The Forbidden Fruit

I am not a Christian, I am a philosopher.  That being said, it strikes me that to understand what morality is, it helps to begin with the story of the Garden of Eden.  First of all, the story of Eden is a myth of origin;  and to understand something complex like morality we could start by using our imagination instead of analysing it to death, as we philosophers have done for two and a half thousand years.

 Interestingly, no one knows where morality came from or how it came about.  Many, many philosophers since Plato, and he lived and wrote 2400 years ago, have been fascinated by the topic of morality.  They have many theories about what it is, but they have never come to an agreement.

In contrast, science is younger than philosophy;  it is only 500 years old;  but the thing about science is that even if scientists have disagreements, they eventually come around to agreeing on the main subjects.

 This has not happened with the concept of morality.  There is no agreement.  Some say morality is obedience to God’s commands, others, that it is derived from the general Good, others, that it is derived from Duty, others that it is human perfection,  others, that it is mutual reasonableness, others, that it is a special class of  (moral) sentiments, others, that it is reasoning about moral discourse.  The problem of figuring out what morality is seems an awful lot like the story of the blind men standing around an elephant trying to understand what it is, each touching a different part - the legs, the body, the trunk, and the tusks -  but none of them able to see what it looks like as a whole.

 Take the ten commandments in the Hebrew Bible, an early written attempt to summarize core moral principles,  supposedly written in stone and brought down from the mountain by Moses to give to the Israelites.  One of those commandments refers back to Genesis:  observe the Sabbath, you must set aside the seventh day of the week - just as God rested on the seventh day of creation.

Whew!  Creation must have been a hard job for God.  Doesn’t God sound like a cranky old man who needs a breather after a hard week  creating the  Universe? According to Genesis, God liked to walk in the cool of the evening. (Naturally, because in the part of the world where Genesis was written - the Middle East - the midday sun is beating down on you.) Genesis is folksy and makes God to be sort-of like one of us.

 It’s likely that Exodus, the story of Moses and the Israelites, was written by a different writer than Genesis.  One of the things that the book of Exodus does which Genesis doesn’t, is create a strong sense of identity for the Israelites.  Genesis is about the beginnings, lost in the mists of time.  Exodus is about establishing a powerful group identity.  A desert tribe that follows ten commandments is one that distinguishes itself from other tribes.

 For some Jews and Christians the  commandment to honour the Sabbath is seen as a moral rule, because they believe that Genesis and Exodus are both literally true, but that is not the case for the vast majority of people on Earth, who disagree. There are hundreds if not thousands of religions, all of them with different versions of the creation myth.  So a commandment to make one day of the week a day of rest because of what is written in the Hebrew Bible cannot really be a universal rule, and therefore it is not a moral rule.

Intuitively we believe that everyone is subject to moral rules.  But if there are a multiplicity of religions, then there are a multiplicity of so-called moral rules:  such as rules about forbidden types of meat, rules about who you can marry, and rules about what is sacred and what is profane.  If we go too far with this line of inquiry we end up saying that there are many cultures with many kinds of moralities.  But if this is so, then moral rules cannot be universal, which contradicts our intuitions.  It can’t be the case that morality is relative to the culture that you live in because this implies that what is morally wrong for me is not morally wrong for you.  That’s why  it’s a better idea to abandon trying to ground morality on  religion, and instead seek a more evidence-based form of moral knowledge.

So why talk about the garden?  Whoever compiled the Bible ( most probably Ezra) produced a master stroke by putting this particular story of the garden of Eden right at the beginning.  It’s actually a creation story that places the origin of morality at the beginning of human existence;  it is presented as the first story to be told, in effect.   I’m assuming that most of my readers are at least vaguely familiar with the story of the garden of Eden.  If so, or even if not, this is a wonderful story that is hard not to forget, once you’ve heard it. First, God creates a beautiful garden, full of plants and animals;  then God creates humankind in “His” image.

The idea that humans were created in the image of God is a fascinating idea, but no one knows what it means, because God is not visible to the human eye.  My concern here is that this idea, that humans are created in God’s image, since we can’t see God, is more likely to be a projection of our own imagination.  It’s more a fact that we see God in our image, rather than vice versa. And that seems to be the result in Genesis, because God is depicted as a cranky old man, who prudently stays out of the noonday sun, and needs to rest at least once a week for an entire day.

Now Plato, in my mind, the greatest philosopher of all time, claims in a book called The Republic, probably the greatest work of Philosophy so far, that apprehending true moral knowledge is like looking directly at the Sun after having lived  cooped up in a cave all of your life.   If we want to learn the Truth, Plato thought that we need to be indirect, that is, we need to learn, not from day to day experience, but from  contemplation of purer forms of abstractions such as “the Good” and “Justice”;  just as it seemed to Plato that mathematical knowledge comes from pure mathematical abstractions, rather than actual imperfect objects.   This has proven to be a much more seductive view of morality than the more down-to-earth view in Genesis, especially for philosophers.  For all we know, Plato’s parable of the cave may have had more influence on Christian Theology and Western Civilization than the Hebrew book of  Genesis.

