Michel Foucault

                                                        (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Taking On Postmodernism

I consider the way of thinking called “Postmodernism” to be a symptom of the spiritual sickness of our time, the sickness that has left so many today filled with feelings of dread and meaninglessness. Those feelings occur because we humans must have a code of behavior by which to live our daily lives. To be without any code of behavior is to be catatonic. But sadly, many of us today have come to believe that no reliable, universal code of behavior – essentially a code of right and wrong – exists, or ever existed, or even can exist. In fact, we don’t trust the code by which we are running our lives right now. All codes, we have concluded, are arbitrary and capricious. All our ideas of right and wrong are, and always were, illusions. And so we run our lives, tentatively, under a cloud of dread.

Postmodernism didn’t cause this ennui. It was caused by the ovens of Auschwitz and the other horrors of the past century. Postmodernism is a response to the horror. So many must have a code, but don’t trust the one they are living their lives by, and thus, assume an air of fashionable skepticism: postmodernism. Unfortunately, this numbing elixir, like a charlatan’s snake oil tonic, once it is taken, only makes the illness worse.  

How could the disciples of tyrants like Stalin, Hitler, and their spiritual cousins have done the atrocities that they did? That is the burning question of our age. So far, the only answer that seems to cover all of the evidence is this cry of pain called “Postmodernism”. It isn’t an answer. Why? Because unfortunately for its too credulous disciples, it comes with more ailments attached than the shaky state of health that they had before they ever heard of postmodernism.   

In the view of postmodernism, the study of history leads us to some harsh, but inescapable, logical conclusions. History, it says, shows us that ideas of right and wrong – values – change radically from era to era and place to place. But values are the concepts that guide our choices and actions in our daily lives.

About all we are able to say with confidence, the postmoderns claim, is that moral decisions and the actions taken from them occur within a given context, and they only makes sense within their context. In another era or place, a value belief always seems absurd.

If I lived in a country in which girls were routinely subjected to mutilation of their genitals, I would be obligated, morally, to see to it that my daughters were all “circumcised” in this way. That would be the morally right thing to do in that context. If I had lived in the Roman Empire in Jesus’ time, I would have been morally right to worship the emperor, attend gladiatorial games to watch men kill each other, and own as many slaves as my means would allow.

                          Joan of Arc (just before her being burned at the stake) 

                             (credit: Eugene Lenepveu, via Wikimedia Commons)

                         

In the Middle Ages, I would have been morally obligated to cooperate with my neighbors to find and seize neighborhood women suspected of being witches, bind each one to a post, pile firewood around her, light it, and burn her alive.

Moral values vary from place to place and era to era so radically, and contradict one another so profoundly, that the only conclusion to draw is that morals are not based on anything universal. They are about as “right” as fashions or tastes in shoes or perfumes. You like peppermint ice cream; I like maple walnut. You are right in your home, and I am right in mine. So, claims postmodernism.

Is there any system of thought that explains why values and the morés that they give rise to change in the ways that they do? The postmoderns think they have found one. The sad part is that the system they see is a very harsh one.

Is there no model of all the facts about our lives, past and present, that can reliably guide us toward our getting some kind of control over the events of our times, so that we can steer ourselves away from the horrors humans have done to each other in the past and worst yet, the horrors we may yet do to each other? “Emphatically, no!” the postmoderns say.

But postmodernism does give its disciples a role in the real world scenario, a way of acting that is brave and even, in a very primitive way, a kind of moral: we can, at a minimum, “tell truth to power”.

We can learn to spot the people who are trying to convince the public of their warped way of seeing reality – i.e., the power mongers – and we can at least try to counter the threat that they pose. Such people always have only one ultimate aim: to put themselves into a position that gives them more and more power over others. Postmodernism, therefore, recommends that we learn to spot tyranny right at its inception, and fight it, maybe even stop it, before it ever gets rolling. We can learn to spot the potential tyrants and oligarchs by their ways of talking, and we can confront them publicly; we can tell truth to power.  

It is worth mentioning here that we are probably not going to fight each other, verbally or otherwise, over which flavor of ice cream to have tonight. But over slavery, we might have some much deeper differences. Even violent ones.

I have written at length about an alternative to postmodernism and its child, moral relativism, but I won’t go over all that material today. Today I’ll settle for talking about why postmodernism is incoherent even in its own terms.

For today, I’ll begin by saying that every system of thought has to be based on clear definitions of a set of basic terms that all who are interested in discussion within that system can agree upon. We have to agree on what we’re going to talk about before we can begin to talk meaningfully about it. This is true of Law, Anthropology, Mathematics, Medicine, or any other field we might name.  

