New Year’s Resolution

As we begin the year 2010, many of us resolve with sincere intentions to cast off our bad habits. But as we all know, shaking off bad habits is easier said than done. Real change requires that we dredge up from the dark abyss of our habitual minds, a new and self-critical awareness of the patterns and assumptions that have chained us to behaviors that lead us toward ruin. Only then we can start acting in less ruinous ways.

The abyss of our habitual thinking is not only a source of our individual fallibilityBrits. It also lies the heart of our fallibility as a nation of people. It’s time to examine some of our assumptions and change what we are doing for the better.

NOTE: This post really got out of hand. I wanted it to be shorter but I ran out of time.

2010 Resolve: Transform our system from one that sets people and nations against one another into one that brings people and nations together.

1: Our Worst Bad Habit

Our nation, the United States of America, was founded by a group of insurgent “terrorists” determined to throw off the religious, economic, and legal conventions imposed upon them by their mother nation.

Brits

(This video was made private on YouTube)

As seen at that time, from the British point of view. Our system was born in self-righteous violence and perhaps not surprisingly, we have continued to create and continuously improve a system that reliably and predictably produces ever increasing violence. As the timeline illustrates, in the 233 years since our founding we have been almost continuously involved in war against other nations of people.

(Click to enlarge)

At a minimum, we can identify about 55 distinct wars, although by some accounting the number exceeds 200. By any enumeration, our penchant for warring is clear enough, and lest you think that we make mostly wars of necessity in defense of our homeland, consider that among our wars only two, WWII and 911, represent actual attacks on upon our nation (our Revolutionary War being in itself, an insurgency instigated by us and conducted upon British colonial soil). One list  includes 35 instances of outright invasions initiated by the United States. The US Department of the Navy lists 234 instances in which the United States has “projected” its military might abroad from 1776 to 1993, excluding “covert actions”.

This does not mean that all of the wars we have been involved in were necessarily “all bad”. I mean, Hitler and his Nazi’s definitely needed some serious attitude adjustment. It just means that we do a lot of warring.

An examination of our history reveals that, with exception of the Civil War and wars against the American Indigenous peoples, the vast majority of our warring enterprises have been carried out on the soil of other nations in acts intended to acquire territory or to influence the affairs of those nations. These acts were often described as righteous moral callings, in which it was our “Manifest Destiny” to bring to ignorant and oppressed peoples the virtues of our ideas about freedom and democracy. In fact though, it seems there was usually some economic motivation lurking beneath our veneer of moral rectitude (wink, wink).

In addition to warring on other nations, our system also reliably and predictably produces warring among ourselves. Although our Civil War stands out in bold relief, a less obvious but clearly related war has been ongoing in our nation. This continuous, low-level conflict is one that pits race against race, haves against have-nots, and gender against gender. It seems that our system is a never-ending font of adversarialism in which there is an endless churn of victims and victimizers—an unending war between the righteous and the damned, the powerful and the powerless. One measure of the conflict within is the rate at which we imprison our fellow citizens.

What is it that turns so many of our fellow citizens into criminals?

2. The Cutting Edges of Our Continuous Improvement

No only does our system produce warring predictably and reliably, but in a culture of continuous improvement, an ever-increasing commitment of our national wealth is devoted the creation of evermore effective means of warring on others as well as among ourselves. If we count military combatant deaths only, during our Revolutionary war, our killing productivity was around 1 to 1. During the Spanish American War circa 1890, we managed 10 to 1. In Vietnam, we achieved 20 to 1. In the Gulf War in early 1990 we achieved 80 to 1. With the advent of remote controlled weapons like Predators we can expect our productivity numbers to “improve” exponentially. And should we ever decide to drop an atomic bomb unilaterally—well you can do the numbers on that one.

Of course, technical knowledge is a difficult thing to contain. Every secret weapon we develop, ends up leaking out. It seems that sooner or later we’re always doomed to find ourselves confronted with the destructive power of our own creations. In the past, diffusing weapons technology required no more than a few sheets of paper or mirco-film. Today, a tap on the keyboard moves the data on the Internet. This gives even greater meaning to the old saw, “Live by the sword, die by the sword”. Confronted with the inevitable diffusion of war technologies, the only solution for a system based in warring, is to continuously innovate new and more lethal warring technologies. The arms race is self-perpetuating.