 So, on with the story!   In the middle of the garden is a tree called the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”  God tells Adam and Eve that they can eat the fruits of all of the trees in the garden except this one.  Now, I ask you -   why would God single out this particular tree?  Why wouldn’t God want Adam and Eve to  eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge?  The author of Genesis slyly supplies the hint: one of the creatures in this garden is a talking snake, who tells Eve that God does not want them to eat the fruit because if they do they will become more like a God themselves. The snake, no doubt, has a hidden agenda, which leads it to  suggest to Eve that it would be well worth it to disobey God.

Later on in Genesis, you have the story of “The Tower of Babel”, where God is quoted as saying  he doesn’t want the builders to make a tower that reaches to the heavens because they will become too much like the Gods if they do.  God, proactively causes all the builders to speak mutually unintelligible languages or "Babel", (short for Babylon, which is the writer of Genesis' little way of mocking the Babylonians) - so that they get confused and can’t finish the tower. (Is that why philosophy was invented too - to confuse people about what morality actually is?)

 So it’s as close as it gets to being official - God is ambivalent about humankind. God created them in “His” image, but is dead serious about preventing humans from becoming too much like “Him”.  After all, God, the cranky old man, doesn’t want them to eat the fruit, and yet he puts the tree right in the middle of the garden and he draws the humans attention to it further, by forbidding them to eat from it.  Any parent knows that if you forbid something that is attractive and easily accessible, you are asking for trouble.   And Adam and Eve are so, so, human, being the first of their kind.

 Just think for a minute - each and everyone of us  will want to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong.  It is absolutely a mark of being human that we need to know the difference between good and evil.  Only the human species uniquely desire this fruit, and to a man or a women, we are not capable of resisting its seductions.  But then, neither can God do anything but act the part too, by throwing Adam and Eve out of Eden for disobedience.

 The story imagines God the creator as Father, and Adam and Eve as children.  We might agree that, in real life, we do not expect infants to know the difference between good and evil,  but we expect that  they will learn the difference as they mature. In the meantime, as they are growing up, we expect them to follow our rules and commands.  The old way is that if children disobey their parents, especially their father, they need to be punished to be shown their place and to be set on the right path.  Hence the “moral”  of this story and perhaps the main reason why this particular story was chosen to begin the Bible.

From a philosophical perspective, what is going on here? First, the Biblical editor's  selection and placement of Book of Genesis implies that the acquisition of moral knowledge marks the real beginning of the human story.  God does not need to forbid the other animals from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, because animals don’t care about being right or wrong. But God is forced to throw the humans out of Eden because they cannot exist as humans without the knowledge of good and evil. Hence, having moral knowledge is exactly what sets us apart from all other creatures.  This is the irony of human nature.

 No wonder the first two humans get into such trouble; the whole thing is a set-up!  The very idea that we can gain moral knowledge by eating the fruit from a tree is simply diabolical; but what a delicious idea:  it is so physical, so scrumptious!  And yet, we all know intuitively that it doesn’t work that way -  as if we could gain moral knowledge by consuming a  pill;  we know that gaining moral knowledge is not easy -  it takes work and it involves a lot of  negative emotions and unpleasant feelings;  it can’t be right to gain that knowledge just by eating a piece of fruit -  but who wouldn’t consume this fruit if they had the chance?  No one!

God, the lonely old father, really wanted us to stay in Eden but made the serious mistake of creating the first humans in “His” image.  If God had just dropped that little requirement, then humans could have permanently resided in the garden, but then they wouldn’t have been human would they?  How diabolical!




                                                  II



  What happens  after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit?  It's one of those stories that some of us love to hear again and again, because it seems preordained,  a kind of formula:  God has created a “perfect” garden full of wonderful things, and there is just one tree and one fruit that Adam and Eve are not allowed to eat there.  Someone whispers seditious ideas into their heads and by a single act of disobedience they inadvertently destroy all that beauty and perfection. What a  tragedy!  But it is not, in fact, the act of eating the fruit that gets them turfed out of Eden, it seems instead that the consequences of  their gaining  moral knowledge is what really riles up Jehovah.
Once Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit they become aware for the first time that they are naked.  That is, they realize that they are doing something wrong, just as we would know we were doing something wrong if we walked around naked in public.  And, having acquired moral knowledge, they are motivated to correct their wrong by covering their genitals with fig leaves.  Plus knowing now that they have done wrong, they feel guilty and hide, as young children might do.

But God, who, as we all know by now, customarily takes his walks in the cool of the evening, is on to them. “Where are you and why are hiding?”  God asks.  “We saw that we were naked so we covered ourselves with leaves and hid,” says Eve.    “Who Told You That You Were Naked?”  (It’s impossible  for me to read that sentence and not imagine it spoke in a loud booming male voice.)

