Degenerative Democratic Party Syndrome (DDPS)

Looking back on the Democratic party's recovery in 2008-09 winning both the Senate and the House of Representatives as well as the presidency there seems to be a peculiar disease affecting those within the party.  The party that once championed Social Security, regulation of the financial industry, and assailed those who supported an endless war on terror and the Bush Doctrine; is now looking at cuts to SS, favors only very minimal regulation of the finance industries, and seems to now lend full support to the the war on terror and tenets of the Bush Doctrine.  Essentially liberals don't really seem liberal anymore, and it's due to authoritarian blindness and the degeneration of the party.  I'm calling this cessation and decay of liberal thought Degenerative Democratic Party Syndrome (DDPS), not to be confused with DRPS (Degenerative Republican Party Syndrome) which seems to affect Republicans when they're in power and causes them to forget every talking point they ever created on fiscal conservatism.  Degenerative party syndromes tend to come about mostly when a party comes to power and rather than representing a principled position in line with past positions, they degenerate to positions that serve the established powers, and begin to praise positions that just a few earthly rotations of the sun back would be polar opposites.  

When Barack Obama was elected president and began serving in 2009, most people who supported him seemed to genuinely believe that he was a political figure that could set right what had once gone wrong during the Bush presidency while reshaping the very nature of the political system.  While he wasn't making a Quantum Leap, his leap as a constitutional scholar to the presidency seemed to capture the hopes of the Democratic Party constituents who expected change.  Since I was not an Obama supporter during the 2008 election cycle - because I saw through his marketing campaign and told personal friends time and time again that his plans for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars mirrored Bush's and he supported increasing the size of the military which was a sure sign of business as usual politics no matter what party is in office- I wasn't as taken as his supporters in the hope for real change in the political system.  However, I did expect a little more from Obama and the Democratic Party than we've seen over the last 4 years.  The primary arguments against Bush seemed to be his unilateral swagger in regards to foreign policy, his curtailment of civil liberties, and a general disgust for his economic and social conservatism.  Yet it seems that the Democratic leaders and pundits alike have shifted towards positions that were once loathed by liberals.  

For example lets take a look at one of Obama's campaign promises to shutdown Guantanamo Bay's US prison site, famous around the world for torturing its inmates.  Recently it's been receiving a little more press with many inmates on hunger strikes to protest the conditions there and that many prisoners cleared for release are still being held.  While we can ignore for the time being that his real plan to shut down Guantanamo was really just a plan to create 'Guantanamo North' right here in the US - which allowed them to continue indefinite detention policies- the striking thing is not Obama's failure to close the facility, but the shift in public opinion towards Guantanamo.  

In just a few years time Democrats have gone from supporting it's closure to being pro Gitmo.  Doesn't it seem odd that one of the greatest stains of Bush's presidency and US foreign policy is now being supported by Democrats?  This is an advanced case of DDPS clearly showing the bend in political opinion since Obama stopped pursuing closing the prison.  It should be interesting now that Obama has renewed his pledge to "close" the facility to see if opinion shifts back.

Another such example is support for the war on terror.  Drone strikes that are being justified by the same old "the world is a battlefield Bush Doctrine" have been embraced by Democrats.   "Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35."  This means that even self proclaimed liberals support drone strikes against US citizens, giving whomever the current president is the power to secretly kill citizens regardless of geographic location and outside the normative processes of law.  Who thinks for a second that if Bush had stepped out with this policy that liberals and Democrats alike wouldn't have supported this policy?

There are so many symptoms of this left wing hypocrisy disease it might be better to list them:  

Obamacare reforms actually closely resemble former Republican plans

Obama signed the NDAA and continued the Patriot Act

Obama fought against any meaningful regulation of the financial industry

Obama favored and signed extending the Bush tax cuts

Obama supports cuts to Social Security and Medicaid

Obama supports immigration reform similar to Bush's plan

So how does one treat DDPS?  They're called principles and they may work for you.  If you believe that invading and occupying countries is a bad idea under Bush, supporting the continuation of those occupations under a new president, principles may be right for you.  If you think drone strikes target only terrorists and support the program despite having no knowledge of who is being targeted even when evidence shows civilians are being killed time and time again, principles may be right for you.  If you think Obamacare is a step towards a progressive healthcare system when there is no public option, principles may be right for you.  If you think that cuts to Social Security and Medicaid are terrible ideas, but voted for Obama, principles might be right for you.  

WARNING: Assuming principled arguments rather than partisan worship may cause: scrutiny from both political parties, defending yourself from straw man arguments that your represent the "other party's" views, feeling nauseous every time you hear the words bipartisan cooperation, death to any political career as you can't change your policy with whatever way the wind blows, and upsetting the establishment.  

Consult history books, experts, and other evidence before making principled arguments.  Do not use while in political office or on national TV or it could result in job loss or controversy.  

Sam Harris- Take 2

Almost two weeks ago in response to the controversy over Sam Harris and Islamophobia, I hastily wrote about my thoughts on Harris' fear of Muslims and why it seems irrational.  Since that time I've continued to immerse myself in arguments by both Harris and those who argue against his theses.  I've taken the time to read Harris' book The End of Faith, Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, and a number of recently written articles on the subject.  Also, since my initial writing, the Boston Marathon was bombed bringing the subject of terrorism to the forefront of our news-media coverage.  It strikes me that a rational understanding of terrorism is both necessary and important in the 21st century especially if we aim to stop such terrible acts from becoming more and more common.  We must begin by dispelling the myths behind terrorism and appreciate the complexity of such issues in order to create real solutions to the problem of terrorism.

Harris' book The End of Faith begins by creating a scenario of a man on a bus who blows up himself, the rest of the passengers on the bus, and inflicts further damage on the streets.  His parents feel "great pride" and the neighbors gather to celebrate his accomplishment of killing innocent civilians.  Then Harris asks "Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy—you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on it easy—to guess the young man's religion?"  What this scenario leaves out is where this attack is taking place which matters especially when guessing the religion of the attacker.  For example, if this story was told in Sri-Lanka, or perhaps even the UK in the 80's, the guesses very well could have been either Hindu or Irish Catholic.  Whatever the case, the suggestion that Islam must be behind terrorism is a dangerous proposition, as demonstrated in the aftermath of the Boston bombings when the Washington Post incorrectly claimed that police had a Saudi suspect under guard in a Boston hospital.  Now, in the case of the Boston attacks, news reports have claimed that the older of the two Tsarnaev brothers was a radical Muslim, but is it logical to assume that he was, before such evidence had been produced?

Certainly analysis of data and statistical information on the nature of terrorist attacks shed some light on the situation.  An article from 2010 at loonwatch.com goes into detail showing FBI statistics on terrorist attacks in the US from 1980-2005.  The graph below shows the likely hood of an attack being motivated by Islamic extremism.

That's right 6% of terrorist attacks are committed by Islamic extremists.  Why then is it so easy to guess the religion of the attacker?  The obvious answer is the over hyped and over inflated connection between Islam and terrorism in the post 9/11 world.  After such a dramatic event, it is easy to see why the connections have been made, and coverage of Boston has refreshed that memory with a week of news reports that create a culture of fear within the US public.  Meanwhile, it's keeping people glued to the news channels which increases their ratings and their profit margins.  So is this guess on religion based on statistical knowledge and projections, or the all too common inference that Islam is the cause of terrorism?  Usually in the scientific world we base our hypotheses off of any relevant data we can collect on the subject, but we seem to have a clear departure from any reasoned or scientific view of terrorism and Islam.  However, we should follow Harris' further arguments on the subject to ascertain if this is actually the case.

After the first chapter provides a basic introduction of the arguments contained in the book, chapter 2 launches us straight into a well written and conceived analysis on the nature of belief, how beliefs can affect behavior, and how beliefs not based in evidence can even harm us, amongst other things.  Outside of a few minor points, I agree with and applaud the work in this chapter.  Chapter 3, "In the Shadow of God" is also illuminating on the subject of how religion can and has played a negative role in society over the years and I agree with much of it as well.  It's when he launches into the next chapter "The Problem with Islam" that I depart nearly completely from the views held by Harris.  While I may not have the space to critique every false argument made by Harris in this chapter I hope to elucidate what I believe to be the most important and most erroneous arguments.