The prince of postmodernism, Michel Foucault, calls all the various fields that have their own intellectual realms “discourses”. Inside of the discourse called “Sociology”, for example, there are ways of making a case for a thesis that are acceptable and others that are not. There are observations of the world that count as evidence and others that don’t. The same is true of Mathematics, Law, Medicine, History, and so on. 

Unfortunately, says Foucault, for those who aren’t familiar with a field of study, experts in the field have already defined its basic terms and accepted rules of argument. Armed with these weapons, they can convince credulous pilgrims who wander into their realms that all arguments made against the experts are flawed. This is because these experts have already cornered the field and defined the terms and rules in ways that give them the advantage in any debate one might have with them. They are bound to win because they have already set up the arena and the rules of the game so that the whole contest favors them.

But we can still give tyranny a hard run for its money, sometimes even defeat it, if we understand how experts in any field set up their terms and rules. What is common in all terms and rules definitions is that they are created by the use of what Foucault calls “binaries”. Thus it is that people involved with the Law can only define the term “crime” by contrasting it with its opposite, i.e. “a normal act”, or in the Law’s terms, “legal” is contrasted with “illegal”. The same thing is done with “sane” and “insane” in Psychology. In discussions about sexuality as well, “perverse”, is contrasted with “normal”.

But what is viewed as “normal” or “sane” varies from country to country and from era to era, as Foucault subtly points out by writing of the genealogies, the histories of the evolution of values in various cultures. Then, if you look closely, you find that the people who control money, armies, courts, and police forces always define the basic terms of their discourses in ways that enable them to keep their power and to condemn any who might try to challenge it. Under their own terms, carefully defined, those with the power can arrest, try, convict, and lock up anyone who might threaten to take their power from them.

For Foucault and his followers, the moral thing to do is to “tell truth to power”. Confront the powerful. Explain the binaries in their discourse. Show, publicly, that their arguments and terms amount to a rigged game for any who might try to challenge them. Show that their terms are far more self-serving than self-evident or logical. By these means, sometimes, one can stop them.  

Postmodernism has its attractions. It seems to bring a sort of order to the whole scattered array of facts that history tells us about ourselves. And it lets us see ourselves as heroes. Tell truth to power.

But I immediately wonder what the postmodernists have to offer to replace the “rigged games” they see in their societies, the societies into which they are born and to which they belong, the societies in which they learned about telling truth to power in the first place.

To begin with, we should immediately ask whose “truth” is being told in one of these confrontations? On what grounds does the one doing the confronting claim his “truth” is true? And how does he know the ones he is confronting are seeking power? What constitutes a “well-defined” term for postmodernists? Or do they ever even recognize any terms as being well-defined?

If Foucault and his followers even try to answer such questions, they inevitably set themselves up as just one more power elite. They must have some terms in place in their own discourse about discourses, or they could not make sense to their listeners, both sympathetic and hostile. And as soon as they attempt to clarify their own terms, they fall into circular reasoning, defining how to define. Which will solve nothing. Then, I ask: “Who are you to be telling me anything?” If they claim that somehow a decent person “just sees” the hypocrisy of those who seek power, I have to ask them to define “decent”. And so it goes. We end up with rooms, then universities, then societies full of people screaming at each other, all claiming they are the ones telling truth to power.

Furthermore, there are people all over the world who are uninterested in defining “decent” or any other key term. In such cultures, answers to these queries are given from holy texts that are already established and accepted in that culture. Experts in those cultures say there is no need to debate any issue. One of the holy texts will settle the matter. There are many such cultures that don’t just differ from us in the West; they differ widely from each other as well.

Under the postmodern gaze, if these cultures clash, as they inevitably will, how is the dispute to be settled? Masses of people screaming at each other – which it seems to me, various pods of postmoderns must become – are little inclined toward compromise. We arrive, by these degrees, at a scene in which you tell your truth, I tell mine, and then if we can’t compromise, we settle the matter with fists or guns. It is then logical for the postmodernists to say that war is just one more pattern of human group behavior that we must accept as inevitable.

In fact, under the postmodern view, why would anyone discuss anything with anyone else ever? All discussions turn into blather and then belligerence, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. 

Even in the West, as the last century showed us so vividly, when an old order begins to break down, social chaos ensues, and then someone who is “strong”, namely someone who can mesmerize and organize a lot of other people, emerges and takes over. Hitler. Stalin. Mao. Idi Amin. And so it goes.

