American support of Tibet: Too little too late

Tibet was taken over by the Chinese in 1951. In 1959 Tibetan protests led to repressive measures by the Chinese that resulted in thousands of Tibetans fleeing their homeland and taking up residence in India, Switzerland, Canada and various other countries. The brutal treatment of Tibetans by the Chinese has been taking place for fifty years. And now the United States half opens one eye and takes a little notice. Why now?

I have nothing to offer but speculation as to why the United States now pays some attention to the suffering of the Tibetans, and speculation is of no use to anyone. I'll therefore keep it to myself. Instead of offering that, let me make a few observations about why it is too late for the United States to play a significant role in helping Tibetans find justice in their homeland.

From the Chinese perspective, the Han treatment of Tibetans, Uigurs and Mongols has been far more beneficial to those minority peoples than American treatment of the Cherokee, Lakota, Apache, Navajo, Ute, Shoshone, Crow, Cree, Iroquois and Ojibway peoples. The native American peoples were subjected to genocidal treatment, and their cultures were in many cases almost entirely obliterated and their traditional lifestyles made impossible by the forceful occupation of their lands. In past years I have been involved in several conversations with people from the People's Republic of China, and this point is always brought up. American treatment of ethnic minorities has been shameful from beginning to end. Americans enslaved Africans and forcibly brought them to America to do labor. Americans conducted an illegal war against Mexico and took parts of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona from the Mexicans before buying even more land from them at unreasonable prices, and Americans have never treated the descendants of those Mexicans who now find themselves in America particularly well. In the process of settling the West, Americans repeatedly betrayed native peoples, took their land from them, rounded them up and shot their women and children even when they had peacefully surrendered. The picture of Geronimo, Chappo, Perico and Chihuahua with the caption “Homeland Security–Fighting Terrorism Since 1492” is not just an amusing joke. The Chinese know that well and find it sufficient grounds to dismiss Americans now who try to take the moral high road.

In more recent times, the American government has engaged in yet more illegal invasions of sovereign nations, this time not a neighboring country but two countries halfway around the world. The pretext for invading both Afghanistan and Iraq was quite similar to that of invading Mexico in 1846; in all cases, the sovereign nations invaded were portrayed as a threat to America's safety and an enemy of American freedom. How can a country that has repeatedly behaved in this way object to the Chinese invasion of Tibet?

Unlike any other war in American history, the American occupation of Iraq has not been financed by taxation of American citizens. It has been financed by borrowed money. Estimates vary, but an estimate published today in the New York Times is that the invasion and occupation of Iraq will have cost every man, woman and child in the United States about $10,000. None of that cost has come through ordinary budgeting, which, during the Bush presidency has already been deficit financing every year. The national debt has grown out of control. About 40% of that debt is owned by foreign nations, most of it by the Chinese. If the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are being waged by borrowed money, and if each citizen of the USA bears $10,000 of the burden, and if China owns around 35% of the American debt, then this means that each American is about $3500 in debt to China. And this does not include the massive trade deficit that America has to China as a result of buying goods produced in that country. It also does not include the credit card debts and home mortgages and automobile loans that most Americans carry, a significant amount of which is also owned by Chinese investors. Being deeply in debt to someone does not put one in a strong position to make demands on the way they behave. The protests of a debtor are easy to shrug off. Ask anyone who has been in debt to the IRS.

As outrageous as Chinese policies in Tibet (and toward the Uigurs and Mongols in their homelands) have been, this may be a situation in which we must listen to Jesus and let him who is free of sin cast the first stone. Unfortunately, the candidate for throwing the first stone at the Chinese for their imperialistic sins is not going to be anyone who has had an empire in the past several centuries. The English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Dutch, Austrians, Hungarians, Israelis, Arabs and Turks will have to be sidelined along with the Americans, and of course the Japanese will have to sit on the bench with the rest of us. So who is left? Is there a David able and willing to sling a rock at the Chinese Goliath?

Unfortunately, any David preparing a sling to hurl a rock at the Chinese Goliath is likely to be just as ready to hurl a stone at the American Goliath, too. Thanks to our past conduct (or what Asians are inclined to call karma) as a people, most of us who belong to the human race (or to some subset thereof) have no option but to hold Tibetans in the light, as the Quakers say. That is, we have little option but to let the best of ourselves feel compassion for all those who are suffering injustice everywhere, beginning with those in our own homes, neighborhoods, countries, and continents and extending it to all living beings, animate and inanimate on this entire planet. That is the very least we can do to begin the healing of the world. Unfortunately, the very least we can do is probably considerably more than most of us will manage to do.

Will the real fascists please stand up?

In a squib called The Danger of Misidentified Dangers I criticized the neologism “Islamofascism” that is used in some circles these days. There is no need to repeat here what was written there, except to say that the word misuses the word “fascism”. Properly used, that word refers to a cluster of characteristics, especially, authoritarian government, patriotism/nationalism, militarism, corporatism and opposition to political liberalism. Some of those terms require futher discussion.

Corporatism

This term is used to refer to a political system in which power is given to corporations. Corporations are hierarchical structures made up of unelected officials that are formed with the purpose of controlling or strongly influencing people's behavior. Typically corporations foster more of a collectivist than an individualistic approach to what kind of conduct is acceptable. Corporations can be of any kind, but a familiar type is the kind formed for the purpose of conducting business and maximizing profit. A fascist form of government tends favor the efficient operation of corporations considerably more than it favors the well-being of individuals.

Liberalism

Political liberalism is a policy that favors the freedom and well-being of individuals over the collective interests of collectives such as the nation, religious organizations or economic corporations.

Given these understandings, it is not difficult to see that Fascism—a form of government that promotes the interests of the state and its economic corporations over the interests of individuals—would be diametrically opposed to liberalism and might even see any kind of liberalism as dangerous. (Who cannot have noticed how the word “liberal” has become in American political discussions a label that no one can wear without suffering automatic disapproval in many quarters?)

When certain politicians and political commentators pin the label “Islamofascism” on real or imagined enemies of democracy who are also often called “terrorists”, it is not difficult to suppose that at least part of their plan is to deflect attention from the genuinely fascist forces that truly are undermining democratic governments and terrorizing all those who have liberal leanings. The people called Islamofascists, in other words, could well be a smokescreen behind which the true enemies of the United States and other constitutional democracies are hiding. The most dangerous enemies of democracy may not be those hiding in caves halfway around the world, but those people, both unelected and elected (or at least supposedly elected), who are wielding power in our own governments and waging a war of attrition against the governed citizens.

In an informative and insightful article in the March 16, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, Jeffrey Rosen writes in “Supreme Court Inc: How the nation's highest court has come to side with business” how all but one of the supreme court justices appointed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George Bush are strongly pro-business and have consistently made decisions that have limited the degree to which major corporations can be sued for damages by private citizens or have their enterprises regulated by state and federal regulations. David Souter (appointed by G.H.W Bush), Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (appointed by Clinton) and John Roberts and Samuel Alito (appointed by G.W. Bush) have consistently made pro-corporate decisions that have limited their accountability to consumers. Many of the most important legislation protecting consumers passed as a result of the efforts of Ralph Nader and his colleagues have been overtuned or severely muted by the Supreme Court during the past two presidencies. The Supreme Court has joined the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II presidencies in championing the interests of the economically powerful over the interests of relatively powerless private citizens. Since 1980, when Reagan was elected, Americans have conspired with the major corporations and the government to erode many of the important protections of individual rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Fascism is alive and well, with no help at all from Islamic forces.

Aaron Russo, in a film entitled America: Freedom to Fascism produced in 2006, offers interesting food for thought. While most people will probably agree with me that the film goes over the top in drawing many far-fetched conclusions and uncritically endorses a libertarian ideology, it also offers sobering chonicles of many of the successful tactics carried out by the Bush administration to expand presidential powers, diminish congressional powers, expand corporate and military powers, and dramatically shrink the powers of ordinary citizens. It is worth watching with an open mind and a critical eye.

If the idea of living in a fascist nation with undisguised imperialistic aspirations is no more appealing to Americans than it is to those who are portrayed as enemies of freedom, it may be time for those who love the liberty of individuals as protected by the American Constitution to consider what we all—whether we are Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Unitarians or Quakers—have to offer one another in our common spiritual resistance to systems of government that consistently favor the wealthy, the powerful and the oppressive over the poor, the weak and the oppressed.

Your tax dollars at work

The current budget of the United States is $2,397,308,000,000 (in words, two point four trillion dollars). Every person who pays taxes into the coffers of the United States contributes something toward that budget, and taxpayers in future generations will pay for what today's taxpayers do not cover. According to the national debt clock the  debt is now over $9.3 trillion, or nearly $30,620 for every living human being in the country (bearing in mind that about 23% of the debt is owned by foreign agencies).

