What is morality? What is law? Many might say, "it's the interest of the powerful." That is, the law or moral rules protect those who are in powerful. For everyone knows, it's better to wrong others and not be wronged, so that those who can get away with it will break the law every time.

You may not recognize it, but this position is the one Socrates argued against in Plato's Republic, the one that lies behind the story of the Ring of Gyges. And today, we see those with power--whether Democrat or Republican, Labour or Tory--proving Socrates wrong. It's a wonder that our society ever came up with the story of Superman, and perhaps the only way we can stomach the idea of an all-powerful being from another world being good and standing up for the poor--see the earliest comics written during the Great Depression--was to imagine a red kryptonite that made him turn bad. 

These points raise the question of the relationship between desire and moral values, or happiness and morality. We often think that morality causes unhappiness. But Socrates wants to argue differently. Only the virtuous person can really be happy. This argument is echoed down the ages to Alasdair MacIntyre in an essay titled "Notes from the Moral Wilderness." You can ignore that part if you want; the important thing is to consider how deep in our politics--whether liberal democracies like the US and UK or state-run capitalism like in China--this separation of desire and morality goes. I'll ignore China for now. Let's just consider a few stories in the headlines today.

Brexit is as Brexit Does

The Guardian reports that if the Supreme Court of the UK rules against Johnson, he may ignore their ruling. Johnson, the Prime Minister of UK, has prorogued parliament for 5 weeks allegedly to prepare for the Queen's Speech in October when his government will lay out its agenda for its term. The problem is that such a long prorogue is unusually and it comes at a time when Johnson is trying to force through a no-deal Brexit against the will of the members of parliament. Where is desire and morality here?

One persistent human desire is to avoid chaos, to allow transportation of goods and resources so that needs are met. The government's own analysis (link here) suggests that these desires would not be honored in the case of a no-deal Brexit. Johnson's prorogue of government--whether considered lawful by the UK Supreme--would separate, therefore, desire from law as announced by the current PM. In short, like Stalin's 5-Year Plan which ignored the needs for food for millions in order to modernize Soviet agriculture as quickly as possible, Johnson's Tory government would ignore the needs for food, medicine, and other goods of his people in order to "get Brexit done" as he has sworn multiple times to do, come what may.

Thunberg's Thunder

In similar news, Gretat Thunberg, the teenage activist from Sweden, appeared before the US Congress to testify about climate change. Instead of submitting her own comments to Congress per tradition, Thunberg submitted the latest IPCC analysis about climate change. "Listen to the scientists," she directed congress.

But at least some congressional members would not have it her way.

"Graves did gently spar with Thunberg over his repeated assertion that China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, should be the main target of activist ire. Thunberg, who arrived in the US in August on a solar-powered yacht, was asked by Graves what she would do if she saw another boat throw rubbish into the sea."

This argument, like others, attempts to substitute moral values over human desire. Obviously, one persistent human desire is the desire for clean air to breath, clean water to drink, and un-contaminated food to eat. Pollution makes that desire impossible to fulfill. Yet, rather than argue about how to make those persistent human desires real, Congressman Graves argued that "we aren't the biggest polluter; you should go speak to the biggest one." What matters in a situation like this one is how legislators, not only obscure or deny human desire, but use moral principles to manipulate others so as to avoid their own responsibility.

Similarly, President Donald Trump used his power to eradicate one law that helped honor those desires for clean air. California had been granted to set its own environmental standards for automobiles because of the polution in cities like LA. Trump denied them that power. Why?

""Many more cars will be produced under the new and uniform standard, meaning significantly more JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!""

Like everyone else discussed in this piece, Trump flaunts his Ring of Gyges while denying the persistent human desires we have.

Socrates and others in his tradition offer us a different road. Our moral values and principles should be those that help us to realize our persistent human desires, to "make desire most effective" in the words of MacIntyre.

We have a responsibility to make our desires effective. We have a responsibility to bring desire and morality together. Until we realize this desire, we will be lost

 Fridays typically mean lots of time in the car driving to appointments, which also means lots of times listening to the news. On Friday 13 September, over the course of several hours, with stops and starts, I heard two news stories repeated over and over: Felicity Huffman's sentencing for the college application scandal and "analysis" of the third Democratic Primary debate the night before. Of these two stories, one is meaningful for everyone, and the other is not, and yet they shared almost equal air-time for regular new stories though, thankfully, not in terms of analysis on NPR. I do not deny that the college scandal--rich parents rigging the system so that their already advantaged children gain even more advantage in their applications for college--should be news or that Felicity Huffman should have been sentenced. Did Huffman's sentencing need to be repeated several times throughout the day? Note that the news of her sentencing did nothing to expand upon the wrongness of this "scandal." It was more about Huffman being sentenced than about the wrongness of her actions.

