To make it easier to follow the ‘chain’ of posts about ‘The Big Picture’, I have created a key-page. It is called ‘The Big Picture’ and is at the top-right of my page header.
As I make more posts, I will update it with links and breif descriptions of the posts. At the end, I’ll try to sum things up, untangle all the threads of the ‘big knot’ and demonstrate how they weave together to show us at least a part of the fabric of the history that surrounds us. Ambitious, I know – but I can dream!
As our society evolves, so do the means we keep ourselves informed.
A thousand years ago, traveling merchants, storytellers and ‘going to the fair’ would be the main ways non-elites (as in, us regular citizens) got information about what was happening in the world. A hundred years ago, we would likely read the newspapers – or have someone who read them tell us about all the interesting things that were going on. Then, the radio, TV….well, you know the rest.
The large and established newspapers, news-magazines, TV-news and to a degree, radio, make up our ‘mainstream media’ (MSM). The majority of the people in our society get all of their news through this means – hence the term, ‘mainstream’.
During the early part of the 20th, the MSM had earned for itself a reputation of impartiality and fierce independance. Journalists were proud to ‘hunt down’ the truth, the whole truth – and report nothing but the truth. And not just report it – report it in as factual a way as possible.
Recently, my father-in-law was looking up some news story from the 1st half of the 20th century – so he went down to the ‘National Archives’ and started looking through the dailies. He was struck at how very differently the ‘news’ had been reported. No fluffy wording. No idiotic interviews with a neighbour who had not seen anything, but happened to be ‘around’ when the reporter needed an ‘eyewitness’. No guesses about what ‘society’ had done to ’cause’ such a tragedy. Just, well, facts. A bit stark, to be sure, but informative…
So, what happened?
Dan Rather has some insights that I think are very interesting:
By the way, Mr. Rather thinks that ‘bloggers’ are the next wave in news-communication – and a healthy antidote to the current malaise of the MSM. Though he does not have a blog himself, in another interview, he said that if he were offered an opportunity to join a group of several bloggers, he just might consider making it the place from which to fight this battle!
Growing up behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, a person had to learn to ‘read between the lines’ of what the official news-media were reporting. The alternative was being left with patently self-contradictory messages. One little example: the headline in a newspaper touted the Soviet Union as the most developed country in the world, while the newsstand itself was just by a big ‘inspirational’ sign that read ‘We will catch up to, then surpass the USA!’
In other words, keeping one’s brain from exploding from ‘doublespeak’ required that one began to construct filters through which to pass all ‘official news’. And, it was all ‘official news’. Of course, we had ‘freedom of the press’ – there were several independent sources besides the official government newspapers! There was the Communist Party newspaper and there was the official ‘Union of Trade Unions’ newspaper, too! Plus, we were told we had freedom of the press!
When we came to Canada in the 1980s, we experienced something that we had then written off as just a bit of a quirk – but, looking back, I suspect it may have been a symptom of a malaise that is now causing the part of the illness of our ‘Western’ mainstream media sources.
I say ‘part’ because in my never-humble-opinion, there are several underlying causes…. It is not a simple situation.
So, what was this ‘quirk’?
When we came here, many Canadians were very welcoming of us. Most were very nice – even if somewhat naive of the world situation, at least, it seemed so to us. They would ask us a lot of questions about what our life had been like and offerered very empathetic replies. We we would describe to them the type of censorship of the press that existed there – how difficult it was to actually find information on what was happening in world events. They smiled indulgently and told us: ‘It is the same here – just from the other direction!’
This seemed a singularly strange response to us. We concluded it was just a poor attempt at trying to make us feel welcome. But, because several different people offered me the same sentiments, it is something I have never forgotten – it did continue to bother me over the decades.
It bothered me because it showed an inability to differentiate between the freedom of the press and censorship. It bothered me because it diminished the importance of protecting freedom of the press by a smile and a wave of the hand….
But it also told me that there was a danger that these people would perceive ‘right-wing bias’ where none existed. That they would suspect it is there – simply because they are told that in Communist countries (which is their ‘opposite’) there is a ‘left wing bias’ – so here there ‘must’ be the opposite, ‘right wing’ bias… This seemed to me to be both a twisted form of reasoning, lack of an ability to assess veracity, as well as an indication of undeserved self-deprecation. Perhaps it was a kind of self-put-down: considering one-self unworthy of actually asessing the situation using their own reasoning an therefore refusing to even try. And I thought this was potentially dangerous….
It seems to me that this, or similar, faulty reasoning has permeated a lot of the learning institutions in ‘the West’ – that this ‘attitude’ is actively being taught in schools to our kids, teens and young adults. And, it has been taught since at least the 1980s!
