The Peripatetic Philosopher continues to ponder:

Why is religion important?

PART TWO

Pilgrims on the Mayflower reach America!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 10, 2015

 "Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world.  His mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour.  We have created a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

"We trash about.  We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and the rest of life.  Religion will never solve this great riddle."

Edward O. Wilson, “The Social Conquest of Earth"

READER’S COUNTER ARGUMENT:



The Pilgrims came to this continent to escape religious persecution by people who claimed to know the ultimate answer.  However, the Pilgrims were of the same persuasion because they were the people who had the ultimate answer and persecuted those who disagreed.

The reason that later religious freedom became a fact in the US was because all the religions in this country wanted to prevent dominance by any particular religion. Yet today many of these Christian sects make every effort to impose their interpretation of the truth on the rest of us of which the prevention of gay marriage is just one example.

When Christianity became the state religion under the Roman Emperor Constantine, it did unto non-believers or those who had different interpretation of Christianity what had been done to them for three centuries by pushing the idea that they were the only one with the ultimate truth.

Even if you find a positives in religion, for the most part it has caused a lot of pain. The Emperor of Japan was considered divine, and during WWII the population was willing like the Islamic suicide bombers to die in support of an ideology.

Religion may be critical in explaining the human journey but for the most part it has made a negative contribution to that journey.

The Catholic Church apposed science in many ways. Galileo is just one example. The church kept insisting the Ptolemaic interpretation was correct. Islam stopped people from scientific investigation around the 12th century because it was interfering with the religious beliefs.

Since Protestantism existed in the US it would be difficult to determine its effect without having the same situation without Protestantism as a comparison.

In all you have written here your response has not addressed the questions I have raised which is that religion is an ideology that like any ideology proclaims to have the key to the ultimate truth and does not question the behavior of the god who is the center of that belief.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

There is much that you say here that makes perfect sense if we are addressing a rational matter, which we are not when it comes to religion. 

Religion all the way back to the medicine men and witch doctors of the beginning of man’s journey on this continent have dealt with irrational fears with the semblance of what seems rational and believable to those terrified of what is not known or understood. 

Science attempts today to fill that void, but unhappily at the expense of disregarding the basic spiritual emptiness, the loneliness that can find no purchase with simply the rational and sensible of that which can be replicated and verified. 

The world has always been a hostile environment not meant for or conducive to the terror of that exists in the human soul, a soul that science denies it exists because it cannot be identified or isolated and therefore replicated and verified with instrumental or concrete values. 

Yet, the soul can be consoled with love and caring and self-forgetfulness, terminal values that comfort the soul to what it cannot understand or relate to that might have existed before, or beyond human knowing.  Alas, life is a lonely experience if one does not embrace the beauty and mystery of this enchanting planet.

All the things you charge religion for, charges that clearly have a history that verifies your assessment, can equally be seen to taint the wonders of science as it in its own way is dogmatic, absolute, unyielding and as aggressive as the ideologies of religion.  

Whereas religion felt duty bound to proselytize the infidels, science has its own inquisition of public opinion in that few if anyone challenges its authenticity, authority or relevance wherever its research might take it.

We have nuclear weapons of mass destruction and cloning and robotics and now we learn of the selling of body parts of fetuses “for science,” when science, blindly going forward, never considers what is lost for what is gained, or what the ultimate consequences might be.   Nature has no conscience and Nature is the god of science.

WHY THE PILGRIMS CAME TO AMERICA

Angie Mosteller posts a compelling article on the Internet regarding the pilgrims.  It is clear, as you point out, what they were escaping from but not what they were going towards. 

In 1534, England broke ties with the Roman Catholic Church. Protestant Reformers saw this as an opportunity to bring true reform to the church in England.  These reformers came to be called Puritans.  However, many Puritans felt little progress had been made toward true reform and that it was time to separate from the Church of England and start anew.

Unfortunately, at that time in England, the Church and State were intimately tied, and Puritans were considered treasonous and lived in danger of both persecution and imprisonment. For this reason, a small group of Puritans determined it was time to leave England. So, in 1609, they sailed to Holland (not America).

For more than a decade, they enjoyed religious freedom in Holland and gathered openly for church under the leadership of Pastor John Robinson. So why not stay in Holland?  