In contrast, Greta Thunberg, a sixteen year-old woman from Sweden, spoke at a protest on the steps of the White House demanding action from our climate-change-denying president. Whether you think, as I do, that climate change is the greatest threat to the future of humanity or not, surely you must agree that climate change is more news worthy than the sentencing of a Hollywood star.

We should not be surprised. For just as the news prioritized Huffman, who has already had her 15-minutes in the spotlight, Thunberg, who doesn't want 15-minutes, the Democratic Primary debate and its analysis emphasized the race to the democratic nomination over the threat of climate change. Only 7% of the 85 questions asked Thursday night dealt with climate change, while a significant portion of the debate focused on the minutia of difference of health care between the leading candidates. Health care is obviously important--more important than the college scandal, yet is it more important than the threat of climate change?

Contemporary news is meant to distract us from the real news. It is a fear-monger that blows up threats that hardly exist, while ignoring the real threats brought on by the "system" we choose to live under. Because, if it can distract us, it protects the system. The rich continue to get richer, and the poor poorer, and the Amazon burns.

My heart clenches and tears threaten to spill from my eyes as I look at pictures and videos of the Amazon on fire. I have always believed in the importance of the Amazon as a source of renewal for the global earth. But why? Many of us can point to movies about the Amazon, or stories of its importance.

But Bolsonaro's words push back against those stories calling them propaganda. For Bolsonaro, the issue of the rainforest, so he says, is about sovereignty.

Sovereignty! What an interesting word! A powerful word!

As someone with Native American heritage, the idea of sovereignty is vital to me and to my thoughts of the indigenous people--the indigenous people of the Americas, North and South, and across the world.

But whose sovereignty is at issue in the Amazon?

To ask that question is to ask a slew of other questions about the nature of a nation, the idea of nationality and national independence, and about imperialism.

It is ironic for a person of primarily Italian and German descent to claim sovereignty for a nation created for Portuguese imperialism, while ignoring the sovereignty of the indigenous people of the Amazon. This irony becomes farce when we listen to the legitimate claims of those Indigenous people concerning the ways that Bolsonaro's government is trying to destroy them, to commit genocide.

But genocide is nothing new to the peoples native to the Americas.

Yet, what does it mean for people to have sovereignty over something like the Amazon?

What is it to own nature?

These are the questions that many native peoples have asked Europeans and European-origin peoples for hundreds of years.

Questions of sovereignty are important. But in the mouths of those in power, they are a red herring at best, meant to distract from the destruction of those not in power, meant to serve the destruction of the earth for the growth of profit.

Questions about nature, about the human relationship to nature, are the vital questions lost in these debates.

Yet, till we answer those questions, our lives are in jeopardy.

Until we remove those who threaten nature and who threaten the indigenous, we re only counting down the clock till we can no longer support human life in a changed climate.

Maria Mies' Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale is a foundational text for understanding the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism. Her task, as noted above, is to uncover the relationship between the exploitation of women, capitalist accumulation, and subordination of colonies. In my thoughts, these are perhaps three forms of exploitation, for accumulation is accumulation of something--the earth--and the subordination of colonies is itself exploitative.

At the heart of this discussion is the idea that capitalism rests on a division of labor--that between paid labor and unpaid labor, and that unpaid labor is often performed by women. Thus, the labor of caring for men and children and the labor of caring for the house--usually unpaid or always underpaid--is work done by women. A feminist, then, is one "who dare[s] to break the conspiracy about the oppressive, unequal man-woman relationship and who wants to change it" (6). Yet, as Mies notes, calling out exploitation of women for what it is--sexism or patriarchy--has only intensified the oppression. The rape culture in the US, especially on campuses, is one sign of such intensification. Another is the rise of Donald Trump, the pussy-grabber and, for many, a sign of the accumulator, the symbol of wealth.

Capitalism rests on violence, and violence takes many forms. The international division of labor is the division between the global north and the global south--something Pope Francis has called attention to in his tenure as pope. This division exploits the labor of the south, just as it has and continues to exploit the resources of the south. And violence characterizes it. We do not need to look simply at the wars in the middle east--we can also see wars in African countries where colonial states set up faux democracies only to watch them crumble and allow further exploitation, the violence of blood diamonds to feed the greed of the north. And we can still witness the violence of the south in the north, for example, at Pine Ridge reservation, where residents suffer throat cancer at 3000-times the national rate because the US government refused to close the plutonium mines so necessary for its aggressive posturing.

