Contempt for the empirical that can’t be readily jiggered or spun is
evident at the top of the executive branch in Washington. The country is
mired in a discourse that echoes the Scopes trial dramatized in “Inherit
the Wind.” Mere rationality would mean lining up on the side of “science”
against the modern yahoos and political panderers waving the flag of
social conservatism. (At the same time that scientific Darwinism is under
renewed assault, a de facto alliance between religious fundamentalists and
profit-devout corporatists has moved the country further into social
Darwinism that aims to disassemble the welfare state.) Entrenched
opposition to stem-cell research is part of a grim pattern that includes
complacency about severe pollution and global warming -- disastrous trends
already dragging one species after another to the brink of extinction and
beyond.
Disdain for “science” is cause for political concern. Yet few
Americans and no major political forces are “antiscience” across the
board. The ongoing prerogative is to pick and choose. Those concerned
about the ravages left by scientific civilization -- the combustion
engine, chemicals, fossil-fuel plants, and so much more -- frequently look
to science for evidence and solutions. Those least concerned
about the Earth’s ecology are apt to be the greatest enthusiasts for
science in the service of unfettered commerce or the Pentagon, which
always seeks the most effectively “advanced” scientific know-how.
Even the most avowedly faithful are not inclined to leave the
implementation of His plan to unscientific chance.
So, depending on the circumstances, right-wing fundamentalists could
support the use of the latest science for top-of-the-line
surveillance, for command and control, and for overall warfare -- or could
dismiss unwelcome scientific evidence of environmental harm as
ideologically driven conclusions that should not be allowed to
interfere with divinely inspired policies. Those kinds of maneuvers,
George Orwell wrote in "1984," help the believers “to forget any fact that
has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary
again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is
needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to
take account of the reality which one denies.”
In the first years of the twenty-first century, the liberal script
hailed science as an urgent antidote to Bush-like irrationality. That was
logical. But it was also ironic and ultimately unpersuasive. Pure
allegiance to science exists least of all in the political domain;
scientific findings are usually filtered by power, self-interest, and
ideology. For instance, the technical and ecological advantages of mass
transit have long been clear; yet foremost engineering minds are deployed
to the task of building better SUVs. And there has never
been any question that nuclear weapons are bad for the Earth and the
future of humanity, but no one ever condemns the continuing
development of nuclear weapons as a bipartisan assault on science. On the
contrary, the nonstop R & D efforts for thermonuclear weapons are all
about science.
When scientists found rapid climate change to be both extremely
ominous and attributable to the proliferation of certain
technologies, the media and political power centers responded to the data
by doing as they wished. The GOP’s assault on science was cause for huge
alarm when applied to the matter of global warming, but the unchallenged
across-the-aisle embrace of science in the weaponry
field had never been benign. When it came to designing and
manufacturing the latest doomsday devices, only the most rigorous
scientists need apply. And no room would be left for “intelligent
design” as per the will of God.
The neutrality of science was self-evident and illusionary. Science
was impartial because its discoveries were verifiable and accurate -- but
science was also, through funding and government direction,
largely held captive. Its massively destructive capabilities were
often seen as stupendous assets. In the case of ultramodern American
armaments, the worse they got the better they got. Whatever could be said
about “the market,” it was skewed by the buyers; the Pentagon’s routine
spending made the nation’s budget for alternative fuels or eco-friendly
technologies look like a pittance.
We’re social beings, as evolution seems to substantiate. Blessings
and curses revolve largely around the loving and the warlike, the
nurturing and the predatory. We’re self-protective for survival, yet we
also have “conscience” -- what Darwin described as the
characteristic that most distinguishes human beings from other
animals. Given the strength of our instincts for individual and
small-group survival, we seem to be stingy with more far-reaching
conscience.
Our capacities to take humane action are as distinctive of our
species as conscience, and no more truly reliable. As people, we are
consequences and we also cause them: by what we choose to do and not do.
The beneficiaries of economic and military savagery are far from the
combat zones. In annual reports, the Pentagon’s prime contractors give an
overview of the vast financial rewards for shrewdly making a killing. To
surrender the political battlefield to such forces is to self-marginalize
and leave more space for those who thrive on
plunder.
The inseparable bond of life and death should be healthy antipathy.
**********
We’ve had no way of really knowing how near annihilation might be.
But our lives have flashed with scarcely believable human-made
lightning -- the evidence of things truly obscene, of officialdom
gone mad -- photos and footage of mushroom clouds, and routinely
set-aside descriptions starting with Hiroshima. Waiting on the
nuclear thunder.
Five decades after Sputnik, such apocalyptic dangers are still
present, but from Americans in my generation the most articulated
fears have to do with running out of money before breath. The USA is
certainly no place to be old, sick, and low on funds. Huge medical bills
and hazards of second-class care loom ahead. For people whose childhoods
fell between victory over Japan and evacuation from
Saigon, the twenty-first century has brought the time-honored and
perfectly understandable quest to avoid dying before necessary -- and to
avoid living final years or seeing loved ones living final years in
misery. Under such circumstances, self obsession may seem
unavoidable.
There must be better options. But they’re apt to be obscured, most of
all, by our own over-scheduled passivity; by who we figure we are, who
we’ve allowed ourselves to become. The very word “options” is
likely to have a consumer ring to it (extras on a new car, clauses in a
contract). We buy in and consume, mostly selecting from prefab
choices -- even though, looking back, the best of life’s changes have
usually come from creating options instead of choosing from the ones in
stock.
When, in 1969, biologist George Wald said that “we are under repeated
pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled --
decisions that have been made,” the comment had everything to do with his
observation that “our government has become preoccupied with
death, with the business of killing and being killed.” The curtailing of
our own sense of real options is a concentric process, encircling our
personal lives and our sense of community, national purpose, and global
possibilities; circumscribing the ways that we, and the world around us,
might change. Four decades after Wald’s anguished speech “A Generation in
Search of a Future,” many of the accepted “facts of life” are still “facts
of death” -- blotting out horizons, stunting imaginations, holding
tongues, limiting capacities to nurture or defend life. We are still in
search of a future.
**********
And we’re brought up short by the precious presence and unspeakable
absence of love. “All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it,
that mirrors can only lie,” James Baldwin wrote, “that death by drowning
is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that
love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the
masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
This love exists “not in the infantile American sense of being made happy
but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
The freezing of love into small spaces, part of the numbing of
America, proceeds in tandem with the warfare state. It’s easier to not
feel others’ pain when we can’t feel too much ourselves.
If we want a future that sustains life, we’d better create it
ourselves.
________________________________________________
[This article is excerpted from Norman Solomon’s new book “Made Love, Got
War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”] Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s
Warfare State” was published today. For more information, go to:
www.MadeLoveGotWar.com