 The story both makes perfect sense, and doesn’t make sense at all, depending on your perspective.  It makes perfect sense if we picture God as the Father and Adam and Eve as the children,  but it makes no sense if God was a perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing being.  I’m tempted to say that Christian Theologians abandoned the Genesis image of God (as an irritable old man) and instead were more heavily influenced by Plato’s attractive idea of Perfection, which then renders the story quite absurd. But I am more interested in how morality was pictured by the author of Genesis, who, thankfully,  lived some time before Plato.

The author of Genesis is telling us that Morality is just what distinguishes us from all other animals; that knowing right from wrong motivates our behaviour in a way that does not exist for other kinds of animals, that we have feelings of guilt and regret for doing wrong, and that wrong behaviour needs to be punished.  Note the focus on wrong behaviour and on punishment.  Even the ten commandments are mostly prohibitions rather than  a “to-do list”.  This is not a coincidence.  Prohibitions are simpler types of rules, and easier to remember and to follow.  In contrast, what is permitted is impossible to detail in advance because of the sheer number of things that we can do.  This is an important point, so I want to emphasize it here: we can easily supply a short list of forbidden things, but it is impossible to list all the things that we are permitted to do, there  just are too many.

The author of Genesis may have been hinting at the idea that God didn’t want us to have moral knowledge because to some of us it seems to go beyond our finite capacity for understanding.  Better to leave that complicated stuff to God, just as parents don’t usually expect their toddlers to know the ins and outs of right and wrong.

As an actual explanation for how humans got morality, the book of Genesis is both imaginative and suggestive, but obviously it is not an  accurate or a complete picture at all.  Still it is a better account than most modern philosophical treatments of the subject, which largely derive from the works of either Plato or Aristotle.  Perhaps it is because Genesis was written independently of Greek Philosophy that it still has something important to say .  There are six basic things about morality that the book of  Genesis gets right:  that morality is a special kind of knowledge, that morality focuses on collective human interests rather than individual interests (eg. the wrong of public nudity), that it distinguishes us from animals, that it involves motivation and the guidance of behaviour, that it mostly consists of prohibitions rather than positive suggestions, and that punishment is essential in its administration.  Pretty good for the first story in the  Bible.

What Exodus, the second book,  gets right about a moral system is  that it requires  full group adherence, collective kinds of enforcement, and collective expressions of group identity. This may not be intuitively obvious to people today, but that is largely because we have successfully internalized morality and it forms the background to all our behaviour.

Many modern moral philosophers, (remember the blind men and the elephant!) with the exception of Bernard Gert,   don’t get that  what is fundamental about morality  is exactly that it distinguishes humans from other animals.   Instead, they point to  the existence of language as that dividing line.  Twentieth Century moral philosophy, often called meta-ethics, is all about the language of morality, moral concepts, moral reasoning, moral discourse, and moral expression.  It largely centers on language, ignoring the importance of punishment, group identity, simple prohibitions, and any demarcation between humans and other animals.  My suspicion is that because philosophers are so good with words and definitions, they tend to obsess about language when talking about morality.

The book of Genesis is a valuable antidote, because it avoids this emphasis on linguistics altogether.    I can see another reason that Philosophers avoid the account in Genesis too.  Evolutionary moral philosophers maintain that morality evolved gradually, so they are invested in the idea that there is no real demarcation between humans and animals.  Also, origins are not fashionable these days, for various reasons having to do with the real difficulties of looking  that far back into human history. My thinking is this:  When we try and imagine how morality originated we are undoubtedly taking a big risk, due to the lack of clear evidence.  All the same, the story of the garden of Eden does a good job of opening up the question concerning the nature of morality, and in doing so it also uncovers some of the paradoxes and complexities involved in  that understanding.

Two Versions of Reality

One hundred and sixty years ago there were two diametrically opposite views of the reality of slavery:  the view of the South that slavery was a “noble” institution, reflecting human nature, with abolitionism seen as a serious danger to social stability;  and the view of Northerners that slavery was wrong and shouldn’t be allowed to spread to the new states in the West.

In 1856 a famous incident in the United States  actually helped to crystallize this divide.  Senator Graham Sumner was an abolitionist.  He was viciously caned in the Senate chambers by a Congressman from South Carolina over his remarks attacking the institution of slavery and the immorality of the slave owners.   Sumner, who had no means to defend himself, came close to death. It took him three years to physically recover enough to return to Senate duties.   The Southern Congressman, Preston Brook was literally given a hero’s welcome in the South.

The effect of Sumner’s caning on Northern opinion was to become more profound and transformative over time.  The growing outrage over the caning of Sumner energized the fledgling Republican party, leading, four years later, to the election of America’s greatest President, Abraham Lincoln. But the South collectively refused to accept the democratic results of Lincoln’s election and attempted to abandon the Union en masse.  The Civil War was the result of what amounted to an epistemic crisis over the reality of slavery.