So how are US tax dollars spent? According to the Friends Committee on National Legislation web site, the current national budget is apportioned as follows: 44% of every tax dollar goes to the military (a figure that includes 13.5% that is paying costs associated with previous wars); 19.7% goes to various aspects of health care; 11.8% goes to dealing with poverty; 10.9% goes to paying interest on the national debt; 7.0% is used to maintain non-military government programs; 2.5% is allocated to scientific research (including NASA) and environmental issues; 2.2% is dedicated to various social programs; and 1.5% goes to all non-military interactions with other nations, such as foreign aid and humanitarian work.

Let's state a hypothetical case. Suppose you paid $5000 in taxes this year to the IRS. This means you are paying somewhere around $2,220 to help pay for everything the military does and has done through the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, Homeland Security, and aid to foreign militaries. Compare that to the $125 you are contributing toward scientific research through the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Forest Service, the National Park system and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The chances are good that you have helped finance more killing, detaining, torturing, wiretapping and other forms of spying than you have helped finance finding solutions to global warming.

It has been estimated that even if American troops are withdrawn from Iraq fairly soon, the total cost of the Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion, or about $3300 for every man woman and child in the USA. (If the average family has 4 people, then the average family's share of that war would be $13,200.)

If the choice had been yours to make, would you have spent money in the ways just outlined? If not, there are things you can do. First, you can write to your various representatives and urge them to spend money in ways you find more appetizing. (I personally would favor reducing military spending to around 3% of the national budget and putting the a much larger share into a national health care system, scholarships for students at all levels, and scientific research. I would also favor balancing the budget by dramatically reducing military spending.)

A second thing you can do is to take more control over how your money is spent by giving substantial amounts to charities and causes that dramatically reduce your taxable income so that little or none of your money falls into the hands of a government that apparently cares much more about killing than in healing, educating and aiding.

Think very carefully about how you vote in this year's elections. None of the leading candidates at this point have shown signs of being willing to make major cuts in defense spending. (Democracy Now! reports that Obama actually supports increasing military spending. That is not the sort of change I can believe in; none of the other leading candidates offer anything much better.) At the very least, if you have grown weary of the American Empire, make the American budget an issue. Ask tough questions. And don't feel there is any wisdom in settling for a candidate whose priorities do not reflect those of you and your family.

Time for a non-military America

Despite the fact that the United States is one of the 189 nations that signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which was opened for signature in 1968, the Bush administration has relentlessly pursued the building of new nuclear warheads. The current aim is to replace all existing nuclear warheads by “improved” versions by the year 2030. There are several reasons why this program, often called the 2030 Bombplex, should be discarded.

• The principal rationale for having nuclear weapons in the first place was to provide a disincentive to other nation states and empires who also had nuclear weapons from using them. If this strategy ever had validity and effectiveness, it was during the Cold War era. That era has now long since passed. All the countries that currently have nuclear weapons are considered allies and friendly trading partners of the United States. The United States no longer has national enemies that have shown any intent of harming it. The time for having a nuclear arsenal has past.
• The only entities that have shown an intent of harming the United States in any way are not nations but essentially guerrilla organizations against whom nuclear weaponry is utterly useless. The most effective way to make peace with these organizations is to stop interferring in their territories. The United States could achieve peace instantly by closing all military bases on foreign soil and by abandoning all policies that consist in meddling in the affairs of other sovereign nations and sub-national tribal groups. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by military means in the world as it now exists, let alone by nuclear weapons.
• Building and stockpiling nuclear weapons by the United States completely undermines the credibility of appeals to other nations to abandon their programs of developing nuclear weapons. It will always be seen as hypocritical for the United States to demand that Iran and North Korea desist from testing nuclear capabilities as long as the United States has an arsenal capable of destroying the entire earth several times over. (People who have not yet seen it should treat themselves to Ben Cohen's Nuclear BB demo.)
• The United States spends a staggering amount of money to maintain its nuclear arsenal and to pay legal settlements to workers whose health has been compromised by working with nuclear materials. It was estimated that in 1998 the United States spent $35,100,000,000 on nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs. (See the fact sheet put out by the Brookings Institution.) This figure has increased during the years of the Bush administration along with the base military budget, which has increased by 70% during the Bush years, and this figure does not include special funds set aside for the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The current military budget is more than $1,000,000,000,000 (one million million) per annum.
• Much of the cost of maintaining a nuclear arsenal is keeping it from falling into “the wrong hands.” (It could be argued that it is already in the wrong hands by being in the hands of the United States military, but let us leave that aside for the moment.) If any of the materials that are or have been part of the US nuclear arsenal were to be commandeered by guerrilla organizations, the results could be disastrous. This may have happened already; the Brookings Institution reports that eleven warheads have been lost in accidents and never recovered. In other words, they are known to be missing, but it is unknown into whose hands they have fallen.

Interestingly enough, none of the leading candidates in the current presidential campaign have made their positions on the future of nuclear weaponry known. Journalists have shown no apparent interest in asking candidates about this issue.

A question worth asking oneself is whether any man or woman who believes in maintaining the conventional and nuclear military prowess of the United States is sane and competent enough to deserve your vote. It may be time to consider writing in a candidate such as Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul or voting for the Green Party. Only those candidates show any signs of promising a change we can believe in.

Does ignorance matter? Who knows?

Twenty years ago I took a bus from Montreal to Albuquerque. I love bus travel, because it it economical and environmentally responsible, but also because one meets interesting people. On this particular trip I sat for about a thousand miles next to a young woman whose husband was in the army. She herself was going to college. We talked about places we had visited, and she said she had been to Niagara Falls. Somehow in the course of that part of the conversation, she volunteered the information that Niagara Falls is located on the border between California and Canada. I pointed out that there are two states between California and Canada and that Niagara Falls is actually on the border between New York State and Ontario. She seemed fairly confident that I was mistaken about this, so both of us agreed to change the subject rather than argue about the disputed location of a water falling off a cliff.

At the time, I was amazed at that one student's geographical ignorance, and I wondered how she had managed to get into college. Now, twenty years later, I almost take it for granted that when I mention Korea, Japan, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand, Afghanistan, Iraq or Turkey to a college student, he or she will have only a dim idea of where those places on, aside from perhaps knowing that they are on planet earth. I also take it for granted that it is not for an unwillingness to learn geography that students know so little about it; the responsibility for their ignorance, I assume, falls on their teachers and on the news media. (If you live in the United States, think quickly. When's the last time you saw an in-depth news report about any country outside the United States? When's the last time you saw Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Chihuahua or Sonora on a weather map?) According to a CNN story “nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map.” (Hint: it is nowhere near the California-Canada border.)

n February 15, 2008 Bill Moyers interviewed Susan Jacoby, author of a book entitled Age of American Unreason. In that interview Jacoby says “without a base of knowledge of how things are you can't really have a reasonable talk about how things ought to be.” The United States has become a nation in which even the allegedly educated—even the educators themselves—have a startling lack of knowledge of history, geography, the arts, world literature and the ways of other cultures.

Rudy Giuliani, former presidential candidate, once said in a debate that if the United States had a health care system like Canada's then Canadians would no longer be able to come here for decent health care. He also called America's health care system the best in the world. No one challenged him. No one, either his opponents or the newsman moderating the debate pointed out that Canada does not have a health care system. Health insurance schemes are managed by the provinces, not by the Canadian government, and each province has a different way of offering affordable coverage to everyone. Moreover, medical care in Canada is generally quite good, often better than what is available in the United States, and always far more affordable. So the answer to Giuliani's question is that if the states in the United States had health care systems like those in Canadian provinces, Canadians would continue to stay in Canada to get excellent health care—and Americans would stop trying to buy their pharmaceuticals in Canada, where a reasonable ceiling is placed on the profits that pharmaceutical companies can make. But how many Americans know enough to challenge a political candidate who makes inaccurate and irresponsible claims?

Democracy works only when the electorate is educated enough to make rational decisions based on a knowledge of reality and on an ability to imagine workable alternatives to the status quo. An ignorant electorate has no access to knowledge as a guide and so is prone to being swayed by untutored emotions, by rumors, by charisma, and by well-crafted manipulation.

Trying every solution but the obvious

It feels as though the US presidential primaries have been on forever. All the slogans have been memorized—“Change we can believe in,” “Ready to lead on day one,” “Faith, Family, Freedom”—and positions have been outlined in debate after debate. Candidates have been grilled by news anchors and commentators, and all the pandits have weighed in with their opinion as to who is most likely to win the black vote in general, the affluent black vote, the rural black vote, the dership by doing all those things?)