These Pilgrims had deep concern for the well-being of their children. Life in Holland proved difficult. The only work available to immigrants was poorly paid, and despite their hard labor, they struggled constantly with poverty. Work was taking a toll on both parents and children. Furthermore, some of the children were assimilating into Dutch culture and abandoning their parents’ values.

William Bradford (a passenger on the Mayflower and governor of the Plymouth Plantation) explained:

“Of all the sorrows most heavy to be borne (in Holland), was that many of the children, influenced by these conditions, and the great licentiousness of the young people of the country, and the many temptations of the city, were led by evil example into dangerous courses, getting the reins off their necks and leaving their parents. Some became soldiers, others embarked upon voyages by sea and others upon worse courses tending to dissoluteness and the danger of their souls, to the great grief of the parents and the dishonor of God. So they saw their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and become corrupt.”

In addition, the Pilgrims longed to bring the gospel to people who had not yet heard the message of Jesus Christ:

“They cherished a great hope and inward zeal of laying good foundations, or at least of making some way towards it, for the propagation and advance of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world, even though they should be but stepping stones to others in the performance of so great a work.”

So for the sake of their children and for the gospel, the Pilgrims made the historic decision to immigrate again – this time to America.

These Pilgrims were prepared to make tremendous sacrifices for future generations – and the sacrifices proved to be costly. By the end of their first winter in America, half of the passengers who had sailed to America on the Mayflower were dead. Yet, the Pilgrims persevered and remained faithful to their God. To use the words of Bradford, these Pilgrims indeed became the “stepping stones” in the formation of what has arguably become the greatest nation on earth.

So, beginning in 1620, according to Max Weber in his comparative religion sociological enterprise, the pursuit of the economic logic of extra mundane beliefs had given birth to a nascent rational ordering system that would ultimately reach fruition in modern capitalism.  Its existential consequences would find no other soil more fertile or no people more ready or resolved than those first Puritan settlers.   

OTHER VOICES OTHER VIEWS

  

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) comes to mind, the preeminent Hindu leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India.  He employed civil disobedience to lead India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.  The Sanskrit for Mahatma is “high souled.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took Gandhi’s model and applied it to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. 

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were benefactors of the individualism, tenacity, resourcefulness of the Puritans who set the template of what became known as the difference between a European and an American. 

Sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) argued that religion defined by its separation of the sacred from the profane, was at bottom society’s worship in a set of collective representations assuring it moral cohesion.  He referred to it as a kind of “Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Solidarity” to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Protestantism.

French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), and author of Democracy in America (1835), was convinced that the political stability of a country always requires a transcendental faith.  He found that in the United States with his Protestantism.  While noting America’s many society flaws, its cohesion was assured due to this fact.   

Whatever the merits or otherwise justifications for a civil religion, there is an insistence among distinguished minds that common presuppositions of any collective life, as you imply, is likely to inhibit scientific classification or taxonomic thrust. 

That said the state of the art of this relatively contentious and sometimes considered obscure branch of learning, religion in the last several decades has had a sharply up take in public consciousness and the public agenda.  How do we explain this?

COULD THIS BE THE “AXIAL AGE OF RELIGIOUS AWAKENING”?

The persistence or revival of assorted branches of Christianity is proof that faith in the divine in this Scientific Age is still surprisingly strong. 

Whatever you may think, religion still provides the spiritual springboard to the lives of the faithful, while a philosophy of disbelief informs them of the vital need for religion, even if they can dispense with god. 

Some religious observers have concluded that all major religious creeds are basically one, sharing a core of common values with liberal humanism in a post-secular age. 

Religion is thriving; religion is everywhere; religion is one, but not necessarily called “religion.”  It could as well be called “science.” 

TO BE CONTINUED

  

The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders,

Why is religion important?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 8, 2015

REFERENCE:

We are in an age that seems to have forgotten how critical religion has been in man’s journey.  A reader’s attentive query – Why is religion important – prompts me to write a brief missive or two on that question.

Sociologist and economist Max Weber and Russian political scientist and sociologist Dimitri Furman are my guides, men known for their original and pragmatic approaches to the great religions of the world.

For the past several years, the subject of religion has progressed from a casual to a compelling interest, especially the roots and relevance of early Christianity to our times.

This is the nature of my "Jesus Story" or The Search for the Real Parents of My Soul.  It commences with Jesus and the Twelve Apostles to Paul and the New Testament, which includes the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as the apostate Gospels of Thomas, Peter and Judas.