This started me thinking about how this attitude may have become come to be in the first place – why was this type of mis-reasoning never debunked by the intelligent people who were being taught it? And then it occurred to me: people will NOT question something IF they do not realize there is something to question!!!
Perhaps I am confusing things a little…. Let me explain this by going over a conversation I had with one of my high-school English teachers. He was a 60’s hippy – all grown up and teaching American Literature now. As we went over interpretations of differen novels, it became clear he was fiercly pro-peace (all war is evil, nothing is worth going to war over) and that he regarded the Soviet Union and the United States as pretty much ‘equivalent’ – economically as well as morally. But, his in-born sense of fairness demanded that since he is part of ‘the West’, it is his duty to be critical of ‘the West’ – just as we, emigrants from ‘the East’ are critical of ‘the East’.
He and I had many interesting discussions – inside the class, as well as outside of it. I’m afraid my inability to properly perceive ‘social boundaries’ meant that I asked some pretty direct questions of him – but he was genuinely a very nice guy and would discuss them with me in the spirit in which I asked them.
If this teacher is indicative of how the attitudes formed in other people of his generation, I don’t know. However, it is interesting to entertain the possibility that he might…
Part of the ‘culture’ of ‘the West’ in the decade plus following WWII was a significant amount of propaganda against Communism. This went along with some pretty serious abuses of human rights – McCarthy and all that. But that culture was also imbued with very positive things, like ‘patriotism’ and the knowledge that as horrible as war is, it is necessary to fight it sometimes…
It is one of those things we, people, tend to do: we tend to bundle ideas together. In this case, the ‘counter-revolution’ which happened – the ‘hippy movement’ – bundled the ideas of ‘freedom=good’ ‘McCarthyism is against freedom’ along with ‘patriotism’ and ‘necessary self-scacrifice in war’, ‘McCarthyism=right wing’, ‘facism=right wing’, ‘facism caused war’…. you see where I’m going with this.
The Hippies (and, really, many pre-Hippies…Hippies were sort of the ‘trailing edge’ of this trend, but I don’t know the proper term to apply) rebelled against ‘the zeitgeist’ of their parent’s society – the good along with the bad! And they were so busy rebelling against ‘the bad bits’ that they never noticed they did not reason things out…and that there even were any ‘good bits’ in their parent’s culture.
In other words, many of these people ‘bundled together’ all their partents’ era stood for. They saw ‘rebelling against government control’ and ‘fighting for freedom’ to be the same thing as ‘rebelling against right wing ideas and people who espouse them’. It never even occurred to them to question whether this reasoning is sound. And since it did not occurr to them to question this, they never did.
These people then became the teachers of the next generation!
Thanks to the demographic ‘waves’, people who grew up on the leading edge (agewise) of this cultural wave have filled all the vacancies in Universtities and Colleges that were getting ready for the swelling numbers of the ‘boomers’ and they made sure to drum these ideas into the students’ heads.
You want to question ‘government authority’? Then question right-wing ideas!!!
Simply put, they failed to differentiate between the ’cause’ and the ‘symptom’: since they saw ‘opression’ come from the ‘right wing’, they eqauted the two and did not reason any further. This then became their entrenched dogma.
And they are still there, still teaching these same ideas… and they are senior enough to be in charge of approving the hiring of new professors. Predictably, they select ones who think like they do. After all, they must ‘guard’ the ‘institutions of learning’ against falling under the influence of ‘right wing McCarthyists’!!!
So, how did my conversations with my teacher go? Rather well. I walked away with a deeper understanding of ‘the West’ and its ‘internal struggle’. But, I think I also had an impact on my teacher. I recall that during one of our last conversations (the year was almost out) we were talking about the Soviet Union’s military backing of some of the most brutal revolutions in Africa.
My teacher was dismissive of my criticism, saying it did not matter if the ‘new’ country accepted help from the USA or the USSR. In his words: ‘When you are hungry, it does not matter who offers you a steak. You don’t ask about their politics, you eat the stake!’
To which I replied that the USA spends billions of dollars on foreign aid – a lot of it in Africa. Sure, they do some bad things – nobody says they don’t. But, they also bring in vaccinations, rice, beans – and books and teachers. The Soviet Union also spends money on foreing aid in Africa. But they never send food or books or medicine. Instead of handing the Africans ‘a steak’, they hand them a gun and say: ‘Your neighbour has a steak. Go take it!’
All my teacher said was: ‘I had not thought of that…’
This is a most excellent video from StopAndLook which explores the origin and nature of our rights.
