War and Anti-War Voices

By Gary Berg-Cross

With a bit of militarism in the air I see that the National Geographic Channel has a series on “American War Generals”  The “war leaders” assembled have some familiar names:

 Gens. Collin Powell, Stanley McCrystal, Petraeus, Wesley Clark, Jack Keane, George William Casey, Barry McCaffrey and Raymond Odierno, along with Lt. Gens. Karl Eikenberry and Michael T. Flynn, and Maj. Gen. Herbert R. McCaster.

Some call it must see other ambitious and fantastic. The Air Force Times called it a cautionary tale as:

“… the U.S. escalates its campaign against jihadists in Iraq and Syria, a new documentary offers a cautionary tale about putting too much faith in technology and forgetting hard-fought lessons from the past. American War Generals,” …. looks at how the U.S. military recovered from its disastrous endeavor in Vietnam, remade itself into an all-volunteer force that focused on fighting conventional wars, and then came close to defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan as it faced a type of enemy it vowed never to fight again.”

A cautionary stance is good, especially in these times and some of the generals use the word mistake and Iraq in the same sentence.  So perhaps we owe some thanks to husband-and-wife co-producers  Peter Bergen and Tresha Mabile, whose  film cites sobering statistics on American and Iraqi deaths . They say 4,489 and more than 150,000, respectively but there are estimates of many more Iraqi deaths due to those external effects of war such as via disease and accident.  The cost to US taxpayers comes in at more than $2 trillion, but here too one can estimate additional external costs such as the benefits of investing the money elsewhere. 

Many of us remember the run up to the Iraq war and how militant voices were heard with nary an anti-war quest given time on the air.  Perhaps we’ve learned a bit from that mistake.  Still I’d be very happy to see a series on those very same anti-war voices now and their retrospective and prospective views.  A good start might be selecting a few folks from the site Americans who tell the truth  - Models of Courageous Citizenship which features:

   citizens who courageously address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness.

They feature quite a few people worth hearing from. Some like Dr. Margaret Flowers & Kevin Zeese have been speakers at WASH MDC.  Others like Jane Addams have had featured blogs.

And  we might all be the wiser to hear a bit more from someone like Chris Hedges War Correspondent, Writer : 1956

"Once we sign on for war’s crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder."

Going the Extra Mile to Visit Jane Addams

By Gary Berg-Cross

One of the many nice national “monuments” in DC is The Extra Mile. As the name suggests its a mile long “monument” bronze medallions installed in the sidewalks of downtown Washington D.C. The markers form a one-mile walking path through an area bounded by Pennsylvania Avenue, 15th Street, G Street, and 11th Street.  These “points of light” honorees are people described as ones:

"through their caring and personal sacrifice, reached out to others, building their dreams into movements that helped people across America and throughout the world".

Each honoree has a custom-made bronze medallion installed along the path. And there are lots of good folk who have a medallion:

• Harriet Tubman - Leader of Underground Railroad Effort to Free Slaves
• Booker T. Washington - Civil Rights Leader
• Susan B. Anthony - Suffragist

 I ran into a stretch of medallions on F Street NW between 14^th and 13^th streets and lo, luck afforded me a chance to step over a special one  – Jane Addams (1860 –1935).  That very afternoon I was to moderate a peace panel which included a small section on the Progressive era and the Women’s movement with Jane as a principle agent.  

Progressive women reformers like humanist  Jane Addams, were both venerated and vilified as they increasingly involved themselves in the peace movement and events like the. 1^st International Congress of  Women, held at The Hague.

In the spirit of an enlightened expanded beyond a Procrustean war-peace dimension many of us have heard Addams’ one-liner on a deeper idea of peace : 

“True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.” 

Addams is, of course, more famous for the social justice she enabled with Hull House. It is interesting to note that she founded the first settlement house which led to a later era of Christian settlement houses that sought to stress a Christian social consciousness via the social gospel.  While Christians latre tried to popularize her Christian image Jane Addams might be better characterizes as a “ force of secular humanism”. 