But that picture does not portray how all people inevitably are. People do communicate. They do arrive at compromises, sometimes even when they begin by disagreeing bitterly. Some do learn to live together without constant, general murder and mayhem. Democracy not only can work, it is working, and in many places, getting stronger.

Therefore, we can, in both logic and conscience, let postmodernism go. We can even resolve to find another way of thought for these times. In fact, there are a lot of people who are sick and tired of cynicism and despair. The Twentieth Century was full of crimes and horrors and madness, yes. But former enemies have reconciled. We got through it, as a species, and went on. In that fact alone, there is much hope.

If we are to find a better way than that of our forebears, and successfully fend off a mushroom clouded future, postmodernism has little or nothing to offer us. In fact, a way of thought riddled with as many contradictions as postmodernism is can be dropped from our culture's tool kit of ideas. It doesn’t work and it won’t. Ever.

Whatever else we may say about values, we know that in the realm of Philosophy, postmodernism is one of the belief systems that is clearly false.

(credit: Bill Waterson, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                           Edward R. Murrow (American broadcast journalist)  

                                            (credit: Wikimedia Commons)    

Edward R. Murrow And The Current Dilemma In America

Among journalists who are based in the U.S., probably the most prestigious award that they can hope to receive is the Edward R. Murrow Award. It is given for outstanding quality and integrity in broadcast journalism. Murrow worked for the CBS network, gathering and broadcasting news to listeners and later, with the advent of television, to viewers.  He got famous first in the early years of WW2 for broadcasting live (on radio) from London while the city was being bombed by the German Luftwaffe. He stayed popular through the war and after it ended and had many successes, making programs that are still seen as models of journalistic integrity in writing, commentating, filming, and editing.

However, in today’s world he is probably best remembered for his response to the “witch hunt” activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his cohorts.

                                     U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy 

                                          (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In the early 1950s, McCarthy fired accusations at all kinds of people, seeking – he claimed – to expose hidden Communists trying to undermine the U.S. in every aspect of its national life. The Congressional investigations that followed these accusations led to the “blacklisting” of many artists, writers, directors, actors, diplomats, and even, for a while, members of the armed forces. These people – whether they were found guilty or not – would then find it almost impossible to get work anywhere in the U.S.

By thoughtful, well-argued analysis, Murrow revealed that most of McCarthy’s accusations were groundless, while they were at the same time irresponsibly, recklessly damaging to the lives of individuals unlucky enough to have become his targets. CBS and Murrow’s popularity rose while McCarthy’s declined.  

McCarthy was officially censured by the U.S. Senate in late 1954. 

In one of the broadcasts critiquing McCarthy’s activities, Murrow quoted from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Cassius is lamenting to Brutus how far from the courage and idealism of their forefathers the current crop of Romans have fallen, especially as that moral decay was being revealed in the wild popularity – near worship – of Julius Caesar. Cassius is certain that Caesar is not morally superior to, or even equal to, many other leading men in Rome at the time.

So why was Caesar on the verge of becoming the dictator of Rome? Why were Romans on the brink of losing their democracy? Cassius thinks he knows:

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

But in ourselves that we are underlings.”

As Murrow explained when he offered this quote to his viewers, Cassius means that Caesar has gained so much popularity and is now threatening to become a dictator because too many Romans have, by their cowardice and indifference in political matters, allowed him to reach this height. Or in plainer language, “it’s our own damn fault”. The public turned against McCarthy. And thus, Edward Murrow, a heroic journalist, brought down the biggest bully of his era.

Or so the mythology among many in the U.S. tells the story. But was Murrow the integral chess piece in the struggle to stop Tail Gunner Joe?

Some critics at the time felt that Murrow actually made little difference in the struggle to bring down McCarthy. Those critics argued what really happened was that McCarthy, after years of destroying the lives of relatively powerless individuals, finally made the mistake of picking on some adversaries more his own size, namely some high-ranking officers of the U.S. Army. That made President Eisenhower mad. Ike was ex-Army and president. In political terms, he was a bigger guy than Joe. Then, McCarthy got cut down to size.

Years later, critics (Chomsky) said similar things about the Watergate Affair.

                                              U.S. President Richard Nixon 

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In 1973-74, when Nixon and his cronies ordered their henchmen to burglarize the offices of the Democratic National Committee, retribution did find them. Then, the Watergate investigations were triggered. Then, Nixon was ousted. The problem for Nixon was that the DNC was just as big as he was.

But Nixon and/or his crew had likely ordered National Guardsmen at Kent State University to shoot into crowds of anti-war demonstrators in May 1970. The Guardsmen wounded 9 and killed 4. After a whole series of investigations … no arrests were ever made. The kids were physical bodies, but political nobodies.

