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In Defense of Democracy

In Defense of Democracy

It’s clear that something important has changed when a sitting American President attempts to overturn the results of a fair election. Refusing to accept the outcome, he is captured on tape asking the Secretary of State of Georgia to “find” eleven thousand votes to flip the election in his favor. When he realizes that he can’t change the vote totals, he calls on his followers to storm the Capitol in order to disrupt the legal process for the transfer of power. He coordinates this mob action with a scheme to replace the democratically elected electors with a set of fraudulently created ones.

This unprecedented attack on the constitutionally mandated process for the peaceful transfer of power was shocking. Perhaps even more shocking, was the fact that when an attempt was made in Congress to remove the President for his role in the mob attack, only seven Republican senators voted for his expulsion. All but two of these were defeated in the primaries that followed. It is clear, then, that this brazenly seditious behavior on the part of the President commands a sizeable degree of popular support. A big majority of the Republican Party, one of the two major political parties in America, has rallied around him and continues to uphold the fabrication that the 2020 election was stolen. Indeed, it has nominated him for the Presidency in 2024.

As disturbing as the behavior of the MAGA crowd is, the activity of the Heritage Foundation is perhaps even more unsettling. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank, is the driving force behind Project 2025. Project 2025 has pulled together a coalition of more than 100 conservative organizations (anti-abortion, anti-marriage equality, anti-black Lives Matter, anti-separation of church and state, anti-climate change action, etc.). The goal is to compile a database of conservative activists and right-wing policy proposals to be ready on day-one if Trump is elected. The non-partisan employees that currently staff the Federal bureaucracy, the Department of Justice, and the judiciary will be replaced by Trump loyalists. The idea is to waste no time in constructing a conservative infra-structure intended to permanently move the country to the right. This was precisely the game plan developed by the “populist” regimes in Hungary and Poland—both of which succeeded in undermining their country’s democratic institutions

Authoritarianism is not Just a Problem for the USA

Democratic-minded Americans need to face up to the seriousness of our situation. The challenges to democratic values and institutions are widespread: they are not confined to this country alone.

We tend to see Trump/populism as primarily a response to changing racial demographics in the USA. In the ten years from 2010 to 2020, the percentage of whites (Euro-Americans) in the US population dropped by 10% –from 72% to 62%. It is estimated that within 25 years, whites will constitute less than 50% of the population. California already has more Hispanics than whites. Right-wing and white nationalist forces are using this development to stoke fears, in particular, to push a “Great Replacement” narrative. This is a conspiracy theory that claims liberals (and Jews in particular) are seeking to consolidate their power by using immigrants of color to replace America’s traditional white ethnic base.

While this racial/demographic dimension clearly plays an important part in the MAGA movement, the roots of populism are deeper and more complex than this. Authoritarianism is not just a USA phenomenon: various antidemocratic currents are gaining strength in countries that do not have our demographic issues. In their “Democracy Report 2024,” the University of Gothenburg Democracy Project compiled an extensive record of current global political trends. A few things stand out.

For the last 15 years in a row (beginning in 2009), authoritarianism has grown at a faster pace than democracy. Today, 71% of the world’s population live under some form of authoritarian government. That is an increase of 48% from ten years ago. Liberal democracies account for only 13% of the world’s population. A large part of this statistical shift is due to the policies of the Modi government that have moved India (the second most populous nation) out of the liberal democratic orbit. But even if we were to set India aside, the political momentum in the world has been to the right.

This drift to the right is not confined to countries with poorly developed constitutional systems. Almost every country in Europe, generally considered a center of democratic governance, has seen the growth of right-wing populist parties. In some, like Hungary and Poland, these Parties have come to power through democratic elections. Once in power, however, they made changes in their constitutions that affected the judiciary, the media, and the electoral process itself. These changes succeeded in undermining the fairness of their electoral systems and made removing these parties very difficult. Other populist parties have won national elections (Italy, Portugal, and Spain), but have been restrained by the presence of functioning parliamentary oppositions. Nevertheless, almost every nation in Europe is experiencing growing right-wing, populist pressure–France, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Portugal, Netherlands, Slovakia, Czechia, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, etc. (Poland alone has moved in the opposite direction –to restore its wounded democracy)

Why is This Happening Now?

The world today is not Berlin of the 1930s. There is no Great Depression, mass impoverishment, nor millions of young men cashiered at the end of a world war without jobs or prospects of any kind—a potential source of shock-troops for the likes of a Mussolini or Hitler. Frankly, it does not appear that there is a simple, single explanation for why this shift to the right is taking place at this time. Rather, it appears to be the product of a confluence of a number of different problems. It would seem that it is the range and complexity of the issues facing humanity that has given rise to a search for some person or movement, some source of strength that can impose its will on an uncertain world.
Five developments have worked to create a climate that fosters authoritarianism.

1) The end of the Cold War. This is counter-intuitive. The victory of democratic capitalism was expected to bring about a more unified and democratic world community. Instead, it has become clear that the polarity that was at the center of the Cold War—the various red lines and balance of power dynamics—actually served to stabilize the international order. The break-up of the competing blocks has left nations more on their own, and has fostered the rise of regional powers (Russia, China, India, Turkey and Iran). This multi-polar world has witnessed an increase in nationalist tensions—and a drift towards war. (Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, re-armament of Japan, increased NATO defense spending, etc.)

2) Globalization and the scientific-technological revolution. The digital revolution and the deindustrialization of North America and much of Europe, has had a negative impact on the core of the old industrial working class. Competition with low wage regions, rising costs (housing, education, healthcare) and stagnant wages. These problems are exacerbated by the decline of trade unionism and traditional left, working- class political parties (communist and socialist).

Globalization also involves an increasing role for international economic institutions—the World Bank, IMF, and WTO; to which should be added the EC, European System of Central Banks, etc. Currently, the global economy is being largely managed by forces that lie beyond national boundaries and are independent of any truly effective democratic controls.

While globalization has multiplied world production, its negative effects on the working class and the critical role played by supra-national institutions, has engendered a nationalistic response. Populism, to a large extent, represents a coalition between a working class that is deeply suspicious of globalization and a network of corporate billionaires that fear international pressures to move away from fossil fuels towards a sustainable economy. The rise of nationalism, which supports the short-run interests of individual states against the long-run interests of the world community, threatens humanity’s ability to adapt to the ecological challenges we are facing.

3) Growing inequality of wealth. Globalization has greatly accelerated the unequal distribution of wealth. Today, the top 1% of the richest people in the world own assets valued at $38.7 trillion—45.8% of the planet’s privately owned wealth. Since 2020, the world’s billionaires have become 34% richer: their wealth increased three times faster than the rate of inflation. It is becoming increasingly clear that the presence of these vast personal fortunes is beginning to have an impact on the political processes of a number of nations. And that impact is overwhelmingly to the right.

There are 756 billionaires in the USA. In the 2020 midterms, they donated four times as much to the Republican Party ($80 million) as to the Democrats.

4) Global warming and the crisis with nature. The unfolding of a conflict with the natural world provides a backdrop to everything that is happening in the world today — killer heat waves, floods, droughts, wildfires, rising seas, etc. The immensity of the problem and the complexity of balancing short and long-run interests gives rise to a fatalistic pessimism that pervades much of world culture.

This pessimism feeds a cynical, me first, nationalistic response– particularly obvious in Russia, China, India and in Trump’s America.

5) Cultural transformation. It is important to recognize the critical role that cultural issues play in the emergence of contemporary authoritarianism. The last 50 years have seen dramatic changes in world culture—perhaps the most rapid and extensive changes in the history of humanity. Three elements in particular stand out. One is the gender revolution. The traditional division of labor between men and women is undergoing a radical and many-sided transformation. This lies at the center of a whole complex of issues having to do with family, marriage, reproductive processes (birth control, abortion), and sexuality (LGBTQ). These changes have added to a general sense of confusion and social turbulence. To many, they are liberating; to others, alarming.