Before callously stating that we are at war with Islam, Harris contends that the views of most commentators on Muslim violence can be ignored, including Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Palestine, collusion of western powers with corrupt dictatorships, and the endemic poverty in the region.  He reasons these claims can be laid to rest because there have been and still are groups that are exploited and live in generally poor circumstances beyond those in the "Muslim world" yet they have not resorted to terrorism.  Instead he focuses on the doctrine of Jihad found in the Koran and tries to establish the imperialistic ambitions of Islam as a whole, explaining that Islam is a religion of conquest with only some Muslims having overlooked the "militancy of their religion."  Harris uses a quote by Bernard Lewis from The Crisis of Islam which states "the presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule."  He goes on to cite passage after passage from the Koran and Hadiths on Jihad.  His basic argument is that Islam is the primary cause of suicide bombings and Islamic terrorism.

We should analyze these claims though using evidence to see how they hold up.  The idea that we can merely ignore what most commentators have said about the roots of Muslim violence because others who are exploited and poor do not commit such acts is false.  This argument clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of the nature of suicide bombings.  While Harris cites Tibetans as a prime example of exploitation not leading to any attacks, we should note that this is a logical fallacy.  Further, suicide attacks are nearly all part of organized campaigns which have always targeted democracies, or more precisely states with democratic elections.  His argument is essentially that if exploitation and occupation cause suicide terrorism, then all areas that experience exploitation and occupation would use suicide terrorism, and since this in not the case, exploitation and occupation do not cause terrorism.  So what causes some exploited people to resort to terrorism and not others?  Robert Pape in his thorough case study of terrorism, has analyzed every case of suicide bombing from 1980-2003 - 315 total attacks.  He argues that terrorism is a tactic of coercion to achieve nationalistic goals, which as stated, all target democracies.  So in the Tibetan example, putting aside belief systems, what strategic logic would attacking civilians or other targets in a non-democratic state have?  Would it be likely to bend the resolve of a totalitarian regime?

Pape again has insights to these questions stating: "Suicide terrorism is more likely to be employed against states with democratic political systems than against authoritarian governments, for three reasons. First, democracies are often thought to be especially vulnerable to coercive punishment. Domestic critics and international rivals, as well as terrorists, often view democracies as “soft,” usually on the grounds that their publics have low thresholds of cost tolerance and high ability to affect state policy... Second, suicide terrorism is a tool of the weak, which means that, regardless of how much punishment the terrorists inflict, the target state almost always has the capacity to retaliate with far more extreme punishment or even by exterminating the terrorists’ community. Accordingly, suicide terrorists must not only have high interests at stake, they must also be confident that their opponent will be at least somewhat restrained. Democracies are widely perceived as less likely to harm civilians, and no democratic regime has committed genocide in the twentieth century...  Finally, suicide attacks may also be harder to organize or publicize in authoritarian police states, although these possibilities are weakened by the fact that weak authoritarian states are also not targets."

So we can move on.  Robert Pape goes to great lengths to establish the real motives of suicide terrorism in Dying to Win writing that: "First, although religious motives may matter and although Islamic groups receive the most attention in Western media, modern suicide terrorism is not limited to Islamic fundamentalism. As shown in Table 1, the explicitly anti-religious Tamil Tigers have committed 76 of the 315 suicide attacks, more than any other group; they are responsible for the spectacular bombing of the World Trade Center in Colombo in 1997 and the assassinations of two heads of state, Rajiv Gandhi of India and Ranasinghe Premadasa of Sri Lanka.
Even among Muslims, secular groups account for over a third of suicide attacks. The Kurdish PKK, which has used suicide bombers as part of its strategy to achieve Kurdish autonomy, is guided by the secular Marxist-Leninist ideology of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, rather than by Islam. Even in the conflicts most characterized by Islamic fundamentalism, groups with secular ideologies account for an important number of suicide attacks. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist group, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, with allegiance to Yasser Arafat’s socialist Fatah movement, together account for thirty-one of ninety-two suicide attacks against Israel, while communist and socialist groups, such as the secular Lebanese National Resistance Front, the Lebanese Communist Party, and the Syrian National Socialist Party, account for twenty-seven of thirty-six suicide attacks in Lebanon in the 1980s."

While Harris has argued against Pape's thesis - that terrorism is best understood in terms of nationalistically motivated political coercion- in his response to controversy, he tackled very little of the abundant evidence presented by Pape that had to do with Islamic terrorism.  Harris wrote: "I would have made it clear to Pape that I have never argued (and would never argue) that all conflicts are attributable to religion or that all suicide bombing is the product of Islam. I am well aware, for instance, that the Tamil Tigers were avowedly secular. Even in this case, however, it seems only decent to recall that they learned the tactic of suicide bombing from Hezbollah and eventually developed their own quasi-religious cult of martyr worship. One can’t really argue that they were a group of classically rational actors. And even here, in this most secular of cases, always used to exculpate Islam, we find the divisive role of religion—because it seems unreasonable to believe that a civil war would have erupted in Sri Lanka if the Tamils, who are nominal Hindus, had been Sinhalese Buddhists, like the government they were fighting. Again, nothing turns on this point, because I admit that not all terrorism need be religiously inspired."

Pape again and again notes the fact that in nearly every case, religious difference is a contributing factor that leads to pursuing the tactic of suicide terrorism.  This obviously has to do with religion being a primary factor in how a person identifies themselves and can then be used to identify the "other", especially when political grievances are at the top of the list.  It seems only fair to note that Harris, on the one hand, is saying that we can put all the political exploitation to the side because there is "no shortage of educated and prosperous men and women, suffering little more than their infatuation with Koranic eschatology, who are eager to murder infidels for God's sake."  Then on the other hand he says, "not all terrorism need be religiously inspired."  So when suicide bombings are done by Muslims, they are evidently religiously motivated, but when done by others they can be and are secular.  Even if we except this there's still further evidence refuting such claims.  Glenn Greenwald wrote this week about the motives of terrorism giving example after example of the stated motives of terrorists.  The main themes are overtly political rather than theological.  If that's not enough evidence of nationalistic and political views being the primary concern, then perhaps we can refer to the most famous terrorist in the world, Osama bin Laden.

"It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies...  The presence of the USA Crusader military forces on land, sea and air of the states of the Islamic Gulf is the greatest danger threatening the largest oil reserve in the world. The existence of these forces in the area will provoke the people of the country and induces aggression on their religion, feelings and prides and push them to take up armed struggle against the invaders occupying the land; therefore spread of the fighting in the region will expose the oil wealth to the danger of being burned up... It is out of date and no longer acceptable to claim that the presence of the crusaders is necessity and only a temporary measures to protect the land of the two Holy Places. Especially when the civil and the military infrastructures of Iraq were savagely destroyed showing the depth of the Zionist-Crusaders hatred to the Muslims and their children, and the rejection of the idea of replacing the crusaders forces by an Islamic force composed of the sons of the country and other Muslim people."

While Harris contests that the claims Bin Laden made were "primarily theological" he ignores Pape's already stated argument of why this is not the case.  Pape writes: "Further, if religious, social, or economic grievances were primary, then al-Qaeda should have been interested in combating three enemies—the United States, Europe, and Israel—with more or less equal weight and with little regard for the target states’ military policies. However, al-Qaeda’s timing and choice of targets shows that religious and ideological factors are not the forces driving the strategic logic of this suicide terrorist campaign.
The United States has been exporting cultural values that are anathema to Islamic fundamentalism for several decades, but bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organization did not turn toward attacking the United States until after 1990, when the United States sent troops to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain."  This becomes even more important when you consider that attacks against Europe and Australia only happened after they stationed troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In fact, Bin Laden offered a truce if they would remove their troops.