The charged politics of the US have kicked up another “Caesar”, it seems. Like the original one and his descendants, Joe and Dick, the new Caesar is looking extremely dangerous. In the myth world of the media, commentators are lining up to be the new, articulate, fearless Ed Murrow. They dream of leading a tv crusade against the new would-be seizer who is trying to seize power.

I don’t expect tv commentators to fix US politics. I know I sound cynical, but actually, I’m hopeful today. Why? Because the latest Caesar has – I think – finally picked on someone more his own size: the FBI. If events now go the way they have at other times in US history, Don Jon may finally have gone too far. The FBI are not guys you tell ill-trained, ill-armed thugs to go after.  

So let me end this post with a ray of hope. The corrupted currents of today’s world swirl harder and faster than did the currents of Julius Caesar’s world, or the worlds of Tail Gunner Joe or Tricky Dickie, for that matter.

In short, I now dare to hope that the guilty are about to get their just deserts. You don’t threaten the FBI.

                                                Seal of the FBI 

                                             (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

                               Alex Jones (credit: Jaredholt, via Wikimedia Commons)

So We Gamble

We gamble. On every idea we use to think, every scientific law, every concept we believe in, in fact, every word we say. Why do I say that we gamble? Because that is the exactly correct way to put what we do when we think, and then talk, about all kinds of subjects, even mundane, everyday topics, our routines, our roles in acting out familiar situations, and so on.

Our words don’t somehow attach to any things in the real world by perfectly logical, unchallengeable connections. But we have to have the concepts that the words try to name, or we can’t think at all. So we do the best we can to define our terms clearly, and then we talk and reason, again, as best we can. 

For example, what makes a “cell” in the living world can get tricky to pin down. Most of the time, by far, we can view all living things as being made of units that we call “cells”. A cell has a number of properties that we say are properties that qualify it as a cell. It has levels of organization, it uses energy, grows, reproduces, and adapts to changes in its environment. But then we must ask: is a virus a cell?

Biologists say “yes and no”. A virus has some cell properties, but not all. So, do we get tongue-tied when we talk about viruses? No. We simply amend our discourse. We make it clear that we are going to talk about viruses when that is what we intend to do, and we agree for the time being not to talk about whether they are cells or not. We talk our way around the problem, and we then can get done things that need to get done. We can even cooperate to do research aiming to find a cure for a new virus. 

               Electron microscope image of covid virus (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Similar troubles afflict our talk about atoms. We have some idea of what an atom looks like. We can see images of atoms by focusing an electron microscope on them. But then what are atoms made of? Can we see those particles? We call them “quarks”, and we have some ideas about them, but no, we can’t see them or even see images of them via electron microscopes. Quarks are just too tiny. We can talk about experimental evidence that we get when we bombard quarks with other particles, but we can’t say we know what quarks look like. At least not with the technologies that we have mastered so far.

And our concepts get shakier. Once chemists thought “phlogiston” was a real substance that was in everything that could burn. Then, Antoine Lavoisier did experiments that proved phlogiston simply did not exist. Not that phlogiston was too tiny for us to detect, but that it didn’t exist at all. It was only imaginary.   

The law of gravity says any two bodies in space are pulled together by a force that is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. In short, any two bodies pull on each other, and the pull gets greater the heavier they are and the closer together they are. However, we should also note that the distance between them, as it gets greater, lessens the pull much faster than reducing what they weigh does. In math terms, this whole relation is expressed as:

                                        

The force, F, pulling any two bodies together is equal to the product of their two masses, m₁ and m₂, divided by the square of the distance between them, d², times a gravitational constant that we can figure out by doing experiments with objects in the material world, and that we choose to call “G”. A pretty simple equation, one that we believed for a long time was always true everywhere. Using this law, scientists hundreds of years ago were able to figure out the orbits of the planets, and how long things here on earth would take to fall to the ground when they were dropped from a tower, and many other calculations. It was an infallible equation. We thought.

Unfortunately, even physicists, the scientists most dedicated to being precise, found out in the late 1800s that this formula doesn’t always work. When we start to talk about very heavy things like our sun, or when the two bodies are moving very fast, this formula that describes how gravity supposedly works gives us inaccurate predictions. And then Relativity Theory was proved and it profoundly modified our ideas about Gravitational Theory.

In other words, even the most rigorous statements of the laws of nature that scientists have found … don’t always work. How much shakier must ideas like “ethnicity”, “ego”, “courage”, “love”, or “justice” be?

I bring these matters up today because of Alex Jones. Stay with me. These two topics do connect.