The author expresses the concepts eloquently and clearly: human rights, at any given time, are what people agree they are. Reaching a concensus is difficult.
The origin of rights determines their nature. This video explores the difference between the position that ‘rights’ originate with each individual versus the position that rights originate with the social group.
Though it is phrased differently, it is very simlar to the different attitudes captured in ‘Common Law’ versus ‘Civil Law’ legal codes: very roughly, the ‘Common Law’ would be more closely aligned with the position that ‘rights’ originate with the individual whild ‘Civil Law’ is more congruent with the point of view that ‘rights’ originate from ‘the state’.
What is really important here is the difference in attitude between the citizen and the State. A little bit of this difference in attitude is described in my post about the difference between a ‘tax cut’ and a ‘tax rebate’: in a tax cut, the attitude is that the money is yours, and the government is able to accomplis the necessary ‘common goals’ using less of your money while in a tax rebate, the attitude is that the money is the government’s and that they have decided to give you a raise in your allowance.
This attitude, in my never-humble-opinion, is key in how the society evolves because it forms the expectations of the citizens towards the government, and vice versa.
And this attitude is one of the ‘threads’ in this great big ‘knot’…
It is important – when embarking upon a long and convoluted description of something – to make sure that everyone following the discussion has a common understanding of what is being discussed. This may sound fatuous, but – it is very common for people to use one word in several ways, to have a very different understanding of a principle or concept from what the speaker has. Such a discussion will not be productive…
So, I would like to start by explaining what I mean by some of the words and concepts which I plan to bring into focus.
This post will continue to be updated as more posts are added.
Absolute freedom and the necessity to accomodate others if we wish to interact with them. ‘Free Speech’ is the means by which we can arrive at a workable balance.
This is just a clarification of what is meant by these words in the context of this discussion.
This most excellent YouTube video (1st of 5-part series) by StopAndLook. It contrasts the view that rights are inherent to the individual vs the view that rights are given to people by the state. This results in very different attitudes (mindsets) between the state and citizen – and I contrast it to my post ‘Common law vs. civil law‘. To further demonstrate the difference in attitudes, I also mention by ‘Tax cut’ vs. ‘tax rebate’ post.
This is part of the ‘Big Picture’ series.
‘Absolute Freedom’ can only be achieved by a person who is absolutely alone. When a person has no others to interact with, they are free to do absolutely anything they wish – and they are absolutely responsible for the consequences of their actions.
What I mean by this is that if this person takes foolish or reckless actions – they are free to do so. But, nobody will help them, as there is nobody else there.
Humans are social creatures – we build communities. In order to get along, we agree to give up some of our freedoms willingly because we have made the judgment that it is in our best interest to do this. So far so good.
Now, we have to find the balance between what we are willing to give up and what we are not willing to give up. In other words, we have started a whole complex ‘freedom/accomodation’ balancing act.
After all, even if we give too many of our rights up willingly, make too many accomodations (or accomodate too far), we will feel oppressed. (An example to illustrate this: a young man willingly gives up his career to move into a different area because he wishes to be with the woman he loves. Even though this decision was done willingly and happily, over time, he may regret the lost opportunities and begin to resent the woman he loves… It may not even be a conscious thing – but it could fester, eventually put a strain on the relationship.)
Obviously, this balance between one’s freedoms on the one hand and willingness to accomodate the community is not the same for every person… Which is exactly why we have to be able to talk about it – openly and without fear.
It is only through open and honest discourse that we can re-balance ‘freedoms’ versus ‘accomodations’. And it is only by voicing our concerns that we can realize that the current ‘balance’ is oppressive. Every society changes and continuously evolves – and as it does, this re-balancing will be necessary!
This cannot be accomplished without the freedom of each and every person to speak their mind, openly and without fear. Therefore, I think the most fundamental freedom – the one which is key in maintaining and re-balancing all the other ones, is the Freedom of Speech.
This is part of the ‘Big Picture’ series.
Each and every person must be free to speak their mind, seriously or in jest, regardless of who they are or what their ideas are. I am fully willing to accept that spreading falsehoods or breaking confidentiality agreements can and should be prosecuted in civil court – that is the appropriate and necessary consequence of this right to speak freely. However, the key here it that is is actionable by the injured party, in civil court – not by anyone else, anywhere.
There is a second part to this ‘freedom of speech issue’ – every person ought to have ‘freedom of speech’ on both the output and the input side, so to speak. The ‘input side’, of course, is the ‘access to other people’s speech’. Because, if a country were to allow each and every citizen to speak freely – but only in sound-proof cells where nobody can hear their voice – the citizens may be able to say what they wish, but it is not ‘freedom of speech’.