If one were to say such a thing, the response of much of the American public would likely be very much like that of the a news commentator whom I happened to hear yesterday saying “Some of the politicians would have us sitting in the cold and the dark. Well not me! I don't want to live like a European !” (I wish I knew which politicians were honest enough to say that more of us should be sitting in the cold and the dark. If I knew who was saying that, I might have a better idea whom to vote for.)

When environmental issues were being brought to everyone's attention a couple of decades ago, we all learned about the Three R's: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The order of those three measures was important; the most effective was named first, the least effective last. And yet recycling is about the only one that has received serious and sustained attention. There is money to be made in recycling. But if people stop buying unnecessary goods, and if they use things until they are no longer needed and then give them to someone else who may have a use for them, then dramatically fewer things will be bought and sold and manufactured. Dramatically fewer things would be thrown into landfill sites or burned or shredded. Reductions in manufacturing, sales and waste management, we are told, would mean fewer jobs and less economic growth. A slower economy is un-American.

So if doing what is right for the environment—living sustainably with the resources that the earth provides and reducing the amount of toxicity poured into the water and air and soil—is bad for the economy as we now know it, then doing what is right for the environment must be un-American. That so many Americans apparently think this way, and feel no shame for their addictions to possessions and comforts and pleasures, is very bad news for the third planet from the sun. And because it is bad news for the earth, it is also very bad news for the very people who are unwilling to change the way they live.

Those political candidates who are calling for change are right. Things must change. But the changes we require are not going to be achieved simply by having news faces in the the White House and the Congress. The changes we require amount to nothing less than a radical change in human behavior, and those changes probably cannot be made without equally radical changes in human nature. Philosophers and religious leaders have been saying as much since writing was first used to record human thoughts. The advice has been given repeatedly and eloquently. It has rarely been heeded. There is not much evidence that the advice will be heeded now.

This year's presidential campaign so far has focused on hope, experience, national security and conservative values. Experience shows there is little hope that the environment will be conserved and that the entire nation is therefore deeply insecure. Which politician has the honesty to try to win the vote of reflective people by saying that?

To send our passions upon God's errands

The state of Pennsylvania was named after its founder, William Penn (1644–1718), the son of an admiral in the Royal Navy who was knighted for his service in restoring Charles II to the throne of England. The Penn family were Anglicans, but at the age of 22 William became a Quaker and a close friend of the founder of the Quakers, George Fox (1624–1691). It is said that William Penn carried a sword during his youth but realized that carrying weapons is discouraged by Quakers. Penn once asked Fox whether he should quit wearing a sword, and Fox reportedly replied “I advise thee to wear it as long as thou canst.” When they next met, Penn was no longer wearing a sword, and when Fox asked why Penn was unarmed, Penn replied “I wore it as long as I could.”

In 1693, William Penn wrote

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it…. It is as great presumption to send our passions upon God's errands, as it is to palliate them with God's name…. We are too ready to relatiate, rather than forgive, or gain by love and information. And yet we could hurt no man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: for if men once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.

It is not only individuals who send their passions upon God's errands, who somehow convince themselves that they are acting on noble motivations when in fact they are being driven by panic or by greed or by ignorance. Entire nations can be convinced that they are doing God's work when in fact they are reacting in blind fear and mindless rage. Consider what Bill Moyer's reported on The Journal on January 25:

Let's first connect some dots in the week's news. In Washington, two public interest groups — The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism — finished a report they have been working on for months. It's an old story but with new math. They went through the record and counted every false statement made by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and even six months after we were at war. How many?

If you guessed 935, you are right on the button. That's at least the number of times the president and seven of his top officials, including Condoleeza Rice, said Saddam Hussein was a national security threat.

What is interesting about this piece is not that the Bush administration told lies or even that they told so many. What is interesting is that so many people believed those lies and blindly followed the Bush administration into a costly, destructive, illegal and unnecessary war. Although not much is said about it now, some may recall that George W. Bush's father, George H.W. Bush (and one of his spokesmen, Dick Cheney), told the nation after the first Gulf War that toppling Saddam Hussein would have been folly. The senior Bush was not at all enthusiastic about this venture in Iraq in 2003, and when his son, the president, was asked why he did not heed his father, George W. Bush replied that he listened to a higher father. He presumably meant God. He apparently believed that he was on God's errand (much as Osama bin Ladin had believed he was on God's errand on September 11, 2001), but it is much more likely that Bush (like Osama) was sending his own passions to Iraq. His fear, his anger, his lust for power, his greed for oil, his need for approval after the first nine months of a presidency in which he was repeatedly ridiculed by journalists and columnists for being an incompetent fool whose strings were being pulled behind the scenes by the ever-sinister Dick Cheney.

What, though, explains why so many senators and congressional representatives and ordinary Americans were willing to follow the pathetic president's passions into a war that was obviously immoral? (Yes, it was obvious to hundreds of thousands of Canadians, Europeans and Asians. I was living in Montreal just before the American invasion of Iraq and marched in an anti-war parade about which Canadian journalist Jacques Richard wrote:

Braving freezing temperatures of -25 Celsius, 150,000 people marched through downtown Montreal Saturday to condemn US-British plans for war on Iraq. The protest was one of the largest political demonstrations in both Montreal and Canadian history, if not the largest.

As one of those 150,000 people I saw people of every age, from elderly men and women in wheelchairs to babies in strollers, and of every political persuasion marching along Ste Catherine street. At one point I went into a bookstore to get warm and to survey the crowd. As far as I could see to the east and to the west there were people marching along, covering the wide boulevard from one side to the other. To all of them it was obvious that America and the United Kingdom were about to embark on a maddeningly pointless and unnecessary war. What took the American public so long to arrive at the same conclusions?

I do not know the answer. What I do know, or strongly suspect, is that as long as people seek the answer to this question by looking for others to blame, there will never be peace in this world. Each individual must answer this question by looking long and hard inside his or her own mentality and asking: What was I afraid of? What comforts and luxuries was I hoping to gain or afraid to lose? What needs did I believe I had that I thought would be met by bombs and mortars and assault rifles and tanks? Why did I believe that war was a means of assuring peace? Why was I willing to have my country's politicians send young men and women to die and kill? Why was I willing to have my nation's treasury depleted so that my grand-children's children will still be paying the costs of this war?

These are personal questions. The answers must be just as personal. And once the difficult answers are found, the next question must be: How am I going to change my way of living so that no one ever again has to pick up a sword to kill or die for my passions?

Left, right, middle or none of the above?

If you are among the growing number of people who feel that the standard way of characterizing political stances as liberal, conservative, left-wing, right-wing and middle of the road is inadequate and confusing, you may be interested in a web site called The Political Compass. The authors of this web site argue convincingly that a more complex and nuanced way of characterizing political stances is needed.

The Political Compass is based on looking at two dimensions of political conviction. One dimension has to do with economic policy. Assigned to the x-axis of a standard Cartesian  type of graph, the left-of-center half of this line represents a willingness to have governmental control of the economy in the form of providing social safety nets such as social security and tax-subsidized universal health care, regulation of corporations, laws concerning minimum wages. The left-of-center half of the line, in other words, represents a tendency to favor communistic policies. The right-of-center half of the line, on the other hand, shows resistance to governmental regulation of the economy. The farther to the right one is on this axis, the more one favors economic neo-liberalism, that is, free markets.

The other dimension that the Political Compass recognizes is where one stands on the extent to which government should be allowed to regulate individual conduct. Assigned to the y-axis, the above-center half of the line represents a willingness to pass laws that criminalize the use of drugs, abortion, some sexual practices. Above-the-center positions also tend to emphasize law-and-order issues, punishment of miscreants rather than reform, a strong military, a willingness to abridge personal rights in the interests of national security. In short, above-center positions tend toward authoritarianism. The below-center positions, on the other hand, show a preference for individual rights and freedoms over national and other collectivist concerns. In other words, the farther one is situated along the y-axis, the more libertarian one's social philosophy is.

If one pictures the four quadrants made by a Cartesian graph, one can think of the four sectors as NE (economically neo-liberal and socially authoritarian), SE (economically neo-liberal and socially libertarian), SW (economically communistic and socially libertarian) and NW (economically communistic and socially authoritarian). Examples of people in each of the four quadrants are George W. Bush, Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher (NE); Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman (SE), Ralph Nader; The Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela (SW); and Pope Benedict, Robert Mugabe and Josef Stalin (NW).