What do the laws of science have to do with Alex Jones? Well, his followers can say that there are no one hundred percent reliable rules that anyone can follow in this world so when they give their trust to Jones, they aren’t being any less reasonable than followers of CNN or the Center for Disease Control. In the end, all of our talk is just opinions.

At first glance, the Jonesies seem right. All of our definitions for all the terms that all of us use are tenuous. But the Jonesies are wrong for several reasons.

In the first place, science and its predictions are backed up by careful review and research done by many scientists in many parts of the world. In fact, in every controversial case, some of these scientists really don’t like or trust each other so they are motivated to try to disprove each other’s statements. In short, the statements of science are peer-reviewed. Advice given by scientists is not based on what a few of them, or even many of them, would like to find in their research, but instead on observable facts that have been tested multiple times, using tests that can be repeated – with the same results – again and again.

Then, in the second place, the scientists do not tell the rest of us, and especially don’t tell the politicians making decisions about how to spend taxpayers’ money, any statements that they claim are perfectly true. They just tell us what they think is very likely to be true given the carefully sifted advice of thousands of scientists.

Thirdly, scientific theories do get changed as decades go by, but the changes are made by better science. Only after a new theory has been thoroughly examined and its predictions tested many times is it accepted by scientists as …truth? No. It then gets accepted as a better way of describing reality, but never as the last word, the final way of describing any aspect of the real world.  

In addition, scientists are specialists: intelligent people who have given their lives to the study of a particular field. Only those specialized in the area that citizens and their politicians are dealing with give advice on any specific topic. Climate scientists give advice on global warming, one of the things they study intensively. They do not give us advice on epidemics like Covid. Epidemiologists do that. And epidemiologists don’t give out advice on the economy or on sports medicine or even on how to grow vegetables in a greenhouse during the winter. Tony Fauci did not comment on the images from the Webb space telescope.

Furthermore, psychologists give us a general caution about all our beliefs: be suspect of every story and every bit of advice that tells you what you wanted to believe before you began investigating the topic. Any topic. Psychologists have volumes of research on how people form beliefs and reach conclusions based on those beliefs. They are (fairly) certain that we all lean toward believing what we want to believe, what will require little or no adjusting on our part.

Looking past one’s own biases and reviewing a lot of research from multiple, qualified, long-established sources – ones with good records going back decades – takes work. Years of practice. And sometimes, even scientists get fooled. For a while. The case of Andrew Wakefield is an instructive one. He was wrong; vaccines don’t cause autism. But it took many scientists going back over the research to see why that was so.

Now, if science is that cautious about its terms and concepts and theories, how much more vulnerable to faulty reasoning are the rest of us as we think about and discuss more common matters? Can any of us precisely define “justice”, “rights”, “crime”, “evidence”, or “opinion” – to name only a few key concepts – as precisely as biologists define “cell”? No wonder we blunder. In everyday discussions, we often, literally can’t agree on what we’re talking about.

And so we come to Alex Jones. I don’t trust him, but that’s not because I can prove his theories are impossible. No, I don’t trust him because his theories about events in our world are based on groundless speculation. Not evidence.

Evidence, for science-minded folk like me does not qualify as evidence until it can be put in front of any people out in the public and it is incontrovertible. Did that mixture of chemicals in the beaker turn blue or didn’t it? Did the eclipse of the sun occur when the astronomers said it would? Do people who take this drug really get well again? Does this additive in your gas tank really make your car go ten percent further on a tank of gas? Did the bacteria become resistant to the new antibiotic as quickly as the bacteriologist said they would?

Jones and his ilk care nothing for eclipses of the sun, but there are other, more Jones-relevant subjects. Are there any child-killers hiding in a DC area pizza joint? Says who? What is their evidence? If the Sandy Hook tragedy was staged by manipulative politicians who hate guns, then what was in those little coffins? Why can people there still tell stories of their lives that corroborate each other?

Or was it all a big act played out by hundreds of actors who never let a clue about the hoax slip to anyone ever? What are the odds?

The chances that there is a world-wide conspiracy aiming to replace the white race with people of color are pretty close to zero. Just like the odds that Covid was the result of a government plot or the odds that the parents who say their kids were killed in Sandy Hook are professional actors who staged a school shooting, one that – Jones says – never actually happened.

The odds that Jones is telling us some huge, government-guarded secrets are as close to zero as they can get in this world. In fact, after the number of lies he has told, I believe he’s only making up stuff to gain listeners and readers who will buy his quack cures for multiple ailments and send him lots of money.