Something has crystallized over the last few days, early in October  2018. It has become apparent that the controversy over the  Kavanaugh Supreme Court Confirmation was really a  conflict over two versions of reality.  “He said, she said,”  refers to two particular views of the family, the role of the father, and the status of men and women.   

According to the Linguist George Lakoff, Conservatives see the family and by analogy, politics and society in terms of a “Strict Father”  “Strict Father” is the traditional view that the father is the unquestioned authority in the family, and the duty of his wife and children is to obey him.  Projected onto the political situation, it means unquestioning support of male authority figures and male led institutions.  It means the silencing and denigration of women who are witnesses to sexual abuse.  Projected onto political ideology it means that income assistance and universal medicare are bad programs because they reward bad behaviour.  It means inequality is good, because it reflects natural differences, eg.  males are naturally superior to females.  It is not much of a stretch of the imagination to see how similar this view is to the Southerners’ view that the slaveholder was a superior specimen to the slave.

Patriarchy, the unquestioned rule by males, is a breeding ground for sexual abuse, precisely because it gives men unchecked power to abuse and to cover up their abuse and silence their victims.  It is not a coincidence that religious conservatives fear feminism. Neither is it a coincidence that a mark of Fascism is the cult of masculinity. Nor, that women who publicize allegations of sexual harassment are bombarded by anonymous death threats on the web. 

Supporters of Donald Trump’s Presidency see him as the man who can get the job done.  They didn’t think that a woman was competent for the job, and their hatred of Trump’s female challenger Hilary Clinton, seemed fanatical.  Remember “Lock her up!”  I am 65 and I have never heard any group of people speak that way about a Presidential candidate before.  Trump became embroiled in a controversy involving accusations of sexual harassment and a recording in which he boasts of inappropriate sexual touching of women.  That controversy appeared to solidify and strengthen his support.  His followers seem to especially appreciate the way he openly mocks and denigrates women in public rallies and on Twitter.  There is plenty of evidence that Trump goes out of his way to denigrate his female opponents in a way that he doesn’t when talking of his male opponents.  But it’s not just words.  Trump has had multiple wives, and multiple affairs, the latest of which, he had with a porn star after his wife Melania gave birth to his youngest son.   It would be hard to come up with a better example of a “male chauvinist pig” than Trump.

What would have been political suicide before 2016 became a hidden strength in Trump’s campaign, and the only thing that could have made this possible  was his penchant for saying whatever he felt in order to deliberately offend and the remarkable way that that energized his supporters.    Donald Trump has made misogyny great again.  But he didn’t do it alone, he had help from Evangelical Christians, who are so concerned about a blocking a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have a baby, that they threw their wholehearted moral support behind an amoral, lying, adulterer. 

Trump just stated that he was afraid for young men growing up in today’s world due to #MeToo and Blasey-Ford’s allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.  This is not surprising, given that #MeToo was a powerful grassroots movement that was largely motivated by the response to his election in 2016.  It’s quite possible that Blasey-Ford would not have come forward with her allegations if not for MeToo. 

Recent events testify to the fanaticism and fervour with which supporters of patriarchy want to turn the clock back on MeToo and equal rights.  Make no mistake about it -  in the Confirmation of Kavanaugh we are witnessing a powerful coordinated action to reverse progressive advances and bring back the dark ages.

What the Nazis did to Morality

Stuart Hampshire was a British Philosopher who worked as an Intelligence officer for Britain during the second world war and interviewed some of the leading Nazis in captivity immediately after the war ended.  The quotes are taken from his book, Innocence and Experience (1989) Chapter 2:  “Justice and History”.  

One of Hampshire’s insights is that there is a bottom ground to morality that is more basic, and, without which, any part directed at increasing the public good is ineffective.  It was this bottom ground of morality, a sense of justice, that the Nazis destroyed.

“ There is a sense in which justice, both procedural and substantial, can be called a negative virtue…. It is negative in comparison with love and friendship, or courage, or intelligence.  One has to ask, in a Hobbesian spirit, what it prevents rather than what it engenders.”

“The Nazi revolution was a revolution of destruction, and more particularly, of moral destruction...The aim was to eliminate all notions of fairness and justice from practical politics, and, as far as possible, from person's minds; to create a bombed and flattened moral landscape, in which there are no boundaries and no limits...”

According to Hampshire,  a strong influence on his moral ideas, “was the sordid behaviour of the leading politicians in Britain confronting Nazism in Germany and Fascism elsewhere...It became obvious that they were ready to tolerate Fascist outrages and threats, and even to curry favour with Fascists, for the sake of protecting private property….I could observe this servility of Conservatives in the face of Fascism at first-hand, because I had become a colleague at All Souls’ College, Oxford, of some of the leading appeasers of Hitler."