The web site has a test that anyone can take for free and anonymously to determine one's own political quadrant. When I took the test I got a score that placed me pretty far to the left economically (-.868 with 0 being middle-of-the-road and -10 being Communist) and slightly less strongly libertarian on social issues (-6.31 with 0 being middle-of-the road and -10 being hardcore libertarian). This made immediate sense to me, given that Nader, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama are people whom I have always admired. It also helped me understand why, despite a left-leaning economic persuasion, I have always felt uncomfortable with the authoritarian nature of Soviet and Chinese Communism. It also made sense to me that the people I have admired least (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher) are at the opposite end of both spectrums to me; they favor economic liberalism but social authoritarianism. So while as a Southwesterner I feel quite comfortable with, say, same-sex marriage and full legalization of marijuana and heroin but think oil companies and pharmaceutical companies should be heavily regulated and the wealthy should be heavily taxed to provide healthcare for the poor, the Northwestern Bush and Reagan believe just the opposite on all these issues.

Take the test yourself and see where you fit. It may help you understand better why you either like this blog cite or hate it.

< p>For those of you who are following the American race for president, you may be interested in looking at the page on the US primaries. You will note, either with delight or with dismay, that all the leading candidates are in the same sector. They are all closely huddled around George W. Bush in the NE sector of the graph. The Republicans are all to the economic right of the Democrats and (with the exception of Ron Paul) more authoritarian, but all leading candidates of both parties are above-center authoritarians and right-of-center economic neo-liberals. If you are still undecided who to vote for, it could be because there is not much difference among the candidates. The only candidates not in the NE sector are Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel (neither of whom has a prayer of being nominated by their party). As the authors of the site point out, the ideological distance among American presidential canditates for the past twenty-five years or so has been less than in any other Western democracy. American political races tend to be among a pack of almost identical candidates. If it's political variety and real political choice you seek, think of living in Great Britain, Germany, Canada or New Zealand. If it's an illusion of diversity strongly magnified and exaggerated by the media you hanker for, The United States of America is the place for you.

A Chinese totalitarian assesses America

One of the most interesting and challenging philosophers of ancient China was Hanfeizi (Han Fei Tzu), who gave a rational defense of what we would now call totalitarianism. For the benefit of those in The United States of America who might like the government to have more absolute and unimpeachable power, I offer this brief report card on how America is doing as a totalitarian state of the sort described by Hanfeizi.

Hanfeizi argued that the ideal government was one based on the three pillars of power, laws and statecraft. What he meant by those three pillars can be summarized as follows:

Power

Power is necessary for a king to gain control over the masses. What this means is that in the final analysis it is the state that should have the power of life and death over the people. Power ensures that no one will question or resist the authority of the government. Therefore, the king should enforce the law as if he were God, which means using power effectively and absolutely but being guided by the constraints of fairness and impartiality. Like God, the ruler should always be perceived as unquestionable. In practice, this means the ruler must be sure always to take credit for successes and to find some dispensable minister to blame for failures. But only the ruler should have this sort of power to take credit and give blame; everyone else in the nation must be credited and blamed on the most objective grounds possible. In practice, this means that everyone must be watchful of everyone else; no one but the head of state can be left unwatched. Only if everyone is equally watched, will there be fairness and impartiality in all public affairs; needless to say, no one's activities will be truly private, so all affairs will be public.

Laws

The fairness and impartiality that the state requires is something that can be measured only against a known standard, namely, the law of the land. Without an objective standard of this sort, no one knows what fairness and impartiality are; they become empty words, like righteousness and benevolence. The king, therefore, like God, should use his power first to make the law and then to see to it that the law is implemented in the same way for everyone and that no one, including the king himself, is above the law in any way whatsoever. Hanfeizi wrote: “Ruler and minister, superior and inferior, nobleman and commoner—all must obey the law.” All those who break the law, whatever their social rank or their place in the government, must receive the same punishment.

Laws, if they are to uphold a fair and impartial government, must be clear, fully public and transparent, and they must be fully enforceable. Laws that are vague, or kept secret, or that cannot be enforced will only occasion contempt for the law in the minds of citizens. Contempt for the law will lead to lawless behavior among citizens, and lawless behavior will serve to erode the government's power.

Statecraft

But the good king also employs statecraft as if he were God, which means that he operates in ways that are mysterious and unfathomable to his ministers; this unpredictability, accompanied by power, inspires awe and dread in his ministers and therefore ensures that his dictates are carried out by them. If the preferences of the leader are known, then people are bound to speak and act in ways that please the leader, rather than speaking and acting authentically. To prevent sycophancy, the successful leader must be as inscrutable as God.

Once the law has been decided, said Hanfeizi, it is imperative that all private doctrines that conflict with the law be prohibited. If teachers are allowed to teach doctrines that conflict with the will of the king, then the law can never be effective. Hanfei was especially wary of philosophers, since they had a way of raising questions that could be answered in many ways, without giving people a means of deciding which answer is the uniquely correct one. If people have their minds full of open-ended unanswered questions, thought Han, then they will only be confused, and confusion is good for no one. So philosophers should be forbidden to teach. The only thing that everyone should be taught is what the law is, what the penalty of breaking the law is, and what the benefits of obeying the law are.

As important as it is for the leader to be as much like God as humanly possible in the ways described above, it is no less important for the leader to make sure the economy of the state is always sound. Just as individuals come to disaster if they spend beyond their means, states will surely fall if they go too much into debt. Therefore, all wasteful spending should be illegal, and like all illegal things, punished. Among the most wasteful enterprises a state can become involved, claimed Han, in is reckless military ventures. A state that is well run and that maintains a healthy economy will have no need to defend itself against external enemies, since its good international conduct will make no enemies. And such a state will also have no need to conquer other states to gain resources, since it will always be able to get everything its citizens need through fair trade. With no need to invade neighboring states or to defend against them, the well-run state need have only a minimal military, so its need for funds will be modest. Therefore, its need to tax citizens will also be modest.

Nothing will bring a state to ruin more surely than habits that undermine fairness and that stand in the way of the best people being appointed to positions of responsibility—and the most incompetent people being removed from those positions. If a ruler's thinking is clouded by considerations of personal favoritism or loyalty, then bad decisions are sure to follow. As potentially enfeebling to a state as personal loyalty and political partisanship are decisions based on taking into consideration the reputation and wealth of the family to which a person belongs. Every individual should be appointed to or removed from positions of power solely on the basis of that individual's performance in the tasks assigned to him or her.

Given what we know of Hanfei's political doctrines, how might he assess how the United States of America has been doing in recent years?

Strict obdedience of the law and punishing all lawbreakers equally.

Few administrations during the past sixty years have done a very good job at this. The US constitution declares, for example, that treaties entered into by the federal government take precedence over laws of the nation, and yet the United States has consistently been cavalier in its honoring of international treaties, United Nations resolutions, and treaties with native Americans. Moreover, the criminal justice system is in a shambles, as manifested by the different treatment of first offenders, depending on their affluence, social position and race.

Moreover, the trend during the past forty years or so has been for presidents to pardon lawbreakers within their own cabinets or within their own political circles.

In this area, therefore, the USA must be given a grade of F.

Meritocracy and avoidance of favoritism and other forms of partiality.

The current system of legislation and enforcement of policies by lobbyists and special-interest groups almost guarantees that few decisions are made on the basis of the merits of the case, and few people are hired, maintained or dismissed from their positions strictly on the basis of the quality of their performances. Whether one looks in governmental circles, the military, the commercial sector, or the academic world, one finds that social connections, affluence and personal loyalty are far more important than competence or skill.

In this area also, the USA deserves a failing grade, but because it is the country in which I was born, I'll give it a grade of B+.

Keeping the economy healthy by favoring fair trade practices.

A while back I went to a very crowded emporium of goods sold at affordable prices. Not being in the market for anything particular, I amused myself by looking at the labels of as many products as I could to see where they were manufactured. Every single item I examined was manufactured in China or some other country that has no laws in place to protect workers or the environment or to pay workers reasonable wages or offer them benefits. Providing cheap goods to the citizens of a nation is not the best means of stimulating that nation's economy. It would be difficult to justify giving our governments of the past sixty years any cumulative grade higher than D-.

Keeping military expenditures to a minimum.

