, more likely, fundamentally wrong. Scientists are discovering that empathy for others, far from being an aberration, or the product of cultural/religious training, is built in not only to all humans, but probably all primates as well. We are empathetic and thereby altruistic not because we’ve internalized religiously-inculcated fears about everlasting punishment for the selfish, but rather because primates, and possibly many other animals, are hard-wired to have concern for the other. As Daniel Goleman puts it in his recent book, Social Intelligence (Bantam:2006), Our brain has been preset for kindness. Most of us will go to the aid of a screaming child without thinking. Our reactions happen instantly and without premeditation. As Goleman puts it, "That this flow from empathy to action occurs with such rapid automaticity hints at circuitry dedicated to this very sequence." (p. 60)
Franz deWaal is an animal biologist who has written about this propensity for empathy that we share with primates (Frans deWaal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton U Press: 2006) He argues specifically against what has been the dominant view among philosophers—to wit, that there exists between humans and all other animals a break or gap, a gap which is signaled most decisively by the fact that we humans exhibit morality, whereas animals don’t. The point has been made by philosophers and by virtually all religions: humans are special, we are the special creatures of God, and as such, fundamentally different and separate from all other life. DeWaal, contrarily, argues that morality is a trait that has evolved, and like all other evolved traits, it has its origins in other (what we call "lower") forms of life. In this case, morality is an outgrowth of empathy, and empathy has now been observed widely among primates like chimpanzees. DeWaal cites some remarkable studies and observations to prove his point.
For example:
"Wechkin et. al (1964)...found that rhesus monkeys refuse to pull a chain that delivers food to themselves if doing so shocks a companion. One monkey stopped pulling for five days, and another one for twelve days after witnessing shock delivery to a companion. These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon another." (deWaal, p. 29.)
To be sure, as deWaal points out, the inhibition about hurting another monkey was greater among individuals who were familiar with each other. But the inhibition pertained even among unfamiliar individuals. Anyone who has read the famous Milgram experiments done at Yale in 1960-62 (students as "teachers" instructed to shock "learners" were quite willing to do so if they were authorized to shock their peers as part of a "learning experiment". See http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm), has to wonder if rhesus monkeys are not, in fact, more moral than humans.
DeWaal cites another observation that makes his point even more strongly. A female bonobo (a primate related to chimpanzees) was observed at an English zoo empathizing not with her own kind, but with a bird.
"One day, Kuni captured a starling. Out of fear that she might molest the stunned bird, which appeared undamaged, the keeper urged the ape to let it go...Kuni picked up the starling with one hand and climbed to the highest point of the highest tree where she wrapped her legs around the trunk so that she had both hands free to hold the bird. She then carefully unfolded its wings and spread them wide open, one wing in each hand, before throwing the bird as hard as she could towards the barrier of the enclosure. Unfortunately, it fell short and landed onto the bank of the moat where Kuni guarded it for a long time against a curious juvenile." (deWaal, p. 30)
DeWaal comments that what Kuni did was not only to empathize with another species, but conformed remarkably to what economist Adam Smith called "changing places with the sufferer." This is empathy, pure and simple. And in this case, it moves immediately to action—the attempt to help the bird fly, and then to guard it against harm.
DeWaal then cites one of Jane Goodall’s observations to the same effect:
"In some zoos, chimpanzees are kept on man-made islands surrounded by water-filled moats...Chimpanzees cannot swim and, unless they are rescued, will drown if they fall into deep water. Despite this, individuals have sometimes made heroic efforts to save companions from drowning--and were sometimes successful. One adult male lost his life as he tried to rescue a small infant whose incompetent mother had allowed it to fall into the water." (deWaal, p. 33)
DeWaal then goes on to cite a theory to account for this empathic behavior:
"...the core of the empathic capacity is a relatively simple mechanism that provides an observer (the "subject") with access to the emotional state of another (the "object") through the subject’s own neural and bodily representations." (deWaal, p. 37)
That is to say, when one animal sees another in distress, the neural and bodily representations of the first are automatically activated to match those of the second, i.e. the one in distress. The motor and autonomic systems (changes in heart rate, skin conductance, facial expression, body posture) of the two animals come into sync. As deWaal puts it:
"This activation allows the subject to get "under the skin" of the object, sharing its feelings and needs, which embodiment in turn fosters sympathy, compassion, and helping." (deWaal, p. 37)
Sympathy, compassion, and helping: are not these the essence of what we consider human, what we consider morality? This is precisely the case that deWaal makes. There exists in primates a simple "Perception-Action Mechanism which results in immediate, often unconscious state matching between individuals." According to deWaal, all higher levels of empathy (understanding the reasons for the other’s emotions; adopting the other’s perspective) build on this "hardwired basis."
