ParisTampaBlog

During the present holiday season I have been reading Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. And of my doing this, of my reading, Dennett has this to say (p.509):

“Here you are, devoting several hours to reading my book. Shouldn’t we both be out raising money for Oxfam or picketing the Pentagon or writing lettters to our senators and repesentatives about various matters? Did you consciously decide, on the basis of calculations, that the time was ripe for a little sabbatical from real-world engagement, a period ‘off-line’ for a little reading?”

Well, no, none of that. I’ve never felt that reading good writers was not the best use of my time. In any case I probably left the “real world” years ago, once I was able to understand that my interests were not the interests of most people, even those closest to me, my own family.

One might even make the case (and I suppose that people have) that I’ve never been in the real world, only in a world of my own which has always seemed real enough.

As for Dennett, when I do take the time to understand what he is saying I find myself pretty much in full agreement. And I’ll have more to say about this agreement.

For the moment, on this the next to last day of the year, let me just place here in my Blog space, one of Dennett’s, and one of my favorite poems, W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, along with the Brueghel painting that inspired it. These words and image, encountered once again while reading Dennett, are what I’d like to take with me going into the new year.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Why is it that the Right in America is so afraid of the Welfare State. Why is it that Europe, the favored travel destination of most every member of our elite some 100 years ago, is now held up as the place where we most of all don’t want to go, the kind of place where we certainly don’t want to live.

The answer most often given is that Europe has become the place where fewer and fewer people work, and instead the place where more and more people depend on cradle to grave government subsidies.

How is it that following the longest world-wide battle in history, lasting some 200 years or more (and for some not yet over), when one side, capitalism, has clearly won out over the other side, socialism, how is it that socialism’s replacement, welfare, has been able to jump into the battle and become today the new threat to the free market capitalists, the clear winners of that longest battle?

Is it just a case of cutting off one head and seeing another one spring up in its place?

No. The answer is that capitalism, while becoming the most efficient wealth creator ever, and while relegating its rival socialism to the historical dust heap, has done little on its own initiative to distribute an adequate portion of its enormous wealth to those who somehow have not much profited from the highly profitable world-wide exchange of goods and services.

Capitalism while enormously successful has failed too many people. That’s the reason for welfare.

Because of this failure (both in Europe and America)  government funded social safety nets have come into being. It’s because capitalism has permitted an ever growing number of failed individual human lives, people left behind as it were in the wake of those powerful and inhumane market forces that refashion to their own not human ends the land and water surfaces of the earth.

Entitlements come into play and provide a much needed safety net. Entitlements are the results of the efforts of some, mostly on the political Left, to cushion the lives of those millions in this country (say those without health insurance), and those hundreds of millions world-wide (say those without jobs). For most of these millions the profits obtained by ubiquitous market exchanges have not much trickled down to them.

Social Security, then one generation later Medicare and Medicaid, along with various other anti-poverty and community social service programs, were enacted into Law by the Democratic controlled Congresses to provide social safety nets adequate to the needs of the growing numbers of people not able to provide for themselves and their families. This is what we mean by welfare. It’s not bad, and it’s here to stay.

You might say if you want that we have been following, since the end of the Second World War, Europe’s lead, becoming a state, like the countries of Europe, where welfare payments  consume a larger and larger portion of our federal  budget. But we had no real choice. Our people’s need  was there and we would have done this on our own, with or without Europe’s lead.

The problem is not welfare, or the welfare state. The problem is whether we are wealthy enough to pay for the programs that we have already enacted, let alone the health care reform act that Congress  is about to pass.  The problem is particularly acute because of growing entitlement spending during the past 40 years or so.

“Since 1970, the historical ratio between defense spending and entitlement spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has flipped. In 1970, total defense spending was 8.1 percent of our economy or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — more than twice the 3.8 percent of GDP spent on the big three entitlement programs.

“Today, the core defense program has fallen to 3.9 percent of GDP, while entitlement spending has more than doubled to 9.6 per­cent of GDP. By 2030, the big three entitlements will absorb roughly 81 percent of all federal revenue if taxes are rightly held at historical levels.”

To read more about this seemingly disastrous state of affairs go HERE and HERE and HERE.

Is the Right, for whom entitlements are a nemesis, right? Need we be afraid that it will happen here as in Europe, that “fewer and fewer people work, and more and more depend on cradle to grave government subsidies?”