The curious nature of these gospels is that none of the authors is actually known, although given recognizable names.  

Biblical scholars have devoted their lives to studying scraps of text and piecing them together into something resembling a montage that helps the general reader such as yours truly.  Ergo, I take no credit for expertise in theology or eschatology, disciplines far afield to my training. I do, however, confess to being something of an autodidact. 

A READER WRITES:

I fail to understand why you feel religion is so important.

For me the only importance of religion is that it illustrates the acceptance by many people of ludicrous ideologies without submitting them to examination and questioning their reality. 

The three religions that arose out of the mid-east portray a god with the characteristics of idiots like Hitler, Stalin, and Moa.  All these men believed that they had discovered an ideology that explained everything, and that their particular ideology was the only correct one. 

These men were responsible for the deaths of millions in their pursuit of their ideology.  The god portrayed in the Old Testament has the same idiotic outlook. He destroyed humanity with the flood and committed other atrocities because he was in charge and everyone better comply with his demands. 

In the New Testament he required a human sacrifice in the form of Jesus and condemned every non believer to hell which is equivalent to the behavior of any dictator. 

Also you have written how you personally witness the ideology of apartheid in South Africa.  Such behavior continues to be currently exhibited by Al Qaida, ISIS and all the other Muslim nut groups who once again are proclaiming that they have the only answer and anyone who rejects that answer must die.

Or look at the adulation the Pope receives in St. Peter’s square as if he has the answers.  It reminds me of the unquestioning adulation of Hitler at those well documented rallies. 

Today I read in the Wall Street Journal that Hindus in India want to prevent the eating of beef because cows are sacred to them.  Religions are ideologies which originated in the past to explain the unexplainable and to control the population. 

People no longer believe in the Greek and Roman gods and call them myths, but they continue to believe that the myths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are real. 

No one knows how the universe began or why. There are speculation and scientific theories of how it all started but no answer of why.  All our invented gods are autocrats because they were invented in a time when autocrats controlled societies. 

If a citizens of the US today were required to bow and adore their leaders like the god of the Middle East requires, we would be upset.  However, religious people find it acceptable even those who live in a democratic society. 

Paul, Augustan and many other religious pontificators are read and admired, but they all suffer from the same disease as Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  They suffer from the delusion that they know the answer and that any other answer has no validity.  There is no hope for our species because our dumb behavior is redundant.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Reader:

You, like all of us of European or African stock, are immigrants to this great country of the United States of America.  So it was equally true of the Pilgrims of the Puritan Christian faith who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the Mayflower and landed the Plymouth colony in America in 1620 on what would become the State of Massachusetts.

Religion is so fundamental to the story of man that it may be useful to cover the subject in a few brief missives as to why I think this is so.  This is the first.  

For Max Weber (1864-1920) and Dimitri Furman (1943-2011), religion is the essential if not the critical linchpin to that story.

We have Max Weber's comprehensive sociology of religion, which started with the essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). 

He continued it with the analysis of The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1915), The Religion of India (1916): The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (1916) and Ancient Judaism.  It was published in 1952 thirty-two years after his death in 1920.

Weber’s sudden death prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with studies of Early Christianity and Islam.

The three main themes in these essays were the effect of religious ideas on economic activities, the relation between social stratification and religious ideas and the distinguishable characteristics of these ideas on Western Civilization.

Weber saw religion as one of the core forces in the society of man.  His goal was to find reasons for the different developmental paths of the cultures of the Occident and the Orient without judging or valuing them.

Like some of the contemporary thinkers who followed the social Darwinist paradigm, Weber wanted to explain the distinctive elements of Western Civilization primarily from an economic point of view.

In this analysis, Weber maintained that Calvinist (and more widely, Protestant) religious ideas had had a major impact on the social innovation and development of the capitalistic economic system of the West, but noted that these religious ideas were not the only factors in that development.

Other notable factors mentioned by Weber included the rationalism of scientific pursuit, merging observation with mathematics, science of scholarship with jurisprudence, rational systematization and bureaucratization of government administration with economic enterprise. 

His paradigm on bureaucracy shows how early Christianity was assimilated into the Roman culture and its bureaucratic structure by Emperor Constantine.  This gave Roman Catholicism a bureaucratic impetus early in the fourth century (305 C.E.) that assured its stability, continuity and sustainability over next twenty centuries despite many false steps.