It is precisely this "hardwired basis" for empathy that has been increasingly observed and isolated in the primate brain. Here we return to Goleman’s summary of recent research. In a chapter called "Neural Wi-Fi," Goleman relates the story of how brain researchers discovered, quite by accident, the phenomenon known as "mirror neurons." Neuroscientists were "mapping sensorimotor areas of monkeys’ brains by using electrodes so laser-thin they could be implanted in single brain cells, and seeing which cell lit up during a specific movement." This was remarkable enough. But, as Goleman tells it, the surprise came
"when a research assistant came back from a break eating an ice-cream cone. The scientists were astonished to see a sensorimotor cell activate as one monkey watched the assistant lift the cone to his lips. They were dumbfounded to find that a distinct set of neurons seemed to activate when the monkey merely observed another monkey--or one of the experimenters--making a given movement." (Goleman, p. 41)
These same "mirror neurons" were subsequently found in the human brain. In a 1999 study by W.D. Hutchinson and his colleagues, an electrode monitoring "a single neuron in an awake person" was observed to fire not just when "the person anticipated pain—a pinprick—but also when merely seeing someone else receive a pinprick." Goleman calls this a neural snapshot of primal empathy in action. And indeed it is. Because what these experiments are demonstrating is that human brains are hardwired to feel empathy for others even before our celebrated cerebral cortex—our thinking brain—is able to decide it would be a "moral" thing to do. As Giacomo Rizzolati, the Italian neuroscientist who discovered mirror neurons has recently put it: these systems "allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation; by feeling, not by thinking." (Giacomo Rizzolatti, in Sandra Blakeslee, "Cells that Read Minds," NY Times, 1/10/06; cited in Goleman, p. 43)
This attunement of humans, brain to brain, constitutes a literally mind-bending confirmation of the human (and primate) propensity to empathize, to resonate with the emotional or physical condition of an other. Much of the primal activity seems to take place in the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with emotions and feelings like anger and fear. If a research subject is shown a photograph of a human face expressing fear, the amygdala instantly reacts to mimic the same fear. Goleman refers to this (especially in its usual face-to-face occurrence) as "contagion" between brains:
"Moments of contagion represent a remarkable neural event: the formation between two brains of a functional link, a feedback loop that crosses the skin-and-skull barrier between bodies." (Goleman, p. 39)
This can also be described as resonance, the "sympathetic vibration" of two brains matching each other "outside our awareness." The fact that it requires no attention or intention is a testament to the sheer speed of this brain matching:
"…the amygdala spots signs of fear in someone’s face with remarkable speed, picking it up in a glimpse as quick as 33 milliseconds, and in some people even in a mere 17 milliseconds (less than 2/100ths of a second.) This quick read attests to the hyperspeed of the low road, so fast that the conscious mind remains oblivious to that perception..."(Goleman, p. 40).
Thus the examples cited at the outset: when we see someone in distress, the hardwired parts of our brain resonate to match that distress, and we are moved to empathy, compassion, and helpful action. As Goleman concludes, though the Media constantly bombard us with examples of selfishness, indifference to suffering, and cruelty, the actual ratio of benevolence to meanness on any given day is overwhelmingly positive.