So, in my definition, ‘freedom of speech’ also includes the ‘freedom to be heard’ and perhaps most importantly the ‘freedom to hear others’ – regardless of what they may say. As in, I get to choose whom I listen to – nobody else may make that choice for me!!! To me, this is an essential component of ‘freedom of speech’.
Of course, because speech is the means of re-balancing freedoms vs. accomodations, those who wish to control the way a society evolves will allways seek to control speech!
Have you ever found a bunch of strings so knotted up, it was difficult to tell which thread went where, how they connected – and how to untangle them? Pulling on some strings just seems to make it more knotted up and incomprihensible… you had to pull a little bit on each one, switching back and forth, to figure it out and realize which ones wrapped around which other ones – and how, before you could make much progress in untangling it.
That is how I feel when trying to describe the ‘big picture’ of the current threats to our freedom of speech – which is the key that unlocks all our other freedoms.
Because the current situation we are facing – the various threats to our freedoms – consists of exactly the type of ‘tangled knot’ made up of several quite discrete (and a few of them frayed into several ‘strands’) ‘threads’! If I ‘pull’ on one ‘thread’ alone, it will not clear up anything… Therefore, I beg you, the reader, to keep this in mind and indulge my ‘haphazard’ and disorganized presentation – hopping from one bit to another, pulling a little bit on each ‘thread’ in its turn…
Another problem I ran into while trying to write this up was just how long the post was getting… It became necessary to break it up into many shorter ones. My fear in doing this? I have tried doing this before, but never got all the ‘bits’ out because something ‘big’ happened that I wanted to comment on – or I never connected them up properly – or I went off on some tangent.
This one, however, is too important not to give it a try.
So, over the next little while, I will be posting a various, seemingly unrelated, stories – each a part of one thread or another which makes up this ‘knot’. And, I plan to connect them up! Perhaps in the last post of the series, perhaps as a separate page (like I am doing with the Aspergers posts).
Any additional information you come accross that you think should be included in this, or when I make mistakes which you could correct – please, let me know! I welcome this because even though I think I see a pattern here, one person can never get the ‘whole’ of the ‘big picture’ without the help of historical perspective…which only comes centuries after the events.
And our freedoms – they are in more danger of being eroded, one tiny bit at a time, than most of us are willing to admit.
No, this is not some sort of a perversion of the ‘One Laptop per Child’ initiative – a very positive effort to help fight poverty in developing nations by placing education within the reach of each and every child, and which I wrote about here.
Instead, one Kalashnikov rifle is the price Osama bin Laden paid for each one of the child slaves he purchased to work on his marijuana farm in Sudan. Think about that next time someone offers you a toke.
Yes – child slaves.
This seems unthinkable – today, in 2008, there are still children being captured and sold to slavery! Some of their stories are beginning to come out, like ‘Slave: My True Story’ by Mende Nazer and ‘Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America’ by Francis Bok.
You can read more in FrontPageMagazine’s story, ‘Child Slavery in the Sudan’ by Stephen Brown. The callousness and lack of empathy of the slavers is difficult to comprehend.
So, how could it be that today, slavery could still be practiced so openly?
I suppose we can thank the ‘desert religions’ and their ‘holy texts’ for this!
Please, do not misunderstand me – most Christians, Jews and Muslims today unequivocally condemn the practice of slavery. Francis Bok even says that he could only escape his slavery because a Muslim family which disapproved of slavery helped him!
Yet, Christian, Jewish and Muslim ‘holy books’ not only permit slavery, they describe the rules of how it should be practiced. And, because ‘it is permitted by God’, many people justify the practice today.
Let’s look at the Christian’s Old Testament (it’s Jewish counterpart being the Torah). Thanks to the Society of Christians for the Restoration of Old Testament Morality, here is an easy link to their ‘Biblically Correct Family Values’ , which quotes:
Exodus 21:7-8: “And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.”
If you are confused by the term ‘maidservant’, note that someone is sold to become one. (Just keep this in mind when reading other bits of the Bible, and the word ‘maidservant’ is used.) And, we know what ‘bethroher her to himself’ means…
The Society’s ‘Biblically Correct’ pamphlet on how to treat rape victims is no less informative:
Deuteronomy 22:28-29: If a man find a damsel [that is] a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty [shekels] of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
Note that it is her father who gets the fifty shekels. The rape victim herself is not even worthy to receive monetary damages.
In other words, the rapist has just bought himself a ‘wife’ by paying her father 50 sheckles. And, she becomes her rapist’s ‘wife’!