There really was, and is, a Covid pandemic. The Sandy Hook school shooting really happened. Airplanes flown by terrorists did fly into the Twin Towers in 2001. There is no New World Order trying to eliminate the white race. I’m willing to gamble everything I have on the truthfulness of these statements.

The final point in this argument, then, is the realization that any of these events, if it was a hoax, would have needed thousands of people to plan and participate in it. In every case of Jones’ wild claims, we can ask: what are the odds of that many people perfectly guarding a secret that big? The odds of there being not one peep from any of those thousands of participants?!

No, Alex. After long consideration of all the facts, and after weighing the odds on several of your theories, I've decided that it's far more likely that you are the hoax. You're a quack manipulating people in order to sell cures that cure nothing. 

But really, you know, your quack cures are small matters compared to some others you've meddled in. Most especially, Sandy Hook. And for the way you hurt the parents of the Sandy Hook victims, some might think a just punishment would be for you to lose one of your children to gun violence. But no, my bet is that even those parents, who ache every day for their lost little ones, would never wish that much suffering onto any other human being, not even you. 

                 President Barack Obama speaking after Sandy Hook shootings, 2012

                               (credit: Lawrence Jackson, via Wikimedia Commons) 

(Closely following Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher and mathematician, I will say: 

I'm sorry. I would have written a shorter post, but I kept getting too emotional to cut anything. 

The following could have been shortened. But the subject is an emotional one for me. Reason meets Passion. A very uneasy meeting.)  

                                                       Hiroshima: August 6, 1945 

                          (credit: US Navy Public Affairs, via Wikimedia Commons) 

War Is Programmable

We could stop the war madness. We have the means. So why don’t we? I think I know.

My dad was a recreational boxer. A middleweight. Trust me; this does connect. He trained and sparred at the YMCA with his friends. He was even a sparring partner for a man who made # 3 in world light heavyweight rankings. Many long years ago.

But Pop was against getting into street fights. “You don’t know which of that guy’s friends may be nearby with a tire iron in his coat ready to hit you from behind. If you can walk away, do it. Or meet the guy later in a ring. But don’t get drawn into a street fight. Think ahead. Walk away if you possibly can.”

I took that lesson to heart.

The difference between acceptable violence and unacceptable violence lies in the exact distinction that my old man was trying to make. Regulated violence – under rules, with a referee and protective equipment – can be instructive. For some people, even fun. And it can involve a lot more than just two persons. An American football team can, in one game, play forty or more guys against the other team. The game is played in a way that requires regulated violence, but also close cooperation from all of those players; it can teach young people useful lessons about fitness, teamwork, focus, and sacrifice for a larger cause.

Regulated violence also teaches youth principles about the real world that are even more basic. You can’t learn to defend yourself from books. You must get in the ring. Similarly, in some sports that don’t involve violence, one can still learn real world truths. You can’t learn to swim from only studying a swimming book. Thus, sport is a useful activity for young people to engage in because it teaches them hard truths. Life is physical. Someday, in the real world, as Pop used to say, being able to swim or to defend yourself might save your life. 

I know that once in a while, unregulated violence as small as a school yard fight or as big as Stalingrad has been unavoidable. It has been so in our world for a long time. Glaringly obvious bullies sometimes had to be stopped the hard way.

Is regulated violence even possible at the national and international levels? Of course. That is what the World Cup and the Olympics are. And there are other international sports contests too. In theory, they pit millions against millions. And there are international Chopin competitions. Acting competitions. Science fairs.

But unregulated violence at the international level, i.e. war, is today neither useful nor unavoidable. It’s the idea of unregulated, big-scale violence, i.e. war, as heroic, adventurous, or even just inevitable that we must stop accepting. We should be reducing unregulated violence in every way that we can. That is the heart of the matter. As John Lennon said: War is over if we want it to be.

We know now that we can change, even as whole societies. Actually, all societies are changing all the time. But in our world today, we could consciously shape at least some of the large trends in that change process. Not just look away and let change run however it will. We have the tools. We could program our young people to behave in ways that would make the chances of wars occurring steadily dwindle down. In fact, our future citizens could live in ways that would reduce the odds of unregulated violence even getting started.

We could teach peace-making skills like mediation to all kids if even the signs of unregulated violence began to appear in the people around them. Our societies could learn to see peace-making skills as being as essential as literacy. If all of the kids had at least some peace-making practice, they would be more and more likely to solve disputes early on, while the disputes were still at the shouting stage.

Logically, teaching peace-making skills would mean that the odds of unregulated violence, over a few generations, would dwindle down to almost nothing. That’s the heart of the matter. Not guaranteeing a peaceful future. No future can be 100% guaranteed. But working at constantly improving odds …that we can do.  