The impact of these studies seems to me profound. It is not "natural," as we are constantly told, to be selfish, rapacious humans necessarily indifferent to the suffering caused by our drive to "have it all now." Even rhesus monkeys will refuse to accept rewards if it means causing pain to another monkey. Nor is it natural or even tolerable to the average human being to don a military outfit and execute orders to kill, maim, torture or vaporize other human beings. Doing so requires the cerebral cortex to override, blunt, and even disable the natural human tendency to empathize with another’s pain. It requires some leader or group of leaders to assure his soldiers that the other is evil, and therefore undeserving of our empathy or consideration.
From a more positive angle, brain studies cited by the Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard in his book Happiness (Little Brown: 2003), indicate that, in fact, empathy, compassion, and altruism are the source of brain activity of a type that Ricard associates with "happiness." He cites Richard Davidson’s report that,
"During meditation on compassion, most experienced meditators showed a dramatic increase in the high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves, "of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature." (Ricard, p. 191)
These gamma waves are focused in a part of the brain called the left middle frontal gyrus. Here is what Ricard, himself a former cell biologist, writes about this activity:
"Davidson’s research had already shown that this part of the brain is a focal point of positive emotions and that fluctuations in its balance are generally modest. But the data drawn from the experiments with meditators were striking. As they began meditating on compassion, an extraordinary increase of left prefrontal activity was registered. Compassion, the very act of feeling concern for other people’s well-being, appears to be one of the positive emotions, like joy and enthusiasm." (Ricard, p. 194)
What Ricard adds to the above discussion of empathy, then, is that not only are humans hardwired for empathy, but that empathy and compassion for others—which lead directly to helping others, or altruism—form the true basis for human happiness. Happiness to Ricard does not mean pleasure, usually for ourselves. For though we can gain some short-term pleasure at the expense of others, we cannot gain lasting happiness thereby. Real happiness, according to Ricard’s study of it, is literally equivalent to altruism. Which is to say, by acting on our brain’s hardwired structure to exhibit concern for the wellbeing of others, we remain true to our real, our evolved human nature. As Ricard summarizes it:
"Living in harmony with that nature sustains the joy of life, while rejecting it leads to chronic dissatisfaction." (Ricard, p. 204)
Lawrence DiStasi
(NB: my interest in empathy was sparked by Gary Olson’s splendid article, "Hard-Wired for Moral Politics: Neuroscience and Empathy," Znet, May 20, 2007. I recommend it highly for a more wide-ranging discussion of the issues sketched here. See it at www.znet.org.)
What follows from this is the alleged primacy of certain attitudes that benefit us in this race. Most prominent is the ability/need to ignore the welfare or feelings of others who may be affected by our striving for self-advancement. Be it businessmen who run companies or politicians who run governments, the direct effects which include killing or maiming or poisoning large numbers of people as well as the environment itself, all can comfort themselves by knowing that this is as it should be, must be. Everyone is required to look out for number one. To feel for those who may be hurt by one’s drive for dominance is to cripple one’s ability to thrive or even survive.
Since at least the Reagan era, and going back to the social Darwinists, all of this has become so self-evident as to need no proof or argument. It’s just the way it is. Just the way we are. Economics proves that we are economic beings.
Recently, however, studies by animal biologists and the results of brain imaging have begun to demonstrate that this view is partial at best, and, more likely, fundamentally wrong. Scientists are discovering that empathy for others, far from being an aberration, or the product of cultural/religious training, is built in not only to all humans, but probably all primates as well. We are empathetic and thereby altruistic not because we’ve internalized religiously-inculcated fears about everlasting punishment for the selfish, but rather because primates, and possibly many other animals, are hard-wired to have concern for the other. As Daniel Goleman puts it in his recent book, Social Intelligence (Bantam:2006), Our brain has been preset for kindness. Most of us will go to the aid of a screaming child without thinking. Our reactions happen instantly and without premeditation. As Goleman puts it, "That this flow from empathy to action occurs with such rapid automaticity hints at circuitry dedicated to this very sequence." (p. 60)
Franz deWaal is an animal biologist who has written about this propensity for empathy that we share with primates (Frans deWaal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton U Press: 2006) He argues specifically against what has been the dominant view among philosophers—to wit, that there exists between humans and all other animals a break or gap, a gap which is signaled most decisively by the fact that we humans exhibit morality, whereas animals don’t. The point has been made by philosophers and by virtually all religions: humans are special, we are the special creatures of God, and as such, fundamentally different and separate from all other life. DeWaal, contrarily, argues that morality is a trait that has evolved, and like all other evolved traits, it has its origins in other (what we call "lower") forms of life. In this case, morality is an outgrowth of empathy, and empathy has now been observed widely among primates like chimpanzees. DeWaal cites some remarkable studies and observations to prove his point.