The second has to do with the clash of modernity with traditional, religious, rural societies. Insecurity and cultural alienation has, in most cases, pushed rural communities to the right, where they have tended to join forces with disgruntled workers and the conservative billionaire club in diverting energies away from humanity’s real, and growing collective problems.

The third cultural issue has to do with race and immigration. Growing numbers of people are leaving dysfunctional and war-torn homelands in search of a better life. In general, they have migrated towards the more prosperous nations–which are mainly white liberal democracies. This is producing large scale contact between different races and cultures, which populist movements have used to stoke nationalist and racial tensions.

The rise of populist/nationalism could not have come at a worse time. Humanity is facing its gravest challenge—our out-of-control growth process is surpassing the carrying capacity of the planet. Our survival requires a massive, world-wide cooperative effort. Instead, we are breaking up into competing centers of power.

Seeing Minority as Part of the Majority

One of populism’s greatest strengths is the absence of a clear, alternative progressive vision of the future. In spite of a general opposition to communism’s authoritarian political system, there was widespread sympathy on the global left for the idea of a socialist economy. The poor economic performance of the communist countries, however, revealed deep, built-in shortcomings with totally collectivized economies. Every communist country has dropped its socialist model. Without socialism, the progressive camp found itself without a path to the future.

The Marxist revolutionary phase is over. Its demise has been accompanied by deep disillusionment. The idea that incremental reforms of capitalism might be the most realistic path forward does not appeal to a left that believed it could create a new world with one bold revolutionary stoke. Marx was wrong, a battered section of the left has concluded, there is no “there” there—no objective social reality we can mold to our liking. All that exists is a myriad of different perspectives battling to control the “discourse”–none able to address the real nuts and bolts of our predicament.

The failure of communism convinced many on the left that grand historical schemes—what they call metanarratives—are illusory: fantasies, doomed to fail. However, they propose, if we can’t raise everyone up, we can at least pull some unworthy folks down. The goal of the left, according to this perspective, should be to assist the most marginalized and vulnerable to resist their oppressors and tormentors—to strike out on behalf of racial minorities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, the homeless, the impoverished, the colonized, etc.

There is much to admire in this stance. But it raises a question. How does a struggle to improve the lot of a minority fit into the struggle to safeguard the rights and improve the lot of the majority? Attacks on democracy are aimed at depriving the majority of its ability to determine how a country should be governed. This is where we see the necessity for a metanarrative. Without a “Big Picture” that can encompass both the minority and the majority, it is not possible to see how their interests could be mutually supporting.

Some on the left see only conflict in the relationship between minorities and majorities. The equal rights sought by Black Americans, they argue, can only be acquired at the expense of whites—by depriving whites of their “privileges.” If equality for Blacks could only be won by taking something away from whites, whites would have no interest in supporting such a movement. Indeed, many of those who see things this way have concluded that oppressed minorities can only advance their interests by rejecting majority rule—by obstructing the exercise of democratic rights on the part of those they disagree with. Such rights, they insist, are simply “tools’ of majority power. As a result, they feel entitled to disrupt meetings and speaking events, and even, in some instances, to use physical intimidation. This is a serious mistake. Disparaging democratic protections discredits the left and contributes to the attack on democratic values. Indeed, it will be the marginalized and vulnerable that will suffer most from any eclipse of democratic rights.

I came of age in America during the 1950s and 1960s, and I have seen the effectiveness of a different approach–of a positive, inclusive, pride of country metanarrative.

By framing the struggle for equality as the realization of the promise of “liberty and justice for all” inscribed in our nation’s founding documents, the rights gained by Black Americans do not appear as something that was taken from somebody else. They are seen as measures that strengthen our democracy, that serve to create “a more perfect union” as called for in the Preamble to our Constitution. Seen in this light, the fight for equality appears as something that is in all our interests—indeed, a patriotic duty.

When we look at the real world we live in, we see example after example where the democratic rights gained by Black Americans have played a positive, indeed, critical role in providing a majority committed to the cause of democracy and instrumental in addressing the needs of all working-class Americans.

What Is Democracy?

In this section, I want to look at the nature of democracy. On first glance, this might seem unnecessary. Democracy is something that almost every American believes they understand. It’s always been here: it’s like the air we breathe. It’s about the right of a majority to choose its government through fair elections. That’s right. But more needs to be said. Elections and majority rule are vital components of democracy. But they do not give us the whole picture.

Democracies are complex: they have vulnerabilities and they need institutional reinforcement. The most common form of government in the world today calls itself a democracy. But it’s not the kind of democracy we in the USA are familiar with. It is, rather, something the Gothenburg Democracy Project calls “electoral autocracies.” This term describes the governments of countries like Iran, Russia, Hungary, Belarus, etc. They hold elections, but they control who can run for office, what kind of information the voters are able to receive, and how the elections are organized. This kind of “democracy” exists, basically, to place a “majority” stamp of approval on leaders who never have to face a real opposition. These are sham democracies.

What we think of as a “true” democracy is what the Democracy Project calls a “liberal democracy.” Liberal democracies, like electoral autocracies, are based on elections and majority rule. The difference lies in the steps they take to guarantee that the electoral process stays fair and open. Majority rule, if it exists without strong institutional supports, has a fatal weakness. There is danger that a given majority may seek to change the rules of the game and make it virtually impossible to vote them out of office. This has been the path followed by most electoral autocracies.

The distinguishing feature of a liberal democracy is that it puts limits on the power of the majority. it is designed to ensure that a minority will have the opportunity to become a majority. The key to this is a bill of rights. This was the great invention of the American constitutional system. The First Amendment guarantees three fundamental rights. 1) Freedom of speech and the press—freedom of information. 2) Freedom of assembly—the right to organize public meetings, and 3) Freedom to oppose the government–the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.

We tend to think of our Bill of Rights in individual terms—the guarantor of our personal liberties. But in equal measure, it guarantees our political rights—our ability to organize and challenge any given majority. Individual liberties and political rights are, in fact, indivisible.

The final piece of the liberal formula is an independent judiciary. This is necessary to ensure that the laws passed by the legislature do not infringe on the rights guaranteed under a nation’s bill of rights.

Almost no one will admit to being opposed to democracy. Instead, they attack different parts of the institutional package. The most common targets are 1) sources of information—the media, internet, means of communication, etc. In the name of opposing “fake news” they nationalize TV stations, close newspapers, and penalize addressing certain topics (Russia). 2) Undermining the independence of the judiciary is another favored approach. In Israel, for instance, the far-right majority in the Knesset argues that the Supreme Court is being “undemocratic” in blocking the extreme laws desired by the current legislative majority. Poland, Hungary, and Turkey have followed this path.

Defending Democracy

The American constitutional system was the first modern democracy. It is based on a brilliant document—but one that is not perfect. Our constitution emerged through a series of compromises, and it embodies a number of flaws. The most egregious was its accommodation to slavery. However, even after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, our democracy still falls short of a one-person, one-vote ideal. Its defects are clearly laid out in an excellent book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (The Tyranny of the Minority). Basically, small states and rural communities are favored over large states and urban areas. The authors estimate that the Democrats will have to win by a 4% margin in order to carry the Electoral College. The book highlights what is perhaps the greatest flaw of all—the difficulty in amending the Constitution. Ratification requires 2/3rds of the Congress and 4/5ths of the states. Something very hard to imagine.

So, here we are. We have got to win the popular vote by something like 6 million votes to avoid a Trump victory.