“Revenge was to be substituted for justice in relation to enemies, loyalty to party and to race was to replace impartiality, and favour and maltreatment were to depend on a person’s origins rather than on his character… The weak and the handicapped and helpless minorities were to be destroyed, rather than helped...Justice was to be identified with the interest of the more powerful, and the exercise of power was to require no justification and to admit no restraint…”

“Below any level of explicitly articulating hatred of the idea of the Jews was tied to the hatred of the power of the intellect as opposed to military power, hatred of law courts, of negotiation, of cleverness in argument, of learning and the domination of learning:  and in this way anti-Semitism is tied to hatred of justice itself, which must set a limit to the exercise of power and to domination…”

“Hitler and his thousands of devoted followers were furiously impatient with all moral complexities and anxieties as such, and were determined to destroy in Germany, once and for all, the tradition of moral and disputable limits in the pursuit of power.”

Is it a coincidence that we now have an American President whose egregious behaviour challenges basic standards of decency, who openly admires Dictators and Authoritarian leaders, and who calls American Nazis "some very fine people"?

Debt: The First Billion Years

What  is debt?   The word is only one syllable, only four letters, but it packs an entire world of  significance and complexity that few other words do.  In the modern world debt is synonymous  with money. But if we stop at money, we are not doing the concept of debt justice, for it goes far deeper than money in both human and evolutionary history.

I think we need to look at debt as a more universal concept that includes all of life.  I see debt as an ever-changing balance between the present and the future.  If too much of what is present is consumed then debt grows too high and the  future is undermined.  If not enough of the present is taken  then we die before we even start.  There must be a balance.

OK, forget the metaphor.  What is it really? Debt is an obligation owed by the "debtor" to the "creditor".  It is an agreement, a contract, that rests on  legal  definitions of property and human rights. This  presupposes human society, governments, associations, markets,  language, memory,  and the ability of legal institutions to enforce those rights.  Debt exists over time periods that are bound by human events. In these time periods debts can be paid down, renegotiated, forgiven, kept in perpetuity, processed into derivatives, and  can even create a global financial meltdown.

The growth of debt and money are not subject to physical laws but to conceptual laws, ie, mathematics, because symbolic concepts are what humans use to communicate and make agreements.  Since debt is not tied to physical laws it can, in theory, grow exponentially.

If humans went extinct there would be no debt, the debt would be paid, so to speak. So debt is ultimately bound by human mortality.  There are limits to the growth of debt therefore.  And human action depends on the existence of the Sun, the Earth and earth, as in dirt and rocks.  These are all finite although Economics treats them as virtually infinite as if they were contained within the human economy.  This is a fatal error, meaning the science of Economics needs to pull a 180.

Why do humans have debt, while other critters don't?   Maybe debt is a biological subject too.   What is the Darwinian explanation?  Let's go back to the metaphor - "an ever-changing  balance between the present and the future"  Every critter has some form of it:  Invest energy now to keep predators at bay in order to survive and pass on descendants; Consume too much and die back;  Exist in symbiosis  with the eco-systems and maintain descendants;   Grow too big, too fast and run out of resources; Migrate to other continents, but eventually run out of eco-systems to destroy, then go terminal.

What I'm getting at is that while debt is a purely human invention, it's meaning and  history have a "biological" continuity.  We use debt in human society to finance investments that we expect to pay off in the future and to help pay for emergencies  All living things sometimes borrow from the future to keep from starving and being eaten.  As long as they succeed in balancing the present and the future they can keep on going, if not, not.   There are a lot of dumb ways to die.
Humans are known for being smart and problem solving.   Humans evolved the capacity to cooperate and share information.  That's what made language, technology and the economic system of trade and markets possible.

There is an ancient association of debt to morality.  The code of Hammarabi stated:  " an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth."  This is moral reciprocity:  if I struck out your eye you could strike out my eye in retaliation.  The concept of punishment derives from this moral sense -  You do something wrong, and you have incurred a debt which gets repaid by a punishment.  When something goes wrong it has to be righted.  There is a balance.  the goddess of justice with her scales exemplifies this moral sense of debt.

This derives from the need, in human society to  balance  individuals and groups.  Groups are what makes humans superior to other animals, but individuals are the source of variation.  Without individual variations populations cannot adapt to environmental changes and they go extinct.  But individuals can take advantage of group sharing and cooperation by free-riding without contributing to the group.

 Moral rules and religion are ways that groups control individuals, so that individuals are, for the most part, prevented from taking advantage of the group as a whole. If this were not the case, then groups would have fragmented long ago and humans would have lost out to other primates.

Primate societies operate on dominance relations.  One's ability to reproduce is reflected by one's social dominance.  This creates a social order but it leaves a lot of potential unrealized.  In human societies people are infinitely more cooperative.  Compared  to all other animals, only humans care for dependents for extended lengths of time.  The idea that  we owe a debt to our parents or to society has been around for a long time.  It reflects the time we have spent being fed and cared for before we are ready to strike out on our own.