Pape continues on the same subject later in the book in chapter 7 stating, "Examination of al-Qaeda’s pool of suicide terrorists—the seventy-one individuals who actually killed themselves on missions for al-Qaeda from 1995 to 2003—shows that the presence of American military forces for combat operations on the homeland territory of the suicide terrorists is stronger than Islamic fundamentalism in predicting whether individuals from that country will become al-Qaeda suicide terrorists. Islamic fundamentalism may play a modest role in recruiting militants, since al-Qaeda suicide terrorists are twice as likely to come from Muslim countries with Islamic fundamentalist populations compared to Muslim countries with tiny or no Islamic fundamentalist populations. However, al-Qaeda suicide terrorists are ten times more likely to come from Muslim countries where there is an American military presence for combat operations than from other Muslim countries. Further, al-Qaeda suicide terrorists are twenty times more likely to come from Muslim countries with both American military presence for combat operations and Islamic fundamentalist populations compared to other Muslim countries.
Overall, this means that American military policy in the Persian Gulf was most likely the pivotal factor leading to September 11. Although Islamic fundamentalism mattered, the stationing of tens of thousands of American combat troops on the Arabian Peninsula from 1990 to 2001 probably made al-Qaeda suicide attacks against Americans, including the horrible crimes committed on September 11, 2001, from ten to twenty times more likely."

For further evidence simply read Pape's books as the examples are too numerous to use.  Continuing on in Harris' The End of Faith he tries to convince the reader that Islam is inherently imperialistic.  This is a claim which historically and doctrinally can be supported to a degree, but in the modern era it doesn't hold water.  Since Harris is essentially arguing that Islam poses a unique threat beyond other religions, it would do well to note that in the US, all our presidents in recent memory have publicly stated a belief in the Christian god, and the US indeed is the largest empire on earth.  Remember, the US has 761 military bases worldwide and spends more on our military than the next 13 highest military spending countries do.  After he argues for their imperialistic attributes he then tries to explain why the problem isn't just Islamic extremists, but that moderates have accepted this strategy of suicide bombings as well.  His strategy seems simple enough, portray the attacks as motivated by religion rather than blowback from western foreign policy.  Note his recent twitter post from April 19th 2013

Everything is on the table when it comes to putting down the notion that our foreign policy might actually bear much of the blame when it comes to the root causes of terrorism.  We should note that the Washington Post has cited an anonymous government source which has stated that the Boston bombings were motivated by US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  What evidence does Harris produce to make these claims of religious motivation?

Harris points to a 2002 poll done by the Pew Research Center that asked the question "Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?"  While the number of respondents in many countries in the middle east seems alarmingly high, this also seems to be a loaded question when the purpose is to establish Islam as a greater threat than other religions.  First, Muslims, as Harris demonstrates, are commanded to defend their religion.  Second, although we don't have polls to verify the responses of Christians in the US, does anyone doubt the number of Christians would be significantly lower than the average number of Muslims that support such violence, specifically if they believed Christianity to be under attack, and that the attack was being done by a foreign country which had been occupying the US and controlling its geopolitics for years?  Finally, what was the response to the attacks against the US on 9/11?  As I documented in my first posting on this subject the vast majority of Americans supported invading Iraq and Afghanistan even though the case against Iraq was completely based on faith in the US rather than real evidence of any threat.  I also noted 93% of Muslims condemned the September 11th attacks.  Is it really that astonishing that people who identify as Muslims would use heinous forms of violence if they felt the religion they identify with was under attack?

This brings up another of Harris' arguments.  Harris calls Chomsky's failure to recognize the moral difference between us and them a "masterpiece of moral blindness."  Although he agrees to an extent with Chomsky's argument that the US is itself a leading terrorist state, he tries to elucidate the moral failing by making the comparison between those who intentionally kill civilians in an attempt to produce maximum damage (the terrorists), and those who unintentionally kill civilians (the US and Israel) which we call collateral damage.  After explaining that if we in the US had perfect weapons we would not need to nor would we kill any innocent people, but we would simply target "the bad guys."  He even goes on to say that: "Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life of a child in
jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a principle we can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance, that despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will be killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well. So do makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools, chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute to the death of a child. There is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable deaths of children on our ski slopes as "skiing atrocities." But you would not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter."

This last analogy actually obfuscates the ethics of war and collateral damage more than it does to clarify these ethics, which is the opposite function of an analogy; his perfect weapons hypothetical does the same.  Even though Harris admits in his writings that the consequences of war - collateral damage, or in the case of Iraq killing over 100,000 civilians - are well known before we engage in them, he has the audacity to compare this to manufactures of common goods which may unintentionally harm people.  First, people who make consumer goods while influenced by profit, are primarily making a good that is well intentioned in its use and that in and of itself is a far cry from war.  There is no evidence to suggest the war Iraq was anything but the opposite of well intentioned.  It is a well established fact that Donald Rumsfeld on the very day of the 9/11 attack, tried to use the attack as a justification for attacking Iraq.  Further, David Frum has stated Chalabi and Cheney "spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia."  There is absolutely no comparison to be made between these two types of "collateral damage" unless we turn a blind eye to the imperial motivations for such a war.

Perhaps a better analogy for Harris would be to imagine a police officer on a busy NY street receives a call that a notorious murderer is only a block away and with traffic at a stand still he decides to callously drive on a sidewalk full of pedestrians at a speed which injures and kills well over ten times the amount of people the murder did to capture the criminal.  The police officer may not have intended to kill so many, but he would obviously have known the implications of his actions beforehand.  This is why almost anywhere in the world the police officer would be tried as a criminal, and it's the same reason why officials in the Bush administration including Bush himself have travel restrictions for fear of being taken before an international criminal court.  However, my police officer analogy wouldn't do for Iraq -although it arguably would in Afghanistan - simply because even to capture a criminal could be seen as a well intentioned motive.  While a certain amount of subjectivity always exists in examining the motives of others for any action, there is far too much evidence making the case that Iraq was simply a war of aggression that used cluster munitions - which pose an unnecessary and unacceptable risk to civilians and we should note every manufacturer of consumer goods is liable for unacceptable risks - and destroyed civilian infrastructure.

More directly to the point, if we can imagine ourselves in possession of the perfect weapons pursuing a different strategy than a war with collateral damage amounting to far more than the damage terrorists ever inflicted, we should be able to imagine what the terrorists would do with such weapons.  Would they pursue a different strategy as well, perhaps targeting the US military and its bases and destroying the western presence in their homeland, or would they simply continue to kill innocent civilians?  This is one of the main points of terrorism as a strategy.  It is constantly used by the "underdog" in terms of military capability.  Even Japan didn't resort to suicide Kamikaze attacks until they were becoming overwhelmed by stronger US military forces.  Harris' arguments seem all but paper thin and framed not by rational thinking, but by assumptions of western moral clarity and rightness against what he seems to view as the tribal and barbaric "Muslim world."

This becomes more clear after reading his next chapter - I'd like to note he spends 45 pages on Islam and only 17 on "western civilization"- where his problems with the US, and to some extent Europe, seems to stem more from religious rejection of science and contemporary social issues.  He fails to mention the true religion of the US, which seems to be globalized hegemonic capitalism supported by doctrines of economic growth, and often poorly evidenced claims of the righteousness of the western world.  While Harris is busy writing and speaking to condemn Islam as a "cult of death," he simultaneously is preaching the goodness of science and civilization.  This system of industrialized capitalism, which has brought about more scientific revolution than any other period in history, is also destroying the very earth we live on.

Carbon emissions alone threaten to disrupt the earth's environment in ways that surely are a greater threat than Islam could ever pose.  The earth's temperature is projected to rise 4-11 degrees by the end of the century and every degree centigrade the temperature increases is likely to reduce grain yields by 10%.  Meanwhile, our ecological systems are already nearing destruction with Ninety percent of all large predatory fish – including tuna, sharks, swordfish, cod and halibut – gone, and more plastic than plankton exists in our oceans.  While science is obviously not the root cause of these issues, it's important that we note science is merely a process of inquiry with testable results.  If we fail to pose the right questions, science can actually hinder our understanding of the world in some ways.  If anything is a cult of death, it is the industrialized system that is destroying our planet and there's no doubt that scientific knowledge has led us not just to greater understanding, but to further exploiting our universe and shaping it to our desires.  Indeed, scientific knowledge is often used not merely for understanding nature and its phenomena, but an attempt to control nature with what is shaping up to be mankind's greatest threat.  Science has helped us create weapons beyond past imagination as well as cures for diseases, but has it given us the moral clarity to deal with such inventions?