All such violence comes back on to women. Though women in the south are raped as much as women in the north, the structures that support this rape are different. Yet, one thing Mies carefully does is to acknowledge differences among women and their experiences while calling for a unity to end patriarchy-capitalism.

Patriarchy is not inherent in social life, and not new. It is a historical manifestation of the relationship between men and women in which men dominate women in various forms. Mies contends that capitalism is a particular historical form of patriarchy--that capitalism cannot exist without patriarchy--endless growth cannot be maintained without a sexual division of labor, a division of paid and unpaid--mostly women's--labor.

One of the interesting points that Mies makes in her argument is that about gender and sex. One analysis contends that sex is a biological category and gender a social one. Women are oppressed as a social category, not a biological category. This analysis nicely undercuts the cause of oppression as a woman's anatomy. Yet, as Mies notes, the analysis does not hold because it rests on a manicheanism--a dichotomy between the material and mental. Manicheanism sees the body as evil and the mind/spirit as good. Thus, it denies the goodness of the body which can only justify an oppression of the body.

What I find surprising is that Mies does not, as far as I read her, carry this analysis through to its terminus. To me, the analysis points to the underlying dualism of all oppression. In short, that often if not always oppression rests on a domination of nature. Thus I would change this claim:

One feminist argument against Marxism is that, if we rid ourselves of capitalism, we will still have patriarchy--women will still be oppressed. Mies transcends that complaint by showing how capitalism rests on patriarchy, is a particular historical form of patriarchy.

But I wonder if patriarchy is itself a particular form of the domination of nature. In short, I wonder if we can begin to heal the relation between man and woman if we have not already begun healing the relation between human and nature.

Holy Crud! Have you read or re-read “The Elements of Anti-Semitism” recently? Everything written there can be used to discuss Trump, Islama-phobia, and the national capitalism of 2017.
 
“Elements of Anti-Semitism” is a chapter in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. I am re-reading the DOE partly because I am using another chapter, “The Culture Industry,” in a class and partly to refresh my mind of the argument so I can draw on it for the book I’m working on, I Aim To Misbehave: Science Fiction Film and the New Values of the 21st Century. I didn’t expect to find much in “Elements,” but from the first line, I was mesmerized by how much the analysis applies today.

Switch in Anti-Islam or Islamphobia for Anti-Semitism, and you have a sentence that applies to today’s world. Racism, in this case against “Muslims,” that is against Middle-Eastern peoples, affects our human destiny—will we continue to be divided over minor differences or will we overcome difference and solve our problems together? But for many, it is also a pretext for their economic interest. This pretext works whether you are interested in controlling oil—a high priced and limited commodity on which all of your dead-labor—technology—rests and, thus, necessary for your profit-margin—or you are interested in the loss of jobs and, so, blame immigrants and refugees for what the capitalist has done to you.

Race, we know today, is an alternative fact—it doesn’t exist, except socially to exclude some. So what unites the people under Trump’s—currently failed—immigration ban is a people of a particular religious belief. This point is both true and false. Like Christianity, Islam has many distinct sects. They are as divided as any Christian from another. Moreover, the current unity of those under the seven-nation ban is also an economic unity. Their countries—and thus the people there—represent economic interest opposed to the national economic interests of the US and the personal economic interests of Trump, who can almost be heard repeating the line from The Sun King, “l’etat c’est moi” (The State is I). In focusing on the ban, though, democrats and other left-wing liberals in the US (and across the world) ignore the underlying reality of the economy. The focus on religion or race detracts reinforces the status economic order—the great inequality that currently overwhelms conscience and Christianity.
 
Thus, we miss what Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out long ago: “Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into the barbaric collective” (138). It justifies violence, as we see in this clip from 12 Angry Men, no less true today even if juries include “non-whites” on them. Thus, race, for the rulers, “serves as a distraction, a cheap means of corruption, a terrorist warning” (139). Trump’s ban and Trump’s wall distract from the fundamental inequality. By blaming Muslims and Mexicans, Trump points the finger away from himself and other rich bastards to people who are often worse off than the average American. In calling Mexicans rapists, killers, and drug dealers, he only repeats the line passed down from Reagan to Clinton to Bush.
 
