World Without Words

Whether the remaining fragments of our moral capacity are to be obliterated by the compulsion to build driverless cars and colonize Mars or to be drowned in the fanaticism of Franklin Graham's Christian Nationalism the effect is the same, the destruction of language, the power of the word to tell about the distinction between the human and inhumane.

       The Trump era--insipid, vulgar, full of lies--is enabled by the dominant motif of our civilization, its bleak logic of political necessity, that generates wars the world around and concentrates wealth that destroys this city and creates that one. A Trumpian world brings into sharper focus what is at stake. Language as the baseline for human expression is at-risk, words as the baseline for the honesty of our experience and the power of our imagination is under threat.

       The Chronicle of Higher Education delves into the Silicon Valley necrosis in a Special Report citing the flagship campus of the University of Illinois and Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., where Illinois is pairing majors in the liberal arts-for example anthropology and linguistics-with computer science; and Assumption is eliminating traditional majors in favor of ones geared to practical skills. "Goodbye art history, geography and, yes, the classics. Hello, data analytics, actuarial science and concentrations in physical therapy," writes Frank Bruni,

"The University of Wisconsin at Superior announced that it was suspending nine majors; Wisconsin at Stevens Point recently proposed dropping 13 majors, including philosophy and English, to make room for programs with "clear career pathways."   [Frank Bruni writing in "Aristotle's Wrongful Death," NY Times, May 26, 2018]

         As the tech giants take-over our vocabulary, substituting data and technocratic ingenuity for words, the capacity for moral reasoning thickens and fogs over as in the global immigration crisis.

        Take the "Windrush" scandal in Britain: Immigrants from the Caribbean were brought on a ship by that name to England legally after WW II to fill its labor shortage. They are now betrayed by PM Theresa May's strategy to make it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. Because the Home Office destroyed their landing papers, after forty years the Caribbean legal immigrants have found themselves to have become illegal. Lost in a maze of bureaucratic paperwork.... "some of the rules are so complicated, and the financial cost of navigating them so high, that people are unable to discover or prove their status conclusively, no matter how hard they try." Harrowing stories have emerged of individuals being made homeless, jobless and stateless...., after they failed to produce proof they were never given in the first place....Not only has the politics become delusional....our entire way of understanding and talking about migration has gone awry, writes William Davies in the London Rview of Books of May 10th.

When home secretaries speak of 'illegal immigrants', they mostly mean people who entered the country legally. When they speak of 'borders', they often mean hospitals, homes, workplaces and register offices. As the experience of the 20th century warned, when language stops working, all manner of things are possible.

       Just so, our own U. S. government's immigration ploys, implicitly supported by The Rev. Franklin Graham's Christian Nationalism and his Project Blitz perfectly reflect this emerging world of language as manipulation and chicanery. 

        Project Blitz is deliberately designed to throw the legislative process in local states into chaos by clogging their agendas. Americans United for Separation of Church and State have found that more than 70 bills before state legislatures appear to be based on Project Blitz templates or have similar objectives. Some of the bills are progressing rapidly.

An Oklahoma measure...awaiting the governor's signature, allows adoption and foster care agencies to discriminate on the basis of their own religious beliefs. Others, such as a Minnesota bill that would allow public schools to post "In God We Trust" signs on their walls, have provoked hostile debates in local and national media, which is in many cases the point of the exercise. [Katherine Stewart, NY Times, May 26, 2018]

       These machinations are no side show to be ignored by those who still hold to an antique faith about God as inseperable from moral imperative. The battle to save words and the meaning of the Word is entering the late rounds. Examples abound:

       The accelerating strangulation of individual rights in the workplace with the recent Supreme Court ruling blocking class actions by employees for the relief of their grievances now forces them to seek arbitration one by one. You can find the same requirement in the small print in most contracts we sign in daily life. You'll have to have a large pocket book to afford a legal action seeking relief from Macys because not only are no class actions permitted, you even agreed to this small print when you signed-on.  Apparently meaningless words become demonic as they are turned against human rights and dignity.

        It is not to be doubted that STEM-based education and a turn to the worship of totalitarian religion has great political utility. Only the kids who know what it's like to be shot at and the communal oriented religious and labor movements remain to resist. That's a large number, of course, but only if we animate it with words that say what we mean about truth and justice.

Alzheimers in Gaza

        Only a new Rosetta Stone can exegete this week's Gaza horror. All the historical facts, all the political expediencies, all the killing and brutalities have been well know and documented for years but like Shelly's "Ozimandias" seem lost in a dessert, unremembered.  Way back in 2006, all of twelve years ago Henry Siegman, a former National Director of the American Jewish Congress told a truth few in the U. S. want to hear today:

"the problem is that....there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state, primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never had the intention of allowing such a state to come into being."

         Why such historical Altzheimers? Shelly's poem aimed at a fearful British government that had suspended Habeus Corpus and could point today as well to our American civilization become dessert-like and without memory, making do in advance of murder with a foreplay of self-interests, religious escapism, and a media fog claiming everything has two sides.

          Israeli PM Netanyahu today never contests that Israel has deliberately moved 800,000 Israeli citizens into settlements all over the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem; proclaiming without apology what Siegman had described in 2006:

"No government serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued, without letup, the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands, which even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible."

       Ahud Barak was on PBS last week explaining, just in case everyone didn't know about Hamas and the Palestinians,"they're the bad guys." While PBS subsequently pulled the interview with the former Israeli Prime Minister from its replays website, it was a declaration ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent (the old Ivory soap ad) of Americans are sure is true.   On the contrary Siegman reported that the then Hamas leader Mohammed Ghazahad rejected the tenets of Islamic religious extremism. "The Koran is not Hamas' charter.... 