While ecological and environmental issues are not scientific problems, but moral problems, more and more people are slipping into a type of scientific millenarianism in which they believe scientific and modern technological advances are just around the corner to save us.  More people are accepting the doctrine of scientific achievement bringing us a better world for tomorrow with electric cars - never-mind that nearly half our electricity comes from coal - and space colonization.  Harris himself proclaims such images stating that: "Two hundred years from now, when we are a thriving global civilization beginning to colonize space, something about us will have changed: it must have; otherwise, we would have killed ourselves ten times over before this day ever dawned."  While Harris alludes to this change being the end of faith and that technology has created a world where single persons can inflict great damage, he leads us to believe that having aspiring martyrs as neighbors poses the greatest threat.  This will be of little importance even a few generations from now.  Future generations will likely care little about our religious conflicts, or the deities we worshipped, much like we care little about the pagan deities of ancient times, but they will care more deeply than we can imagine about the condition of their air, their water, and the general environmental destruction of the earth we will be leaving them.  We cannot solve moral and ethical problems merely by ridding the earth of religion or accepting science as the path to all knowledge, and as much as I like to see belief systems without evidence challenged, I cannot support ending faith unless we are to simultaneously critique and challenge our own belief systems.  We can meditate for our own spiritual enlightenment and try to metaphysically become one with everything as much as we want, but the real truth is that we need to take informed actions in the real world to connect with nature as more than just a controller of nature, but part of a living system that industrial civilization is destroying.

So when we look back at the motivations of what causes people to commit terrible acts of violence and injustice I've discussed, I hope we can take a good look in the mirror.  Not just to realize the failings of our own countries foreign policy and the blowback it has created, but our own belief systems and the actions they are responsible for in all arenas, specifically our irrational belief in a system that is currently destroying the very world we live on.  Furthermore, the one thing Harris and Islamic terrorists have in common is both believe the US is at war with Islam.  This is a dangerous notion as it is the root cause of Islamic terrorism, as well as a justification of US foreign policy which despite Harris' dubious "moral clarity" has been waging an aggressive war that has killed far more than terrorism.  I encourage all interested in the subject to read Pape's work, and to take seriously what those who attack us give as their motives.  

Epilogue:  If you remain unconvinced that Islam is not the primary cause of terrorism or that the US and Harris have an irrational fear of Islam I encourage you to read the articles below, as well as the linked articles in my first post on the Harris controversy.
http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/terrorism-other-religions.html
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/all-in-/51653064#51653064
http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/01/not-all-terrorists-are-muslims/
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/01/06/muslim.radicalization.study/
http://bigwhiteogre.blogspot.ca/2013/04/harris-vs-greenwald-and-hussain.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/22/richard-dawkins-islamophobic?CMP=twt_gu
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/qasim-rashid/do-you-even-hear-muslims-when-we-condemn-violence_b_3125564.html

Sam Harris Rational or Irrational Fear of Islam?

Recently the hotly debated topic of whether "new atheists" such as Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens have irrationally overhyped the dangers of Islam has broken out on the internet.  It all got started when Glenn Greenwald posted a tweet with a link to an article by Murtaza Hussain, and Nathan Lean at Salon.com, which led to Sam Harris emailing Greenwald in response to the tweeting of the aforementioned article.  This led to Greenwald posting his exchange with Sam Harris with Harris' permission.  Then Greenwald posted an article on Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus.  After some back and forth on twitter Harris replied to the claims in Greenwald's article.  There was also more twitter arguing and Richard Dawkings chiming in to support Sam Harris.  I have been a fairly faithful reader of Greewald's writings first at Salon.com and now at The Guardian as well as reading his book With Liberty and Justice for Some.  Since I'm also a (less avid) reader (although I have watched numerous debates, speeches, and interviews) of Sam Harris it took me some careful review to form an opinion on the subject due to my respect for both Harris and Greenwald.  However, after reading some of the articles and the twitter fights between the two I must say I'm a little shocked at the whole incident.

First I'm an atheist in that I don't worship any gods or attribute natural phenomena to some sort of spiritual deity.  I believe Islam is deserving of harsh and precise critiques due to the obvious abuses and  the behaviors it can create in its adherents.  People can and should be able to criticize the religion without fear of being labeled bigots or racist simply for critiquing a religion.  However, Harris' critique of Islam and Muslims is often overblown in terms of having a rational fear vs having an irrational fear of Islam.

While Harris has taken the time to clarify some quotes that were perhaps misconstrued (albeit confusing in the first place), Greenwald and Hussain were not the only people to complain about his "fascist quote".  Christopher Hitchens did as well stating, ""When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders."  Harris has explained the remark in his response to the controversy, but aside from this and a few other remarks I find his response unconvincing and failing to rebut many claims made against him.  While much controversy has erupted over this singular comment, there hasn't been as much discussion of other damming evidence showing that Harris overstates the threat of Islam and even radical Islam.

Let's consider the article the quote came from.  It is a scathing attack on the failure of liberals to realize "a cult of death is forming in the Muslim world," and "the truth is that we are not fighting a “war on terror.” We are fighting a pestilential theology."  What is most striking to me in this entire article is the constant dichotomy between western civilization and Islam and his use of this dichotomy to explain the moral failings of Islam while attributing the US and Israel with having a "moral high ground."  Since Harris himself uses this dichotomy, I think it is fair to make concrete comparisons between what is being done by the US and Israel (as well as other western states) towards the middle east or "Islamic world" in order to put in perspective just how dire these threats are.  Even though Harris makes the claim that "nothing about honestly discussing the doctrine of Islam requires that a person not notice all that might be wrong with U.S. foreign policy, capitalism, the vestiges of empire, or anything else that may be contributing to our ongoing conflicts in the Muslim world."  He uses comparisons between the US and Islam writing "they (liberals) ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so," and therefore Harris makes it fair game to critique the rationality of the extremity of his fear of Islam vs fear of the crimes of our own state.

So just how dire is the threat of Islam?  Harris states that "The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization."  Harris is making the claim that religious affiliation and solidarity with other Muslims who commit "sociopathic behavior" just may be the greatest threat to civilization.  Putting aside the facts that civilization actually began in the areas that he calls the "muslim world," often making a sharp distinction between this world and civilization, this is an easily provable falsehood.  We can establish this by putting the threat in perspective, much as Harris has done in his article earlier this year on guns and gun control in the US.  In the article Harris seeks to put into perspective the true reality of gun violence in the US by stating that there are an estimated 100,000 deaths due to the failure of doctors and nurses to wash their hands properly, which is obviously greater than the number of deaths caused by gun violence.  Although he concedes that "A narrow focus on mortality rates does not always do justice to the reality of human suffering" -It should be noted that a mere mortality rate doesn't even come close to doing justice to the suffering caused in Iraq by the US and that it's subsequent foreign policy continues to cause suffering in the region.  Between refugees, secret prisons, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and injuries the toll becomes incalculable-.  Therefore to put the threat of Islam into perspective we can look at the data on the subject.  The odds that you'll die in a terrorist attack are around 1 in 9.3 million worldwide and 1 in 20 million in the US.  This puts your odds of dying in an extremist muslim attack behind the the risk of being mauled to death by a dog.  It's actually lower since not all terrorist attack attributable deaths were committed by Muslims.

However, if you lived in Iraq your chance of dying from the US led invasion was over 1 in 50, because the US wiped out 2.5% of Iraq's population.  So while Harris attributes the US and Israel with a moral high ground for avoiding the killing of noncombatants he fails to note we kill more both in percentage and in number than do Islamic extremists.  However, we do have to pay attention to the very high death toll and real threat posed by Islamic extremists, but anyone with any detailed study of the effects of Islamic extremism would have to concede that those who suffer the most from Islamic extremism -in both attacks and other heinous forms of oppression- are those who live in the "muslim world."  As Hussain points out in his reply to an article shared by sam harris on twitter, "The simple fact is that Islamic extremism is almost exclusively a threat to people like me- not rich, white, westerners like Sam Harris."  This distinction is important because it comes to the heart of Harris' argument for secularism and against Islam.  As Chris Hedges put it, "they externalize evil. Evil is not something that you struggle with within yourself. Evil is embodied in religion."  This is why Harris asserts that Islamic "benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest threat facing civilization."