For example:
"Wechkin et. al (1964)...found that rhesus monkeys refuse to pull a chain that delivers food to themselves if doing so shocks a companion. One monkey stopped pulling for five days, and another one for twelve days after witnessing shock delivery to a companion. These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain upon another." (deWaal, p. 29.)
To be sure, as deWaal points out, the inhibition about hurting another monkey was greater among individuals who were familiar with each other. But the inhibition pertained even among unfamiliar individuals. Anyone who has read the famous Milgram experiments done at Yale in 1960-62 (students as "teachers" instructed to shock "learners" were quite willing to do so if they were authorized to shock their peers as part of a "learning experiment". See http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm), has to wonder if rhesus monkeys are not, in fact, more moral than humans.
DeWaal cites another observation that makes his point even more strongly. A female bonobo (a primate related to chimpanzees) was observed at an English zoo empathizing not with her own kind, but with a bird.
"One day, Kuni captured a starling. Out of fear that she might molest the stunned bird, which appeared undamaged, the keeper urged the ape to let it go...Kuni picked up the starling with one hand and climbed to the highest point of the highest tree where she wrapped her legs around the trunk so that she had both hands free to hold the bird. She then carefully unfolded its wings and spread them wide open, one wing in each hand, before throwing the bird as hard as she could towards the barrier of the enclosure. Unfortunately, it fell short and landed onto the bank of the moat where Kuni guarded it for a long time against a curious juvenile." (deWaal, p. 30)
DeWaal comments that what Kuni did was not only to empathize with another species, but conformed remarkably to what economist Adam Smith called "changing places with the sufferer." This is empathy, pure and simple. And in this case, it moves immediately to action—the attempt to help the bird fly, and then to guard it against harm.
DeWaal then cites one of Jane Goodall’s observations to the same effect:
"In some zoos, chimpanzees are kept on man-made islands surrounded by water-filled moats...Chimpanzees cannot swim and, unless they are rescued, will drown if they fall into deep water. Despite this, individuals have sometimes made heroic efforts to save companions from drowning--and were sometimes successful. One adult male lost his life as he tried to rescue a small infant whose incompetent mother had allowed it to fall into the water." (deWaal, p. 33)
DeWaal then goes on to cite a theory to account for this empathic behavior:
"...the core of the empathic capacity is a relatively simple mechanism that provides an observer (the "subject") with access to the emotional state of another (the "object") through the subject’s own neural and bodily representations." (deWaal, p. 37)
That is to say, when one animal sees another in distress, the neural and bodily representations of the first are automatically activated to match those of the second, i.e. the one in distress. The motor and autonomic systems (changes in heart rate, skin conductance, facial expression, body posture) of the two animals come into sync. As deWaal puts it:
"This activation allows the subject to get "under the skin" of the object, sharing its feelings and needs, which embodiment in turn fosters sympathy, compassion, and helping." (deWaal, p. 37)
Sympathy, compassion, and helping: are not these the essence of what we consider human, what we consider morality? This is precisely the case that deWaal makes. There exists in primates a simple "Perception-Action Mechanism which results in immediate, often unconscious state matching between individuals." According to deWaal, all higher levels of empathy (understanding the reasons for the other’s emotions; adopting the other’s perspective) build on this "hardwired basis."
