Response to Lessons of History

I think the Durants’ are advocating an extremely dangerous view on war (or as it is now more commonly called, foreign affairs). In their chapter on history and war, they have a little debate between a general and a philosopher, beginning with bringing up some instances in history where war has stopped some evil, Hitler etc. Then they move on to their first point:

“In the present inadequacy of international law and sentiment a nation must be ready at any moment to defend itself; and when its essential interests are involved it must be allowed to use any means it considers necessary to its survival. The Ten Commandments must be silent when self-preservation is at stake.”

“The essential interests” of course meaning the interest of the state and “any means it considers necessary to its survival” can be applied to anything. This broad statement can be used to justify any foreign affairs and is basically saying that the state should be able to act freely towards others, as long as it suits themselves.

“It is clear (continues the general) that the United States must assume today the task Great Britain performed so well in the nineteenth century – the protection of Western civilization from external danger.”

Then then start explaining this “external danger” as communism. Will and Ariel go on explaining that if nothing is done it is only a matter of time before most of the world will be under communist dictatorship. Then they ask the question:

“Is it not wiser to resist at once, to carry the war to the enemy, to fight on foreign soil, to sacrifice, if need be, a hundred thousand American lives and perhaps a million noncombatants, but to leave America free to live its own life in security and freedom? Is it not a farsighted policy fully in accord with the lessons of history?”

Finally a solution is proposed. Should America not have the right to invade other countries, countries of inadequate and barbaric ways? Should America not be allowed to shed blood on foreign soil for the preservation of our wonderful western ideology and culture? The solution proposed is a simple one. Smash up what you don’t like. Although we have yet to see a full on war between communism and capitalism (or the rise of communism that was to be the inevitable future) the US has more or less used this approach (the sledgehammer) in its foreign affairs. So how has America succeeded in being the protector of western civilization? This is a debatable and complicated question with many angles so I will give you a short and simple version of my opinion on it. Although we are not approaching anything catastrophic quite yet the situation seems pretty grim. The Middle East has received a lot of attention lately and although the media coverage has mostly been shallow and exaggerated it is clear that the situation there is serious. I think a big reason for how it has developed is due to western involvement. The good old hammer seems to have caused more problems than it solved. This does not mean that I buy into the classic leftist response; that if we are just open minded and show love and understanding the problem will solve itself. ISIS is an extreme fascist state that needs to be dealt with, although just plainly bombing them (the classic US solution) will not solve the issue or protect the western world. The approach the Durant’s are justifying, too often creates more terror and destruction than what is was supposed to solve. These kinds of arguments are what lets the US chase its interests, at whatever cost.

Terrorism is without a doubt a real problem, which requires a real solution, but I think the structure of the western world is a more important and less recognised issue. In the long run, that will be what really matters. The Durant’s talk a bit about economy and capitalism in their book. I quote:

“The capitalist, of course, has fulfilled a creative function in history: he has gathered the saving of the people into productive capital by the promise of dividends and interest; he has financed the mechanization of industry and agriculture, and the rationalization of distribution; and the result has been such a flow of goods from producer to consumer as history has never seen before. He put the liberal gospel of liberty to his use by arguing that businessmen left relatively free from transportation tolls and legislative regulation can give the public a greater abundance of food, homes, comfort and leisure than has ever come from industries managed by politicians, manned by governmental employees, and supposedly immune to the laws of supply and demand. In free enterprise the spur of competition and zeal and zest of ownership arouse the productiveness and inventiveness of men; nearly every economic ability sooner or later finds its niche and reward in the shuffle of talents and natural selection of skills; and a basic democracy rules the process of insofar as most of the articles to be produced, and the services to be rendered, are determined by public demand rather than be governmental decree. Meanwhile competition compels the capitalist to exhaustive labour, and his products to ever rising excellence.”

This basic theory of capitalism sound very nice and productive but there are some problems in practise. The businessmen that have been “left relatively free from transportation tolls and legislative regulation” have increased the gap between the rich and the poor to such an extreme (and given little back) that the state is unable to provide the basics needed for the level playing ground capitalism is supposed to be based on. The “natural selection of skills” has been a narrow one, since the skill of selling is all that is rewarded, and in many cases the ones at the top (in wealth, supposedly the fair way to judge ability) have simply been lucky by inheriting something or investing in the right company. Economy has become an almost abstract thing, our invisible god, studied and controlled by a few. The free market is no longer free due to advertisements that are everywhere. It’s a big field of study, how to trick people (and children) into wanting something. These ads, that we can’t avoid, cloud our judgement, therefore removing free choice from consumption. So there is not much truth in this dream of capitalism today.