I believe we can do this if we can get the American people to understand what’s at stake in this election. Partly, this involves educating people about the political invention that truly made America great–and what it would mean to lose it. But alongside of this, we need to develop a vision of where this country needs to go –-what we could accomplish as a nation if we could address our problems as a united people.

But that’s another essay.

War in Gaza

Gaza and the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is perhaps, the most complex political dispute on the planet. What makes it so complicated is that both sides see themselves as victims, and each depicts the other as an aggressor. And on one level, both are right.

Israel was born of antisemitism. This is an important starting point for understanding the conflict. There is a tendency of many on the left to see Israel as simply an instrument of Western Colonialism. While certain Western Powers did play an important role in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, seeing Israel from this perspective fails to take into account the impulse that drove millions of Jews to seek refuge there.

Zionism, the idea that Jews should return to their ancient homeland in Palestine, was initiated by Theodor Herzl in response to the Dreyfuss Affair. Dreyfuss was a French Army officer who in 1894, was wrongfully accused of spying for the Germans. His trial and conviction revealed a shocking level of antisemitism, not only in the French military, but also, in the larger society. Herzl, an assimilated Austrian Jew, was devastated by this revelation. Doubting that Jews would ever be accepted as full citizens in European society, he issued a call for a First Zionist Congress to meet in Basel in 1897.

Zionism played an important role in the birth of Israel. But it actually came on the scene quite late. It did not have a major demographic impact in Palestine until the rise of Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s. In 1922, even with support from the controlling colonial power, Great Britain, Jews constituted only 11% of Palestine’s population. By 1931 that number had grown to 16%. After 1934 (when Hitler was appointed chancellor) immigration gained momentum, and by 1945, Jews constituted 31% of the population of Palestine–Muslims 60%, Christians 8%.

The end of WWII left millions of European Jews without homes or a homeland. Most did not want to return to countries that either could not protect them, or actively collaborated with the Nazis. This added a new dimension to Zionism. More than simply a “homeland,” a safe place to practice their religion, the creation of a Jewish state was increasingly seen as fundamental to their survival. The Holocaust had convinced most that they must acquire a capacity to defend themselves. They needed a state of their own. “Never again” would they allow themselves to be led like lambs to the slaughter.

That’s pretty much where the founders of Israel were coming from. A people traumatized by an organized, methodical effort of a major industrial power to physically exterminate them. Indeed, Israel declared its independence only three years after the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau. I do not see Zionism, as such, as the driving force in the creation of Israel. The main impulse was survival. Zionism provided a religious and mythological framework that connected a vast array of different nationalities to a cultural core and to a land from which they had been separated from for 2000 years. Religion in Israel is more than a belief system: it is a “deed” to the land.

The Palestinians

My involvement with this issue began in 1987 when a Palestinian friend invited me to travel to Jerusalem to spend a few weeks in their home. From what little I knew about this conflict, I was sympathetic to the Palestinians–but more sympathetic to the Israelis. I held a view that I believe was widespread in the American left at that time. I thought the Jews did what they had to do to secure their survival—what any people in their place would have done. At the same time, I understood that the creation of Israel inflicted a wound on the Palestinians. However, I saw the on-going conflict as due to the stubbornness of the Palestinians: their refusal to come to terms with the existence of Israel and their unwillingness to accept a solution that could be mutually acceptable.

My friend knew my thinking on the situation and organized a trip that would allow me to see things from a different perspective. We visited every major city and refugee camp in the West Bank and Gaza, and talked with a wide variety of different Palestinian activists and groups. It didn’t take long for me to recognize what was wrong with my previous point of view. I had not understood what the Palestinian reality was all about.

The debate over relative victim-hood disappears when you are over there. One people have all the rights and the power to enforce them—the other have no rights. They are essentially powerless. That doesn’t mean that Israelis are always abusing and mistreating Palestinians. It means that whenever there is a conflict between an Israeli and a Palestinian, it is ultimately up to some Israeli (police, judge, administrator, military officer, etc.) to decide how to settle it. That’s the bottom line to living under military occupation.

If military power, the ability to defend themselves and control their own fate, is the central motif of Israeli culture, powerlessness, the subjugation by outsiders, has been defining feature of Palestinian history. It began when their homeland, without their consultation or consent, was divided in two to provide the territory for the new Jewish state. They rejected the decision of a UN, which at that point in time, was dominated by a few major Western Powers. They attempted to resist militarily, but were overwhelmed in a short, one-sided war. By the end of that war, somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 thousand Palestinians lost their homes and ended up in refugee camps–many in Gaza. Indeed, the current population of Gaza consists largely of the descendants of those refugees.

The 1948 war—the “Nakba,” or catastrophe as the Palestinians call it–was only the beginning of their tragic saga. A critical turning point came in 1967 when another war resulted in the Israeli conquest of what was left of the land granted to the Palestinians by the UN resolution–the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. For the past 56 years, Israel has controlled these territories and has prevented the Palestinians from consolidating them into a nation. Instead, they have subjected them to one form or another of military rule.

Unless you are living and traveling with Palestinians, walking in their shoes so to speak, it is difficult to get a true picture of what a military occupation is all about. It is a life of constant harassment, humiliation, and insecurity. Military checkpoints are everywhere, making any trip to see friends or relatives an unpredictable and complicated hassle. Everything the Palestinians want to do—buying a new car, remodeling a kitchen or putting a new bathroom in one’s house, requires written permission: interminable paperwork. Decisions are arbitrary, and denials cannot be appealed.

And then there is the relentless encroachments of the settlers—bullying and threatening their way onto the land, seizing farmsteads and homes that lack “proper documentation” or are on “sacred” soil—mentioned in the Bible. Their threats are backed up with automatic weapons and the certainty that in stealing other’s lands, they are doing God’s work.

Many of the settlers are Americans. I talked with a number of them—one who had spent the summer of 1967 in San Francisco (the Summer of Love –“come to San Francisco with flowers in your hair”). They see immigration to Israel as “returning” to their real home–a place they have been disconnected from for over 2000 years. Apparently there is no statute of limitations when it comes to abandoned real estate in Palestine. They see the Palestinians who live in the villages and cities, the people whose parents, grandparents and distant ancestors built the houses, erected the fences and planted the olive trees, as “squatters:” illegitimate interlopers who need to find some other place to live.

Young Palestinian men are rounded up on the word of informants they cannot confront or cross-examine. 40% of Palestinian men have been arrested and held under one or another of the 1600 military orders that control every aspect of Palestinian life. When charged with a crime, Palestinians are tried in Israeli courts and can only be represented by Israeli lawyers. Because they are not citizens of Israel, they cannot vote in Israeli elections and thus, have no political or peaceful means to influence the laws and policies they have to live under.

Israelis like to talk about their generosity in granting Gaza self-rule. One only has to go to Gaza to see what a poor gift that was. Gaza is a little strip of desert surrounded by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. It has no natural resources and 96% of its water is undrinkable. It is one of the most densely populated places on earth, made up of impoverished war-refugees and their descendants. 80% of its residents live below the poverty line. It has been accurately described as an “open-air prison.” Israel did not give it—it dumped it.

A slow-burning fuse

Palestinians are not fools—they know what is going on. They have been haggling and negotiating with Israel since 1967 to get control over the lands taken in the war. Negotiating with Israel, according to a joke going around, is like this. Two men decide to have lunch together. They order a number of different plates, and at some point, they begin to argue over how to divide up the bill. While the argument is proceeding, one of the men begins eating off the plate of the other. That’s a pretty apt description of the Palestinian’s experience in negotiating with Israel.

Because I don’t want to write a book on this subject, I would like to end this essay with a few final thoughts.