It is precisely this "hardwired basis" for empathy that has been increasingly observed and isolated in the primate brain. Here we return to Goleman’s summary of recent research. In a chapter called "Neural Wi-Fi," Goleman relates the story of how brain researchers discovered, quite by accident, the phenomenon known as "mirror neurons." Neuroscientists were "mapping sensorimotor areas of monkeys’ brains by using electrodes so laser-thin they could be implanted in single brain cells, and seeing which cell lit up during a specific movement." This was remarkable enough. But, as Goleman tells it, the surprise came
"when a research assistant came back from a break eating an ice-cream cone. The scientists were astonished to see a sensorimotor cell activate as one monkey watched the assistant lift the cone to his lips. They were dumbfounded to find that a distinct set of neurons seemed to activate when the monkey merely observed another monkey--or one of the experimenters--making a given movement." (Goleman, p. 41)
These same "mirror neurons" were subsequently found in the human brain. In a 1999 study by W.D. Hutchinson and his colleagues, an electrode monitoring "a single neuron in an awake person" was observed to fire not just when "the person anticipated pain—a pinprick—but also when merely seeing someone else receive a pinprick." Goleman calls this a neural snapshot of primal empathy in action. And indeed it is. Because what these experiments are demonstrating is that human brains are hardwired to feel empathy for others even before our celebrated cerebral cortex—our thinking brain—is able to decide it would be a "moral" thing to do. As Giacomo Rizzolati, the Italian neuroscientist who discovered mirror neurons has recently put it: these systems "allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation; by feeling, not by thinking." (Giacomo Rizzolatti, in Sandra Blakeslee, "Cells that Read Minds," NY Times, 1/10/06; cited in Goleman, p. 43)
This attunement of humans, brain to brain, constitutes a literally mind-bending confirmation of the human (and primate) propensity to empathize, to resonate with the emotional or physical condition of an other. Much of the primal activity seems to take place in the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with emotions and feelings like anger and fear. If a research subject is shown a photograph of a human face expressing fear, the amygdala instantly reacts to mimic the same fear. Goleman refers to this (especially in its usual face-to-face occurrence) as "contagion" between brains:
"Moments of contagion represent a remarkable neural event: the formation between two brains of a functional link, a feedback loop that crosses the skin-and-skull barrier between bodies." (Goleman, p. 39)
This can also be described as resonance, the "sympathetic vibration" of two brains matching each other "outside our awareness." The fact that it requires no attention or intention is a testament to the sheer speed of this brain matching:
"…the amygdala spots signs of fear in someone’s face with remarkable speed, picking it up in a glimpse as quick as 33 milliseconds, and in some people even in a mere 17 milliseconds (less than 2/100ths of a second.) This quick read attests to the hyperspeed of the low road, so fast that the conscious mind remains oblivious to that perception..."(Goleman, p. 40).
Thus the examples cited at the outset: when we see someone in distress, the hardwired parts of our brain resonate to match that distress, and we are moved to empathy, compassion, and helpful action. As Goleman concludes, though the Media constantly bombard us with examples of selfishness, indifference to suffering, and cruelty, the actual ratio of benevolence to meanness on any given day is overwhelmingly positive.
The impact of these studies seems to me profound. It is not "natural," as we are constantly told, to be selfish, rapacious humans necessarily indifferent to the suffering caused by our drive to "have it all now." Even rhesus monkeys will refuse to accept rewards if it means causing pain to another monkey. Nor is it natural or even tolerable to the average human being to don a military outfit and execute orders to kill, maim, torture or vaporize other human beings. Doing so requires the cerebral cortex to override, blunt, and even disable the natural human tendency to empathize with another’s pain. It requires some leader or group of leaders to assure his soldiers that the other is evil, and therefore undeserving of our empathy or consideration.