“International government is developing as industry, commerce, and finance override frontiers and take international forms”

This has now happened. The complexity of how global capitalism has impacted the world is immense. The most noticeable change is in the trade game. Everyone has to compete for capital. Our obsession with economic profit requires everything to expand and reproduce, the cycle of capital has to keep going, but this cycle has become a destructive one. Companies, driven by this profit motive, all over the world have been doing horrible things. There are many examples of companies buying some self-sustainable land in Africa, start farming fish or plants, ultimately ruining the eco system, forcing the people around to try to get a job in the company, low pay, worse standards of living and so on. Companies exploiting nature for profit, companies with child labour, slavery. Everyone knows that a big part of the big companies are involved in some bad activity. This is normally written off as the greed of a few individuals but here is where we go wrong. This kind of activity is precisely what capitalism promotes. This is an ideological issue. Our structure rewards this.

But who am I to judge the customs and institutions of society?

“Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they proposed to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generation after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history……So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it – perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulating development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.”

So am I not just the hormone driven rebellious youth? Well, yes. And it is very true that the tension between groups of different opinions is useful in providing strong and withstanding ideas. So my view should be questioned and criticized. But there are two vital points I think the Durant’s are missing in their argument for conservativism. Firstly, they have too much faith in what has survived through history being the best way for the future, and secondly they forget that the old, the men, the upper class are the ones in power. There is not a radical and even discussion going on between the ones in control, and the ones protesting. For although most of the roots remain underground and unseen, they are what controls how the tree grows. Our way of life; school, work, media, are designed by the people in power, to remain in power. Our ideology is constructed to reproduce itself. That is why, now more than ever, the radical is desperately needed.

The future awaits us with challenges, different from the ones we have had to face in the past. Environment, economy and technology to name a few. Environmental issues are well known and climate change is undeniable. The changes in climate that are going to happen even if we would stop polluting today are bad enough, but we are changing very little and very slowly. The melting of the ice, rise of sea level and increased frequency of environmental disasters in the future will be a huge problem, especially for the poorer countries. How are we going to deal with the destruction of large areas of land, entire eco systems destroyed, villages, towns, cities, homes swept away. Our economy can deal with small hits, but what will happen when disaster strikes? How will we recover from that? And where will the people go? We can already see how difficult this is with the refugee crisis, because although money and data flow more and more freely from country to country, people have a harder and harder time with it.

Then there is technology, we are approaching some sort of sci-fi realm sooner than we might realize. Robotics, biotechnology, the internet and artificial intelligence will all play a big part in the future, and with these technological advancements there arise political, moral and philosophical questions that we have not had to answer in the past. Robots are getting advanced enough to take over a large part of our jobs, self-driving cars are an example that is already here, and they are cheaper and make fewer mistakes. How much work should robots be allowed to do, and what happens to all the unemployed? Biotechnology will allow us to change our physical and mental abilities, we will be able to remove bad memories and even create feelings. We will have to find answers to moral questions and ask ourselves what it means to be human. The internet is already working its way into the heart of society, it is becoming the center of information, communication and entertainment. There is more data available than ever before and it is way easier to store it. The internet has developed huge monopolies (contrary to the dreams of its early inventors) that control most of that data. How much freedom should we give them? Artificial intelligence might seem like a farfetched sci-fi dream but it is already here, though not in a form of a human. Artificial intelligence programs have the ability to learn and adapt, and process huge amounts of data to find patterns etc. All of the major tech companies are investing in AI and developing their own programs. Most of them seems primitive and stupid but they are still learning, and what they are designed to learn is often disturbing. One example is Google’s smart reply, an email feature that gives you a few short optional answers to your email based on its content, you chose the best one and save a few seconds. The program is learning how to understand the content of your emails, and by giving it access to them and feedback with your choices, you are teaching it. With all the data we give these companies they have endless options of how to use it. Google already has a profile on all of its users that it then sells to advertisers. Imagine how precise this profile will be in the future, and imagine the power that comes with it. The options for manipulation and control this opens up are way scarier than the classic conscious robot story. Google has been known to share its profiles with the NSA and in 2014 Facebook conducted an unauthorized psychological experiment on its users. Should we trust these companies for this much control? I’m not saying that we should stop advancing technology, technology simply brings with it new options, good and bad, we just have to be careful with how we choice to use it.

These problems that we face, these questions that we need to answer are not being dealt with in an appropriate way, if at all. There are new possibilities that await us in the future that could lead us to peril or greatness. We need a rational way to deal with these problems instead of having major decisions being made by “the capable few” based on economic profit. Capitalism will not do this, we need something new. Even though we can look into the past for insight on the future, the answers of tomorrow cannot always be found in history.