1) For a historical overview, I would recommend reading Simha Flapan’s book—“The Birth of Israel: myths and realities.” He uses historical documents, dairies and personal papers to establish that Israel’s Zionist leadership –all of them, from Ben Gurion on– did not accept the boundaries laid down by the UN, but intended to eventually bring the whole of Palestine under Jewish control. That was, and still is, the Zionist vision of Israel. That is why Israel never published a map of its boundaries—leaving expansion open– and why it did everything in its power to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state—which would have set limits to its growth.

2) The establishment of settlements, which began under Begin, was aimed at creating “facts on the ground.” The goal was (and is) to establish an irreversible process of Israeli takeover of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Israel has short-circuited the negotiation process—and has made creating a Palestinian state extremely difficult. Israel gobbled up the land while the two sides were supposed to be negotiating.

3) The new right-wing Israeli government is giving the green-light to settlement expansion.

4) The formation of an alliance between the USA, Saudi Arabia, and Israel threatens the one tool that Palestinians can use as leverage in their struggle with Israel—the ability to deny Israel full diplomatic relations with the Arab World until the Israelis come to terms with the Palestinians. This new alliance promises to side-line the Palestinian issue, reorganizing power relations in the Middle East without solving the Palestinian problem.

How to Look at Hamas

All of the above was well known to Hamas. They acted to derail the process towards a new political alignment in the Middle East. I believe they knew exactly what they were doing. They consciously and deliberately designed a horrific crime against unarmed Israeli civilians. They knew that this would cut to the core of Israel’s very purpose for being—a state to protect its people from slaughter. They knew that Israel would not be able to control its rage and desire for revenge, and that in order to destroy Hamas, who was ensconced in the population centers of Gaza, it would have to deal a devastating blow to innocent Palestinians. To punish the murderers, the Israelis would have to become murderers. This would enrage the Arab and Muslim world, and bring an end to any efforts for a reconciliation with Israel.
So far, it looks like Hamas has achieved what it set out to accomplish.

Is Hamas to be congratulated? Do the ends justify the means? It appears that many on the left are prepared to accept Hamas’ slaughter of innocents, and to see their brutality as merely payback for past wrongs done by Israelis to Palestinians. Such thinking will spell the death of the left. The ends do not justify the means—the means determine the ends. Wanton brutality and inhumanity only begets more of the same. Many of us have lived long enough to see how movements that sought to embrace the highest human ideals were undermined by brutal methods—the purges of Stalin, the Cultural Revolution of Mao, and the killing fields of Pol Pot. In 1948, over 100 Palestinian villagers–men, women, and children–were slaughtered at Deir Yassin by the Irgun. And the Palestinians have never forgotten it. Just as the Israelis will never forget October 7. Reconciliation between these two peoples can never be built on acts of cruelty and brutality. Hamas is an outlaw movement. It must be held responsible for its crimes.

Without a higher moral vision, the left is just another player in an endless saga of bloodshed and suffering.

Intro to Blog

Introduction to Commentary on Contemporary Events

A new and different world is taking shape in the 21st century. It’s not the one we hoped for. It’s the one brought about by massive wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, floods, pandemics, and killer heat waves. Global warming is here and it’s killing us. But there is something else happening besides our painful reckoning with the natural world. While this other event may be less obvious, it is no less life-threatening. Right-wing social and political currents are creating roadblocks that hinder our capacity to resolve our conflict with nature.

Democracy is losing ground in a global struggle against authoritarianism. We, in the USA, are very much in the thick of this battle. Ten years ago, having elected a Black president, the idea that our democratic political system might descend into some form of despotism seemed out of the question. And yet, here we are—barely holding our own in a struggle against those who seek to undermine our institutions of popular self-rule. If the USA, the birthplace of democracy in the modern world, was to pass over to the dark side, the odds of humanity surviving our current challenges would be greatly diminished.

To some, this might sound like American exceptionalism—exaggerating our nation’s role in the world. That’s something we progressives have always disparaged. And with good reason. it has been important to challenge attitudes of American superiority: notions of entitlement that have led us to covet other nations’ resources and which have drawn us into one war after another. And frankly, progressives are not boosters. Our goal is to change things–make them better. As a result, we focus on our nation’s shortcomings rather than on its accomplishments.

But times change. There is still plenty in America that needs fixing. But we won’t be able to get to any of that if we don’t win the fight to preserve our democracy. And if we want to contribute to that effort, we are going to have to change the way we think.
To begin with, we need to recognize that things are not all one way or the other: not all good or all bad. Problems can actually be, and almost always are, complicated: they have more than one side or dimension. Yes, people are the products of their circumstances. But they are also the products of the choices they make. They can be both victims and perpetrators at the same time. That’s true of Russia as well as the homeless. True believers have a hard time with that. They want simple answers–a side they can support whole heartedly. But that’s not the way the world works.

The idea that everything must fit neatly into one category or another is an important part of the authoritarian playbook. Categorical thinking polarizes: it draws an indelible line between “us” from “them,” and facilitates the demonization of some “other”– liberals, gays, Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, feminists, etc. It draws attention away from the real problems that need to be addressed. The demagogue is more concerned that some teenage transexual might use the wrong bathroom than the fact that Florida might soon be washed over by a rising ocean.

As unlikely as it might have seemed a few years ago, we could lose this battle if we don’t develop a better understanding of the dynamics at play. And if we were to lose, if humanity became divided up into a collection of power-driven, ego-maniacal authoritarian states, an angry planet will take its revenge on its large-brained, but foolish progeny.

Start with Yourself

There is a basic rule I learned from my days as a political activist. If you want to change the way other people think, start by changing the way you think. Other people are not empty vessels waiting for you to enlighten them. They have attitudes and ideas that are based on their social connections and life experiences. While they may have things all mixed up, there is almost always some element of truth hiding in the chaotic underbrush. That’s where you want to begin. Rarely can peoples’ ideas be changed through a frontal assault. You have to get them to listen to you first.

Too many progressive suffer from an affliction that affects many of those who feel they have the moral high-ground—self-righteousness. Nothing polarizes more than an attitude of superiority. It’s a powerful tool if your goal is to humiliate and crush an enemy. But it’s the worse choice you can make if your goal is to find common ground.

In this section, I am going to write three essays in which I look at three complicated issues that are central to the current political debate in America. Getting these issues right, I am convinced, are critical if progressives wish to have a positive impact on their more conservative neighbors. We have to make changes in our selves: grow beyond the issues that defined the social and ideological conflicts of the 20th century. We are at a new stage of human development, and we need to do some catching up.

Progressives need to develop a new identity, a new way of thinking about who we are and how we fit into the world around us. We need to bridge the deep chasm that currently separates us from people who should be on our side. We like to talk about people voting against their self-interest. Well, it’s not simply a matter of voting against their self-interest: they are voting against us. They don’t like us. We need to think about that.

1) In the first essay, I am going to address the debate about the soul of America. Can the wellsprings of our nation be traced to the arrival of the first African slaves in 1619, as claimed in the provocative book by Nicole Hanna-Jones? Or should our roots be traced to the War for Independence and the creation of the modern world’s first constitutional democracy? If ever an issue cried out for moving beyond either/or, this is it. I believe getting this right is an important part of racial reconciliation.

2) In the second essay I want to look at how progressives understand the nature of the society we live in. Is our capitalist economic system the product of a conspiracy by the powerful to enrich themselves? Or did it evolve spontaneously because it was capable of addressing certain problems better than any other system?

Did we learn anything from the efforts to build socialism in the 20th century? I will argue that the Marxist model of socialism was seriously flawed and unworkable. It is not possible at this stage of development to do away with a market and all forms of private property. However, our current conflict with nature makes clear that humanity must develop a way to collectively manage its economic development. Marx was wrong about the specifics, but he was right about the need for a new social contract that can enable humanity to cooperate at a higher level.