"we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions....I don't think there will be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis."It is a sentiment echoed by Hasan Yousif, the Hamas leader in the West Bank [from] an Israeli jail: "We have accepted the principle of accepting a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders."

        In 2005 when Prime Minister Arial Sharon withdrew Israeli settlements from Gaza as cover for his creation of large settler towns in the West Bank like Har Homa and Kiryat Arba, World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, himself a Jew, spent 11 months in Gaza as the Middle East envoy of the Quartet (United States, Russia, European Union and the United Nations). 

 In a 2017 reflection with Haartez he remembered a more hopeful moment of seeing the Gaza greenhouses with the Palestinian chairman Mahmoud Abbas

.

"and looking at the fruits and everything, and there was a joyous atmosphere: 'Boy, we're about to get this going and we're going to have hotels by the beaches and we're going to have tourism and it's going to be fantastic...' and the Palestinians really know how to be hosts."

       The euphoria lasted only nine months. The Israelis blocked all the border crossings out of Gaza demanding lengthy terror-proofing:

"Everything was rotting because you couldn't get the fruit [to market]. And if you went to the border, as I did many times, and saw tomatoes and fruit just being dumped on the side of the road...."

       In this 2017 reflection Wolfensohn told another truth to Haaretz, that powerful forces in the U.S. administration were working behind his back.

"They [the U. S.] did not believe in the border terminals agreement that would have brought Gaza's abundance to market and wanted to undermine his status as the Quartet's emissary...."

         He shared with Haaretz that the official behind this policy was Elliot Abrams, the neoconservative who was appointed deputy national security adviser in charge of disseminating democracy in the Middle East but "every aspect of that agreement was abrogated" said Wolfenson.   Abrahms today is a close advisor to the Trump White House from his post as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. 

       Caught in a dessert of lies and lost truths the American nation and many others need a Rosetta Stone that can inform democratic discernment. Jim Wall, former editor of "The Christian Century" magazine underlines in his blog "Wallwritings" the tepid attitude of U. S. media to protect itself by reporting both sides.  In a month of slaughter with more than 2,000 Gazans killed and wounded and zero Israeli casualties there are not two sides; only the fact of the killing with more probably on the way. Gaza is a terrible outdoor prison kept in situ by U. S. foreign policy, taxpayer dollars and Israel's intention to take over all of what is left of the Palestinian West Bank.  

Regicide II

        It's now possible to foresee that the nation faces a likely Trump presidency until 2024. The script is clear enough: Just in time, a conservative Supreme Court nominee may replace a retiring or dying jurist enabling a conservative court that could block any impeachment proceedings or indictments however concocted; a perceived PR triumph in Korea or Iran, or both, will swell the Trump base. Constant warfare helps, and with the economy booming the presumed Democratic takeover of the House next November could slip away.

       It's not all bad news. With our brilliant techno-society caught in an unintended whirlpool of inequality and justice-focused faith communities struggling for reinvention a six year hiatus in the catacombs could be a gift.  Time for rethinking and learning.  

       The first stage of that learning platform will be to understand that the Age of Trump is only a placeholder for the larger tyrannies of markets and powerful elites that have always subverted democratic practice. Most people know this instinctively from their own experience with politics as manipulation. 

        Six years underwater offer opportunities to organize new waves of critical thinking latent in lived experience. Like the innovative proposals in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society--just published by Princeton University Press. Defining property as inherently monopolistic, authors Eric Posner and Glen Weyl suggest determining ownership through public auctions and distributing voting power through a system of shares. If you own six shares you can strategically distribute your preferences, instead of one person one vote. No, it's not socialism. It's a new line of thinking that deserves careful analysis. 

        Important clarifications of both faith and technology are in order during this six years living underground. The Christians are notorious for folding in the fourth quarter, at exactly the point where dreams of resurrection offer an escape from the thicket where love requires justice. For many reasons other faith communities also have trouble universalizing that connection.

       

       Then there are those other religions. Atlantic Magazine correspondent Franklin Foer challenges the dominion of Silicon Valley in World Without End: The Existential Threat of Big Tech(Penguin Press) citing the tyrannical potential of the big five technology giants (Google, Amazon, etc). The growing clamor in the tech world against hierarchy--not always as smart or as creative as claimed--especially male hierarchy, is a sign of hope; the sound perhaps of constructive revolution against life defined as data boiling up from the bottom of the pyramid.

       There are precedents. Four hundred years ago devout Puritans like poet John Milton threw themselves heedlessly into Cromwell's 1645 revolution whose goal was to end the tyranny of kings and conform daily life and governance to the purposes of God. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexcercised" Milton would write,

"that never sallies out to see her adversary, but slinks away from the race that must be run not without dust and heat. " 

        He experienced plenty of both writing book-length "pamphlets" aimed at balky Parliaments and at Charles I's acusstomed tyrannies. Supporting a New Model Army that sang hymns going into battle, the reformers pursued nothing less than "regicide," the head of the king; and while they did put him to the axe the Royalist spirit of domination by the fittest survived and still does to this day. 

       Milton ended up imprisoned and on a track that for a time threatened to use the same axe on him. In the end, for better and for worse, the Puritans changed the world spreading some good seed, but the worst part of their creation became  the global-wide systems of domination that claim to be "doing God's will" as Goldman Sach's CEO, Lloyd Blankfine, likes to put it. 

       Regicide II is a kairos time, perhaps as long as six years, when we may have opportunity to think well and deeply and faithfully toward an end to all killing. That would be time well spent.