3. Our System Specification

In the beginning there were 2.5 million colonial immigrants and about 3537441 square miles of Westward opportunity obstructed only by a few millions of Native Americans armed with nothing more than arrows, stone hatchets, and clubs. Easy pickings.

Our system specification reflected the hopes and dreams of a people presented with seemingly unbounded opportunity.

The Founders wrote: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Justice, tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and liberty are worthy aims that, when taken as a whole, involve a delicate balancing act between individual liberties and national well-being. A basic framework, call it a system specification, for that balancing act was spelled out in the our Constitution. Two of the key components for optimizing our system were; the checking and balancing between our three branches of government and a “Bill of Rights” that was designed to protect the rights of individuals and minorities against the tyranny of any majority that comes to power in course of democratically determined affairs.

Taken as a whole, our Constitution consists of some worthy aims and a set of procedures that place checks on the concentration of power that had plagued the Founders’ experience in their homeland. Not surprisingly, they had little to say about the concentration of  wealth that translates into disproportionate power. Excluding dark-skinned slaves and red skinned natives, the concentration of wealth had not yet occurred among those pilgrims. On the subject of private property, the Constitution said only that no person shall be deprived of it without “due process of law”, law being a binding set of rules by which we agree to conduct our affairs, regardless of individual status.

4. Our Gospel of  Gimme

As time passed, the unbounded opportunities of our new nation became increasingly bounded. Our population grew and individuals laid claim to increasingly scarce land and resources. As demand began to exceed supply, differentials in wealth and power increased. Then cameth the “Gospel of  Gimme” that was writ and evangelized by the claimants to greater portions of wealth and power.

• Thou art born equal but some become more equal than others.
• Thou shall not tamper with the natural and Godly process by which inequality arises.
• Thou shalt prosper if thou art fit and if thou art unfit, thou shalt serve the fit or perish.
• Thy fitness shall be known by the measure of thy cunning, power, wealth, and luck.
• Thy un-fittness shall be known by thy poverty, misfortune, and powerlessness.
• Thy wealth or lack thereof is sacrosanct and takes precedence over the laws of mortal men.
• Thou shalt revel in the blessings of implied Constitutional liberties that suggest to some, thy right to secure thy fortunes with righteous vengeance against those who are less equal and less fit.
• Thou shalt take no heed of the words “Justice”, “Tranquility”, and General Welfare, for these are the utterances of demonic Socialists who wish only to plunder thy wealth and give it to those who are unfit.
• The laws of nature and God decree these things are so and thou shalt not mess with God and nature, unless…
• Thou shalt be exempt from any or all of the above if, and only if, thou dost realize a tidy profit, in which case, thou art clearly more fit and more equal.

The “Gospel of  Gimme” confounded our national common purpose as well as human common purpose set forth in our Constitution with the adversarial purposes of wealthy individuals and powerful interest groups seeking to maintain the prerogatives of their power. It celebrated adversarialism as the true Darwinian “invisible hand” by which all that can be good, beautiful and natural, can be brought forth. And thus the nature of all human endeavor came to be seen as inherently violent and conflictual. In the acquisition and defense of wealth, national and personal, nature and God decree man against man, group against group, nation against nation, in mortal combat until cometh “The Four Horsemen”. Après moi, le déluge!

But the Gospel of Gimme is not quite science and not quite religion. It is a hybridized system of superstitious belief evangelized by wealthy and powerful elites. It asserts that humans are born in sin and that the qualities that define them as human are a thin veneer that overlays the beast within. The bottom line of our new gospel  is that there will always be virtuous winners and damned losers and, in a Darwinian struggle, the virtuous winners must constantly gird themselves against the predations of the damned. The best defense is a ruthless offense.

Think about it. By the simplest reckoning, there is no sense to the idea that humanity was born into an instinctual maelstrom of mutual malice and perpetual conflict—tribesman against tribesman, wrenching hard won food from the mouths of the weak. If these bullies and thieves defined our fittest, then their survival could only have assured the prompt extinction of the human experiment.

The “Seville Statement” of 1998 provides a useful, if less ambitious, explanation of the nature of being human, claiming only that adversarialism can be only one among many co-equal motive forces guiding human action. Alfie Kohn does a fine job of explaining in, “Are Humans Innately Aggressive?“.

As for the criticism of “moral fallacy“,  the sword cuts two ways . Our nature is not determined by instinctual aggression or altruism. At the very least, it is determined by what we decide to do as forward imagining creatures.