According to Joslin (2004), “The new humanism, as [Adams] interprets it comes from a secular, and not a religious, pattern of belief.”  Fair enough that something that starts a bit more secular can inspire others to do the right thing.

Jane Addams’ pacifism, social activism and pursuit of justice earned her label and interesting label as, “the most dangerous woman in America.”
She was dangerous enough with progressive ideas that in 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States.   

A good neighbor to have in DC and her Medallion is worth visiting and her thoughts remembered.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.
                                      Jane Addams

Events and Entropy are in the saddle

by Gary Berg-Cross

Ralph Waldo Emerson is supposed to have said:
"Events are in the saddle and ride mankind." 

It seems an apt image for these eventful times which are riding roughshod over humanity. Just a while ago things were bad enough with Veteran Affair scandals and the Supreme Court riding citizens, especially women, and favoring business, religious & sectarian interests with activist retro decisions. Sure there were climate change issues with a record year of temperature in 2013 and monster storms, but this all seems mild compared to the flood of happenings now. Did I mention Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan? Or someone with guns named Bundy? Sorry I am distracted. One worries that it’s a bit like climate change itself with old weather patterns shifting and new turbulences everywhere. Just a while ago scenes of families and children on our border filled headlines and the sights of the children tugged at our hearts. This has been blown away by new headlines.  The NYT captured only a tiny bit of the tumult and angst with:

A Week of Agony, From Eastern Ukraine to the Gaza Strip

Russia’s asymmetric and opportunistic proxy war in Ukraine has turned into a real war with bombing of cities and shoot downs. Events seem to be evolving to a new form of Cold War which will bring more proxy state battles, red scares and us-against-them reasoning.  The elite adults, our best and brightest, seem inefective again and the populous has lost faith in them.  While it is not yet the floodgate of the  Guns of August, we've just celebrated  the 100th anniversary of Austrian  Archduke's assassination in Sarajevo. Chaos breaths new opportunities for violence and so we see the acute escalation in another asymmetric conflict as the Israeli state bombards areas and tanks “churned into Gaza to hunt down militants raining rockets on Israel.”  

It’s déjà vu all over again with unending and escalating conflicts & crises that can’t be stopped by normal means and we drift into that helpless feeling that events and animosities are in control. Every side sees itself as victims and can justify the carnage. That's not a good long range vision and as they say eventually an eye for an eye culture leaves us blind.

A predictable, percolating fallout of this blindness is that truth and its pursuit becomes the first casualty of conflict.  Conflict is just too important to the conflicted to be covered in an objective way. Sound discussion is silenced by conflicting emotions as the 2014s gets defined as a time when “paroxysms of senseless tragedy that the world cries out for a halt.”  But there seems no easy way to halt events till “We Win!”  Or to consider it another way, peace loses.

I was foolish enough to take a book of readings on Peace for a short

vacation and the contrast between such thinking and curre,nt events was triply upsetting as I wished for more than being at peace but being able to make peace. But then the investment in armaments is much greater than the investments is peace-ments.

In human affairs we’ve had momentous times. Some leading up to war and others following it.  One thinks of WWI and its immediate aftermath which involved the two current hotbed locations of Russian with the communist revolution and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and, as discussed by Paul McGeough its dicing up by Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot. They struck a deal on how to carve up the region should the Ottoman Empire collapse as a result of World War I. Fans included colonizing conservative pols like Winston Churchill:

”The British grabbed Palestine, attempted to set up puppet monarchies in Arabia and in 1921 cobbled together hostile peoples—Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs—into the artificial and unstable kingdom of Iraq, ruled by the imposed Hashemite king Faisal. ….this form of indirect rule was "empire lite" as fashioned by Churchill, then colonial minister. “(see Cambridge historian Catherwood’s Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq)

Sure we need pols like Churchill at times that can ride events and like the feeling of control. But they can be invested in their own empires and occupations and associated visions and rhetoric that eventually un-horse us. As further discussed in McGeough's article on Mid-East borders, people are still devising ways of diving the territories up.