Holding on to discredited, fanciful models of socialism, however, is hindering our search for a realistic path to the future.

3) In the third essay, I want to take a look at how progressives look at America. Pride in, and love for one’s country is a powerful force. However, it can easily be incorporated into an authoritarian agenda. Currently, nationalism is on the rise throughout the world, and it is being pitted against the universal values humanity needs to meet our global challenges.

However, America is a unique nation. Citizenship is not defined by membership in some tribe or ethnicity. Every immigrant acquires citizenship by swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—a covenant that provides every citizen with equal protection under the law and an equal voice in choosing their government. While in practice our country may fall short of its ideals, nevertheless, working with the freedoms embodied in our constitution, Americans have been able to consistently extend the scope of their rights and liberties.

Currently, our democratic freedoms are threatened by people who push a different narrative of our nation’s founding and history. By seeing only the negative and denying the positive, progressives enable the right to monopolize the pride and affection that people naturally feel toward their homeland. We need a progressive nationalism—one that embraces the universal principles that were written into our founding documents and that have, throughout our history, served to inspire those who sought to realize them

The Nature Of Human Intelligence

How Rational Are We? The Need to Better Understand the Nature of Human Intelligence

Introduction

How smart are we? Throughout this website I argue that humans are a unique kind of being: an intelligent life-form. That doesn’t mean we always have the right answers or make smart choices. It means that unlike other animals, our survival does not depend upon the physical capacities that are built into our organisms–claws, canines, wings, gills, etc. Rather, we rely on our ability to understand cause and effect: a level of intelligence that gives us the ability to use nature’s processes for our own ends.

We clearly are intelligent. The gains made by contemporary science—genetic engineering, hydrogen fusion, supercomputers, etc.—are truly cognitive marvels. Ironically, it is the incomparable powers that our intelligence has made possible that pose the greatest threat to our survival. We have been too successful. Our out-of-control growth process is taxing the carrying capacity of our planet. We are good at pushing the process forward, but we haven’t figured out how to bring it under control. The trade-offs that would involve are the true measure of rationality. And frankly, this is not rationality’s finest hour.

On top of climate-change denial, we have seen massive, conspiracy-fueled resistance to public health measures during the pandemic. Currently, in the USA, millions of literate, 21st century Homo sapiens have embraced bizarre narratives– Pizza Gate, QAnon, and the like. A sizeable slice of the public is prepared to accept any fantasy that appears to support their side in a political and culture war that is basically unconnected to the real problems facing humanity. And this lunacy is being stoked by a demagogue who has given the nation a crash course in denial and deceit.

All of this raises the question—how rational are we? During the 19th century, human intelligence was seen as an irrepressible force, a power that would inevitably give rise to a rational and more humane world. Today, however, faced with an ever-growing number of intractable problems and self-inflicted wounds, that opinion has fallen out of favor. Doubts about our rational powers are gaining strength and the future, as popular culture informs us, is almost universally seen as dystopian.

This disillusionment and loss of faith in our rational powers has to be concerning. Intelligence is our species’ ticket to the future: it’s how we survive. If we are not up to the mental challenges we face, we won’t have a future. As we know from personal experience, we humans are affected by what we think about ourselves. If humanity loses faith in its intellectual capacities, its ability to make the effort that the future requires will be severely compromised. An army that doesn’t believe it can win, has already lost.

Our species’ intelligence is undeniable. At the same time, a celebratory approach towards human rationality is not in order. We have an ample capacity for illusion, error, and plain old stupidity. Indeed, what is clear is that we are neither wholly rational nor wholly irrational. The question, then, should not be whether we are one or the other, but rather, whether it is possible to tilt the playing field—to create an environment that enhances our rational dimension. I believe it is, and it has to do with developing a greater awareness of how our minds work.

A Series of Essays

I have decided to break the discussion of human intelligence into a set of essays. It’s not an easy subject and is best digested in small bits. I begin with the problem of determining the relationship of human intelligence to that of our animal relatives. This is a critical issue for human evolutionists. It goes to the heart of what is distinctive about humanity. Surprisingly, there is no scientific consensus on this: just a lot of different opinions.

I find this gap in our knowledge deeply troubling. The problem here is that we don’t really know what intelligence is. Think about that. Clearly, our intelligence holds the key to our special relationship to the natural world. But we don’t know what it is or how it compares to that of the other creatures on this planet. Frankly, that gap bears testimony to how little we really know about our place in nature.
In this first essay, I tackle the problem of the distinctive nature of human intelligence. I end that discussion by bringing the analysis of our mental capacities up to date—by arguing that the very features that make our intelligence exceptional makes us vulnerable to the conspiracy theories and disinformation that currently plague us—that threaten to derail our efforts to focus human effort on the existential challenges we face.

The Distinctive Nature of Human Intelligence

My hypothesis about human evolution begins with difference–the conviction that there is something that radically distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal world. The key to understanding our place in nature, then, lies in discovering what that difference is and how it could have come about. The vast majority of human evolutionists don’t see things this way. They don’t believe humans are radically different from other animals. In their view, the fact we evolved from an animal is incontestable evidence of our continuity with other life-forms. And in this, they are following in Darwin’s footsteps.

Before Darwin, it was assumed there was an unbridgeable gap that separated humanity from the natural world. Darwin erased that gap. While he did not propose a specific model of human evolution, he uncovered the mechanisms of an evolutionary process that could account for all the varied life-forms found on our planet—including us. The implications of his discovery were clear: humans must have “descended” from a “lesser animal:” we are an inseparable part of the animal kingdom. That was a message humanity needed to hear at that stage of our development. But times change. Today, it is what makes us different—the disconnect between humanity and the rest of nature —that we need to understand. After all, it is what makes us different that has gotten us into all the trouble.

Efforts to determine what’s different about humans invariably end up focusing on intelligence. We clearly are smarter than other animals. The question, however, is by how much? Darwin believed our intelligence was on a continuum with that of the animal world. Yes, we are smarter, he argued, but the difference is one of degree rather than of kind. This position has a lot going for it. Our brains are much larger than those of other animals– three times larger than those of our great ape ancestors and seven times larger than those of the average mammal. Nevertheless, there is nothing in our neurological architecture that doesn’t have antecedents in the brains of other animals. Bigger—yes: but fundamentally different—no evidence. When we consider the latest experimental evidence about the intelligent behavior of other animals, the case for degree over kind would seem to be incontrovertible.

And yet, common sense would seem to suggest there is something importantly different about our intellectual faculties. There are two features in particular that lend weight to this assumption. The first is an issue that Darwin should have noticed—but didn’t. Our level of intelligence has placed us outside the sphere of Darwinian evolution. Darwin’s revolutionary discovery was natural selection—the process by which the biology of animals automatically adapt to the rigors of their environment. However, humans don’t adapt to their environment with their biology. Our intelligence enables us to adapt with cultural inventions–technologies, organizational forms and accumulated know-how. These unique capacities would seem to indicate that humans have passed over some cognitive threshold that distinguishes us from all other creatures on the planet.

The second critical distinction has to do with the different kinds of information that humans and animals can process. Even such intelligent animals as porpoises and chimpanzees cannot be taught a single fact about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The knowledge that animals can acquire is restricted to the perceptual information they can extract from direct, sensory experience. Humans, on the other hand, can synthesize information into abstract constructs. We can build mental models of things we have never directly experienced—like the Big Bang, distant galaxies, sub-atomic particles, and the fall of Rome.

What explains this difference? Does it simply represent a step on a continuum—or does it involve a leap to another plane?