For those who wish to ignore violence and war, let’s review some basics here. We can’t afford another world war. But we can’t eliminate all aggressive urges from our natures either. What we could do is strive in homes and schools to the limits of our powers to reduce the odds of our urges turning into big-scale horror. We could learn to live with, but still control, aggression.

We could reprogram ourselves -- or  more accurately, our next generation -- to manage and channel aggressive drives into useful rather than harmful actions. We now have enough knowledge of how human behavior is created to design our society so that violence gets tamed.

We could give kids more outlets in things like sport, academic competitions, the arts, and even competitive roles in the working world. But these outlets have been around for a long time, you say. They haven’t stopped the madness.

                                                          Boys sparring 

                                     (credit: Arkady Gaidar, via Wikimedia Commons)

What we could add in our world right now is programs put into the schools to teach kids to spot and mediate disputes. We could train our young people to release their own competitive urges safely while we simultaneously train them to spot disputes between other kids. Then, we could train those same kids in mediation skills so they could disarm potentially violent situations and keep them from ever getting out of hand. See anger forming. Mediate and articulate for all parties while the dispute is still small. Keep all forms of violence from boiling over into destructive outcomes. (“There. And we didn’t ruin our sport. We didn’t cheapen it. Now. Shake hands, you two, and let’s go back to the game.”)   

In my lifetime, I saw the USSR go from being a nuclear-armed superpower to gone. The USSR was outrun so badly in the economic realm, and exposed to the truths of democracy so consistently, that, in the end, its leaders just gave up. Surrendered. Without a world war. Those times proved for me that war is obsolete. We can evolve socially without wars. No one can tell me now that war is inevitable. We just have to take this bull by the horns and wrestle him down.  

Do I believe that grade school peace-making skills would translate into greater and greater peace-making skills in the adult world? Yes. And if you think adult disputes are somehow more profound than schoolyard ones, you’re kidding yourself. Study Ukraine right now. Actions due to some more big bully brats.

Why am I hopeful we can tame this monster? Look at the big-scale evidence.  

In these times, we don’t sit and watch a new flu variant advance through our population and do nothing about it. We fund research being done by scientists looking for vaccines to immunize citizens and to prevent the new variant from spreading. We aim to wipe the new variant out or at least reduce its effects on humans until those effects are minor or, better yet, gone. We figured out how to change some of our behaviors, morés, and customs, and we changed.

               Vaccine research (credit: Bonnie Allen, CBC, cbc.ca news) 

We also don’t watch a new pest eat its way through our grain fields or vegetable gardens and bow our heads in helpless resignation. Or face a year of minimal rainfall and watch our crops wither and die. We fund research by entomologists who are looking for ways to halt every new pest’s spread. We dam rivers to store water for dry years. We store grains in silos, freeze vegetables and meat, and can or dehydrate other foods so that we have a strategic food reserve. We face pests and droughts without having to face famines because we have learned a whole range of actions which make our food supply more secure than was the case even two generations ago. We adjust our patterns of behavior, our morés, and our customs, and we survive.

These are learned behaviors; they are not written into us by our genes. Why they got established in our forebears and passed down culturally to us is easy to see: they were behaviors that enabled citizens in the societies that discovered and practiced them to survive, reproduce, increase in numbers, and spread into new territory. These behaviors once were not parts of our way of life. But they are now. By trial and error, we got subtler in our behaviors, our culture, more capable of nuance, and we survived better than did competing societies over the long haul. Then, most of all, we kept teaching the smarter morés and behaviors to each new generation of kids. Our social ecosystem changed; it evolved.  

So why don’t we get motivated, even urgent, about teaching peace-making skills to our kids, and thus at least improve their chances of staying out of World War Three? Such action would be a lot more rational than what we are doing now, stuck in our habits, moving numbly through the day, doing mostly the same as our forebears did, working, drinking, laughing, ignoring the threat, talking in clichés, and vaguely hoping for the best.

I believe we aren’t doing anything new, hopeful, affirmative, and pro-active to prevent big-scale violence, even WW3, because we have fallen prey to the same old cognitive dissonance pitfalls that generations before us did.

Deep down, we don’t like the idea of setting out to change any part of our way of life because most people generally just don’t like change. It takes us a long time to accept changes to any of our patterns of behavior or concepts or values. 

For example, most people now in semi-rural areas accept that once in a while their farmer neighbors have to apply a spray to their crops. We don’t even know what’s in the spray and most people now make no effort to find out. Food-related morés today trump almost every fear. It took generations to train us to this openness, but we did change. We can do the same with peace-making. 