It’s the natural course of entropy that trends toward disorder, unless events are in the hands of a intelligent horseman.  So we’d like an intelligent horseman like FDR please. But then we'd need a whole stable of FDRs along with cultural change. Not likely, alas.

Some Things a Humanist is Thankful For

 By Gary Berg-Cross

Once again it is time to turn the thanking function up high in the human brain. Religious groups have their top 10 lists. Faith. Usually makes that list of things to be thankful for:

Knowing that there is a higher power you can turn to when things become to difficult for you to deal with on your own is a blessing. We all have our doubts about this from time to time and most seem to return to the idea that something much more powerful than we are has had a hand in making this all happen. 

Sports fans, comics, foodies & regular folks have their lists too filled with family, friends, food, health and prosperity. In austere times many young people, such as new grads, would be in hot water without the family safety net. Not everyone can start a business borrowing their parent’s money. And tweeting makes for silly lists of things like Justin Bieber, tanning lotion and Funyuns.

But as I asked last year, why not a humanist/nonbeliever list for Thanksgiving? Here’s a small update.

Sure family will be on that list too. My older grandkids celebrated a pilgrammy activity time in run up to turkey day at school filled.  They feasted on seasonal wordfinding along with  harvest and preparation rituals including gathering firewood and folding bedsheets. For my son's new 6 month old I am extremely thankful. He brings everyone happiness.

 Here’s a start on a list of things I’d be happy to happen, that I’m thankful for happening or that people might say or think about on Thanksgiving.

  10. The end of a long political season and I'm still glad that I won’t be bombarded by silly gaffes of politicians on Thanksgiving day. Can we hope to move to effective policies and government? Wait are pols already visiting Iowa. I’d be thankful if we could rein that in a bit and give us a break.

9. More peace efforts and more effective ones…I’m thankful for the modest success we’ve had, but people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and Israel  are only a short list of folks who, at times, can’t defend themselves from missiles of various kinds. I’m not thankful for the folly that let’s that mess continue.

8. More accurate historical skeptics to properly celebrate, educate and entertain our  dinner guests with some myth busting facts. That Pilgrims' festival?  The Pilgrims and the Indians did not, as the myth has it, sit down at tables, bless their food or pass the serving dishes. Did they really invite the natives or did the natives investigate what all the gun fire was about?. Finding a party they brought there own food and cooked accordingly.  

7. I celebrate Thanksgiving as a multicultural, humanist event rather than a religious one. Greg Epstein Humanist Chaplain @Harvard has a simple 3 item Outline for a Humanist Thanksgiving Dinner Discussion. Yes, food and thankfulness  it has  but it also has some guiding questions about community: For those who are part of a Humanist/secular group: how could our Humanist community be a better resource for ourselves and for others seeking community? How might we get more involved? Should we do dinners like this together more often? For those who aren’t part of a Humanist/secular group: what would you want your own connection to community to look like a year from now?

 6. And while we are on community, I celebrate some of the national humanist and secular organizations like CFI and AHA that move us towards a better society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. You can find secular grace statements on the AHA celebration site:

A Secular Grace:

For what we are about to receive
let us be truly thankful
…to those who planted the crops
…to those who cultivated the fields
…to those who gathered the harvest.

For what we are about to receive
let us be truly thankful
to those who prepared it and those who served it.

In this festivity let us remember too
those who have no festivity
those who cannot share this plenty
those whose lives are more affected than our own
by war, oppression and exploitation
those who are hungry, sick and cold

In sharing in this meal
let us be truly thankful
for the good things we have
for the warm hospitality 
and for this good company.

  5. Last year we  could celebrate the failure of the not-so-democratically-super, Super Committee. This year we can’t yet celebrate handing a fiscal bump in the road but I still look forward to solving our problems, rationally. Let’s celebrate rationality and balance. Let’s celebrate that type of productive thinking employed across the wider scope of society.  

4. Managing and pulling off a great Thanksgiving feast requires quality planning and critical thinking. We can celebrate people who exemplify this with an affirming balance and a concern humanity and civil society. We lost a leading practitioner this year in Paul Kurtz, but we can still celebrate his life and remember.  