What we have seen is anger and fear over the last 40 years, anger and fear that Trump was able to capitalize on, and which the Clinton-Democratic team also tried to capitalize on by labeling Trump the greatest fear. As Horkheimer and Adorno point out, this fear has roots in the denial of human rights.

Let’s ignore, for present purposes, the elitism here—an elitism we must resist. The main idea is that the vast majority of people recognize that class division, great inequalities of wealth, cannot exist hand in hand with freedom, which rests on human rights. A right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness opposes any strict class division. (Thanks to my colleague, Matt Guardino, for pointing out that this distinction may be exactly why Jefferson changed John Locke’s wording.) Classes mean that some will always have more life—not just a higher quality of life, but as has been shown, more life itself, as poor people die at higher rates than rich people; classes mean that some will always have more liberty—liberty to speak to the government, liberty to move about—who really among the working class can change where she leaves so easily, except at great cost to find another low-paying job (imagine what the lives and liberties of Mexicans must be like that the risk coming to the racist US!), or the liberty to leisure, or even the leisure to be free from paying taxes; classes mean that some will always have more happiness than others—and Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness is only the exception that proves the fact, as his escape from the homeless shelter left thousands behind.
 
What we must resist, and what drives a great many people to be anti-Islamic, is class society! “Bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic purpose: to conceal domination in production” (142). In 1944, the Jew represented the thief as a scapegoat for the real thieves, the owners of the means of production, the factories and farms. “The economic injustice of the whole class is attributed to him.” In an ironic twist of fate, today’s Muslim is our Jew, as is the Mexican and the black, and the Native Americans who are dying in the cold as the resist the oil pipeline that will poison the Missouri and, with it, the Mississippi, the great river of the US. These groups represent the injustice of the capitalist class. The Muslim threatens our freedom—that is, our economic freedom, for that is the only kind of freedom in which the politicians have any interest. The Mexican (and the Indian and Chinese) threatens our jobs—which makes it all the more fantastical that free trade has causes a loss of jobs in Mexico. The black threatens prosperity with their resistance to the state form, their laziness and welfare moms who procreate for more and more handouts, and their drug dealers who reject the 9—5 for a liberty only a capitalist could imagine.
 
Industrialism and contemporary life allow no reflection on these issues. Anyone who questions authority—from the Dixie Chicks to Edward Snowden—is ostracized, threatened in their economic life for voicing their opinions. The Tyranny of the Majority, divorced from the state, finds its true form in economic domination. And without reflection, we become self-absorbed, none as much as the Donald himself.

America’s exceptionalism is a megalomania unlike any other—we must impose our form of life on others, for we represent freedom. The Muslim, like the Jew before, opposes freedom and wants to dominate us. They reject our way of life; so, we must strike pre-emptively and allow no more in. Megalomania takes the form of narcissism in the Commander in Chief who thinks he can run the country with executive orders, the stakeholders be damned. If the world does not reflect back his priorities, he is free to construct alternative facts, and the news media, already a tool of capitalist production, can do nothing to prevent him, despite their own rattling of sabers. For in the end, neither Trump, nor the democrats, nor the media can risk the revelation of the great wizard behind the curtain—that profit drives their version of the truth. Alternative facts represent that truth better than any other before: all values become marketing tools; truth and facts have already serviced capital in that role. Thus, class can never be challenged because any challenge is an alternative fact. Poverty is the result, not of capital and class warfare, but of the lack of personal responsibility. (In this, the Catholic Church has been complicit since Leo XIII declared that unions could not morally strike. We can only hope that Francis might reverse centuries of institutional drives for the heart of Christianity: charity.)
 
Such exceptionalism, megalomania, and narcissism points to Hitler, without hyperbole. “Democratically he insists on equal rights for his delusion, because, in fact, not even truth is stringent… Thus, Hitler demands the right to practice mass murder in the name of the principle of sovereignty under international law, which tolerates any act of violence in another country” (160). The US has practiced its own form of violence in other countries in the name of capital, demanding that The Hague bring to justice any violator of human rights, except its own citizens. The exceptionalism might lie at the root of the US, for what kind of person could strike out over thousands of miles to colonize a new land and spread over it, ignoring the people who lived the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness before them?

We cannot rest in such pessimism, though. We cannot fall into the darkness that haunts the legacy of Frankfurt School critical theory. We are always capable of choosing the direction of our future. We have to diagnose the sickness that threatens to overwhelm us—the exceptionalism, racism, narcissism, megalomania—all of it, rooted in class and capital. I do not say it will be easy, that it will be possible, only that human fate rests on this challenge. We must fulfill the promise of Aristotle, to become citizens of the world—that is, people who can direct their social living—which is restated by Marx: men make their own history.