Harris' arguments for why Islam is such a threat come off somewhat convincingly unless we apply the same standards to ourselves.  Let's be clear that a failure to apply the same standards to our own state result in an externalization of evil and a sanitization of crimes being committed in our own name -Harris himself has argued for US and Israeli rightness while arguing against Islam using this same tactic-.  Harris states that "the only way that Muslims can reasonably be said to exist as a group is in terms of their adherence to the doctrine of Islam," and that Muslims have "an equally dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend one’s faith, both from within and without, is similarly central to the doctrine of Islam."

So how would those claims be applied to the US?  The war in Iraq was launched based off of the belief of protecting the US and its interests from the threat or potential threat of Iraq, specifically from the unproven and zero evidence claims that they had WMD.  This war was one of many wars where a majority of the US public supported the war at the beginning of the war.  Further evidence shows that the US public supported the war even over a year after the conflict began with 54% supporting it in September of 2004.  What kind of dangerous dogmatic beliefs would the US public need to have to support a war based on false claims?  The answers could be said to be blind patriotism, and viewing all their moral and political questions in terms of their national identity.  What's important to note is that the US public adhered to an illegal doctrine of preemptive war, with a dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend our faith that Iraq had WMD, and protect our country from within and without.  The legitimization of the use of violence against our "enemies" is no less radical and follows a very similar process to religious indoctrination, whereby the public was indoctrinated to believe in a profound threat to their country with no supporting evidence.  It's also worth noting for perspective, that 93% of Muslim's when polled, condemned the 9/11 attacks.

Now we have to pause to concede that Islam and more correctly Islamic extremism poses a threat in more than just one arena to the inhabitants of the globe.  This is why it deserves strong critiques from Harris and others.  Honor violence and extreme patriarchy are just two cases.  It is also in part responsible for over 3,000 deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2011.  However, Iraq and Afghanistan are the two countries with the most terrorist attacks in the world.  This begs the question of what exactly motivates the violence throughout the "muslim world," and whether or not the relationship to Islam is the fundamental factor.  Does rationality or religion tend to dominate more of the so called "muslim world"?  Dalia Mogahed,  former Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, says "Politics, not piety, differentiate moderates from radicals' in the Islamic world."  

Still more experts like Tariq Ali (an atheist British Pakastani) have argued, "the "war against terror" is immoral and counterproductive. It sanctions the use of state terror - bombing raids, torture, countless civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq - against Islamo-anarchists whose numbers are small, but whose reach is deadly. The solution then, as now, is political, not military. The British ruling elite understood this perfectly well in the case of Ireland. Security measures, anti-terror laws rushed through parliament, identity cards, a curtailment of civil liberties, will not solve the problem. If anything, they will push young Muslims in the direction of mindless violence."

This analysis was generally confirmed correct by the CIA, as Greenwald pointed out, back in 2004.   "American direct intervention in the muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature and support for radical extremists while at the same time diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies."  Another report about the 2008 gallup poll, that Greenwald also pointed out, has Mogahed saying, "Some actually cited religious justifications for why they were against 9/11, going as far as to quote from the Koran -- for example, the verse that says taking one innocent life is like killing all humanity."

This last quote is so poignant to the debate, when you compare what actual Muslims are reported to have said vs the characterization of Muslims by Sam Harris "While there are undoubtedly some moderate Muslims who have decided to overlook the irrescindable militancy of their religion, Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage—as Muslims—is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed. The tenets of Islam simply do not admit of anything but a temporary sharing of power with the “enemies of God.”  Please read the full article so I'm not accused of taking him out of context.

The article goes on to state, "We are now mired in a religious war in Iraq and elsewhere. Our enemies--as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves--are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances."  These are assumptions that I have yet to see evidence for, and as a skeptic I think we should ask Harris to provide his evidence.  Then Harris continues, "It is not enough for moderate Muslims to say “not in our name.” They must now police their own communities. They must offer unreserved assistance to western governments in locating the extremists in their midst."  He's actually advocating that they must without reservation allow foreign governments access to their nation to locate the extremists, although it is a well known fact that the US doesn't just locate extremists.  The US kills them, captures them, and even tortures them.  Imagine just for a second if we applied the same standards to our own country.  We would have to give up Bush and Cheney to the International Criminal Court for war crimes.  We would have to submit our country to foreign governments to give up people that other countries decided were criminals outside the normative processes of international law.  But this is only hypothetical as they would have to have the most advanced and expensive military in the world, and currently that's our game.

Harris continues in that same article and goes on to say, "However mixed or misguided American intentions were in launching this war, civilized human beings are now attempting, at considerable cost to themselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people. The terrible truth about our predicament in Iraq is that even if we had invaded with no other purpose than to remove Saddam Hussein from power and make Iraq a paradise on earth, we could still expect tomorrow’s paper to reveal that another jihadi has blown himself up for the sake of killing scores of innocent men, women, and children. The outrage that Muslims feel over U.S. and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns."  This in not only in stark contrast to the poll cited above about the middle east, but absolutely ignorant of the history of the middle east.  Perhaps Harris is unaware of the use of cluster munitions in Iraq which means "Iraqi civilians will be paying the price with their lives and limbs for many years," according to Steve Goose -This is also evidence contrary to Harris' claim that we avoid killing non combatants-.  The part that shows true ignorance however is that the outrage in the middle east is not primarily driven by policies of; aggressive preemptive war, bombing of civilian infrastructure, torture, black op prisons, and  just maybe the death of 2.5% of their countrymen after a decade of sanctions that caused the death of children to increase dramatically with reports ranging from 170,000 to 500,000+, but is "primarily the product of theological concerns."

Again, I'm not arguing against criticizing Islam, I'm arguing against using religion as a basis for overtly political arguments in favor of "civilized human beings" (inferring that those in the middle east are less than civilized human beings) that are attempting to improve the lives of Iraqi people when Iraqis are obviously being harmed by policies of continued war waged by these same "civilized human beings."  Harris then writes that, "there is, after all, little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death."  This brings to mind the question of whether Harris realizes that Pakistan is both an Islamic republic as well as a nuclear state -with the highest levels of support for Islamic fundamentalism-, but again he asserts that because these countries are muslim they are not deterred by the threat of death.  Therefore they pose an extreme threat to the country with the most powerful military and intelligence organizations on earth, and with the most advanced nuclear deterrence system on earth that is currently considering investing even more money in nuclear weapons.

While Harris isn't wrong in asserting that religion plays a major role in the politics of the middle east I believe his arguments are a vast oversimplification of the problems with an overemphasis on religion while virtually ignoring the political and social motivations for extremism.  After all Harris may be  unaware there is a long history of the US supporting religious groups (such as the Mujahideen) to stop Arab socialism and communism, and continues to fund the Taliban.   Not to mention US support for Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Indonesia.  How this support has in many ways led to the de-liberalization of the middle east is debatable, but dismissing them to focus on motives of faith is irresponsible, and a mischaracterization of the issues.

Harris continually asserts that the problems are overwhelmingly religious rather than rational or political, yet still more experts like the Middle East Research and Information Project claim that, "Because it is associated with Western modes of thinking and behavior, liberal democracy is always in danger of being associated with Western misdeeds, real and alleged. To many Arabs and Muslims, Western economic, political and cultural influence appears more pernicious than ever. The so-called intellectual onslaught (al-ghazw al-fikri) on Arab-Islamic culture and identity is a main theme of the day, and many see liberal democracy as part of that assault...  Western debate frequently mirrors the themes, concerns and obsessions of the Islamist one, albeit with different connotations. The more sophisticated skeptics usually refer to Islam as an effective barrier against development, modernity and democracy; the less sophisticated to “the Arab mind,” which is allegedly inclined toward authoritarianism and incapable of accepting pluralism and self-critique."  Instead of asserting that religion plays the dominate role in middle eastern politics as well as every area of their life, it is much more correct that religion, poverty, education, as well a foreign political policies all play a central role in the problems facing the middle east.  Why Harris places so much emphasis on the religious aspects of these issues is both predictable, as he is mostly preoccupied with religion, but also a mischaracterization of the problems with too much emphasis on religion, while at the same time arguing for many imperialist policies.