3. Despite our best selfish and self-centered efforts damaging it we still have to be thankful for Nature, its system resilience and mystery. One is reminded of the Albert Einstein  quote in this regard, “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”  I’m not thankful about the former part, but contemplating the latter can sure be oceanically wonderful.

2. I’m still glad that America is an exceptional nation and not yet an oligarchy. True, our stats aren’t what they once were and there is a growing wealth gap that suggests the exceptionalism isn’t trickling down, if that’s where it comes from. I’m glad that Elizabeth Warren is a senator along with people like Bernie Sanders and Angus King.  They are more in the mold of public servants that our founders might celebrate.

1. Not sure what is the # one thing to be glad of? One thought is that it’s only a month or so  till Tom Flynn (he of "The Trouble with Christmas") goes to work on Dec. 25^th. That’s a Tuesday so he isn’t off the hook like last year. 
So we have to decide whose turn is it to give him a call while he's in the office?

Celebrate and make your own rituals, even if they are modest and human sized. “When some as small as speaking a simple truth for human values becomes ritual, it finds  a place in the human heart. And as  Muriel Barbery, noted in her The Elegance of the Hedgehog our ability to see greatness in small things is deeply important:

 Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”

  Happy Thanksgiving.

Hearing the Voice of Bertrand Russell

by Gary Berg-Cross

The recent mention of Bertrand Russell in the Washington Post was nice reminder of a philosophical thought leader who was influential during my childhood. The article’ discussion takes place in a drum beat atmosphere for war with Iran and focused on some of Russell’s thinking about how we could survive in an age of nuclear weapons. Generally pacific, although he supported WWII, his approach during the Cold War was to confront, but not attack the Soviet Union over its nuclear materials and weaponry. Russell thought that a defensive deterrence stance was the right approach for ending war and “the only hope for humanity’s long-term survival in a nuclear age. Still sound advice and “ahead of his time” as the article notes.
Russell, born into the liberal aristocracy (his godfather was John Stuart Mill), was justifiably famous as a mathematician & logician with a three-volume work Principia Mathematica, on the foundations of mathematics, written with Alfred North Whitehead on 1910. Logic has moved on from the atomism of that work but Russell’s generally writing earned him a nobel prize for literature in 1950 "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". It is a bit wonderful to hear humanitarian ideals being praised so freely. Bertie is remembered broadly as a campaigner for intellectual, social and sexual freedom, as well as peace and disarmament. It's a voice that heard in my mind as I read his wrtitings in paperback as a youth. For me and for many Russell’s image combined a rational, skeptical, humanist, and philosophical voice with an atheist one. Russell was probably the most prominent atheist voice of the era and well known for this from the 1920s on. His broad knowledge and clear philosophical argument provide a standard that only people like Dan Dennett attain:

"Dan Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher." Marvin Minsky

In logical and analytic debates with clerics like the Jesuit Copleston he prefigures and illuminates the current debates by people like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has been called by one critical of both he and Russell, “the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell.”
He wrote about his view on Religion in Why I am Not a Christian (published in 57, but given in a lecture in 1927). In outline it covers:

• 1.1 What is a Christian?
• 1.2 The existence of God
• 1.3 The moral arguments for deity
• 1.3.1 The argument for the remedying of injustice
• 1.4 The character of Christ
• 1.4.1 Defects in Christ's teaching
• 1.4.2 The moral problem
• 1.5 The emotional factor
• 1.6 How the churches have retarded progress
• 1.7 Fear, the foundation of religion
• 1.8 What w e must do

Russell’s logical approach is great to read and you can see a 3 minute video Bertrand talking in 1959 about this, truth, intellectual belief and his discarding of Christian dogma in his pursuit of knowledge onYouTube. One might find it amusing to see the interviewer trying to find some scrap of religious belief in Russell who focused responses as a “passionate skeptic” of such things are an intellectual joy to behold.
“A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”

— Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic