HUBRIS: In Greek tragedy, the overweening pride of those who believe the
Gods are with them. Corollary: Those whom the Gods would bring low, they
first raise up.

1.

In the wake of America's 60's turbulence, David Halberstam published "The
Best and the Brightest". The reference was to the extraordinary group of
young (mostly) men and women John Kennedy gathered about him in forming his new administration. Intelligent, well-educated, and successful in life, possessed of contagious energy and infectious self-confidence, they breathed an air that no problem might be beyond their abilities. Dedicated and graced with talent, they could but succeed.

Halberstam's characterization, of course, was irony: the "The Best and the
Brightest" mired us in Vietnam.

Our current administration's brightest, no less self-confident, aggressively
swell their chests with the air of the "Best and the Strongest". If you are
the strongest, you don't have to be the brightest. And the "Best" - what we
aspire to, and the mantle they assume - is, only too easily, seduced by the
"Strongest", and corrupted by it.

The administration's spokesmen imperturbably make their case for war with
little or no real acknowledgement that they may be wrong. Potential
difficulties simple common sense suggests are all too real are dismissed
with a wave of the hand. They pay no more than lip service to where things
may go wrong, and airily assure us things will work out as they believe. We
can count on it! Seldom has so much recklessness been passed off with such
dangerous assurance.

The hubris of the "Best and the Brightest" is the enthusiasm of the smartest
kid in the class. But we know that the smartest isn't necessarily the
wisest. The hubris of the strongest transcends anything else - and wisdom
not the least.

2.

From the introduction to President Bush's "The National Security Strategy of
the United States" just released:

"The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism
and technology."

Quotation heading the first chapter in "War in Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't
Want You To Know." By William Rivers Pitt, (with Scott Ritter) - just
issued:

"Today every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this
planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman, and child lives under a
nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of
being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or madness." - John F.
Kennedy

The National Security Document statement is very much of this moment. The
Kennedy statement is as true today as when he made it, some forty years ago.
It has stood the test of time. The National Security Document asks that we
design our futures on the basis of its instant wisdom. At the very least,
this should give pause.

For one pass this may lead to, consider where the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict is now. Whether by acceding to terror as their mode of action, as
the Palestinians do, or by reflexively striking back, while insisting on
terror's absolute cessation as the whole and only basis for moving forward,
as the Israeli's do, all are BOWING BEFORE TERROR. In a world that fights no
longer with sticks and stones and blades, but with nuclear tipped missiles
and vials of contagion, it is giving away before a reality too much like
striking matches in a dynamite factory. As such it opens a path down which
we all may be pulled to disaster.

The slender thread frays, and THAT danger must not be forgotten.

Our current leaders betray little or no awareness of that risk. There is
nothing in "The National Security Strategy of the United States".

Hubris.

3.

This administration has boldly proclaimed a long-term foreign policy
dramatically at odds with all previous American history, and our fundamental
understandings of who we are and what we stand for. It is a breathtaking
vision of world embracing ambition, whose utter beneficence they expect us,
and all others, to assume. To move us toward it, they have begun to play on
our reflexive post 9/11 fears. In many respects, it is a reprise of the same
strategy they follow with regard to national missile defense. They paint a
lurid threat with such fierce and vivid color, that our knees can scarcely
keep from jerking in assent. It is well calculated to keep us from
consideration of the relative likelihood of the proposed threat. That would
be the first counsel of wisdom. Instead, they use the ploy of directing
attention away from the question by responding that, because you can't deal
with all potential threats, doesn't mean you can't address some of them.
Unless your resources are infinite, however, you need to prioritize. If your
responsibility is as great as theirs, it becomes a moral obligation. Failure
to do so, in the grave matters confronting us, constitutes a dereliction of
duty unprecedented in its potential gravity and consequences.

Do you doubt it?

We have already seen it!

Consider, if even a tenth of the expenditure on national missile defense
over the past decade had been directed instead at intelligence efforts, we
might have connected the dots we now know were there to connect, and
prevented 9/11. All of the experts, as well as simple common sense, combined to suggest that something like the 9/11 attack was far more likely than the firing of a missile from a rogue state. It must be admitted the failure to prioritize our national security threats happened largely on Clinton's
watch, but it was the advisors and acolytes of this administration who
shaped the debate, and so energetically drove forward a commitment to
national missile defense, to the exclusion of other, more likely, areas for
concern. Have they acknowledged their responsibility? In their afflatus, are
they even aware of it?