The policies Harris has argued for are; torture, saying that, "I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror", -the argument that says this is merely a hypothetical and that he has philosophers penchant for controversial subjects or ethics is absurd when he is purposely coming up with outlandish situations to justify the use of torture at a time when torture is being authorized by the US publicly-, profiling of Muslims, "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it... there are people who do not stand a chance of being jihadists, and TSA screeners can know this at a glance.", and to me the most repellant claim that, "there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney."  The reason why I find this last claim so repellant is that it is a crime against reason to suggest that tens of millions of people in the muslim world even have a sliver of the destructive force that Cheney had under his influence.  This is especially true  because Cheney is a radical proponent of preemptive wars which are held by international law to be illegal, and one of the crimes brought up against the Nazis at Nuremberg.  The reality is that yes the threat of Islamic extremists are scary, but not nearly as scary as those who have the power to subjugate an entire country to the foreign policy of their making by military force in a preemptive and unilateral invasion.  How can anyone not see that a man with a gun is probably more powerful than a man without one, and a man that can influence the most advanced military force the world has ever known to invade a country on false premises (and did precisely that), constitutes more of a threat to the world than Islamic extremists?

While I'm willing to concede that Harris is neither racist or bigoted, it is obvious why he has had to defend himself from such claims.  Perhaps with some perspective on the claims Harris makes over and over again about obviously over exaggerated threats of Islam, we can take a step back and see it's a much more complex problem than merely boiling it down to religious extremism.  Harris is right to criticize Islam on many fronts including the religious dogmas which have hurt mostly their own people, but he is wholly wrong to use religion as the primary factor in all that is wrong in the middle east while ignoring the crimes of the west, and suggesting the US has a moral high ground in the war on terror.  Political motivations as well as international policies -specifically US policies- are just as important if not more important in shaping what seems to be the growing violence of the middle east.

Further, I would also like to say that Harris, and even Dawkins, on this controversy, have not responded with composure or respect at times.  Harris and Dawkins have both tweeted "quote mined" attacks against Greenwald which do a great deal more to distort the views of Greenwald.

This claim that Greenwald supported the Iraq war by writing in the preface of his first book explaining his apathy towards politics and "coming of age" in political terms - that uses a quote that merely states he gave Bush the benefit of the doubt in his handling on the war on terror- is a mischaracterization of enormous proportions.  If you'd read the book you'd know it is anything but a source of support for the Iraq war nor does it give support for Bush's policies.  Harris has also made claims against Greenwald's character which have nothing to do with the debate at hand.  Simple vilification of ones critics, while straw-manning, crying libel and slander at your critics, and failing to provide either context or a reasonable rationale for the obviously over inflated fears Harris propagates about Islam -especially in the context of an endless war waged by those who Harris asserts have a moral high ground- are reason enough for rational and reasonable atheists and theists alike to condemn not Harris, but some of his ideas as both irrational and unfounded in reality.

When a person attacks another on character because they have been attacked on their work, is not only disingenuous (as Harris supposes of Greenwald), but more importantly counterproductive to a much needed debate on just what role Islam plays in the middle east and the world in general.  Rather than see two (or more) influential writers debate the topic of what does and does not constitute a rational fear of Islam the debate quickly spiraled into attacks on character, accusations of bullying, and claims of being attacked unethically while complaining about having to defend controversial statements -and in my opinion (and others) irrational and contradicting reality-, we as a society benefit from open discourse.

Update: I've written a second post on Sam Harris here.

UpdateII: I came across a gallup poll asking...

Apparently people in the US must be a "cult of death" as well.  For more on this see this.
Update III: For more on Sam Harris and his faith in government while criticizing religion read this.

Markets and Art: The Commodification of Music Destroys Art

"Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity."
— Che Guevara

A recent Truthdig article found here, caught my attention because of the similarities in the views of artist Robert Shetterly, a painter of activists, and my own views on the commodification of art.  Although I've already written before on the subject here, in a post about Music and Industry, I have decided to revisit the subject spurred by some very piercing quotes about art by Shetterly.

He says, "Artists today, are using the dominant culture system to determine how they value themselves and I think that’s a very dangerous thing for artists. ... Art is one of the few places where critical voices can live. Even in universities these days it can’t live with so much political pressure. The real voice is lost.”

Shetterly continues, “Art, is one of the last places where people can have the freedom to live outside the system, or at least on its scraps, instead of trying to be one with it, which robs you of your voice finally. It’s so easy to be co-opted.  This system will take anything from anybody and if it can commodify it, it will embrace it.”

The general point I think Shetterly is making is that artists are losing their true voice in order to turn their art into a commodity.  It's important that we define specifically what we mean by a commodity.  A commodity is any good or service that is produced by human labour and offered for general sale on the market.  Commodities also have specific characteristics that help us further define, and conceptualize commodities.

A commodity is something that has a value, which can be further subdivided into use value and exchange value, as well as a price.  Use value is simply the utility of use a good has, which differs from it's exchange value, although Marx's concept of use value is somewhat different from more classical definitions (I will abstain from going into too much detail on the subject, but highly recommend reading A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx).   A common example of this is a diamond which although it may have a high value of exchange, it doesn't serve much of a purpose as a  utilitarian item.  A commodity has a use value because, by its intrinsic characteristics, it can satisfy some human need or want, physical or ideal.  Use value also means that the commodity has social value, or that it is useful not just to the producer itself, but has a use for others generally.

The exchange value of a commodity means, that the commodity can be traded for other commodities, and thus the owner of a commodity can benefit from others labour.  It differs from price value which is the monetary manifestation of exchange value.  In other words, exchange value could be seen as the trading ratio between two commodities without using money as a medium of exchange.  Perhaps a few examples will illustrate these points better.

If I create music with my bass and make it a tradable product of human work (like capturing music on a CD) with social value and offer it to the market, it is a commodity.  However, me playing my bass in the music room of my home where no one else can hear, then it has no use to anyone else and therefore is not a commodity.  If I invite a friend to listen to me play my bass as a gift to them, it is not a commodity because it has no exchange value even if it serves a utilitarian use to that person (assuming they have a use for what they hear).  If I invite many people over to listen to me play a concert and require an exchange of either money or another commodity to play for many people, then the music I produce is certainly a commodity.  This is because it is being traded and has both use value, and exchange value that will probably have a set price as well (often called a cover).  Even though the act of me vibrating the wooden top of my bass by coaxing my strings to oscillate, a tree consisting of the same type wood as my bass, vibrating because of natural phenomena, which may cause it to creak or fall over, (no matter how pleasant the sounds may be) are not a commodity (unless of course I perhaps recorded and sold these sound recordings).  Nor is the bass by itself a commodity if it's only use is for firewood, unless I specifically trade or sell the bass as firewood.

So as artistic as my own or anyone else's playing may be, there is a specific process by which we turn this art into a commodity.  However, commodities often have another peculiar characteristic which is the lack of qualitative differentiation.  The term fungibility is used to describe this similarity of quality which implies that certain goods or services can have full or partial mutual substitution.  As Marx states in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist."  Now perhaps this is why I find the blind fold tests in DownBeat (a feature were jazz musicians are played records without being told what is being played, and asked to comment on the music, who they think it could be, and give it a rating) to be so interesting especially in the last ten years.  Often the musician being tested doesn't recognize the recording straight off, or a specific individual sound of a musician.  Comments along the lines of "it sounds like" or "it could be anyone", or my favorite "it's somebody sounding like..." are all too common.   I would wager that in many cases with the amount of technically proficient jazz musicians out there in the world, even the most knowledgeable studied jazz fanatic would have a hard time telling who produced which bit of jazz music, and often (at least with more mainstream or traditional jazz) whether they were French, American, or African in similar sensory tests.

Why this seems to be the case has to do more with the process of making the music (and the business of recording the music) than it has to do with the end result or product.  In Marx's analogy on who grew the wheat, one would have to submit that although different soil types and physical environments would definitely perhaps provide very subtle notes to someone with a very refined palette for tasting wheat, to society as a whole this difference would be nearly impossible to detect.  Even if they could distinguish the differences it would be very difficult to assign the wheat with a country of origin.  Perhaps it is due to the fact that during the 19th century the process for growing grain was very similar from region to region.  Even with the advent of chemical fertilizers and pesticides used to grow crops, in study after study, organic vs. conventional (a qualitative difference in price at nearly any grocery store) consumers given sensory tests usually cannot tell conclusively which is organic or conventional, and the results to which is preferred are pretty evenly mixed.  However, I have on a few occasions taken a sip of milk which didn't taste quite right, (I'm an avid drinker of only organic milk) and was able to tell I was starting to ingest conventionally produced milk.