According to a table on a website maintained by Christopher Hellman, the military budget of the United States was $396,100,000,000 in the year 2000. That figure was more than the combined military budgets of the next twenty-eight nations. In contrast, the total military budgets of the three nations that David Frum, via George W. Bush, dubbed the “Axis of Evil,” namely, Iran, Iraq and North Korea, was $11,800,000,000. In other words, the United States spent $33.57 for every $1.00 spent on military hardware and personnel by the nations it claims are its most dangerous enemies. As of 2003, according to answers.com the United States military budget accounted for 47% of the entire world's military expenditures. That was before the illegal invasion of Iraq, which led to a war that according to the National priorities website costs Americans $275,000,000 per day As of January 7, 2008, the total cost of the Iraq war was more than $483,000,000,000, which is about $1600 for every man, woman and child in the country.

In this area, the record of the United States is so abysmal that it does not even deserve a failing grade. It deserves to be expelled from the school and perhaps even sent to prison.

Arriving at fair and enforceable laws.

A country that has, by frequently cited estimates, more than 12,000,000 people who have entered the country illegally, obviously has flawed immigration laws. The most sensible move would be to stop trying to make it illegal to come to this country to earn an honest livelihood. And while we're at it, we might consider stopping trying to legislate against the use of narcotics, stimulants and intoxicants. Despite these examples of silly and largely unenforceable laws, on the whole the laws of the United States, namely, those in the constitution, are not bad. All told, a fair-minded grader might give the country a grade in the C+/B- range.

Being mysterious and secretive.

Although some people might at first think that America's politicians get full marks for being inscrutable and impossible to fathom, closer reflection would lead most people to conclude that in fact the inner workings of most politicians and leaders are quite out in the open and hardly disguised at all. It is evident that what makes all successful politicians tick is money. First of all, hardly anyone but a multi-millionaire can get the attention necessary to get elected. Secondly, very few can resist the lure of money once they are elected. America, since at least the time of Kennedy's election, has become a plutocracy, a government by the wealthy and for the wealthy. There is no secret or mystery about that. So by Hanfei's criteria, American government would again have to get an F.

Blaming others for what goes wrong.

At last we find a category in which American politicians have excelled during the past sixty years. During most of my youth, everything that went wrong was blamed on Communists and Communist sympathizers (a category that included almost everyone who ever had a concern for anyone besides themselves). No sooner had the Communists disappeared into the oblivion of history than Americans began blaming everything on Islamo-Fascists, jihadis, terrorists and people who hated our freedom. The truth, however, is that almost all of America's political problems have been brought on by American politicians themselves and by the people who elect them. It is probably true of everyone in the human race that they are their own worst enemy. It is indisputably true of Americans as a whole, and especially of America's leaders. Yet who ever takes the blame for their own folly? Who can resist taking credit for things that are in no one's control and that by some fluke occasionally go well? American leaders can proudly show that on their Hanfeizi report card they have one A.

Conclusions

At first it might seem like good news that American leaders during the past sixty years have done so poorly at following the advice of a man who engineered one of the most brutally totalitarian governments in the history of China. Unfortunately, it turns out that what would make a totalitarian government work well are pretty much the same things that would make a constitutional democracy work well. So what makes America a mediocre also-ran as a totalitarian state also makes America a second-rate also-ran as a freedom-promoting democracy. That notwithstanding, we hear American politicians routinely saying such things as “We live in the greatest nation in the history of the earth” (Rudy Giuliani recently said that) or ”Everyone in the world would live in America if they could” (Mitt Romney recently said that). Alas, so long as American political leaders keep saying that but acting like plutocratic bullies, the country they aspire to lead will never be much better than a dream that somehow never managed to come true.

A moment of silence! Now what?

As another year draws to an end, many people are making resolutions for the new year, both for themselves and for the human race. Rather than adding to the weight of unfulfilled resolutions and vows, let me offer a few tips on what to do with silence. (I am assuming all readers of this blog have a refrigerator magnet that says “You have a right to remain silent” and that you exercise that right many times a week. If so, you may find some silences more awkward than others and therefore welcome a tip.)

One of the many kinds of contemplative exercise I have learned through Buddhist practice is one that I have recently read about in connection with Quaker practice. In both of these contemplative traditions there is an exercise that begins by sitting quietly and letting the mind settle as one concentrates on watching the breathing process. Once the mind has settled down from the relatively excited state it maintains during normal waking activity, turn your attention to the some place within the body, such as the region around the heart or in the pit of the stomach; it is best to pick a place in the body where one readily feels physical manifestations of emotional changes. People who are visually oriented may wish to imagine a light shining into that region of the body.

The next step can involve slowly and silently reciting a short list of ethical guidelines. I usually recite in my mind the ten precepts of Buddhism, but one just as easily use the Ten Commandments, or a list of virtues that Stoics recommend cultivating. The object of the exercise is to recite these ethical sayings while keeping attentive to your physical responses to them. If it helps, you can even recite the ethical guideline and then think “Where do I stand in observing this one?” Usually if one recognizes that one's behavior has fallen short of the ideal, there is a physical response that one identifies as a twinge of conscience. Sometimes, if one is paying close attention, one will notice an urge to move on quickly, to run away or to distract oneself. That should be seen as an invitation to stay and hold that feeling in the light, until it is clear where it is coming from. As the feeling is held in the light, it will usually become clear why the feeling of uneasiness has arisen. It will also become clear what one has to do to avoid that uneasiness arising in the future. Et voila! A resolution arises spontaneously.

Because my daily life involves quite a lot of speaking and writing, my practice is to reflect on where I stand with respect to following the guidelines on speech offered by the Buddha.

Before you speak, ask yourself about what you are about to say, Is it true? Is it beneficial to someone? Is there likely to be a receptive audience? If it is not certain that what one feels like saying is true, best not to say it. If it is not going to benefit anyone to hear the words, then why say them? Even if what one has to say is true and beneficial, there may not be anyone around who is likely to receive and welcome what one says. If there is not a receptive audience, then there is not much point is speaking. And even if what feels like saying is true, beneficial and has a receptive audience, this may not be the right time to say this particular thing.

Not infrequently, when I imagine shining a light within my body, I detect some uneasiness arising from a recent failure to heed those guidelines. I recall that I have said something without being fully confident of its accuracy. Often I realize I have recently spoken reactively or in irritation or in hopes of being seen as clever or witty or just to pass time, not to benefit anyone. Sometimes I realize that it should have been obvious that my words would fall on deaf ears. And many times I realize in retrospect that my timing was off. When any of these realizations arise, I hold them in the light. It almost always becomes clear what I should have done in the recent pass, and what I should resolve to do in the future.

Pausing to give thanks

George Fox admonished his followers to be aware of their own similarity to villains and sinners mentioned in the Bible. Rather than saying “I t is they, they, they who sin and fall short,” he suggested getting i nto the habit of saying “It is I, I, I and we, we, we who are in this condition.” (See Truth of the Heart, p. 12-15.) Because it has been my lifelong practice to seek fault nearby rather than far away, and to see flaws in self and friends more readily than in real or imagined enemies, I may give the impression to some of being unduly critical of my own home and native land. Indeed, many of the blogs here may seem to fall into the “Blame America First” genre. If that is how my writings appear, it shows how deceptive appearances can be.

A Buddhist friend of Japanese-American background once told me that he thinks the most important gift that Japanese Buddhism has to make to Americans is the practice of expressing gratitude repeatedly—not only for things for which gratitude is the most obvious response, but also for things that may seem to invite expressions of discontent. Not just Japanese Buddhism, but all of Buddhism encourages practitioners to feel contentment and joy with even the smallest of good fortune, whether that good fortune is one's own or belongs to a friend, a total stranger or an enemy. When I am counting things to be deeply grateful for, one of the first items on the list is the effects that years of Buddhist practice has had on my mentality.

Also very high on my personal list of things to feel thankful for are the Sun, the planet Earth and the country in which I happened to be born and in which I have lived almost 42% of my life so far. Not only when the mood strikes, but daily I feel deep gratitude for a range of blessings found in the United States.