From a more positive angle, brain studies cited by the Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard in his book Happiness (Little Brown: 2003), indicate that, in fact, empathy, compassion, and altruism are the source of brain activity of a type that Ricard associates with "happiness." He cites Richard Davidson’s report that,
"During meditation on compassion, most experienced meditators showed a dramatic increase in the high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves, "of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature." (Ricard, p. 191)
These gamma waves are focused in a part of the brain called the left middle frontal gyrus. Here is what Ricard, himself a former cell biologist, writes about this activity:
"Davidson’s research had already shown that this part of the brain is a focal point of positive emotions and that fluctuations in its balance are generally modest. But the data drawn from the experiments with meditators were striking. As they began meditating on compassion, an extraordinary increase of left prefrontal activity was registered. Compassion, the very act of feeling concern for other people’s well-being, appears to be one of the positive emotions, like joy and enthusiasm." (Ricard, p. 194)
What Ricard adds to the above discussion of empathy, then, is that not only are humans hardwired for empathy, but that empathy and compassion for others—which lead directly to helping others, or altruism—form the true basis for human happiness. Happiness to Ricard does not mean pleasure, usually for ourselves. For though we can gain some short-term pleasure at the expense of others, we cannot gain lasting happiness thereby. Real happiness, according to Ricard’s study of it, is literally equivalent to altruism. Which is to say, by acting on our brain’s hardwired structure to exhibit concern for the wellbeing of others, we remain true to our real, our evolved human nature. As Ricard summarizes it:
"Living in harmony with that nature sustains the joy of life, while rejecting it leads to chronic dissatisfaction." (Ricard, p. 204)
Lawrence DiStasi
(NB: my interest in empathy was sparked by Gary Olson’s splendid article, "Hard-Wired for Moral Politics: Neuroscience and Empathy," Znet, May 20, 2007. I recommend it highly for a more wide-ranging discussion of the issues sketched here. See it at www.znet.org.)
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Remember Mossadegh
One of the problems with Americans (and a boon to American governments intent on international mayhem) has always been our people’s total lack of historical memory. Thus, in the current climate of blaming everything going wrong in the Middle East on the "interference" of Iran; or the equally phony accusations that Iran is enriching uranium to build nuclear weapons; or the fallback accusation—that leaving Iraq now would pave the way for Iran to "take over" the southern half of Iraq; in this climate, Americans who remember anything remember only the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. They remember the humiliation that Iran imposed on the United States, its citizens paraded helpless before the world, its government helpless to rescue them. It is that memory that predisposes Americans to simply nod in agreement when any wild accusation is trotted out, for who could doubt that a nation controlled by fanatic "mullahs" would commit nefarious acts?
History, however, tells a different story. Iranian history, as recounted by Stephen Kinzer in his recent book Overthrow, points out that Iran in 1951 was a nation led by a democratically-elected and western-educated leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, who, as a fervent nationalist, aimed to bring his nation into the modern world. He would do this in the most open way—by nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, which had been controlled for years by British Petroleum. Accordingly, in Spring 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize its oil industry, even agreeing to compensate the British for the money they had spent constructing the oil infrastructure. But though the British had nationalized their own coal and steel industries, they considered a similar movement by a client state to be beyond the pale. It was a "breach of contractual obligations" which the former empire would do all in its power to prevent.
The first thing done, of course, was to assassinate the character of Mossadegh as "wild," "fanatical," and "gangster-like." The second was to enlist the aid of their American friends, now led by a new President, Dwight Eisenhower, with a new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. As Kinzer points out (p. 215), Dulles had a very firm view of the world and how it should be: "For us, there are two sorts of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others." Clearly, Mossadegh and Iran were "others." Kinzer provides chapter and verse of how Dulles and the CIA (headed by his brother, Allen) set about reversing the course set for Iran by Mossadegh. It was one of the most vicious, blatant and ultimately far-reaching examples of American imperial control of foreign nations on record, including the "blowback" effects we are still living with.