Only humans have marriage, which is an agreement between two families that many ways resembles  a debt because it is the recognition of a mutual obligation.    There are countless wedding ceremonies and customs which in some way symbolize the transfer of debt from old to new, such as the customs of dowries and bride price. The exchange of rings symbolizes a down payment, and the marriage ceremony itself is a mutual contract. The object of marriage has traditionally been for procreation, thus the wedding can be seen as the loan of resources that are required to start a new family.  This may well be the original form of debt.

 Thus, in inventing and using the  concept of debt we recognize that our very existence derives from a give and take between generations and between humanity and nature.

Unfortunately there is one difference between what the concept of debt means in the human economy and what it means in the bigger economy of nature.  In Nature's economy  we can't re-negotiate ourselves out of extinction by filing for bankruptcy.     Can humans negotiate with Climate Change?  In this sense I don't think the huge debts in non-renewable resources that we are piling up will ever be  forgiven.  I think we are in for a rude awakening.

The creativity with which we use the concept of debt today should not blind us to the fact that we need to understand the physical limits of human action and energy use.  In other words, we need to know how the human economy can exist and sustain itself within the Earth's Economy.  Let's use our brains and knowledge to manage all kinds of  debt wisely so that we can continue to have a future.

Charter 8

III. What We Advocate

Authoritarianism is in general decline throughout the world; in China, too, the era of emperors and overlords is on the way out. The time is arriving everywhere for citizens to be masters of states. For China the path that leads out of our current predicament is to divest ourselves of the authoritarian notion of reliance on an “enlightened overlord” or an “honest official” and to turn instead toward a system of liberties, democracy, and the rule of law, and toward fostering the consciousness of modern citizens who see rights as fundamental and participation as a duty. Accordingly, and in a spirit of this duty as responsible and constructive citizens, we offer the following recommendations on national governance, citizens’ rights, and social development:

1. A New Constitution. We should recast our present constitution, rescinding its provisions that contradict the principle that sovereignty resides with the people and turning it into a document that genuinely guarantees human rights, authorizes the exercise of public power, and serves as the legal underpinning of China’s democratization. The constitution must be the highest law in the land, beyond violation by any individual, group, or political party.

2. Separation of Powers. We should construct a modern government in which the separation of legislative, judicial, and executive power is guaranteed. We need an Administrative Law that defines the scope of government responsibility and prevents abuse of administrative power. Government should be responsible to taxpayers. Division of power between provincial governments and the central government should adhere to the principle that central powers are only those specifically granted by the constitution and all other powers belong to the local governments.

3. Legislative Democracy. Members of legislative bodies at all levels should be chosen by direct election, and legislative democracy should observe just and impartial principles.

4. An Independent Judiciary. The rule of law must be above the interests of any particular political party and judges must be independent. We need to establish a constitutional supreme court and institute procedures for constitutional review. As soon as possible, we should abolish all of the Committees on Political and Legal Affairs that now allow Communist Party officials at every level to decide politically sensitive cases in advance and out of court. We should strictly forbid the use of public offices for private purposes.

5. Public Control of Public Servants. The military should be made answerable to the national government, not to a political party, and should be made more professional. Military personnel should swear allegiance to the constitution and remain nonpartisan. Political party organizations must be prohibited in the military. All public officials including police should serve as nonpartisans, and the current practice of favoring one political party in the hiring of public servants must end.

6. Guarantee of Human Rights. There must be strict guarantees of human rights and respect for human dignity. There should be a Human Rights Committee, responsible to the highest legislative body, that will prevent the government from abusing public power in violation of human rights. A democratic and constitutional China especially must guarantee the personal freedom of citizens. No one should suffer illegal arrest, detention, arraignment, interrogation, or punishment. The system of “Reeducation through Labor” must be abolished.

7. Election of Public Officials. There should be a comprehensive system of democratic elections based on “one person, one vote.” The direct election of administrative heads at the levels of county, city, province, and nation should be systematically implemented. The rights to hold periodic free elections and to participate in them as a citizen are inalienable.

8. Rural–Urban Equality. The two-tier household registry system must be abolished. This system favors urban residents and harms rural residents. We should establish instead a system that gives every citizen the same constitutional rights and the same freedom to choose where to live.

9. Freedom to Form Groups. The right of citizens to form groups must be guaranteed. The current system for registering nongovernment groups, which requires a group to be “approved,” should be replaced by a system in which a group simply registers itself. The formation of political parties should be governed by the constitution and the laws, which means that we must abolish the special privilege of one party to monopolize power and must guarantee principles of free and fair competition among political parties.

10. Freedom to Assemble. The constitution provides that peaceful assembly, demonstration, protest, and freedom of expression are fundamental rights of a citizen. The ruling party and the government must not be permitted to subject these to illegal interference or unconstitutional obstruction.

11. Freedom of Expression. We should make freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom universal, thereby guaranteeing that citizens can be informed and can exercise their right of political supervision. These freedoms should be upheld by a Press Law that abolishes political restrictions on the press. The provision in the current Criminal Law that refers to “the crime of incitement to subvert state power” must be abolished. We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.