• The Constitution. The more I have studied the founding documents on which the United States was founded, the more I have come to admire them. Informed by the values of The European Enlightenment, the Constitution was written by men who were deeply wary of the abuses of power to which men are prone, and perhaps especially when they think of themselves as fulfilling the will of God. The genius of the Constitution is manifested best in its carefully crafted system of checks and balances, designed to keep any branch of government from growing too powerful and invasive in the lives of the ordinary citizen. The spirit of compromise—even some rather unfortunate moral compromises, such as the concessions to slavery—pervade the work, and this spirit of compromise has been one of the greatest strengths of the United States through the decades.
• Location, location, location. The North American continent has a breathtaking geographical diversity, most of it beautiful. Surrounded by seas, the land is relatively safe from attack from the outside, as a result of which it would be possible to spend nearly all of the continent's resources on promoting civilization rather than on military defense.
• Excellent neighbors. The United States is blessed with long, undefended borders with two peace-loving countries. Canada to the north provides a steady example of refined multicultural civilization, much of which has found its way across the borders to enrich the culture of the United States. Mexico to the south has a vibrantly exciting culture and a hard-working population, some of which has found its way into the United States to increase the agricultural and industrial productivity of the United States. While it is a shame that so many Mexican and South American families are dependent on workers finding employment out of their own countries, Americans would be immeasurably poorer, both economically and culturally, if it were not for the flow of workers coming from points south.
• Religious diversity. Part of the genius of the Constitution is the first amendment, which prohibits the formation of a state religion but guarantees right of association and freedom of belief and freedom of speech. Many observers have rightly argued that the prohibition of forming a state religion has allowed the United States to have one of the most diversified religious populations in the world. The presence of many kinds of Buddhist, numerous denominations of Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs, not to mention the many religions of American native peoples.
• Ethnic and cultural diversity. Before Europeans touched foot on American soil, there were already hundreds of peoples who had learned how to live on the continent without destroying its resources. Their linguistic, cultural, and racial diversity made the Americas a remarkably rich land. Over the centuries this richness has been augmented by waves of immigrants from all parts of the world, each bringing its own values and perspectives (not to mention its food!). To its credit, America has always eventually found ways to embrace everyone who has come to live within its boundaries, whether they have come involuntarily as slaves, or have sought refuge after their own countries have been devastated by wars and natural disasters, and whether they have come legally or illegally. North America is truly a melting pot to which everyone who has come to its countries has made an important and welcome contribution. That the United States has been part of this multicultural adventure is an occasion of joyous gratitude.
• Thanksgiving holiday. Although the list of things for which I am grateful is much longer than I have given here, I am going to close my list by noting my gratitude to the fact that there is a national holiday set aside just for giving thanks. Every year people set aside time to give thanks for their health, their well-being, their freedom, their relatives, their friends and their many other individual and collective blessings. Just about everyone, whether or not they feel a need to thank anyone in particular, pauses to look around them at all the things worth living for. And this itself is perhaps the most wonderful gift of all to the people in this land.

The danger of misidentified dangers

When I was a tender lad of 13, I read a book by then director of the FBI, John Edgar Hoover, entitled Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America. The book, published in 1958, was designed to make the reader terrified of the imminent Communism threat, a conspiracy of evil-minded men and women dedicated to destroying freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and every other freedom that Americans love and cherish. After reading the first couple of chapters, I responded as the author no doubt hoped: I became afraid—very afraid—of Communists. By the time I had finished the book, I was still afraid, but the focus of my fear had changed from Communism to the FBI. Hoover's warnings against Communism seemed so obviously unsubstantiated and overstated that I became much more alarmed at the prospect of anyone taking the book seriously than at the prospect of Communists taking control of the educational system, the news media, the government and my private life. Although it would be a decade or so before I learned about the psychological concept of projection, I had an unshakable conviction that Hoover was a frightened man because he was a frightening man, a man with a mind filled with suspicion, hatred, fear and, yes, the very deceit of which he was warning his readers.

After reading John Edgar Hoover's book, which was intended to terrify the reader and thus could reasonably be classified as a piece of terrorist literature, I never again had any worries or concerns about Communism. That Communists were so intent on destroying American freedom struck me as a preposterous claim. Surely, I thought, their motivations had to consist of something more than simply wanting to destroy freedom. There must have been something positive they hoped to achieve; human beings, it has always seemed to me, are rarely moved by nothing more noble than the wish to eliminate good from the face of the earth. And yet for some thirty years after reading Hoover's pathetic piece of fear-mongering (which I assumed was itself motivated by somewhat noble but disturbingly misguided intentions), I stood by helplessly as a great deal of American foreign and Domestic policy was driven by this ridiculous and unnecessary fear.

When the Communist threat unofficially and symbolically came to an end with the fall of the Berlin wall, I thought for a week or two that the manic panic driving American politics might eventually die for want of an enemy to fear. That thought proved to be short-lived, however, for soon Americans were being treated to hand-wringing reports of a new enemy: terrorists. It was not long before it was clear, although not often clearly stated, that what Americans should now be alarmed about is a horde of Muslim fanatics whose goals were, amazingly enough, identical to those of the defunct Communists. Just like the Godless Communists before them, the God-frenzied Islamists were obsessed with world domination and the total eradication of freedom in every form. A new dangerous enemy had been found. The Cold War could continue. Or, if one prefers the language eventually used by Norman Podhoretz, World War III had come to an end, and World War IV was under way.

In recent months one has been hearing with increasing frequency references to a group of people known as Islamofascists. “Islamofascism” is a term that Stephen Schwartz of The Weekly Standard claims to have coined. In his own explanation of the term, Schwartz says it “refers to use of the faith of Islam as a cover for totalitarian ideology.” One suspects that the first element of the compound, ‘Islamo’ is used to distinguish this sort of totalitarianism from the kind of domination of the world advocated by signatories of the Project for the New American Century or by those who use the faith of Christianity or Judaism for totalitarian ideology.

Stephen Schwartz advises that we learn to use the term “Islamofascism” accurately and sparingly. Properly used, he says, it refers to the ideologies of such organizations as al-Qa'ida and Hezbollah, which are organizations informed by, respectively, Sunni and Shi'i principles. Schwartz's reason for placing these two very different organizations under the same umbrella seems to be that both have contempt for Israel and both sponsor disruptive paramilitary campaigns against Israel and her allies. His reason for calling that umbrella ‘fascist’ seems to be to call attention to the resemblance of their putative anti-Jewish sentiments to the sentiments of Germany under the National Socialism.

One of the notable features of al-Qa'ida, according to Lawrence Wright, a scholar who has studied that organization's websites and whose observations were aired on CBC's program Ideas in a program called “AL QAEDA AND THE ROAD TO 9/11 ”, is that they have next to no political or economic policies at all. Fascism, as usually understood, is a politico-economic ideology based on a state-controlled economy (in contrast to a free-market economy) in a state based on a strong sense racial or ethnic or national identity (in contrast to identity based on commitment to spiritual or intellectual principles). It would appear, therefore, that there is nothing at all Fascist about Islamofascism. The ‘fascist’ element in the compound seems chosen not to be politically or economically descriptive or informative but to be psychologically manipulative. Its purpose, it seems, is to conjure up fear—in this case, a fear of the specter of racism, and especially the specter of anti-Semitism.

On October 29, 2007 on the Fox News program America's Newsroom, a guest reminded viewers that America has dangerous enemies “who need to be killed.” This was preceded by several references to Islamofascism. It is quite possible that the guest was at most half right; there probably are dangerous people in the world whose policies would not do America or anyone else much good. It is unlikely, in my view, that anyone anywhere has ever needed to be killed; more likely is that there are people whom other people would like to be killed. In fact, what I would be inclined to argue is that it is precisely those people who would be willing, or even eager, to see others be killed who are the dangerous people of this world. The so-called Islamofascists do not have a monopoly on dangerous people. The guest on Fox News who asserts that others need to be killed is dangerous for precisely the reasons that her would-be victims are dangerous. Anyone calling for the bombing of Iran is at least as dangerous as anyone in Iran. It could be argued that the more influential the person advocating the bombing is, the more dangerous that person is.

Just as in 1958 the militant anti-Communists were no less dangerous than the Communists, now the militant anti-Islamofascists are no less dangerous than the people designated by that dubious label. What is dangerous is militancy. What is dangerous is the issuing of overt and veiled threats. What is dangerous is the state of mind, wherever it may occur, that enables anyone to see another living being as a worthy candidate for death. No particular group of people has a corner on the market of being dangerous in that sense.

People who are dangerous do not need to die. They need to be listened to. They need to be allowed to state their grievances without being prejudged. They need to be treated as human beings fully entitled to all the respect that any other human being is entitled to receive. Until that basic principle is understood, neither America nor anyone else will ever be out of danger.

Indulging ourselves to death

The Chinese Daoist author Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) looked around the world in which he lived some twenty-five centuries ago and asked “Why are there so many boats on the river? Why are people building bridges just so they can easily get to the other side of the river? What is wrong with people that they can't be happy where they are?”

Do you have an answer to his question? Do you understand your own Wanderlust, your own compulsion to travel, whether by bicycle or automobile or airplane or virtually by serfing the Web? What is wrong with you? What is wrong with me?