In the end, the study of the sociology of religion, according to Weber, focused on one distinguishing part of the Western culture, the decline of beliefs in magic, or what he referred to as "disenchantment of the world" and the rapid rise of science in man’s consciousness. 

*     *     *

Russian Dmitri Yefimovich Furman studied the sociology of religion more from a political than an economic perspective.  His analysis complements rather than refutes that of Max Weber. 

He was called in The New Left Review, "Russia’s leading comparative scholar on the political systems of the post-Soviet states.”  His PhD thesis was on "Religion and Social Conflicts in USA" (1981).

In recent years, he has been editor or author of a series of studies of the former Soviet border states including the Ukraine (1997), Belarus (1998), Chechnya (1999), Azerbaijan (2001), and the Baltic States (2002).  He wrote a monograph on Kazakhstan (2004)., and dozens of separate essays and articles.  

Isolated as he was in Soviet Russia of exchange with scholars abroad, Furman once remarked that Russian thinkers of his generation had no choice but to be autodidacts, which meant they were always liable to reinvent the bicycle. 

Furman was noted by temperament as a pragmatic researcher with little interest in intellectual genealogies or engagement with parallel bodies of work.

His thesis Religion and Social Conflicts in the USA (1981) turned into a book and focused on the role of Protestantism in American history and society. It offered a detailed empirical sociology of American churches, denominations and sects in the 20th century.

This remarkable study became the hallmark of his comparative work with the emphasis on the influence of religion on the political life of society rather than the prominence of economics on religion favored by Max Weber.

Why, Furman asks, at the outset, had France known four revolutions since the 18th century, and some 15 constitutions, and the United States just one of each?

Bourgeois society in America, he argued, had from the beginning combined exceptional dynamism with extreme stability, a combination that could not be understood apart from the peculiar salience of Protestantism in its formation.

America, he claimed, included both the unfettering of a drive for knowledge and a biblical respect for the immutability of the constitution. 

Though officially church and state were separated, the reigning ideology of the nation mingled religious rituals and symbols with secular forms and themes in a promiscuous potpourri whose very lack of clear divisions or borders was permissive of continual economic and social change.

UCLA professor Perry Anderson profiles Dimitri Furman in a long essay titled “One Exceptional Figure Stood Out” in The London Review (July 30, 2015) in which he reveals the clarity and originality of Furman's scholarship.  

My next missive will be to share Furman’s analysis of religion along with appropriate references to that of Weber's as well.  In that offering, I will attempt to show why his ideas appear so compelling.  Unfortunately, it is hard to acquire information on him.  His book is currently unavailable on Amazon.com.

The Peripatetic Philosopher admits:

Why My Fascination With Millennials

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 6, 2015

HEADLINE:

 “Sales at Bonefish Sink!" (Tampa Bay Times, August 6, 2015)

Sales have plummeted at this Tampa Bay franchise chain, experts conclude, because the millennials don’t see upscale chains as adventuresome.  They prefer mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa restaurants run by local people in the community.

Typically, and expectedly, these experts see millennials as being “anti-chain” driven when a simpler and more telling explanation is that millennials don’t waste their energy being “anti” about anything. 

They don’t find it necessary to dine where you pay for the ambience or the brand or for the opportunity to rub shoulders with the up and coming, or those who think they are. 

For millennials, it is simply a matter of getting the biggest bang for the buck, and letting those who prefer fancier eating accommodations, all the more power to them. 

Millennials are not into resentment or standing on some soap box and protesting the high prices for low lights and cloth napkins.  They just drive by these eating emporiums.

NOT A NEW FASCINATION

For the past twenty-five years, I have been following the growing presence of what I deemed “personhood” as opposed to the “common good” that has been the rhetoric of the priests, pundits, politicians and academics since time immemorial. 

Since coming back from South Africa in 1969, I have seen a tectonic shift in American values, first almost imperceptible but gradually gaining momentum until I saw it having some considerable force in 1990, when I wrote Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (2^nd edition 2014).  I wrote then:

The established culture of American society, the “common good,” has failed to support the society that it would define.  Yet, many of its advocates, often located in American Think Tanks, stubbornly insist it is the only way.  Against this reality, the culture of “personhood” now struggles to establish itself …

“This difference has already had pivotal ramifications across America, from the home to the workplace.  Adversaries have been made of parents and children, teachers and students, the clergy and laity, manager and workers, leaders and followers in all walks of life.  It has also produced a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements in the organization.”  

This chart taken from Work Without Managers that summarized the shift:

My designation of “personhood” hardly made a ripple on public consciousness, not even after Executive Excellence Magazine featured my idea.

It was not until Time Magazine (May 20, 2013) featured a cover story on millennials with the title “The Me Me Me Generation” that Americans started to take stock of this growing phenomenon. 

It shows the power of words.  This word, “millennials,” is a designation beyond the Hippies, “Y” and “X” generation; beyond the “Occupy Wall Street” movement of that moment that had no legs. 

It was not “personhood,” I wrote, “but an angst of the “common good” that was already fading.

If you studied the crowds of malcontents of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, it was evident there were few if any millennials.  They are not into protest.

Joel Stein made a most salient observation in his Time article on millennials:

“Millennials aren’t trying to take over the establishment; they’re growing up without one.”

Millennials have, indeed, grown to maturity in a climate where words took precedence over deeds, presence over performance, where false expectations were treated as real supported in denial, where justice was often the epitome of injustice, where authority had no teeth, and celebrity created the noise but provided little music.  This has found millennials retreating into themselves, and for it called “narcissistic.”

That said millennials have not had to think, do math in their heads, or weighty research to write school papers.  They plagiarize the Internet without guilt, content to lead ghetto fabulous lives addicted to their computers and mobiles while disinclined to take seriously what they have been taught was important.

With millennials, a philosophy of belief is implied rather than stated.  Whatever millennials may think, religion still provides the spiritual springboard of their lives, while a philosophy of disbelief informs them of the vital need for religion, even if they can dispense with the Bible and God.    

With all their excesses and counterpoint orientation, Joel Stein in Time Magazine thinks they’ll save us all.  On this I am more circumspect as I see them as a work in progress, one gaining momentum and in that process changing the very nature of what we call “civil society.”

   

THE WORLD IN DISORDER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 4, 2015

A READER ASKS,

WHERE IS THE GOVERNMENT IN THIS?

A READER WRITES:

I don’t often agree completely with simple statements as the world is just too complex, but with these I do with these two of yours: 

“The insanity of the tax code has been a product of Democrats, Republicans and Independents, Liberals as well as Conservatives who write the codes.

When it comes to money sense, we have not been an inspiring people.  If you have your doubts, check our history from the beginning.  We throw money at problems hoping it will stick with something approaching solutions.  It seldom does.”

I enjoyed this piece, thanks for sending it out.  A few thoughts raised by it follow.

Your analysis of our history of the foibles of labor, industry, profit and loss is interesting, but it seems to me it should have included government, which has been and is overly involved as I see it, and is less often absent at the downside of economic action than present on the upside.

The sixteenth amendment was a massive change in this country’s life.   With it “we the people” provided the government, via constitutional dictate, a claim over all property by virtue of giving it prior authority over all income earned in the nation.  The individual citizen (or business) has since owned nothing, but what the government decided to leave him. 

What is a “Fair share” is totally subjective opinion as is one of the other popular phrases used today, “Living wage”. 

How does one fairly decide “Fair share”, or accurately compute “Living wage”?  I don’t know how that would be properly done, but do believe it hasn’t happened yet.  Nor do I think I would trust the folks championing either of those conditions to honestly make the call.  One reason being their demonstrated tendency to confuse “want” with “need”.  This I think bears on the issue:

The Congressional Budget Office has just published a study, The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010, which shows that the top 40% of income earners paid 106.2% of total federal income taxes, while the bottom 40% paid -9.1%.

This isn’t the study’s headline, so you have to dig a bit to get that information, but look at Table 3 on page 13 of the study to find that information.

The Table shows that the top 20% of income earners paid 92.9% of total income taxes in 2010 (the latest year available), and the next-highest 20% paid 13.3% of total income taxes, so the top 40% paid 106.2%.

Since 92.9% of the tax burden deemed proper by our political system isn’t, in the minds of some, a “fair share” one wonders what an appropriate definition would be and, of course, who would be best qualified to write it?

Is income alone the best measure of how well the middle, or any other economic class is doing?  Might it not be as much misleading as helpful to honest discussion to focus exclusively on dollar income?  Twenty years ago neither king nor pauper had the access today provided to all who have a smartphone and that includes nearly all middle class and most lower income folks. 

You say, 

“To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.  The same holds true of ourselves.” 