But there is more – here is explicit command to obey one’s owner– especially if one’s owner is also a Christian!
1 Tim. 6:1-2: “Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and [his] doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise [them], because they are brethren; but rather do [them] service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort.”
My point is not that the slavers in this story are Muslims – there are all kinds of slavers in the world today, both religious and secular. However, it seems that feeling justified in owning (and abusing) other humans who are enslaved, feeling righteous in this practice, truly believing that one has the right to oppress others because it pleases God – that is a monstrous mindset.
Yet, it is this very mindset which is at the root of both slavery and the imposition of religious law onto secular society. Whether it be the medieval Inquisition or modern-day Sharia – the mindset is the same. People feel justified in committing atrocities because they truly and honestly believe this is the will of one God or another…
That is why it is essential that we do not allow our secular laws to become increasingly accomodating of religious laws or even religious sensitivities! That is why we must fight against the creeping of religious rules – ALL religious rules – into governing the behaviour (and speech) of the people in our society!
The best way to make this world a better place for everyone, in my never-humble-opinion, is to make good education so accessible, everyone gets some.
The more, the better. Why?
It may be naive on my part, but I have always thought that many injustices throughout the world are not opposed because it simply does not occur to people that they could be opposed. One good thing that results from education is the broadening of one’s perspectives, learning about different places where things are done differently, and the realization that it is possible to ‘question stuff’…
Education also teaches us how to reason. It does not matter what we are learning, we cannot escape acquiring some formal reasoning when we ‘learn stuff’. That is also good.
But, perhaps one of the best reasons for making education available to everyone is that it will open horizons for kids and open up possibilities for them that they never dreamt of before.
That is why I think that efforts like ‘One Laptop per Child’ are so important – and why every child, male or female, should become educated.
But many people question how children would benefit from simply having an internet-connected laptop. What would they do with one? How would they learn? Many of them do not even speak English – or any of the other languages dominating the internet! What use would such a computer be to them?
A little while ago, one of my sons came across an interesting article about a brilliant study done by a physicist named Sugata Mitra in New Delhi, India. It was called ‘Hole in the Wall’:
An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens. Based on the results, he talks about issues of digital divide, computer education and kids, the dynamics of the third world getting online.
The results were brilliant! The computer, connected to high-speed internet, had a touch-screen interface. It ‘mysteriously’ appeared, cemented into a wall, in a New Delhi slum… no instructions, no manual, no rules, no help. What happened next was, well, enlightening!
What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.
If you have the time to read the whole interview with Dr. Mitra, I would greatly suggest it. If not, here are some of the highlights:
But there was more to Dr. Mitra’s curiosity…he wondered how effective self-directed learning would be in more formal subjects…like, say, physics…
Well, I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their physics teacher in and asked him, “What are you going to teach these children next year at this time?” He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the four children and said, “Look here guys. I have a little problem for you.” They read the questions and said they didn’t understand them, it was Greek to them. So I said, “Here’s a terminal. I’ll give you two hours to find the answers.”
Then I did my usual thing: I closed the door and went off somewhere else.
They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself, doesn’t mean much. But I said to him, “Talk to the children and find out if they really learned something about this subject.” So he spent half an hour talking to them. He came out and said, “They don’t know everything about this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn’t know.”
That’s not a wow for the children, it’s a wow for the Internet. It shows you what it’s capable of. The slum children don’t have physics teachers. But if I could make them curious enough, then all the content they need is out there. The greatest expert on earth on viscosity probably has his papers up there on the Web somewhere. Creating content is not what’s important. What is important is infrastructure and access … The teacher’s job is very simple. It’s to help the children ask the right questions.
This makes so much sense!
And, please, consider that many universities and colleges have started putting their undergraduate courses online – accessible for free!!!
Here are some examples: MIT Open Courseware, Carnegie Mellon open learning initiative, John Hopkins open courseware, and many, many more!!! So, with a laptop, an internet connection and a healthy dose of curiosity and desire, a kid in Africa or Sri Lanka or anywhere else in the world can access world-class education. There is still the question of accreditation, but that is only necessary to getting a job – not to actually using the education on their own!
Just think how empowering it would be for young people, all over the world, to gain access to this kind of education! If Dr. Mitra is correct, then self-directed learning is the most effective way to educate our children. So, let us put the tools into their hands – and let’s watch them grow!
Of course, education is not the answer to ending oppression – but it is an important step. It is much more difficult to oppress a society of people who are well educated and internet literate than it is to control people who don’t know how to call out for help!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 