Are the processes by which we make art really coalescing and homogenizing to the point that we can actually say that the qualitative differences between different musicians are being reduced to a point of full or partial mutual substitution?  Since commodities are defined not just by the utility that the commodity has to the producer of the commodity, it has to have some larger social value.  What's clear, at least within the record industry, is that the company who is financing and distributing a record often could care less about what type of music is being sold, or how artistic the music on the recording is.  They simply care about how many units are being sold.  Although there may be some record labels that only market specific types of music or music that represents a certain set of ethics (i.e. ECM), but if they want to stay in business they have to factor in how many units are going to be sold.  Similarly, a restaurant that has live music or any music venue must concern themselves with how many people are showing up at the door and paying a cover, or patronizing their business in order to continue as a business entity.  This in and of itself leads to the disappearance of qualitative differences making music played for the entertainment or enjoyment of others and for money, most definitely a commodity that has at least partial ability for mutual substitution.  If one band can draw an audience the same size or of similar size to another, the utilitarian purpose they serve of drawing a crowd is the same as any other no matter how well or artistically they perform.

What this means is that artists survive by adhering to market rules and a market based ideology.  This leaves artists to replicate the obsessions of society and popular cultural ideas (even when the dominate culture is a culture that is destroying the very earth we live on).  Obsessions of this society may include the extreme obsession with falling in love (often lyrics in music concentrate on gaining or losing someone in terms of a possession with an extremely narcissistic attitude of how this make them feel), or even superhuman musical feats of playing an extremely large amount of notes in a very short amount of time with (and sometimes without) an underlying logical structure.  They champion the self and the heroism of the soloist, whether in jazz or in rock, while almost all forms of aboriginal music champion group or communal participation over individual performance.  The last point is perhaps best shown by the famous story Dave Liebman tells about when he asked Miles Davis "why he had a saxophone" in his band.  Miles responded to Dave, "Because people like to see you move your fingers!”  Perhaps that's the reason some people also like incomprehensibly fast "shredding" metal guitar.  Mostly in the jazz world at least there is a very heavy concentration on aesthetics.

“But aesthetics are a means to an end,” says Shetterly. “When they become the end themselves it becomes tiresomely academic [which does not] invite us to think and feel about something human. Instead it’s about composition, color and brushstroke. Those things are a means to delivering the message. If a painting is only about its own medium, it becomes very narcissistic and ingrown. ... It is either academic or about titillation ... it’s about flash. It’s about turning our nerves on but not our minds. It’s really about distraction. ... It all goes by so quickly and it’s exciting and feels good, but it also takes us away from what is important.”

I doubt I could begin to count the number of jazz or modern classical music concerts I've been to that Shetterly's quote would be a perfect review for.  There is a serious fetishization of the quality of the performance we give in the here and now, with the constant shadow of every other jazz musician and jazz performance ever made (even and especially the recordings) for direct comparison, both within the performer, (often to the point of it being a plague to the music itself amongst the less experienced) and the seasoned listener.  Musicians in the field often concentrate more on crushing time feels, face melting solos, and other aesthetic ideals in the music than conveying a sense of humanity or a message greater than the sum of its parts.  However, the part that I found most intriguing about his quote is that he calls out most of the commodified art for what it really is, a distraction.  Art that expresses little beyond perhaps individual, self reflecting, and inward looking emotional content that also fetishizes mastery of aesthetics, serves little purpose to society at large beyond momentarily distracting us from the real state of the world around us.  Further, the musicians who blatantly commoditize themselves and their music, are often those who produce trivial musical content that is mostly about titillating the audience.  This can be seen in pop music, as scantly dressed singers dance in an erotic fashion while singing songs that contain the musical and lyrical depth of an emotionally disturbed toddler.  Even amongst artists who reach for higher aesthetic beauty and lyricism, the musician is often well removed from the realities of both the world and their culture in favor of creating some sort of transcendent momentary escape from social conditions and even mortality.

Very few artists who are in any way able to make a living within the performing arts, are willing to tell the truths of the world both within and outside of their art.  You don't here too many songs about the fact that 90% of the large fish in the ocean are extinct, or that industrial civilization, using the once vast stores of fossil fuels, is leading to severe climate change that threatens life on earth as we know it.  The reasons may seem obvious as very few people want to buy this kind of music, and specifically within the more artistic traditions in the US, jazz, and modern classical music, the marketability is already so small it is becoming nearly impossible to survive on their performance "career" alone.  There may be something to be said for not just reducing music or art to protest music, but if the music doesn't even serve the purpose of getting the audience to at least begin to question their own existence or self, what purpose does the music serve?

The article continues, "Shetterly says that people who have a genuine interest in art are often beaten down and stripped of their ability to pursue the truth. The commoditization of art, if it hasn’t already reeled you into its arms, exiles you to the world of academic theory and nonreality, where you do not have the capacity to rebel against the free market. Either you adhere to the rules or you are cast into an irrelevant pool of degree-holding artists who have left the real world in search of vague ideas like space, subjectivism and postmodernist expression."

In my own personal experience with music that first sentence couldn't ring in any truer.  Whether it's instructors that insisted the music isn't as popular or happening because the players and music today just isn't as good, or whether it's setting aside any personal artistic goals or approaches to the art form, and instead focusing on playing more like the people who they came up listening to on records.  However, the blame can't be placed squarely on the shoulders of teachers and professors as usually they're just trying to relate to you the real world facts of the music business, which is that you must succumb to the market and the demands of the field or you will not survive as an artist.  People wanted me to play like the guys on the "great" records because that's what everyone is used to hearing and that's what gets you work.  They don't beat your individual creativity down for fun, but they realize at least on some level that until you obtain a certain level of respect within the clique of your specific craft and more importantly within the general market for music (the consumers), no one will care about your search for truth.  Some of them have spent countless hours pursuing their own musical truth in the face of market conditions that could care less about their art.  Not relating that same thing to you in advance would be cheating you of the advance knowledge that it takes adaption to the market in order to make a living, no matter how meager it may be.

Those who have other means of support often find themselves relegated to pursuing meaningless advancements to the tradition, whether it be blending genres or styles, adapting their music to current pop trends, or worse, pursuing total abstractedness that serves not even the producer.  It does nothing for  bringing people together, but instead pushes people further away from music, partially because it is entirely foreign to the general listener.  Those that pursue music along the lines of this total abstraction often are guilty of making it obviously clear that they have little or no purpose for why they produce such music beyond narcissism and to distract themselves and others from pursuing anything meaningful in their lives.  It is a music where there cannot be an objective, or even truly a subjective good or bad, but also masks any intent the performer lacks for seeking truth with their art, while at the same time allowing them to claim to be the hippest thing around.

The article continues "If university art departments haven’t already shrunk, they’ve transitioned from the traditional style of instruction to one that is based in abstraction and historiography."  The truth is often hard to take, but jazz departments across the US, as well as any modern music department, focuses in on the historical development of music as a linear history leading us up to the current time, not simply to enlighten the student, but to help them find a place to fit into the relevant musical trends.  It's focused on helping students find success within the trends and often, as previously stated, pushes aside personal ideals of finding a voice within themselves to finding a niche within the scene.  This is purely a market dominated process by which universities seek to help students find a way to achieve marketable success as that is just about the only thing left to be attained.  Often, rather than having a student really seek an individual voice, they push homogenizing many voices from within the tradition into some sort of cohesive voice they can label as their own.

“So many people today know that there’s a lot wrong but it’s not being articulated for them so that they can act on it,” Shetterly says about young artists like Samuel Scharf. “Art should do that. It gives you the permission to act. But it’s been removed on purpose because it has an effect on the consciousness of people. It verifies what they sense is wrong, but cannot articulate for themselves.”  In other words we can use music to express the wrongness of our culture with purpose, just as we can use music to express the rightness of love or any other thing.  However, there is a purposeful denial of using art to express often even purposeful individualistic emotion in favor of a focus on aesthetic and the commonly accepted values of musical traditions as they relate to style.