Furthermore, we do similar things in regard to disease control. We are earlier on in the social conditioning process with vaccines. Many still don't trust them. 

But public health measures are like changed practices in agriculture in one clear way: we used to be entirely suspicious of them. Now, when a farmer is spraying his crops, people in the area hardly even glance at him. Now, when I say I’ve had three Covid shots, people yawn. The statement is no big deal. Gradually, grudgingly, we are changing. 

We’ve accepted that we don’t want to starve, and we don’t want to be sick.

Yet we take little to no action whatsoever against the far more terrible threat posed by stockpiles of nuclear weapons. They could kill over half of us in an afternoon.

I believe that we are lulled partly by the fact that we haven’t had a really big war in a long time. In fact, in contemplating the destruction another really big one would wreak, we look away. Talk about other things. Laugh. Drink. 

In the terms of science, the negative reinforcement for the bad behavior takes too long to arrive. Most of us, in the past, have been too lazy and obtuse to learn the hard lesson: don't let aggression get out of hand.  

That’s exactly what cognitive dissonance reduction looks like.  

The “social vaccine” we could use to teach kids peace-making is controversial. But the destruction that WW3 threatens could be planet-killing.

The evidence from our past says we have kept doing wars for centuries largely because of this same mental malaise. However, “I  don’t like thinking about it”  is not a rational reply to an existential threat. We are going to have to do something more than our forebears did if we are to dodge that WW3 bullet.

We don’t want to change our way of life even though one honest look at our “ways of life” tells us that all “ways of life” are changing all the time. Agricultural sprays, dams, and vaccines say so. They are. Once they were not.

Unfortunately, all humans are programmed in this obstinate way. Our default position on nearly all change is to resist it; be loyal to the past. To the “ways” of our forebears, no matter how irrational those ways might have been. 

But I believe it is very clear that if we do what we have always done, we’re going to get the results we have always got.

Fortunately, it does not have to stay that way. Peace education offers us a very good chance at a practical way out. A curriculum for the kids in our schools. And we’ll experiment with our peace programs and modify them till the evidence shows they work. All of this could be done quite readily. It’s the starting that’s mesmerizing us.

Once a society passed a kind of critical mass of pacifism, the peace memes would nourish themselves. They would spread more easily in each new generation in ways analogous to the ways by which Dawkins’ “selfish genes” spread: effective peace memes, once taught to even a few, would more and more persistently create conditions under which their own future spread would be favored over all competing possibilities.

Kids who grew up in homes and schools learning nuanced peace-making skills would become parents and teachers in the next generation. Solving disputes rationally, while also respecting the rights of others every day as their default practice. Peace-making would become as natural as washing one’s hands.

                                        teaching a child hand-washing (credit: cdc.gov) 

Washing hands isn’t “natural”. It was not programmed into us by our genetics. We acquired handwashing habits by cultural programming because the first people who regularly washed their hands lived healthier lives. Then they taught this “way” to their kids, who did the same.  Similarly, we could learn peace as a way of life. Handle violence if we needed to, but hardly ever need to.                     

The days of war could, and should, be put behind us. We have the knowledge, from Psychology and Sociology, and we have the means, in our school systems.

War may have served human cultural evolution once, but today it serves no useful purpose. We could consciously do for our nations everything that war ever did for them without having wars. Without even one mother having to look out her window to see two army officers coming up to her front door.

Unregulated mass violence – war – today makes as much sense as making work by locking our bulldozers in sheds and giving shovels to dozens of workers. It’s stupid because it is inefficient and obsolete. A pointless waste of young lives.  

I’ll close today with a small salute to the ones in every society who have done their best in the past, and who are doing their best now, to bring about these changes that I envision. I mean teachers, of course.  

I was one for thirty-three years. I strove every day to nudge my students a little further down the road toward mutual courtesy and respect and, thus, toward settling disputes peacefully.

To those of you who are retired, thank you for your service. You were the cadres of sense and decency. To those of you still in service, hang in there. You are the hope of the world. Of you, I am asking, please write peace into every one of your lesson plans.

Even in Math and Science? Yes, even in Math and Science. For example, even the study of numbers has room for digression on Arabic numbers and al jabr and the Mayans having the zero. With sensitivity, we can give higher profiles to all of the world’s cultures in our schools and thus improve the odds of peace. Pro-active peace-making in every subject, plus specific mediation skills courses in all schools.

Peace Education could still save us from the nightmares of Physics. And yes, I really believe that.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a positive day.

                                                       kindergarten class 

                           (credit: woodleywonderworks, via Wikimedia Commons)