What the CIA under Kermit Roosevelt did was to set out to undermine and sabotage a legitimately-elected government, using every means at its disposal. First, they had to come up with a better reason to overthrow Mossadegh than nationalizing his own oil; they found it easily—he was "leading Iran toward Communism." For the US to overthrow him, therefore, was to stop the spread of Communism. Then the CIA set about the process of undermining Mossadegh’s government. As Kinzer puts it,
"Under their plan, the Americans would spend $150,000 to bribe journalists, editors, Islamic preachers, and other opinion leaders to ‘create, extend and enhance public hostility and distrust and fear of Mossadegh and his government.’ Then they would hire thugs to carry out ‘staged attacks’ on religious figures and other respected Iranians, making it seem that Mossadegh had ordered them…The plan budgeted another $11,000 per week, a great sum at that time, to bribe members of the Iranian parliament. On ‘coup day’ thousands of paid demonstrators would converge on parliament to demand that it dismiss Mossadegh….If Mossadegh resisted, military units loyal to General Zahedi (also in the pay of the CIA) would arrest him." (p. 123)
Of course, not all went exactly according to plan. Mossadegh discovered the plan and the bribes in parliament. He called a national referendum on a plan to dissolve parliament, and won. But the CIA and Kermit Roosevelt persisted. First they got the Shah of Iran to issue a decree dismissing Mossadegh, appointing General Zahedi as the new prime minister. But this plan, too, aborted when Mossadegh learned of the coup plot. When the shah heard this, he fled to Rome. Still, Kermit Roosevelt persisted in one last attempt. He muscled his Iranian agents into activating their plan to create chaos in Tehran. Gangs of paid thugs ran through the streets breaking windows, firing guns, beating strangers and shouting "Long live Mossadegh and Communism!" (p. 127.) Other thugs attacked the first ones, creating the image of civil war. Mossadegh refused to engage in street violence and sent his police simply to maintain order. Since many of his police were also in the pay of the CIA, the violence continued, and on August 19, Roosevelt sent thousands of demonstrators on a rampage, seizing Radio Tehran and setting fires. Bribed units of the army and police joined the mayhem, attacking government offices. Then, under Roosevelt’s guidance, General Zahedi drove to Radio Tehran and announced himself as the lawful prime minister under orders from the shah.
All that remained was to arrest Mohammad Mossadegh. Army tanks fired upon his house, his defenders fled, and he was arrested. Gen. Zahedi became prime minister, and the shah, still cowering in Rome, was persuaded to return and reclaim his peacock throne. The shah then tried Mossadegh for treason, imprisoned him for three years, and condemned him to permanent house arrest. He died in 1967 at the age of 85. The shah, meantime, became a staunch U.S. ally, protected for 30 years by a vicious, Mossad-trained secret police agency known as Savak.
All this was not without consequences. As Kinzer points out, "the role of the United States in overthrowing Mossadegh and its long, uncritical embrace of the shah" led not just to unprecedented anti-Americanism in the Middle East, but eventually to the Iranian revolution, the rule of the ayatollahs, and most of our current problems. One of Kinzer’s sources (Mostafa Zahrani, World Policy Journal, Summer 2002) puts it succinctly:
"…when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the US embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran..."
The chain of consequences can be continued almost indefinitely, especially in Iraq—where the U.S., to counter Iran, supported Saddam Hussein—and in Afghanistan, where the U.S., to entrap the Soviets in "their Vietnam," supported the mujahedeen fighters and one of their rising leaders, Osama bin Laden.
Now, when we hear United States policy makers on all sides insisting that Iran is the chief villain in the Middle East, perhaps we can see our own reflection. Perhaps we can even remind ourselves that if democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh had been allowed to maintain the legitimate changes he had instituted more than 50 years ago, we wouldn’t be watching the same, and now more calamitous scenario, play out yet again.
Lawrence DiStasi
History, however, tells a different story. Iranian history, as recounted by Stephen Kinzer in his recent book Overthrow, points out that Iran in 1951 was a nation led by a democratically-elected and western-educated leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, who, as a fervent nationalist, aimed to bring his nation into the modern world. He would do this in the most open way—by nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, which had been controlled for years by British Petroleum. Accordingly, in Spring 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize its oil industry, even agreeing to compensate the British for the money they had spent constructing the oil infrastructure. But though the British had nationalized their own coal and steel industries, they considered a similar movement by a client state to be beyond the pale. It was a "breach of contractual obligations" which the former empire would do all in its power to prevent.
The first thing done, of course, was to assassinate the character of Mossadegh as "wild," "fanatical," and "gangster-like." The second was to enlist the aid of their American friends, now led by a new President, Dwight Eisenhower, with a new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. As Kinzer points out (p. 215), Dulles had a very firm view of the world and how it should be: "For us, there are two sorts of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others." Clearly, Mossadegh and Iran were "others." Kinzer provides chapter and verse of how Dulles and the CIA (headed by his brother, Allen) set about reversing the course set for Iran by Mossadegh. It was one of the most vicious, blatant and ultimately far-reaching examples of American imperial control of foreign nations on record, including the "blowback" effects we are still living with.