One thing that is wrong with both you and me is that we are part of a network of enterprises that are destroying the only planet available to us and to our descendants. One Quaker writer, Marshall Massey, has argued that our current willingness to live in a way that destroys the earth that our children's children will inherit is morally equivalent to slavery. The people who founded the United States of America benefited from the labor of slaves. This was not much less true of those who did not own slaves than it was of those who did. People in colonial times enjoyed goods and services produced in an economy that depended heavily on the involuntary labor of captured human beings, people who would never enjoy all the things that their forced labor made possible. Today we look back on slave enconomies and find them deplorable. We feel a sense of justifiable smugness about our own moral superiority to our ancestors (or to those who enslaved our ancestors, as the case may be).

And yet we ourselves are enjoying goods that are, in effect, being stolen from future generations. We are living comfortable lives by depleting the resources of the earth, thereby making it impossible for our descendants to enjoy what we enjoy—perhaps even making it impossible for them to survive at all. Our oblivious insensitivity to the effects of our lifestyles reaches a scale of immorality—of evil if you prefer that term—that makes slavery look like a charitable institution in comparison.

Our generation is certainly not the first to live an unsustainable lifestyle. History is full of civilizations that have so destroyed their environments that the civilization fell into a state of ruin. In the Mesopotamia, the so-called cradle of civilization (in what is now Iraq), both the Sumerians and the Babylonians had enough people living such lavish lives that the environment eventually collapsed, bringing the human cultures down with them. The Romans had a similar effect on the environment of northern Africa during the times when rich and powerful people in the Roman Empire were living in luxury. The Easter Islanders, the Mayans of Guatemala and southern Mexico, and various other indigenous peoples in North America lived beyond the sustainability of their environments. People have been in the business of indulging themselves beyond the capacity of their environments to sustain their greedy pursuits for a very long time.

What makes modern times different from these past examples of environmental collapse, of course, is that nearly everyone everywhere is participating in a pursuit of pleasure and comfort that puts severe strains on the environment. When people destroyed their environments in the past, they could migrate to a new location. In the world in which we now live, the human population has grown so large that nearly all habitats that can sustain human life are filled to overflowing with human populations. The effect of the world-wide degradation of the environment is cumulative, both across space and through time. Environmental scientists have made the following observations:

• 20,000 species a year are going extinct, most of them because of degradation of the environment due to human activities.
• Human beings collectively consume approximately 20% more resources than the earth can produce.
• As a result, 60% of the earth's ecosystems have been severely compromised.
• At current rates of extinction, it is estimated that 12% of all bird species, 25% of mammal species and 30% of all amphibian species are likely to be extinct by the end of the 21st century. If you are a parent with young children, your grandchildren will live to see all this extinction —provided your children and grandchildren live as long as human beings now live, which may turn out not to be the case.
• 90% of the total weight of the ocean's large predators (such as tuna, swordfish and sharks) have disappeared in recent years.
• Degraded plastic is now found everywhere in the earth's oceans, and biologists report that all species living in and near the ocean have significant traces of plastic in their systems. Plastic is not bio-degradable, has no nutritional value, and often impedes the normal biological processes that keep a species healthy. Its toxic omnipresence is slowly strangling all the lifeforms on our planet.

While nearly every intelligent and well-informed person shows at least some level of concern about our relationship with the environment, few are both willing and able to see what radical changes would be required of all of us in how we live, what we buy, how and where and how often we travel.

It is as if we all believe that our own personal projects are so important that we can be excused from adjusting our lives. (For example, I am using the energy-guzzling medium of the Internet to disseminate this message. Does the fact that I am writing about the environment somehow lighten my share of the burden that is being placed on the weary earth? Does the fact that you are reading this message reduce your impact on the environment? You and I both ahve some thining to do.)

Every man woman and child, whether he or she is a Buddhist, a Christian, a Hindu, a Humanist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Sikh or a Wiccan, owes it to the rest of the human race and to future generations to give some thought to these questions.

• Why are we individually and collectively so blind and deaf to the effects our personal decisions have on other human beings, on animals and on plants?
• If we would like to put this into the language of Asian systems of thought, why are we so oblivious of our karma and its ripening?
• If we would like to put it into the language of the Abrahamic religions, why are we so unwilling to be custodians of God's creation and to preserve it for our descendants? How can we be so sinfully scornful of the creation of which we are a part?
• To put the matter in a language anyone can understand, how did we descend into such an abysmal ignorance and insensitivity that we fail to see the obvious?
• How can we change? If so, when do we start? Why are we waiting?

There is an environmentalist named Kurt Hoelting, who draws upon both Christian and Buddhist sources of inspiration, as well as upon scientific literature. He stresses our need as human beings to be in touch with wilderness. By losing touch with wilderness, he writes “we have placed our own psyches on the endangered species list.” The destruction of the environment is not only the consequence of our collective insanity; it is the cause of further forms of insanity. We have lost touch with something fundamental to who we are. We have lost touch not only with our animal natures but with what some would call our divine natures, namely, our ability to reason and to imagine courses of action other than the ones to which we have become habituated. This is nothing new, of course. The Chinese Daoist philosophers asked the provocative question “Of all the ten thousand things in nature, why is it that only human beings have to ask themselves ‘What is the Way?’” While the situation is not new, it is arguably more critical now than it has ever been before. We are now at the point where we cannot afford to be insane any longer.

To a human being in touch with wilderness, and with that part of nature that is not dominated by human obsessions with comfort and with pleasure, it is perfectly obvious that the individual self is a pure fiction. None of us are individuals. No one is independent. No one is free. No one can be secure. To pursue such fictions as individual rights and freedoms, and autonomy and freedom and security is to chase phantoms of one's vain imagining. We are all in this together—you and I and the chickadees and the mice and the salmon and the ladybugs and the juniper trees. Not one of us is free of the others or independent of the others—all of them.

When we lose touch with nature, we gain something, but what we gain is an illusion, an impossible dream that may begin with a seductive pleasantness but that sooner or later turns into a nightmare. We gain the delusion of individual selfhood and autonomous agency, and with that acquisition we take on the full brunt of the calamity of modern human life: the competitiveness, the greed, the insensitivity to others, the narcissistic isolation that manifests itself in constant struggle at the personal level and in warfare among peoples. When each of us is living in a way that depletes the available resources of material goods and energy, it is inevitable that we eventually feel justified in fighting to the death over them. We convince ourselves that we are entitled to live as we wish and that those who have the resources we need to do so are somehow undeserving to be living on the land that has the resources we crave. We turn them into demons. We invade their land. We kill them. Then we cannot understand why they resent us, and we turn their resentment into further evidence of their moral inferiority. This story is as old as history itself. But it is not the only story told in human history.

Ever since the dawn of recorded human history, there have been people offering us alternatives to the madness of personal and collective greed. In every part of the earth and in every culture there have been those who have invited us to learn to be content with having just what we need to survive, to be content with going no further than walking distance from our homes, or to be content to have so few possessions that we can easily carry our homes on our backs. Few people, especially in groups of people who pride themselves on being “civilized” accept the invitation. We may delude ourselves into thinking we are following the Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad, but how many people actually manage to live their lives as these great men lived theirs? There are a small handful of people who actually follow the examples of simplicity manifested in the lives of the Buddha or the Christ, but there are billions who imagine they are doing so.

You have read this. Now, what do you propose to do?

Where have all our manners gone?

On September 23, 2007, the CBS program 60 Minutes carried an interview with Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The interview, conducted by Scott Pelley, was conducted in the customarily aggressive 60 Minutes style. One does not expect politeness or good manners in 60 Minutes interviews; that is not their style. It was, however, shocking to hear Pelley quote President Bush. The transcript of the program shows that Pelley said this:

I asked President Bush what he would say to you if he were sitting in this chair. And he told me-quote-speaking to you, that you've made terrible choices for your people. You've isolated your nation, you've taken a nation of proud and honorable people and made your country the pariah of the world. These are President Bush's words to you, What's your reply?

President Ahmadinejad seemed slightly taken aback, but he regained his composure quickly and said he did not believe President Bush had really said those things. Pelley claimed that he was quoting the American president directly. If Pelley was telling the truth, it is a truth that should make all Americans feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed. There is no excuse for one head of state to say to another, even through a television interviewer, that the other head of state has taken a nation of proud and honorable people and made his country the pariah of the world. That, of all people, President Bush, who has disgraced his own country in the eyes of the world, should say such a thing is a prime example of a pot calling a kettle black; but that is not the point. The point is that no head of state should ever speak in such undiplomatic and unprofessional language of another. Speaking in such a way is inexcusably rude, not to mention potentially dangerous. It is conduct unbecoming a president of the United States.