Now their "wisdom" is urging another, much greater, expenditure of
resources, and this time the lives of our children are thrown into the
balance - perhaps many, many of those lives. What will be said if, during,
or even after, a war with Iraq, Bin Laden strikes us again, as hard, or
harder, than before? It surely cannot be ruled out. After all, 9/11 took
place with no known aid from, or even connection with, Iraq. What will we
think when we reflect, as surely we will, that, at a cost of but a fraction
of the wealth, and probably only few of the lives directed at eliminating
Saddam Hussein, we might have made the necessary connections, and averted a new tragedy? They will doubtless try to wriggle out of responsibility, but we cannot. We opened the door to it; its consequences will be ours to live with, and we cannot, in conscience, avoid asking ourselves the question: Was war with Iraq the best choice, the wisest dispersal of our wealth, of our talent, and of our lives?

The ultimate description of Democracy is Lincoln's: ". . . . we, even we
here, hold the power and bear the responsibility."

4.

Hubris was one of the central themes of Greek Tragedy. This administration's
war hawks are lost in their afflatus, as the National Security Document
proves. They believe the Gods are with them, and the outcome can be none
other than what they propose. Whether as short term strategy, with its
failure to address priorities, or as sheer recklessness in the matter of
how, and to what degree, things might spiral out of control, or as a
long-term betrayal of America understood as "the last best hope of Earth",
their vision is fatally flawed. They are riding high now, but they have
clearly laid out the paths down which they may descend to their destruction.
How low will the Gods bring us if we follow, if we do not find, if we do not
insist upon finding, better, wiser, choices?

R. K. Rodebaugh

Science and Modernity
By R.K. Rodebaugh
Published The Modern Tribune
March 22, 2003

The modern world is born of the nexus between human creativity and the
discoveries of modern science and technology.  That nexus has created, and
is creating, a world that prospers no longer by the sweat of our brow and
the strength of our backs, but by the educated creativity of its people.

Societies achieving a strong flow of educated creativity will prosper; those
failing, will not, and will fall into eclipse. That flow will not come from
people systematically repressed, suppressed, and exploited. It will come
from populations secure in self-governance, rich in opportunity for
innovation and its implementation, and able to achieve a satisfactory life
for all.

The societal, institutional and conceptual structures of all previous human
history have been, and are under, assault by a new reality whose birth
travail has vexed the last three hundred years. It is the sheer prodigality
of outcomes that becomes defining:  such potentials are released for both
constructive and destructive outcomes that we must be keenly aware of the
power and responsibility that devolve upon us.

Modernity is about our increasing mastery of material reality. It is not
wisdom (except of a particular sort), and it is not spiritual elevation, or
moral accomplishment. It remains for us to inform the modern world with
those achievements.

The above attempts to distill a message from the long arc of the human
story. It seeks to define where we are now. Before laying out the particular
understanding of history  which leads to it, I want to make it clear that I
do not comprehend some steadily winnowing dialectic working its will through history. A Grand Narrative of sorts, perhaps, but nothing like a
relentlessly evolving storyline. Rather think of change under the aegis of
some great transformative pulse, followed by a period of adjustment, and a
rich elaboration of consequences.

We are social creatures. We live in mutually interactive, mutually
supportive societies. Our first model for social organization was the tribe.
For tens of thousands of years we survived by inhabiting this planet as
tribes. Between five and ten thousand years ago, to seize the advantages
inherent in large-scale domesticated agriculture, we transitioned into far
larger, far more extensively and intensively organized societies. What was
required was enduring control of fertile land, and people constantly on that
land to work it. What emerged were division of labor constructs, ruled from
a narrow base of military, governmental and religious elites via severely
hierarchical top down authoritarianism. Coercive force could, and largely
did, suffice. The vast majority of people could be assured of the
necessities of life, but their grasp upon them was tenuous. Most of the
human beings in these new societal constructs were "division of labored"
into some form of peasantry, peonage, serfdom, or slavery; that is to say,
an efficient organization of the sweat of our brow and the strength of our
backs. But we got an unintended consequence: Civilization.