Need for a Different Model of Intelligence

Part of developing a new relationship with nature involves changing the way we think. Just as humanity replaced a mythological imagination with logical and causal-based reasoning, we are going to have to develop new ways of making sense of a universe that doesn’t always behave according to our current expectations. During the 20th century, we learned that light, depending on the context, can exhibit the properties of either a wave or a particle. In the same vein, our intelligence can be seen to differ from that of animals by both degree and kind. In some ways, our cognition is clearly on a continuum with that of other animals. At the same time, there is a yawning gap, a discontinuity that separates our mental faculties from theirs. There is something missing in the way we understand human intelligence.

Currently, human cognition is viewed through a biological lens. It is traced to the functioning of a physical organ: the brain–something we are born with. If we see our intelligence as the expression of a biological-based capacity, then we must assume that it developed through an evolutionary process. This would appear to support the idea that it is on a continuum with animal intelligence. Evolution has an unavoidably gradual, continuous dimension. It involves the transformation of the biology of a community of animals (species). For any genetic change in an individual to be passed on it must be compatible with the biology (the reproductive system) of the other members of its community. If an individual mutation is too extreme, the offspring will either be inviable or sterile (like mules or tiglons). This would seem to suggest that the human brain must have evolved through a relatively continuous process and that a major discontinuous event would have been extremely improbable.

There is a different way of looking at human intelligence. But we must begin by abandoning the idea that that our intelligence is based wholly on a biological foundation. Human cognition, in fact, depends largely on a “tool:” an instrument that is independent of our biology–language. While the biology of our brain has been shaped to assimilate a language, nevertheless, a language must be learned. It is truly a tool: a kind of code we obtain from our external social environment. It consists of a set of symbols (words) and rules for combining them (grammar) that enable us to represent our thought processes in a form that can be read by others. However, it does much more than render our mental processes tangible.

language provides the brain with capacities that are not built into its natal endowment. A human level of intelligence is not a product of our biology alone. It is the result of a merger between biological processes and a cultural tool. The brain is indeed a biological organ, and it took shape through an evolutionary process. Its operations lie on a continuum with the brains of other animals. Like their brains, it is equipped to use sensory information (sight, sound, touch, and taste) to construct the world of images that we experience in perception. Language, however, adds to that capacity. It enables the brain to go beyond perception—beyond imagery. It allows it to construct abstract models of things. And this transforms human intelligence.

Language is Abstract

When we look around us, we see a world that is made up of objects. Our senses form images of these objects—trees, lawns, houses, dogs, etc. Those images are representations of real, individual things. It is generally assumed that words are simply labels we use to designate these objects. We see that thing over there and we tell our neighbor: “That’s a rock.” But is it a rock? Or is it a small, roundish, grey-colored, hard object? If we call it a rock, we are ignoring its individual, physical composition and are focusing instead on what it has in common with a set other things. Rock is a category.

Categorization is a fundamental feature of intelligence—not just human intelligence, but that of animals as well. In a world in which no two things are ever entirely identical, it is important for animals to find commonalities—general patterns that make the world recognizable and predictable. Animals form perceptual categories. They lump together objects and events that share certain critical physical or behavioral characteristics in common. A gazelle must know the difference between a cheetah and a lion. It must also know the common danger posed by a lion that has a mane and one that doesn’t. Humans also construct perceptual categories. However, we are capable of constructing a different kind of category; one that is not based primarily on perceptual information.

Perception—the information we get from our senses—enables us to recognize that all those skinny creatures that lack limbs, whether they are large or small, brown or multicolored, are fundamentally the same kind of creature. They should be put into the same category–snake. Beware of them. At the same time, our senses tell us a snake is very different from an alligator or a turtle. These animals neither look alike nor behave similarly. However, naturalists have discovered that in relationship to the animal world in general, these animals share certain important features in common. As a result, we have put them in the same category– reptile.

What does the word reptile mean? What does it refer to? The word does not refer to any real, tangible creature. There is no actual, existing reptile entity that we can see and touch. There are just individual snakes, alligators, turtles, etc. There is, then, nothing concrete the senses can use to form an image of reptile. Reptile is an abstract model that the mind constructs from certain features that are shared by snakes, alligators, turtles. Sounds good. But what is an abstract model? If we can’t experience something with our senses, how can we experience it at all? While we may not be able to form an image of reptile, we can think reptile. We have no problem with that. However, what we normally don’t realize is that we can’t think reptile without the word reptile.

Let’s perform a thought experiment. Try to think reptile without bringing the word to mind. The result is a series of images of different individual reptiles. Without the word reptile, the mind cannot rise above imagery—above images of different individual reptiles. Humans process information differently than other animals. We use language as a tool to create models of things that transcend the framework of the senses. (See addendum for more extended discussion of this)

Language does not, as is generally believed, translate already existing thoughts into something tangible. Rather, it enters into and re-organizes our mental processes. My favorite description of this was given by the Soviet psycho-linguist, Lev Vygotsky. He coined a term—“verbal thought”–to describe the peculiarities of human consciousness. Human mental operations, he proposed, are formed through a merger of language with our biologically-based cognitive processes. “Thought,” as he put it, “is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them.”

Vygotsky’s clinic studied language acquisition in hundreds of children. He concluded that when children learn a language they are not simply memorizing a list of names; they are reorganizing their mental processes. They are encoding their perceptual world into terms that elevate their thinking to a higher level of generality. Words that refer to concrete, observable objects—rose, daisy, etc.—must be connected to and coordinated with a set of more abstract, inclusive terms, e.g., flower, plant, etc. It takes years, Vygotsky’s research established, for children to correctly sort out the different levels of generality involved in mastering a linguistically organized picture of the world.

The Social Nature of Human Intelligence

There is another critically important dimension in the relationship of language to human intelligence. I’m just going to touch on it in this essay.
Language gives rise to a collective consciousness. It gives humans access to each other’s mental processes and states of awareness. As you read these words, you are experiencing my thought processes. The capacity of language to connect the thinking of different individuals enables humans to pool knowledge from different people, times, and places. Every time we perform a math or engineering problem, we are making use of inventions that have come down to us from the beginnings of civilization—algebra (Egypt 1650 BCE), geometry (Greeks, 300 BCE), “Arabic” numerals (India 6th Century AD), etc., etc.

The ability to construct a collective body of knowledge is clearly one of our greatest assets. The greater part of what any human individual knows has been acquired from other people—from one’s community, one’s culture. How many of us know, from our own personal experience, that the Sun lies in the center of the Solar System: that our bodies are made of trillions of little cells: that continents drift: that germs cause disease: that we evolved from apes—or even that Omaha is in Nebraska.
Language accumulates, organizes, and makes the distribution of a vast reservoir of knowledge possible. We largely think with the models that others have constructed.

Every Strength is a Weakness

In this essay, I have attempted to demonstrate what a powerful asset language is. It is the primary factor that accounts for humanity’s dominant position in the biome of our planet. It carries our intelligence beyond the boundaries of the biological brain, placing us on a new, and unique path of cultural development. Nevertheless, it is not without its downside.

There is a contradiction that lies in the very core of language. On the one hand, it gives us the ability to construct abstract models and acquire information from others. These gifts immeasurably multiply our cognitive capacities and our knowledge base. At the same time, however, by extending our consciousness beyond the framework of the biological brain, language gives rise to an awareness that is not fully grounded in our own sensory experience. One may know a lot about germs, galaxies, sub-atomic particles, the length of the solar year, etc., but that knowledge is not derived from one’s own direct experience. It is based on constructs that come to us from other times, other places, and other people.

Our consciousness, then, is largely the result of a collective, historical process. Our view of the world is a construct that represents something of a cooperative, cultural consensus–the way a given community has come to make sense of its experience. In general, our access to a collective body of knowledge is immensely valuable and provides us with information that vastly exceeds that which we could acquire on our own. However, our dependence on knowledge that has been put together by others has its downside. It is not fully grounded in our own sensory experience. When traumatic or unexpected events take place, it can more or less rapidly fall apart.