I don’t think so. But the federal government, while not turning away from its commitment to welfare and an adequate safety net, should direct a much higher proportion of its efforts to job creation, that which would mean in many cases just getting out of the way of the entrepreneurs, those who make welfare or the redistribution of a country’s wealth, even possible.

At one time agriculture consumed a huge portion of the country’s wealth, a huge portion of the government’s outlays, some 40% of GDP. This changed only when agriculture become more efficient.

The only answer to the welfare state’s not consuming the lion’s share of the country’s wealth is to grow the country’s wealth. The threat to us is not what’s happening in Europe. It’s what’s not happening in Europe. The pie, the wealth is not growing, at least not growing enough to insure investment in future growth.

So as in the past the Federal government has to get out of the way of the people who are able to make the pie bigger. Only in this way, when there is more there to start with, higher earnings and higher federal revenues, will workers get to keep a larger portion of those earnings and will those who need help, the poor, the old, the unemployed, the sick and the handicapped, and all the others, get that help, that which might even mean, in the best of possible worlds, a reentry into the work force.

In his Nobel speech President Obama says this: “For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.”

These words, of course, won him plaudits from the Right. And mostly silence from the Left, at least to the extent that I’m aware of the Left’s reactions to the President’s address.

But doesn’t one have to qualify the President’s statement, because taken at face value we would have to say that since evil does exist we ought to be able to find it, confront it, isolate it, and take the necessary steps to rid the world of it, as we’ve done, say, with the small-pox bacillus.

But we can’t do that. We’re not even able to find and confront Bin Laden, for many the embodiment of evil in this world.

In fact man has never had that kind of power over evil. Evil, if the President is right and evil does exist, always lies a bit beyond our ability to confront it and vanquish it. We speak of it but even if up close to it, as in a police line-up, we probably wouldn’t be able to recognize and identify it.

So the President’s words need qualification or explanatory notes. Otherwise the statement that evil does exist in the world is without real substance or meaning.

The actual situation in the world is something else. Mostly, and this is probably true for Obama, as well as for those on his Right and Left, one can’t assume that the the good will prevail, that people will always do the right thing.

To the extent that we are realists, as the President I’m sure would have us believe of him, we know through experience that a good number of people will not do the right thing, but rather what may be, or at least appear to be, some very bad (evil) things.

Furthermore, while we may say that evil exists in the world, we find it much harder to say that this or that person is evil. In fact, Obama doesn’t say this. He is careful to say only that evil exists, a safe enough statement and one that probably pleased his listeners at the Nobel ceremony. In addition, I’m sure that no one in attendance thought that the evil of which the President spoke was in the room with them.

It may very well be that the President only used the word evil in his ceremonial talk because he needed, there before the Nobel Committee of Peace, their support for him and what’s fast becoming his own war in Afghanistan. For one can and should fight evil.

An interesting question, — do you think that if Obama felt that evil didn’t exist he would have ordered the additional troupes to Afghanistan?  I would say yes. Because whatever his reasons for sending the  troupes, it couldn’t have been to combat the putative evil in the world.

For me the President would have done better not to have mentioned evil. This kind of language, as George Bush showed us, doesn’t help to improve relations between and among peoples. In my own lifetime I have never encountered evil. I would have to admit that I don’t know whether it exists, and I suspect that Obama doesn’t either.

Cruelty, horrible actions that seem “evil,” yes, but these are not “in the world” but only in the world of men. The world out there includes much more, and most, if not all of it, lies outside man’s good or evil  designation.

Animals that prey on other animals, trap them, and eat them while they’re still alive, — do we call these acts evil? I don’t think so. And yet these acts are as horrible as any done by man to man, or woman.

Why is that? Why is there no evil in the world other than that of just one animal, man? Well we’re told by those who pretend to know that man, different from all other creatures, should know better. The polar bear dining on the walrus cub shouldn’t.

So by not knowing better than to do something, when we should know better, that makes us evil? No, I find that explanation unsatisfactory.

Actually the only thing that gives some reality to the concept of evil is the fact that man, throughout recorded history, has made use of it, or something like it, to describe behavior that he doesn’t understand, let alone approve. In that sense the idea of evil has been around a long time. We’ve talked and written about it forever, but does it exist?

Again, no. It doesn’t. I much prefer Plato’s substitution of ignorance for evil. Ignorance I know. I’ve encountered it many times, and I know that to do something about it is within our means. If he had given it more thought the President wouldn’t, couldn’t have said or meant what he said.