It was no easy time for tribal societies as they came up against these new
Civilizational ones. The strengths of the new constructs proved to be both
wide and deep. Tribal territory was seized through the disciplined
application of force by a professional military, and tribes were variously
disrupted, displaced, and (or) dispersed. Not infrequently they were
enslaved. On occasion, tribes would take their revenge by assaulting and
overthrowing a (usually) declining Civilizational society. More often than
not, however, a newly triumphant tribe would, in a generation or two, became more Catholic than the Pope with respect to what they had overwhelmed. They would be conquered by their conquest! So powerful and persuasive were the possibilities which opened to this new societal paradigm.

For the next several thousand years we circled within this paradigm,
elaborating upon it in many ways. Many distinct civilizations, rich in
culture and accomplishment, arose and prospered. But the bedrock minimum
remained the same: an efficient organization over time of simple human
physical tasks - any ten peasants could tend the fields and mind the herds
as well as any other ten peasants. Coercive power was decisive.

Eventually, the unintended consequence - Civilization - got around to a new
idea. A second pulse. It was Newton's idea. It may not have been entirely
original with him, and aspects of it are certainly apparent in thought, and
trends of thought leading far back into recorded history, but it is
incontestably Newton's formulation of the idea, (in the Principia of 1687)
that leads to its implantation in the fertile soil of post Renaissance
Europe. Its subsequent rooting and exfoliation leads directly to modern
science and technology, and on to the modern world.

Newton does not simply set forth that there is a gravitational attraction
between bodies, but formulates it as a precise mathematical relationship.
The force is directly proportional to the product of masses of the
attracting bodies, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance
separating them. The force is calculable! Precisely and exactly calculable!
And a like conceptualism might be thought to extend to all of physical
reality. The natural world is encompassed by a regime of mathematical rigor.
Material reality can be described by universal, discoverable, mathematically
exact expressions of causality.

After Newton, the Physicist Bernoulli, observing that the flow of air over a
surface curved on top and flat on the bottom produces an uplift, can
calculate what flow of air, over what surface of wing, will produce exactly
what lift per unit area of wing. You can build a plane and know that it will
fly! A child can observe steam displace a heavy iron lid from a pot. The
grown James Watt can, after Newton, calculate precisely what pressure of
steam against what piston head can, when translated through the mechanical
apparatus of the piston, produce exactly what turning force on a wheel or
crankshaft: the steam engine.

With Newton, science transforms from a cottage industry of inspired
eccentrics into a constantly broadening, ever deepening, universal human
endeavor. Over the next three hundred years, this constant and rigorous
pursuit of scientific knowledge has yielded up a cornucopia of opportunity
for human creativity, as both invention and enterprise, to feast upon. And
it has.

A new age comes upon us and everything changes - as it did with the
Agricultural Revolution and the birth of Civilization. The first great
consequence of the Scientific Revolution was the Industrial Revolution.
That, and the continuing advances flooding in its wake, so dominate us with
their dazzling transformation of our material circumstances, that we
generally fail to be aware of the changes in human societies that have
accompanied the process. Consider, three hundred years ago there were no
democracies (Pace Switzerland). Today a great portion of the world's people
live in democracies, and those societies are incontestably the most vital
and prosperous we have. Three hundred years ago, if you had proposed that
you had to educate all of a society's children, you would have been laughed
at. Today, it is the accepted commonplace. There is more to the modern world than the car in your driveway, and the channel changer in your hand.

The work by which the world prospers has changed. Slowly and inexorably, a world has been emerging that prospers by the educated creativity of its
people. Societies have been, and are, transforming themselves in
accommodation. As noted above, a strong flow of educated creativity will
arise from populations secure in self governance, rich in opportunity for
innovation and its implementation, and able to realize a satisfactory life
for all: The New Paradigm.

Historically, that's our story! The Grand Narrative (of sorts). Two pulses
and two periods of adjustment, the first seemingly so far distant that we
are generally only vaguely aware of it; until, of course, we reflect on the
fate of Native Americans. The second pulse comes only three hundred years
ago, with the rooting and exfoliation of Newton's idea. The putative Man
from Mars, looking back on the human story, would see - I believe well above all  - these two things: our transition to Civilizational societies, and the
advent of modern science and technology. In between: periods of adjustment,  and an exploration of possibilities within a general given, gradually enriching a matrix from which the next pulse might come.