I came of age in the USA during the 1960s, and I participated in and/or witnessed various different communities, both in the USA and throughout the world, go through transformative changes in their ways of thinking. The catchword of that era was revolution. While that word meant different things in different places, in the youth upsurge that I participated in, it referred primarily to radical changes in the way people thought. While the roots of much of this new thinking had been developing for some time, nevertheless, it grew into an engine of change almost overnight.

There is, I have come to believe, a tipping point—-a moment when social dislocation and dissatisfaction reach a level where old norms and ideas no longer resonate. At that point, people begin to look for new ways to make sense of events. They open up to new ideas. While there was much that was positive in the opening up process of the 1960s and 1970s (opposition to Vietnam war, racism, and inequality in general), at the same time, the breakdown of the old consensus and our dependence on the thinking of others revealed a dark side.

The rejection of the past, the failure to connect with our society’s collective experiences, left many activists without any solid grounding. They were susceptible to extreme and fanciful ideologies, many falling under the sway of demagogues, charlatans, and cult gurus of all stripes— “visionaries” who emanated conviction and certainty, and who provided simple, emotionally charged solutions. And no solution is simpler than to reduce complex problems to a battle against some malevolent enemy.

Frankly, this is the world that is growing up around us today. The irrationality of a QAnon movement, the bizarre conspiracy theories of Pizza Gate and Shape-shifters, the efforts to prosecute Dr. Fauci, election denial, etc., should be taken seriously. We have been here before. These over-the-top beliefs and behaviors are indicative of the rise of a dangerous, psycho-social process–of a search for certainty and security that has gone off the rails.

How can rationality prevail once the irrational has taken hold? That’s our task.

Conclusion: Degree or Kind?

At the beginning of this essay, I stated that human intelligence differs from that of other animals by both degree and kind. Recent advances in comparative neuroanatomy reveal that the basic architecture of the hominin brain (from Homo habilis through early Homo sapiens), in spite of its significantly larger size, was fundamentally the same as that of Australopithecus and our closest great ape relatives. Then, around 140,000 years ago, the shape of the brain of our Homo sapiens lineage began to undergo changes.

The most probable explanation for all of this, is that the hominin brain was essentially a scaled-up great ape brain (differed by degree) that reached a level (early Homo sapiens) where it could begin to work more effectively with symbols. This altered the selective calculus, favoring the development of a fully developed language capacity, and by 50,000 years ago, a new, linguistic-based intelligence came into being. A difference in degree enabled the evolving human brain to incorporate a cultural tool that gave rise to an intelligence that was different in kind.

Skepticism

One of implications of the analysis presented here is that with language, human consciousness is largely a social/historical construct. Our knowledge keeps accumulating. But as it accumulates, it changes. As we learn more about one thing, it affects the way understand something else. Human knowledge, then, is always incomplete. The upside of this is that there is always room to learn more. The downside is that we generally don’t know as much as we think we do. As a result, we often fail to foresee the consequences of our actions, and as a result, we stumble a lot–commit a lot of errors i.e., atomic energy, plastics, use of fossil fuel, etc.

The fallibility of our knowledge has given rise to a powerful skeptical current. However, we should distinguish between two kinds of skepticism: dogmatic skepticism and healthy skepticism. Dogmatic skepticism argues that because our knowledge can never be complete or perfect, truth is an chimera, a Will’o’the wisp that lies beyond our grasp. Knowledge is held to be nothing more than a narcissistic illusion. Dogmatic skepticism produces nothing but paralyzing doubt.

Healthy skepticism also recognizes the incompleteness of our knowledge, but while counseling prudence, it embraces progress. While our knowledge may never be perfect or complete, it is always capable of improvement. Healthy skepticism is a wise guide–keeping the mind open and rejecting all dogmas.

I

A Synopsis of Beyond Biology: The Evolution of a Cultural Being

The book sets out to resolve a conundrum that has stymied attempts to develop a scientific understanding of humanity

At the beginning of the twentieth century, in response to the theories of racial superiority that accompanied the rise of colonialism, cultural anthropology put forth the thesis that human behavior is different from that of other animals. It is not an expression of innate, biological processes, but rather, is learned: acquired by an individual as a member of a community. This is culture. Different levels of cultural development cannot be traced to evolutionary dynamics, but instead, are the products of uniquely human, historical processes.  

During the late 1960s and 1970s, a school of thought emerged that challenged this position. This new school argued that humans, like all other living creatures, are the products of an evolutionary process guided by natural selection. Everything about us has been shaped by biological survival imperatives and as a result, all our behavior can ultimately be traced to evolutionary goals. This is the position of sociobiology, and in one form or another, it dominates the thinking in the field today.

The book begins by accepting cultural anthropology’s premise that human behavior is built on a different foundation than animal behavior. At the same time, it acknowledges that humans are the products of an evolutionary process guided by natural selection.

These two seemingly contradictory facts can be reconciled by conceiving of a different kind of evolutionary process—one in which natural selection could produce a being whose behavior was no longer governed by natural selection. What kind of evolutionary process could do away with itself? could produce a being whose ongoing development no longer depended on an evolutionary process?

The key to resolving this conundrum lies in a new understanding of culture. Our ancestors got on a unique evolutionary track. Rather than adapting to their environment with their biology, they adapted with cultural behaviors: with technology–tools that make use of the properties of natural objects; with new forms of communication made possible by other kinds of “tools”—signs, mime, and eventually symbols; and lastly, they were able to use their communication tools to combine their individual energies into coordinated actions—in effect, producing social “tools.”

         All of these behaviors are ways of generating powers and acquiring capacities that are not built into an individual’s biology. I use the term “tool” to highlight the fact that cultural behavior consists of making use of the properties of something outside the individual organism—natural objects, signs and symbols, and the energies of other people. Culture is an alternative to biological evolution; it enables a creature to acquire new capacities without going through an evolutionary process.

         Humans are unique because, unlike other animals, we did not adapt to our environment with our biology. Instead, we adapted to culture—a way of adapting to an environment without having to change one’s biology. Yet We Did Evolve

         While culture may be an alternative to biological evolution, nevertheless, it has its own biological requirements. Our great ape ancestors began with a biology that had not evolved to perform these kinds of behaviors. It took three million years to turn that great ape into what we are today. The process of evolving a biology that is fully adapted to a cultural way of life is the story of human evolution. That’s what this book is about.

         Human evolution was more than simply a biological event. Culture—which is acquired behavior–can only exist within a social framework. Human biological evolution was inseparably connected to the emergence of a unique, culturally constructed community. The growth of our oversized brains—a product of selection for these new, more complex behaviors—was accompanied by a set of trade-offs: longer pregnancies, extreme infant dependency, and prolonged childhoods, all of which created the need for mutual aid between the sexes–food sharing and a sexual division of labor. The human community is itself a cultural construct—it depends on norms, rules and shared values—all of which are social “tools” that human communities use to organize themselves and facilitate cooperation.

The final step in our evolutionary process took place around 60,000 years ago. This is when the brains of our Homo sapiens lineage completed their divergence from those of our archaic sister lineages (Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc.) and assumed their contemporary, rounded form. The evidence suggests that this is when Homo sapiens evolved a capacity for a fully developed, symbolic language system.

         Language was the true game changer. It enabled humans to construct higher level abstractions. Symbols make possible the development of concepts—mental models that transcend the framework of imagery, e.g., law, custom, love, mammal, plant, etc. But language does much more than that. It gives our mental processes a tangible form–sounds—that makes them available to others. This enables individual experience to be “off loaded;” to become part of a collective body of information that can be processed and passed on by an entire community. Our individual consciousness and states of mind have come to depend upon our historical and social station and not just on our own individual experiences.