 It is interesting that the Federal government’s Agricultural Dept. includes the SNAP (food stamp) program and proudly boasts of feeding 40 plus millions of citizens annually. 

That same government includes the Dept. of the Interior which operates the National Park System of which both the government and “We the People” are justly proud. 

Ironically, in all our dozens of national parks there are lots of signs, but none so ubiquitous as “Don’t feed the animals”.  If you ask why, they tell you with great concern it makes the animals dependent and unable to look after themselves.” 

I keep hearing that America has the highest corporate tax rate in the world.  Is that true or not? 

If American companies could get by without paying taxes why do they so often try to move their headquarters overseas to lower their tax burden?  Also, is it not true that the decline in corporate tax payments as a percentage of government revenue occurred primarily as a result of revenue growth provided by the graduated income tax system?  In fact, I believe the government lowered excise taxes specifically to gain support for the new tax amendment.

Your comments on the importance of education are spot on.  Any failure of anyone in the top .1% of wage earners in this country to pay a “fair share” pales in its impact when compared to the failure of individuals to take advantage of the opportunities made available to them and the increasing spiral of opportunity that grows from just completing high school. 

I do not accept the argument that failure to complete high school is caused by poverty.  That argument insults every poor person who stayed and got a diploma.  The reasons for failure to graduate are more complex.

You quote C. Ingraham as writing:

“All my black friends have a bunch of white friends.  And all my white friends have one black friend.” 

That is an interesting way to suggest that integration is a failure and segregation still abounds, especially among those racist whites.  Yet there is the question, “What is a bunch?”  Could eight be a bunch?  Non-Hispanic blacks constitute 12.2% (2010 census) of the US population.  Me thinks Mr. Ingraham may be more about his agenda than facts that prove a point.

This has been fun and I could go on, but let me just finish by thanking you for continuing to bring thought to the world.

Take care,

Ted

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ted,

This is a remarkable piece of work.  You bring up a number of valid points, which I’m sure will stimulate other readers upon reading yours, hopefully to check out some of your references. 

You are quite right about my intentions. 

These are difficult times and there are no simple answers to our societal problems, indeed, to our world problems. 

We are a society like any other times in the history of man only now we are a global society needing the participation of all voices from all perspectives to get a handle on our common destiny. 

Thank you for taking the time to give a well thought out response.

Jim 

The Peripatetic Philosopher offers:

THE WORLD IN DISORDER – 

AN EXCHANGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© September 14, 2014

“You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. in cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine.”

Nick Hanauer, “The Pitchforks Are Coming…For Us Plutocrats” (Special Report: July/August 2014)  

A READER WRITES:

Please explain to your readers that liberals in the United States are not delusional and don’t wish to “take money away” from the rich (to redistribute).  We simply want the uber-rich (all 2- 3,000 families) to pay their fair share… since examination shows they don’t. 

In 1918, US top tax increased to 77% (for over one million dollars) to finance WWI; was reduced to 58% in ’22; to 25% in ’25; to 24% in ’29. 

In ’32, top marginal tax rates to 63% during Great Depression & increased thereafter: 1954- 1951 to 91%, to 92% in ‘52/’53; 91% ’54- ’63; ‘64’s top to 77%  and to 70% 1965- ’81; to 50%, 1982-’86;  for ’87   to 38.5% for individuals;  to 33% 1988-1990; 31%  ’91-’92.  In ’93 39.6 thru 2000. 35% 2003-201?

No wonder we now have inadequate revenue!  Corporations once paid @ 2/3 of all U.S. taxes; NOW, they pay 9%; and many pay zero!  This has a cumulative effect!

Read David Cay Johnston’s “Perfectly Legal” (2005) to see how our tax codes stack the deck. 

Read Nick Hanauer’s op-ed “They’re Coming to Get Us Plutocrats with Pitchforks,” where he (a billionaire) makes the case that TAKING CARE OF PEOPLE (i.e., this country’s middle-class ‘engine’) will enhance our economy. 

The liberal objective isn’t economic equality, just equal opportunity.  Today, someone earning a $60,000 salary pays a larger percentage of his income in taxes than the 400 richest Americans.  And that’s just wrong.