What the CIA under Kermit Roosevelt did was to set out to undermine and sabotage a legitimately-elected government, using every means at its disposal. First, they had to come up with a better reason to overthrow Mossadegh than nationalizing his own oil; they found it easily—he was "leading Iran toward Communism." For the US to overthrow him, therefore, was to stop the spread of Communism. Then the CIA set about the process of undermining Mossadegh’s government. As Kinzer puts it,
"Under their plan, the Americans would spend $150,000 to bribe journalists, editors, Islamic preachers, and other opinion leaders to ‘create, extend and enhance public hostility and distrust and fear of Mossadegh and his government.’ Then they would hire thugs to carry out ‘staged attacks’ on religious figures and other respected Iranians, making it seem that Mossadegh had ordered them…The plan budgeted another $11,000 per week, a great sum at that time, to bribe members of the Iranian parliament. On ‘coup day’ thousands of paid demonstrators would converge on parliament to demand that it dismiss Mossadegh….If Mossadegh resisted, military units loyal to General Zahedi (also in the pay of the CIA) would arrest him." (p. 123)
Of course, not all went exactly according to plan. Mossadegh discovered the plan and the bribes in parliament. He called a national referendum on a plan to dissolve parliament, and won. But the CIA and Kermit Roosevelt persisted. First they got the Shah of Iran to issue a decree dismissing Mossadegh, appointing General Zahedi as the new prime minister. But this plan, too, aborted when Mossadegh learned of the coup plot. When the shah heard this, he fled to Rome. Still, Kermit Roosevelt persisted in one last attempt. He muscled his Iranian agents into activating their plan to create chaos in Tehran. Gangs of paid thugs ran through the streets breaking windows, firing guns, beating strangers and shouting "Long live Mossadegh and Communism!" (p. 127.) Other thugs attacked the first ones, creating the image of civil war. Mossadegh refused to engage in street violence and sent his police simply to maintain order. Since many of his police were also in the pay of the CIA, the violence continued, and on August 19, Roosevelt sent thousands of demonstrators on a rampage, seizing Radio Tehran and setting fires. Bribed units of the army and police joined the mayhem, attacking government offices. Then, under Roosevelt’s guidance, General Zahedi drove to Radio Tehran and announced himself as the lawful prime minister under orders from the shah.
All that remained was to arrest Mohammad Mossadegh. Army tanks fired upon his house, his defenders fled, and he was arrested. Gen. Zahedi became prime minister, and the shah, still cowering in Rome, was persuaded to return and reclaim his peacock throne. The shah then tried Mossadegh for treason, imprisoned him for three years, and condemned him to permanent house arrest. He died in 1967 at the age of 85. The shah, meantime, became a staunch U.S. ally, protected for 30 years by a vicious, Mossad-trained secret police agency known as Savak.
All this was not without consequences. As Kinzer points out, "the role of the United States in overthrowing Mossadegh and its long, uncritical embrace of the shah" led not just to unprecedented anti-Americanism in the Middle East, but eventually to the Iranian revolution, the rule of the ayatollahs, and most of our current problems. One of Kinzer’s sources (Mostafa Zahrani, World Policy Journal, Summer 2002) puts it succinctly:
"…when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the US embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran..."
The chain of consequences can be continued almost indefinitely, especially in Iraq—where the U.S., to counter Iran, supported Saddam Hussein—and in Afghanistan, where the U.S., to entrap the Soviets in "their Vietnam," supported the mujahedeen fighters and one of their rising leaders, Osama bin Laden.
Now, when we hear United States policy makers on all sides insisting that Iran is the chief villain in the Middle East, perhaps we can see our own reflection. Perhaps we can even remind ourselves that if democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh had been allowed to maintain the legitimate changes he had instituted more than 50 years ago, we wouldn’t be watching the same, and now more calamitous scenario, play out yet again.
Lawrence DiStasi
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