“A person who painted a portrait for a king,” Shetterly says, “was painting what the client wanted to see. A person who’s painting for the rewards of an economic system is painting, similarly, for what the client wants to see.”  The difference between then and now, Shetterly says, is that art today is not about superiority and propaganda, as with royal portraits, but about turning our brains off. It is about silencing pain and suffering, and distracting ourselves with images that bring short-term pleasure, surprise, and satisfaction.  Mainstream culture, Shetterly says, keeps us distracted from the fact that our luxury, for example, comes at the expense of cotton farmers in India, garment makers in Bangladesh and Hispanic tomato pickers in Florida. The goods we buy at retail stores and supermarkets are cheap because the labor used to cultivate those products is underpaid.   “Our culture has been taking a lot of warmth and comfort from the rest of the world in a very exploitative way,” Shetterly says, “so that we can live that way while other people don’t.”

Once again, the art of today pushes us into the world of the surreal asking us not to engage with either each other, face our own selves, or face the deteriorating planet, but to shut ourselves off to the world in order to use the music like we're shooting up dope.  Stick your earbuds in when you're walking in the city to avoid having the homeless ask you for money while you transplant yourself into an individualist pleasure seeking state riding the melodic lines of your favorite artist, while the sounds of poverty and the increasingly disconnected modern age pass you by.  Shut yourself in a room and place much of the value of your identity on your ability to make changes on the tunes everyone must know and play at increasingly faster tempo for hours.  Forget the fact that without drastic action, climate change will make the earth uninhabitable in any comparable way to its present state, and make sure you transcribe and learn yet another "god of music's" first chorus so you can wow future audiences with stylings you stole from them.  Most of all don't focus your music or your life on anything that can't be marketed to others or you risk falling into obscurity.

The article closes with, "Art today is about protecting the consumer. It is no longer propaganda for those in power, as art has been for most of history. It is about reassuring customers that there is nothing wrong, as long as they continue to shop."  As some would say, why worry about the real state of affairs when it comes to art.  Just escape the harsh realities of the world with your art because after all the world will eventually be swallowed up by the sun at some point anyway, and why spend your life not always trying to be happy?  Meanwhile, the same people that espouse this philosophy will continue in a marginally unhappy existence at best, while ignoring the very real steps and actions that humanity could take to erase the causes of much of this suffering.  Indeed, it is akin to drug use as more and more youth and adults alike, buy into musical or artistic escapism in order to dull the realities of a world with suffering.  I'm reminded of the history of work songs that the African American slaves created in order to make bearable the pain of working as a slave in the fields of the American south.  While I do believe that music can and should at times be used in a role of transcending the horrific circumstances of life, the work songs have little in common with modern market driven music that is created not to build a sense of community amongst workers and lend voice to others suffering, but to convince everyone that it's all okay, and if you order another drink the fine establishment we're playing at will be happier.

Also, the fact that the sun will eventually destroy the earth is of little importance or meaning to the fact that the earth is being systematically destroyed by industrial civilization.  If I tied down the person you loved most and began to slowly dismember them toe by toe and finger by finger behind a locked door I suspect you would find an object to break the door down and try to stop me, not concede that they're going to die someday anyway.  We as human beings need to stand for something (as one of my teachers constantly told me), and the other millions of species on earth along with our future generations of humans that depend on clean air, water, and the planet at large, are worth standing up for.

Before anyone gets too angry at me for attacking either their livelihood, or their probably deeply held views about the importance of their own artistic expression and that of others, I'd like to clarify a few things.  First, I don't think it's impossible to receive some sort of exchange for music or art in order for someone who spends much of their time pursuing musical truth to survive in a decent manner.  There are plenty of sphere's of non-market based exchanges that happen constantly within our own society and which dominate other cultures.  This post is specifically about the fact that we as artists are being forced not to be able to seek truth through music and art, but to conform to market principles in order to get a piece of the ever shrinking music markets, especially for performers of live music.

Second, there is no reason why we should have to subject ourselves, and our art, to being forced into these very same market principles.  Although I could write an entirely new entry on this, it is easily imaginable that as a society we could support ourselves with the necessary needs that we have such as food, water, shelter, clothing, and sociable environments needed for proper brain development in a non-violent society with plenty of time left over for pursuing our own artistic truths.  There would even be time for exploring both our individual place in the universe, as well as societies through music and art.  Aboriginal cultures in many climates spend drastically less amounts of time as do modern cultures providing for their basic needs.  It's not impossible for us to adopt a different system.

Third, the thing that is missing from music, despite the constant complaints of those in the music profession about lack of culture and interest in art music, is a sense of community.  We do not socialize our music, we market our music.  Anyone with more than a few musician friends on Facebook understands the gig-spam problem of marketing themselves rather than sharing and socializing themselves and their music with others.  Some people give the gift of music to others and do so out of love for their art.  Their songs are about what life in the real world is like to them, only expecting to hopefully affect others with their music positively, and live off any scraps that get thrown their way.  Even if I would applaud a musician expressing something beyond their individual feeling about the world it is more commendable than those who are motivated in large part by market forces.

Fourth, if you care about music, whether it's jazz or modern art music, it's up to us to change the culture that surrounds it.  I'm reminded of the all too frequent psychosis of the modern parent who seeks to protect and shield their child from anything bad in the world, rather than pursuing the true role of a parent, which is to socialize their child, and turn them into a capable adult.  It's ridiculous because even if one does somehow manage the impossible feat of shielding their child from all that is bad in the world, at some point they're going to grow up and leave your house (although that time seems to be coming later and later in life for the youth of today, especially with males).  Then they're going to have to step into the real world, sooner or later, and deal with all those evils of the world.  If the culture is so bad that we can't entrust our children to it, then perhaps we need to build a culture of resistance towards the destructive dominant culture, and work towards changing our own communities into a place we feel comfortable enough to socialize our children in.

The same could be said of the world of music and art.  We may constantly try to protect our music or art from those that seek to profit off it or change our art away from the truth, but the fact remains that if we intend to survive from it, we need a piece of the pie or at least some scraps.  If the musical world makes playing art music untenable, we should be actively trying to change the musical landscape that surrounds us.  This means that we have to do something about the incredible centralization of capital in the music industry, the centralization of the media that market music in both radio and TV, and that we connect to each other within our community in more meaningful ways than those dictated by market incentives and motives of profit.  The musical dumbing down of the populace has not only affected the musical quality within the general popular culture, but as I've argued it has changed the purposes for playing jazz, and even "folk" music, which are two examples of truly american music.  It's up to us to realize that music is connected to more than just a tradition of the music itself and it's aesthetic ideals, but that it intertwines itself into everything else about our culture from economics, to social issues.  If it's not working, we need to make changes, not just spend our time making the "changes".

Finally, I appreciate, on what I feel is a deep level, the music of jazz and contemporary or modern classical music when it is at it's best and have marveled, at how much of an affect music can have on me personally.  It can force me into both self reflective and culturally reflective states which brings about a change not just psychologically, but a change that manifests in my daily actions.  However, this is a rare occasion and often I hear/d this type of purposeful music at gigs and venues that were ill attended, with little pay offered for the musicians.  The vast amount of vapid jazz and modern music I've taken in over the years since I became somewhat obsessive over music, far outweighs the meaningful music that compels me beyond a sense of momentary titillation.  The culture of narcissism and the extreme fetishization of aesthetics are what I want to see gone, not a tradition or musical art form, and it is these things I'm speaking out against.  I'm reminded of a jam session I played where a saxophonist called a bebop standard at a nearly unplayable tempo for the rhythm section, not in an order to create music of a high magnitude with the other musicians, but to cut the band members and to provide a sense of self worship and reward for the unnamed musician, who was merely flaunting his daily practice routine.  If we're not even interested in making quality music with the people we play with over sounding "good", then we have no right to call ourselves artists let alone perform compellingly for the listeners.  While all the aesthetics of music are important we need to realize they are a means to an end and stand for a deeper purpose behind why we create music, and work to install that ethic in our surrounding culture.