5. What We Have Wrought

Our “Gospel of  Gimme” system of belief has produced an “interesting” situation.

As a nation against nations we have done quite well.

Not least among the reasons for our good fortune has been our willingness to press our advantage over and against other nations when opportunities have presented themselves.

• Westward expansion against weak native populations
• Projection of military power throughout the Western Hemisphere
• Abundant access to underdeveloped resources of other nations
• Exploitation of slave labor and immigrant underclasses
• De facto winners of wars between European colonial powers

It would seem that our system might be vindicated if by common good, we mean our nation alone. But rather than systematically producing a common good for the peoples of our nation our “Gospel of  Gimme” has guided us to produce a divided good in both the national and international domains.

The “Gini Coefficient”, a measure of how the goodness of each nation’s wealth is distributed among its people, places the United States in the company of Uruguay, Jamaica, Uganda, Nigeria, Cameroon, and others making up the poorest and most fractious of nations.

If we compare the GPI (Global Peace Index) map and Gini Map we see that the more evenly wealth is distributed within a nation, the less likely that nation is to engage in warring against other nations. It seems that the impetus to war on others is reduced among peoples who do not fear for their national well-being.

And the less likely that nation’s people are to war among themselves. It seems that the impetus to war upon each other is reduced among those who do not fear for their personal well-being.

6. Strange Happenings

It appears that there is a negative correlation between the evenness of wealth distribution among the peoples’ of a nation and that nation’s inclination to war with other nations and among themselves. If this correlation is meaningful—if it is causal—then the how and why of that distribution is worth thinking about.

In 2005 news-bit, “The New Economist” offered up the following news-bit:

A recent Chicago Fed working paper, Wealth inequality: data and models (WP 2005-10), summarises key facts about wealth distribution in the United States, and what economic models have been able to explain so far. The authors, Marco Cagetti from the University of Virginia and Mariacristina De Nardi from the Chicago Fed, find that wealth in the US “is highly concentrated and very unequally distributed: the richest 1% hold one third of the total wealth in the economy“.

Compared with other OECD countries (for which data is available) the US is the most unequal: ..the United States exhibits the highest degree of wealth concentration, with the largest shares of total wealth in the hand of the richest percentiles of the wealth distribution. The lowest values are found in, among others, Australia, Italy, Japan and Sweden, and intermediate values in Canada, France and the United Kingdom.

(emphasis added)

In an offhanded coda, the author added, “No real surprises – but a useful overview.”

“No real surprises”?

6. The System that Produces Ever-Increasing Conflict

Our “Gospel of  Gimme” asserts that the distribution of wealth occurs through a natural process that produces the greatest good that can be achieved by humans. In certain types of social organizations it actually works that way, but as societies begin producing wealth beyond that needed to sustain their members, there begins an accelerative process in which which some members of the society acquire disproportionate wealth and use the power that come with that wealth to gain further advantage. This polarization and concentration of wealth that increases at an ever-increasing rate, is an inherent characteristics of an unregulated market economy. It is like a viral infection that gets out of hand. Unabated, the virus drives its victims mad.

For example, at the dawn of mankind, each tribe of humans worked as a team, wandering the African savanna, hunting and gathering, Although conflict most certainly happened between individuals, on the whole each tribe’s safety and survival depended on working together and sharing the fruits of their labors. In a Darwinian sense, it was this collaboration that enabled humans to survive and reproduce. To the extent that you can separate out their economic system, it produced a wealth distribution that looked like this.

But the data for our nation show that our abundance of wealth and our “Gospel of  Gimme” have produced a wealth distribution that is described as an “L-Curve”. (For it to make visual sense, you need flip the X and Y axes.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a nifty explanation that illustrates the scale of the concentration effect in the U.S.

Once the virus of differential wealth and power has taken hold, conflict becomes endemic. It does more than produce conflict between the haves and have-nots. It produces conflict throughout the system.

When we try to convert the L-Curve into more comprehensible distribution it appears to be bi-modal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we see bi-modal, the first thing we should be thinking is that we are actually mixing two systems, each obeying a different set of rules. When you have two different sets of rules, you get conflict.

7. Breaking the Habit

So, to act on our 2010 our New’s Year’s resolution, we need to convert the two conflicting systems that look like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Into one shared system that looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Thanks to John S. Dowd for helping me sort out the curves.