Liberals want to protect worker rights & benefits, aid the less fortunate, seek solutions to society’s problems and try to leave the world a better place for future generations.  That’s a liberal. -  We need more liberals.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Your statistics are accurate as America’s tax code has been a boondoggle from the first with politicians using it to grease the skids to ensure their reelections.  Your references – David Cay Johnson and Nick Hanauer – support your data although I was surprised to see Nobel Laureate for Economics, Paul Krugman, not mentioned. 

There is a breach here between the statistics you offer and the fact that we have yet to find a way to generate capital for business investment and expansion, which translates into employment, without inducing wealth creators to take such risks.  

The insanity of the tax code has been a product of Democrats, Republicans and Independents, Liberals as well as Conservatives who write the codes. 

When it comes to money sense, we have not been an inspiring people.  If you have your doubts, check our history from the beginning.  We throw money at problems hoping it will stick with something approaching solutions.  It seldom does.

The Federal Reserve Board shows economic improvement from 1989 to 2013 has been steady for the top 3 percent, flat for the next 7 percent, and declining for the bottom 90 percent with nearly a 20 percent gap of 3 to 7 percent.  Wealth separates us into the equivalent of concaves.

Psychologist Ed Benner shows nearly a perpendicular curve between wealth and the number of friends on Facebook, whereas beat writer Christopher Ingraham shows that social segregation is still a fact in 2014: “All my black friends have a bunch of white friends.  And all my white friends have one black friend.”  

The Tampa Times columnist Jeff Harrington shows how far middle class workers on the lower rungs are falling behind:

·       The lowest 25 percent making less than $20,000 a year show virtually no improvement. 

·       The next 25 percent making $30,000 but less than $40,000 show a sharp dip to less than $20,000 in 1990, but recovered to normal earnings level but with no improvement. 

·       The next highest 25 percent increased to $40,000 but were unable to rise above that level. 

·       The highest 25 percent rose from $60,000 to about $85,000 in 2000, then leveled off at $90,000 to the present.

Popular myth has the median household income in the US at $75,000.  The Economic Policy Board shows it is $53,890 in 2014.  For most earners, wages aren’t keeping pace with inflation dropping as much as 2.7 to 4.2 percent in actual spendable income.

Meanwhile, there is some encouraging news.  Real and projected spending per Medicare recipient in 2014 dollars show a leveling off and far below those projected over the next ten years.

It may seem this is an open declaration in support of your liberal thesis when clearly it is not.  The key is education for young people to take education seriously and stay in school.

THE PREFERRED ELIXIR, EDUCATION

Society has never had sufficient wealth to carry a population that cannot read or write or think quantitatively proficiently enough to develop the skill base to be employable and self-supportive.

Count on politicians and academics to mouth the pejorative words the disadvantage want to hear about wealth creators, not realizing wealth creation is not a zero sum game but the responsibility of each of us to take care of ourselves and our loved ones.  

Education develops self-acceptance which leads to self-reliance and self-direction.  This spells confidence.  In “Confident Thinking” (2014), education is presented as the complement to formal education, not its replacement. 

We will always have the “uber-riche.”  In the long history of man, the formula has seldom varied, not even in the United States.  The top ten percent controls the majority of the assets in land, water and mineral rights, as well as political clout be the ideology autocratic or democratic across the globe.

BRIEF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

In ancient history, it was the conquerors (Genghis Kahn, Attila the Hun), then emperors (Alexander the Great, Napoleon), followed by the rise of monarchies (Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire, James I of England) and the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church that controlled wealth and power. 

Feudalism flourished into the 16^th century when Martin Luther and John Calvin broke away from the Roman Catholic Church and established Protestantism.  The Protestant work ethic shattered conventional boundaries in power and enterprise giving rise to capitalism.

Fledgling democracies followed ending the Feudal Age and leading to mercantile capitalism.  Into this midst rose the American and French Revolution, then the American Civil War, which spiked the Industrial Revolution. 

Totalitarian states also emerged (German Nazism and Russian Communism) with each societal eruption technological change left the conventional world behind playing catch up to the present day.

Early in the 20^th century, the working middle class came to share in this wealth by organizing into labor unions and suing for better wages and working conditions.  Workers went awry by also giving up control of work for comfort and security.  This shadow now foils their progress. 

The 20^th century was marred by constant conflagration (i.e., WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, etc.) and  led to wide fluctuations in the economy.  Wealth creators profited immensely during these wars swaying the working middle class away from labor unions to greater corporate control with such incentives as wage and entitlement benefits. 