Perhaps emboldened by President Bush's carelessness and rudeness, a few days later Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, addressed aggressively rude remarks of his own to President Ahmadinejad, who was an invited guest speaker at the university. President Bollinger said:

Let's then be clear at the beginning. Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. And so, I ask you—and so, I ask you, why have women, members of the Baha=E2=80=99i Faith, homosexuals, and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country? Why, in a letter last week to the Secretary General of the UN, did Akbar Ganji, Iran's leading political dissident, and over 300 public intellectuals, writers and Nobel laureates express such grave concern that your inflamed dispute with the West is distracting the world's attention from the intolerable conditions in your regime within Iran—in particular, the use of the press law to ban writers for criticizing the ruling system? Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?

Then, before he invited President Ahmadinejad to speak, President Bollinger closed his introduction by saying:

Frankly—I close with this comment—frankly and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will, in itself, be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do. Fortunately, I am told by experts on your country that this only further undermines your position in Iran, with all the many goodhearted intelligent citizens there. A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country—was at one of the meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations—so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party's defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more. I am only a professor—I am only a professor who is also a university president. And today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better. Thank you.

I, too, am only a professor. But if Lee Bollinger were the president of my university, I would demand his resignation as president for making such embarrassingly disgraceful comments in full public view to an invited guest. There is no excuse whatsoever for inviting a guest to speak and then to introduce him by accusing him of being a petty and cruel dictator with a fanatical mindset who makes preposterous and belligerent statements.

As Alexis de Tocqueville observed long ago, the United States of America has never been the envy of the world for being a bastion of refinement and polished civilization. That notwithstanding, the United States has in the past been a place of decency and civility. Are those days gone forever? Are we now to expect the president of the country to make rude and disparaging remarks of other heads of state? Are we to take it as a matter of course that prominent academics associated with our most prestigious universities will blurt out schoolboy taunts to invited guests? If so, we have become a sadly fallen nation indeed.

If no one else will apologize to President Ahmadinejad for the brazen crudeness and impudence of our public figures, then I will. President Ahmadinejad, on behalf of the American people, I apologize for the shoddy treatment you received while visiting my home and native land. While I myself have many differences of opinion with you, I admire the gracious cheerfulness with which you received the rudeness of my countrymen, and I thank you for saying several things about the policies of my country that desperately needed to be said. May your criticisms of us not fall on deaf ears.

A grandson of Confucius assesses America

In “America's report card” we saw what grades the United States might get if graded by the standards set by Walt Whitman's poem “The Broad-axe.” In this squib, we'll take a look at how the United States might be graded if we used the standards of Kongji, the grandson of Kong Fuzi (Confucius), who is credited with writing these words:

There are nine standards by which to administer the empire, its states, and the families. They are: cultivating the personal life, honoring the worthy, being affectionate to relatives, being respectful toward the great ministers, identifying oneself with the welfare of the whole body of officers, treating the common people as one's own children, attracting the various artisans, showing tenderness to strangers from far countries, and extending kindly and awesome influence on the feudal lords.

Applying the criteria

Kongji goes on to explain “If the ruler cultivates his personal life, the Way will be established. If he honors the worthy, he will not be perplexed.” Our current ruler seems to cultivate his personal life, if we understand cultivation to mean keeping in good physical fitness. The President reportedly has many rigorous workouts every week and loves to ride his bicycle vigorously enough to work off 1000 calories per session. He also claims to read more than one hundred books a year. So we are off to a good start. When it comes to honoring the worthy, our President seems to believe that he does just that, although his criteria of who is worthy could be questioned. All appearances indicate that being worthy in the eyes of the President consists mostly in being loyal. While loyalty is a good quality if it is toward a noble and honorable person, loyalty to a person of low or questionable integrity is not always a positive quality. In the interest of not prejudging the situation and coming to a conclusion without adequate evidence, we should perhaps say that there is not enough impartial information to give the President a grade on this criterion.

Konji says of the ruler: “If he is affectionate to his relatives, there will be no grumbling among his uncles and brothers.” The President does seem to be affectionate toward his father, his mother, his brother, his wife and his children. Once again, he would probably receive high marks from the grandson of Confucius.

Konji says “If he respects the great ministers, he will not be deceived.” Here most of the evidence suggests that the President is not especially good at listening to great ministers. He does seem to do well at listening to those who agree with him, but there are many well-informed thinkers who have excellent advice to offer who seem to go unheard, or at least unheeded. In this area the President is right on the borderline between failing and getting a barely passing grade. (A tougher grader than I might just fail him.)

“If he identifies himself with the welfare of the whole body of officers, then the officers will repay him heavily for his courtesies.” From the very outset, the commander-in-chief has earned a reputation for being selective in which of his generals he heeds. Those who seriously question or openly disagree with the command-in-chief's policies find themselves on the margins. If one understands officers as including non-commissioned as well as commissioned officers in the armed services, and if one asks whether the command-in-chief identifies himself with their welfare, he cannot, I'm afraid, be given a passing grade. American members of the armed services are being exposed to unnecessarily dangerous circumstances, as a result of which serious injuries and psychological traumas are being sustained, and follow-up care for the wounded has not been even close to adequate. It is alleged that the commander-in-chief has not attended the funeral of a single uniformed serviceman who has died in the war in Iraq. It is difficult to escape the impression that the commander-in-chief has a difficult time expressing his care for the people whom he has sent into perilous situations. It is reported that he regularly cries when he thinks of the dead and injured, but his tears have not been translated into policies that would help better to prevent them from dying and being wounded.

Kongji says of the successful ruler: “If he treats the common people as his own children, then the masses will exhort one another to do good.” Here the President receives his lowest grade. His sluggish response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina has been well documented. The poor, the weak and the helpless citizens of the United States have never been the focus of the President's attention. Indeed, their share of the economic resources in the United States has steadily decreased during the past seven years. The rich and powerful have fared much better. They have enjoyed tax cuts and various other advantages that have resulted in dramatic increases in their wealth and power. Regulations that have restrained the greed of major corporations have been steadily eroded. No progress has been made toward providing universal health for everyone, including the poor and the powerless, in the country. The quality of public education has declined noticeably. If the common people had been our President's children, they would have been disinherited or treated as medieval tyrants treated their bastard offspring. Even giving the President an F might qualify as grade inflation.

So how are we doing in the realm of commerce? Konji says “If he attracts the various artisans, there will be sufficiency of wealth and resources in the country.” Encouraging, through a relentlessly dogmatic commitment to free markets, business enterprises in this country to seek the lowest-paid labor in the world has resulted in the steady diminishing of industry in the United States. Artisans have not done well at all in recent years. The principal beneficiaries of the President's policies have been the extremely wealthy and those in the poorly paid unskilled service sector. A larger percentage of people live in poverty in the United States than in any other industrialized nation. If there is a sufficiency of wealth and resources, they are so poorly distributed as to be almost non-existent to those with the greatest need. Once again, a fair-minded evaluator would reluctantly have to give a grade of F.

“If he shows tenderness to strangers from far countries, people from all quarters of the world will flock to him.” In this area the President himself has apparently had the will to show kindness to strangers from foreign lands, provided their plan is to come to this country to work at wages so low as to be tantamount to economic slavery. Unfortunately, he has failed to convince his most ardent supporters of the wisdom of showing compassion to people from foreign lands. As a result, there has been a collective paralysis of legislators to arrive at any workable remedies to the problem of economic refugees who have come to this country in hopes of making a decent livelihood. Our ruler seemingly has good intentions, but is it not with good intentions that the road to hell is paved?

“And if he extends kindly and awesome influence over the feudal lords, then the world will stand in awe of him.” The world has never stood in awe of the current ruler of the United States, and the world stands in less awe of the country as a whole every passing week. A Confucian would no doubt find a close link between the qualities of the President and the declining international prestige and influence enjoyed by the United States.

Summary

Taking all the criteria of Confucianism into consideration, our current ruler does not fare much better than when America's greatest poet, Walt Whitman, were used as a basis of evaluation. If the country had had inadequate leadership for only eight years, we might have hope to expect a slow but steady recovery to health. Unfortunately, incompetent leaders have been the norm in the United States for at least the past twenty-five years. Some Presidents have done better than others in specific criteria, but none have been consistently admirable, noble and competent leaders of the sort that Confucians always dreamed. It is, therefore, difficult to be both reasonable and optimistic about the future of the United States. If we stay on our present course, there is probably nothing to look forward to but steady cultural decline.

There may be an alternative. Hints on what the alternatives are may be found in the Declaration of Independence. A detailed look at how that revolutionary document might be applied to our current situation may be the subject matter of a future squib.