12. Freedom of Religion. We must guarantee freedom of religion and belief, and institute a separation of religion and state. There must be no governmental interference in peaceful religious activities. We should abolish any laws, regulations, or local rules that limit or suppress the religious freedom of citizens. We should abolish the current system that requires religious groups (and their places of worship) to get official approval in advance and substitute for it a system in which registry is optional and, for those who choose to register, automatic.

13. Civic Education. In our schools we should abolish political curriculums and examinations that are designed to indoctrinate students in state ideology and to instill support for the rule of one party. We should replace them with civic education that advances universal values and citizens’ rights, fosters civic consciousness, and promotes civic virtues that serve society.

14. Protection of Private Property. We should establish and protect the right to private property and promote an economic system of free and fair markets. We should do away with government monopolies in commerce and industry and guarantee the freedom to start new enterprises. We should establish a Committee on State-Owned Property, reporting to the national legislature, that will monitor the transfer of state-owned enterprises to private ownership in a fair, competitive, and orderly manner. We should institute a land reform that promotes private ownership of land, guarantees the right to buy and sell land, and allows the true value of private property to be adequately reflected in the market.

15. Financial and Tax Reform. We should establish a democratically regulated and accountable system of public finance that ensures the protection of taxpayer rights and that operates through legal procedures. We need a system by which public revenues that belong to a certain level of government—central, provincial, county or local—are controlled at that level. We need major tax reform that will abolish any unfair taxes, simplify the tax system, and spread the tax burden fairly. Government officials should not be able to raise taxes, or institute new ones, without public deliberation and the approval of a democratic assembly. We should reform the ownership system in order to encourage competition among a wider variety of market participants.

16. Social Security. We should establish a fair and adequate social security system that covers all citizens and ensures basic access to education, health care, retirement security, and employment.

17. Protection of the Environment. We need to protect the natural environment and to promote development in a way that is sustainable and responsible to our descendants and to the rest of humanity. This means insisting that the state and its officials at all levels not only do what they must do to achieve these goals, but also accept the supervision and participation of nongovernmental organizations.

18. A Federated Republic. A democratic China should seek to act as a responsible major power contributing toward peace and development in the Asian Pacific region by approaching others in a spirit of equality and fairness. In Hong Kong and Macao, we should support the freedoms that already exist. With respect to Taiwan, we should declare our commitment to the principles of freedom and democracy and then, negotiating as equals and ready to compromise, seek a formula for peaceful unification. We should approach disputes in the national-minority areas of China with an open mind, seeking ways to find a workable framework within which all ethnic and religious groups can flourish. We should aim ultimately at a federation of democratic communities of China.

19. Truth in Reconciliation. We should restore the reputations of all people, including their family members, who suffered political stigma in the political campaigns of the past or who have been labeled as criminals because of their thought, speech, or faith. The state should pay reparations to these people. All political prisoners and prisoners of conscience must be released. There should be a Truth Investigation Commission charged with finding the facts about past injustices and atrocities, determining responsibility for them, upholding justice, and, on these bases, seeking social reconciliation.

China, as a major nation of the world, as one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and as a member of the UN Council on Human Rights, should be contributing to peace for humankind and progress toward human rights. Unfortunately, we stand today as the only country among the major nations that remains mired in authoritarian politics. Our political system continues to produce human rights disasters and social crises, thereby not only constricting China’s own development but also limiting the progress of all of human civilization. This must change, truly it must. The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer.

Accordingly, we dare to put civic spirit into practice by announcing Charter 08. We hope that our fellow citizens who feel a similar sense of crisis, responsibility, and mission, whether they are inside the government or not, and regardless of their social status, will set aside small differences to embrace the broad goals of this citizens’ movement. Together we can work for major changes in Chinese society and for the rapid establishment of a free, democratic, and constitutional country. We can bring to reality the goals and ideals that our people have incessantly been seeking for more than a hundred years, and can bring a brilliant new chapter to Chinese civilization.

From New York Review of Books website:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/chinas-charter-08/Translated from Chinese by Perry Link

Slavery and Fossil Fuels

The nineteenth century global economy was a like a small scale version of today's global economy. Trade in slaves, sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cotton were the drivers of global economic growth. But the growing trade in the above mentioned non-human commodities was first made possible by slave labour in plantations in the tropics and the American South.

In our modern global economy, cheap fossil fuels have taken the place of slaves. Industrial farming, convenient travel by automobile, and the transportation of commodities by trucks and tankers is all made possible by fossil fuels.

The nineteenth century movement to abolish slavery, called “Abolitionism” was motivated by the moral inhumanity of slavery. Slowly but surely, the idea of buying and selling human beings, of separating members of slave families, of punishing slaves with whippings and other forms of torture, came to be seen as morally unjustifiable.

The twenty-first Century movement to stop runaway global warming is based more on science than on morals. Science tells us that the unchecked growth in fossil fuel consumption is leading to accelerating global warming. Science also tells us that this warming has catastrophic potential for all humans because of the increased probability of drought, forest fires, flooding and destruction of biodiversity.