When profits declined, these wealth creators downsized, outsourced work, reengineered operation, sponsored a litany of redundancy exercises or relocated to cheaper labor abroad.  Workers believed themselves powerless to do anything as they had become complacent and counter dependent on the workplace for their total well-being.

Conditioning is a powerful weapon when the mind cannot grasp life beyond its programming.

Contrast this with the fact that over the past sixty plus years or since the end of WWII in 1945, position power in industry and commerce has shifted gradually to knowledge power with workers, not management possessors of this knowledge.  Yet workers still behave as if unskilled laborers, reactive and dependent up on management.  It would be comic if it weren’t so tragic.

The United States now has the best educated workforce in the history of mankind with 80 percent of all workers belonging to this professional class.

The problem is that these professionals remain complacent, dependent and wait for wealth creators to rescue them when they have most of the power. 

It is the other 20 percent, the foot draggers, the high school dropouts, the malcontents, the drug addicts, the social misfits, the young people playing house and having children when they are still children, handicapping themselves to a life of poverty and despair that complicates the problem further. 

These people attempt to make their poor choices everyone else’s problems.  This gets the attention of academics, economists, and social thinkers with little or no attention given to the 80 percent highly qualified professionals who are underutilized and dangling on the vine as if terminally adolescents comparable to mid-20^th century unskilled workers. 

More absurd, few seem to have a proper perspective on the situation as many of these professionals bemoan their status while living at home or on the welfare dockets blaming their woes on everyone but themselves as well. 

Society has not leveraged the 80 percent professional working class to advantage.  Consequently, wealth creators have been allowed to treat this new class of workers as the “Robber Barons” treated unskilled workers in the early 20^th century.   

This astounds immigrants who have come to this country, sought an education sometimes against impossible odds, then took the risks and absorbed the pain to realize successful careers.  They display a passionate belief in America because they have found that through hard work and dedication opportunity finds them.

A PERSONAL ASIDE

Having grown up in a poor white family, my mother made it clear the only way I would go anywhere was with an education, which meant to study hard.  Taking her advice, I finished in the top ten percent of my high school class winning an academic scholarship to university, where I graduated Phi Beta Kappa.  Life has been good for having earned an academic education.  Many others have done equally well by being essentially self-educated with the results being strikingly similar.

Francis Fukuyama writes in the September/October 2014 issue of FOREIGN AFFAIRS (“America in Decay: The Sources of Political Dysfunction”) that our interior secular socioeconomic structure is anachronistic, which translates, our programming is all wrong for the times.  In Meet Your New Best Friend (2015), I write:

“To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.  The same holds true of ourselves.”

Author-philosopher Charles D. Hayes is a totally self-educated man who has written widely on this problem of education, saying “Education is not something you get; education is something you take.”

We are not all as motivated as author Hayes is “to take” an education, and since credentials rule the day, it is pragmatic to get an education simply to earn a job interview.    

Many children are likely to be educated the same or less educated than their parents as parents have drifted into the role of being their children’s “best friend,” when parenting is an adult guidance system into self-dependence and has nothing to do with friendship.

WHERE AMERICA STANDS IN EDUCATION

According the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, of the 23 countries surveyed, the United States is fourth from the bottom with barely 30 percent of US adults having achieved a higher level of education than their parents did.  Even bleaker as education bottom feeders, only 1 in 20 Americans ages 25-34 from parents who did not receive a high school education have graduated from college. 

Compare this to the 20 richest countries in the OECD survey where it is one in four.

The gap between high school and college graduates in annual earnings between 1979 and 2012 was $30,000 after inflation.  This is only likely to widen with time putting more people on the dole, more people criticizing the super rich, whose children attain education levels equal to or exceeding their parents, meaning, wealth creators will remain dominant well into the future.

Badgering the rich for not paying their fair share is academic.  The rich still pay most of the tax revenue collected by the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, DC.  That, too, has always been true. 

Eduardo Porter, OECD statistician writes in The New York Times (September 14, 2014):

Educational attainment of children that is greater than that attained by their parents varies from nearly 60 percent at the top to just over 20 percent at the bottom:

ORDER OF RANKINGS: Russia, Korea, Finland, Belgium, France, Ireland, Poland, Netherlands, Canada, Estonia, Sweden, Australia, Spain, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Slovak Republic, UNITED STATES, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic. 

If this is not disturbing, it is difficult to think what might be so considered.

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