         With language, biology and culture became fused. Our brains assimilate language enabling us to think with words, and by using words, we are able to think with abstract concepts. This is when humanity, equipped with a higher intelligence, separated itself from the animal world. Before language, cultural development had depended on biological changes, primarily on the growth of the brain. Language provided humans with an “open-ended” intelligence—a way of accumulating information and improving their models of the world without having to go through biological changes.

         At this point, biological evolution passed over into historical and social development. Natural selection had given birth to a being whose on-going development was no longer guided primarily by evolutionary dynamics.

         Humans, as the title to the book suggests, have moved beyond biology.

As living beings, we will always retain a biological dimension. Our life process, however, has become merged with a cultural world that provides us with powers and capacities that carry us beyond the framework of our biology. We have become a new kind of being– a cultural being. 

However, this is not entirely a success story. Culture mediates our relationship to the natural world. It creates a gap between us and nature, and this gap has given rise to an existential crisis. We were born in ignorance; we awoke to a conceptual capacity without any deep knowledge of ourselves or the world we lived in. Our ability to create cultural forces ran ahead of our understanding of their consequences, and now our very survival depends on our ability to bridge the gap—to develop a deeper understanding of what kind of being we are and what we must do to bring our powers into balance with the rest of nature.

The Goal of Beyond Biology

Continued…

The truth is, we don’t really know how to make sense of ourselves—how
we fit into the natural world. When I say we, I don’t mean just you and me. I
mean the global scientific community. The evidence that humans evolved
from a species of great ape is overwhelming. But no one really knows how
to factor that information into our understanding of ourselves.

While the great majority of educated humanity recognizes that we emerged
out of the animal world, no one has been able to produce an evolutionary
model that can explain how we could have become so different from other
animals. Unable to even specify what distinguishes us, evolutionary
scientists deny that such a distinction exists. They attempt to force their
ideas about us into the same molds used to make sense of other animals.

To many, the fact that we don’t know what we are may not seem to be a
problem. Indeed, it could be argued that we are what we are, whether or
not we know what we are. That is a profoundly mistaken idea. We are a
unique kind of being; we are an intelligent life-form. That doesn’t mean we
don’t make stupid mistakes or that we are always rational. It means that
information plays a different role in our survival. We don’t survive, as other
animals do, with the biological resources that nature provides us with.

Human survival depends on our capacity to understand cause and
effect—how things work. It is this intellectual capacity that has enabled us
to make use of nature’s powers and to organize ourselves into vast,
collective complexes. However, our capacity to create technological and
organizational forces ran ahead of our understanding of how these were
impacting our world. We were blind to the ways in which these forces were
degrading the life-sustaining processes of our planet.

An intelligent being survives by what it knows. Our current crisis is not the
expression some inevitable conflict between humanity and the rest of
nature. It is, rather, a reflection of the stage of development we are at.
While our organism is built on a great ape biological platform, we are truly
different from every other animal. Unlike them, we did not emerge fully
formed from our evolutionary process. That puzzling statement embodies a
critically important truth about what we are and the nature of the current
crisis we are facing.

Around 60,000 years ago, the biological phase of our evolutionary
development more or less came to a close. That was when our Homo
sapiens ancestors evolved a fully developed language capacity. Language
holds the key to what we are. With language, intelligence became
separated from knowledge. Intelligence is a capacity an animal is born with;
knowledge is something that is acquired through experience and
communication–learning.

Language enables humans to materialize their thought processes: to
represent ideas with symbols (words). This allows us to share and
collectively process our internal mental states: to re-work our ideas and to
build upon them. With language, humans are able to construct abstract
models of the world—models that elevate our understanding beyond the
information provided by the senses.

Our senses can tell us that creature over there is like certain others—a
lizard. They cannot tell us that it is a reptile—a category that includes
turtles, an animal that our senses tell us is very different from a lizard. Even
less can our senses tell us that it is a vertebrate, a category that includes
such distinctive creatures as fish, amphibians, mammals and birds.
Abstraction allows us to discover an order in nature that transcends the
evidence of the senses.

With language, knowledge not only broke free from the limitations of the
senses, it also broke free from the circle of individual experience. Human
mental capacities were no longer defined by the biology of individual
brains, but rather, become inseparably connected to the pool of knowledge
accumulated by human communities. Language turned knowledge into a
collective, social-historical phenomenon.

The Cultural Bubble

The fact that our knowledge of the world is not the direct product of our own individual experience, but rather, is derived largely from our membership in community, reveals something fundamental about human life. We do not have a direct relationship with nature.

Humans live in a bubble. As I just pointed out, most of what we know about
the world comes to us from our society—our myths, science, histories—the
accumulation of knowledge we have access to. But this bubble is bigger
than knowledge. All our necessities, food and goods, are the products of
the operation of a complex, humanly-constructed economic system. The
way we treat each other, our rights and duties, are regulated by a set of
legal and ethical rules, and are enforced by a network of social institutions.

Our health is ministered to by a scientific establishment and a highly
organized medical care system–and so it goes. Everything we do—from
procreation to art and entertainment, takes place within a social framework
that we have built and that operates by our rules.

This bubble is what anthropologists call culture. It is a construct that stands
between us and the natural world—and it determines how we interact with
that world: how we think about it and what powers we can bring to bear on
it. The problem we face today is that this cultural bubble is driven by
dynamics that are at odds with those that govern the working of the natural
world. If these two can’t be reconciled, it will be our human world that will
perish.

The Awakening

In sum, we are an intelligent being that does not know what it is. This is
what I mean when I say our evolutionary development has not been
completed. With other animals, their evolutionary process could be said to
have come to an end when they have become a distinct species—when the
biology of a community of animals has acquired a form that allows them to
exploit some ecological niche.

We are different. A species that survives by knowledge, whose biology has
evolved not to fit into some specific environment but to accumulate
information—information that enables it to exploit every environment– is
very different. Knowledge has no end point. We are, then, an open-ended
being. Our growth process is never completed. However, while there may
not be a finish line, that does not mean that there are not different stages in
our developmental process. That, I believe, is where we are at today. We
need to complete a critically important part of our birth process: we must
bring the workings of our cultural bubble into line with the laws that govern
the natural world.

There is no ready-made formula for how to move forward. But there are, I
believe, four important elements we must come to terms with.

The first has to do with biological evolution. To understand what we
are, we must first recognize our roots in the animal world—how we
are a part of the stream of life that emerged from the substance of our
planet. At the same time, we must understand how we became so
different from all the others. Both of these are necessary if we are to
understand how we fit into the natural world. Evolution provides the
framework within which the human drama has unfolded.

The second has to do with our cognitive powers. We must deepen
our understanding of our unique intellectual gifts–what they share
and where they differ from those of the animal world. In particular, we
need to understand their shortcomings and vulnerabilities. Our
access to information provided by others is a great source of
strength, but it carries with it a susceptibility to disinformation. While
we have a capacity for objectivity, our perceptions are never entirely
divorced from our wishes, fears, needs, and illusions.

Third, we cannot rescue nature at the expense of our own
development. There is no going backwards. Our role, I have come to
believe, is to bring intelligence into the organization of nature. If we
are to have a future, we will need to build a real partnership between
humanity and the natural world.

And last, we must figure out how to manage our cultural bubble. This
may be the most critical and difficult problem of all. Humanity is going
to have to work together on an unprecedented level if we are to avoid
being a destructive force. That, I believe, will bring us back to the
problem we posed at the beginning of this essay; the need to find a
balance between individual liberty and collective purpose.

These are the issues I would like to pursue on this website.