From this it becomes apparent that we are currently in the midst of a period
of profound worldwide re-adjustment - a perilous passage. Critically, it
suggests a stance with which to approach things: Mutually undergoing a
change as vast and sweeping as any we have ever encountered, we need less to confront one another as to work together to meet the common difficulties of the passage. We are all in it together, and such intelligence as we can
muster, and such wisdom as we can achieve become our greatest necessities.

Realize first that we confront something new. The history we might search
for insight remains largely the history of a now dying paradigm; one in
which coercive power alone could be, and most often was, decisive - a
paradigm attuned to, and successful in, an earlier reality.

Lincoln: "the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
We must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.".

A world that prospers by the educated creativity of its people may sound
quite promising, and, in the main, it has proven so; but the story of the
past three hundred years has hardly been a walk to the paradise garden. The
West, the first beneficiary of modernity, was also its first victim: the
"satanic mills", wars, revolutions and turmoil of the past two hundred plus
years testify to enormous disruptions. All around the world societies coming
to modernity experience a revolutionary change in their material
circumstances, and, at the same time, feel a gravitational pull towards a
radically new societal paradigm. It is all an invitation to upheaval and
uncertainty, and we have had it: the period adjustment to a great
transformative pulse.

The steadily increasing dependence of modern societies on the freely given
talents and abilities of their people is inexorable, and yet the benefits
native to that dependence are only fitfully realized. Turmoil ensues. And it
is not simply a matter of resistance by the elites being displaced. For the
people themselves, it is a new world, and they have to learn how to be
comfortable in it, to feel secure in it. The possibilities for exploitation
by narrow and particular interests within societies, and for dangerous and
widely held misunderstandings by the broad base towards which power is
moving, are great.

Our primary task becomes managing the passage to a new paradigm - for to
make the passage seems inevitable, barring such catastrophe as,
unfortunately, modernity itself makes it all too easy to envision. Tribal
societies could not, did not, and perhaps their people ultimately did not
wish to, decline the transit to a new reality. Today's people face a similar
problem with regard a transition they can clearly see possesses great
capacities for a better life, but which also immerses them in a new and
profoundly different world, with which they have had, at best, limited
experience. With the best will in the world, whatever those who have
substantially made the passage, America, Western Europe, Japan and the
Pacific Rim, may attempt (and we must make the attempt) will be inseparable
from the power of the modern world to both enthrall and disrupt. A volatile
blend of envy, fear, and resentment is both inevitable and understandable.
Our universal charge becomes finding mutually constructive outcomes.

The very nature of modernity opens vast possibilities for improvement in the
material well-being of all peoples everywhere, but it also enables conflict
no longer with sticks and stones and blades, but with nuclear tipped
missiles and vials of contagion. This prodigality of outcomes, both
constructive and destructive, becomes possibly the essential point. Recourse
to violence begins to take on the aspect of striking matches in a dynamite
factory, and peace becomes mutually beneficial for all, including parties to
previously intractable conflicts.  Make peace and you can move on,
prospering by the educated creativity of your people.

It seems obvious, to me at least, that over the next one hundred years or so
the human race will make such choices as will define our future for the next
several hundred years, or perhaps even our entire fate as a species - in so
far as that is ours to determine. We can either chose a path of comity and
cooperation, of peaceful resolutions to tensions, opening the way to a full
flowering of our (now demonstrably) enormous constructive and creative
powers, or we may choose a path of persistent and pervasive contention,
locking us into the unproductive stasis of stalemate, or giving ourselves
over to endless cycles of violence, bleeding incessantly, and lashing
ourselves to the wheel of conflict.

I believe in people, in both their ability and desire to make wise and
constructive choices. But this happens only in a world at peace. Threatened,
we too easily become creatures of our fears and not our hopes.

This transformation can work to beneficent ends, but the passage is
hazardous. It is for us, now, rather to facilitate that passage, to seek its
realization with ever diminishing pain. To do all we may to assure emergence
of what can be a far richer and more hopeful world than any we have known.
It would be my hope that, from the perspective herein, we come to engage
this process consistently, compassionately, creatively.  We have seldom had
a greater or more urgent task, or more golden an opportunity.