What would it be like to live with this faith in one's people?
What would it be like if the two people running as Republican and Democratic nominees spoke like this?
What would this world be like if the US honored the treaties they made with the Cheyenne? The Lakota? Any group of American Indians?

Chief Black Kettle honored the treaties he made with the white man, with the representatives of the Great Father, the POTUS. For his faith in the Great Father, he had to live under the rule of Chivington who, not only attacked Indians he had said he was at peace with and said he would never attack, but oversaw the mutilation of those people killed--the cutting off of men's and women's genitals which his soldiers used to carry gun powder or war as trophies.

Black Kettle wanted nothing but to live a peaceful life. He was gunned down by Chivington's men as he tried to save his people from slaughter.

The Plains Indians knew they could not win a war with the US. They simply wanted to live in peace and to protect their way of life. When Red Cloud visited Washington, he said he knew some day the Lakota would have to turn to being farmers, but not yet. Give them time. They still had plenty of buffalo yet.

We like to think that it was the gold that drove the US government to break these treaties. But it was more than gold. It was land, the best form of property. We cannot separate the treatment of the American Indians from the treatment of the land by European-Americans.

Maybe it isn't hate--though it seems like it. Maybe it's just that they loved gold so much they could not see the land, or the Indian.

Pray with me to the Great Spirit today.

Last night, I had to wonderful opportunity to participate in a panel on the movie "Why not home?" by Jessica Moore at the Sarah Doyle Women's Center at Brown University.

The movie is simply wonderful, showing the beauty of homebirth while discussing--in a most balanced way--the issues involved. If you have the opportunity, please attend one of the screenings around the country. I am thinking of attending the one at Brookline in order to meet the film maker.

In the US, we spend more on birth than any other industrialized nation ($111million), while suffering worse outcomes. For example, the C-section rate has increased to 32% in the US over the last 12 years, while maternal mortality has increased--more mothers dying from birth. Further, our infant mortality rate has fared poorly compared to other countries--deaths have decreased only 13% in the US while they have decreased by 23% in other industrialized countries.

One other interesting point from the movie: the main study used in the US to discriminate against homebirth refused to include the major study from the Netherlands. Thus, the Netherlands' study involved 500,000 homebirths, while the US study involved only 50,000.

As I stated last night, when we deny people information, when we limit people's choices, when we refuse to share information with others, we dehumanize them. In the US, our medical field and the media dehumanize women and children every day, every year, killing many and making many others suffer. I ask you to inform yourself and your loved ones and all you know about the facts around birth, midwifery, and family life to make the best decision for you.

A recent article in The Atlantic discusses a survey of US Americans on their perception of the US government. Overwhelming majorities of Trump and Clinton supporters believe that "Washington" is broken. Yet, the survey shows, roughly 40% of their supporters believe that Washington can fix its own problems. To my knowledge, 40% is less than half, so not a majority. Yet, the Atlantic analysis ignores this issue and instead asserts "So voters will have to decide which candidate they think can best steer the government that they hope can reform itself."

Moreover, The Atlantic states "The poll also shows that more Americans believe the federal government is “most likely to provide solutions” to that challenge, outpacing state and local governments, big business or national corporations, local businesses, community or non-profit groups, and individuals." Yet, the summary of the survey says differently:

Nearly half of Americans (47%) feel that a mixture of “positive actions taken by some combination of businesses, local governments, non-profits, and Americans themselves” will result in more progress on the major challenges facing the country.

and

Americans continue to look to the state and local institutions to drive progress. More than two-thirds (68%) still believe that state and local institutions are more likely to have new ideas and solutions because they are closer to the problems, more adaptable, and have more at stake in finding solutions than national institutions (23%) despite having more financial resources, experience, and long-term stability.

So The Atlantic article proves either misleading or simply incapable of interpreting the data. Perhaps part of the problem with Washington is that average US Americans cannot trust their news sources to provide accurate information. (I note that the article cited above does not have a link to the survey itself, found here.)

What is most interesting, however, is the way that the survey and the people who took it accept a basic misunderstanding of government, of "Washington." Especially in a democracy, the government is none other than the people. To ask the question, who can fix the government is to dissociate the people from the government which they comprise. In fact, much of modern politics rests on this dissociative disorder of the polity.

Perhaps our most fundamental challenge is to repair the split in the polity between seeing itself as an electorate and the elected officials as the government.