Because the case for preventing global warming is largely based on science it has a much better potential for gaining widespread agreement among the world's nations. It took fifty years for the British abolitionist movement to halt slavery in the British colonies, where it finally ended in 1833. But it took closer to a hundred years and a wrenching civil war for the United States to abolish it.

It's instructive to examine the difference between British and American abolitionism. In both countries slave owners and slave traders stood to lose profits from abolition. But in Great Britain slaveholders were a small society of men who owned plantations in the British colonies, mostly in the Caribbean. In the United States slavery was the basis of the Southern states' economy. When American abolitionists first aimed a direct mail campaign at the South in the 1830's, the Southern reaction was swift and decisive. The entire white population of the South rallied around the cause of slavery, intimidating and physically expelling anyone who dared to disagree.

As a voting block, the South was able to stalemate and paralyse all three branches of the federal government whenever attempts to deal with the issues of slavery were made. It took the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, to end the stalemate, but the Southerners refused to accept the result and quickly declared war on the Northern states.

There is no doubt that the economies of Great Britain and the United States were harmed by abolition. Slavery, was, after all, profitable. But the majority of English and Americans were persuaded that the moral result was worth the cost.

In our modern global economy, it is some of the richest corporations – the oil corporations like Exxon and Shell that stand to lose the most from our taking action to stop runaway global warming. The fact that they are so profitable is relevant here because their huge profits are being used to subvert political systems all over the world.

Unfortunately, the 2016 U.S. election of Donald Trump has left us with an American Executive and Legislature that is bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry.   It's no wonder that they have made it their goal to block the kind of national and international action necessary to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

 One of our priorities  should be to put a stop to the undue influence of corporate money on politics. We don't even have ten years to turn things around, let alone fifty. There is no justification for putting the human race at risk for the sake of oil company profits.

A Little Knowledge Can Be a Dangerous Thing!

I had a conversation with my eldest son Michael about a month ago. It was just before I got married. We discussed: “Why can't knowledge be used to make things in society work better?” This question of my son's got me  thinking about what is knowledge and what is the difference between knowledge of nature and knowledge of human affairs. In philosophy, this is called epistemology, the study of knowledge.

I was very gratified that Michael was interested in this subject. And, though at that time that I studied philosophy in University, I wondered whether there was any point in it, my son's question made me realize how important the consequences of a particular epistemology can be.

Consider the case of “self-fufilling prophecies”. I believe that my neighbour is a witch. I accuse her in public. She denies it, but under the law the way to ascertain if someone is a witch is to torture them ( truth by ordeal). It's no surprise that the majority of accused will confess after being tortured. And the publicity of the case leads some people to see more witches, just by the power of suggestion. Soon more people confess to being witches and now we're into a full blown witch hunt.

Eventually the witch hunts ended but not before tens of thousands of women were burned at the stake. This happened about five hundred years ago. The interesting thing here is that the fact that witches with supernatural powers don't exist didn't stop the Europeans from seeing more and more witches. In other words, beliefs can be self-reinforcing even though they are false.

Consider another case closer to home. Banks don't actually have as much money as people deposit in them. They create money by loaning out multiples of their cash deposits. If most depositors believe that there is enough money then there is enough money. And as a consequence, each individual will have no trouble withdrawing their whole deposit if they want to. But if enough people believe that there isn't enough money, they will make a run on the banks, banks will close down and people will not be able to withdraw their money. So their won't be enough money.

Or, if enough people believe that money is worth less today than it was yesterday, they will delay paying back their loans, they will spend their money as fast as they can, the money supply will expand and prices will rise. So money will be worth less. Again, a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Our beliefs about ourselves effect our actions. Author George Soros calls this “reflexivity”. That means that human behaviour is not independent from our knowledge of it. Why is this important? Because it means that the correspondence theory of truth does not always work. A statement is true if it corresponds to reality. I'm sitting on a chair. This corresponds to the truth. No problem. But what if our thoughts change reality? Then the idea of “correspondence” is problematic because thoughts and realities are not independent of each other. It's when you get into things like witches and money that correspondence to reality is a problem because what we believe about witches or money effects their reality.

We can assume that the correspondence theory of truth works for natural science but not always for the social sciences because of the principle of reflexivity. Thus the idea that the way we study social science must be different in kind from the way we study nature. Of course we go on acting as if the truth of our statements about humans corresponds to reality but we have a lot harder time knowing for sure. What we believe could just be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the stronger we believe it the more self reinforcing it becomes.

If knowledge must be certain this implies that those with access to knowledge have a monopoly on the truth. Any political system based on this will be rigid and closed to change or improvement. This is the religious, tribal, and totalitarian approach to knowledge and it leads to a closed society. That's why epistemology is so important. If we believe that knowledge is fallible then we have to be at least open to other points of view and open to change in our views. And if knowledge is imperfect that means that there is always room for improvement.