roundtable: Revolution and Morality

roundtable: Revolution and Morality

Revolution and Morality

Vigdor Schreibman - FINS (fins@access.digex.net)
Fri, 5 May 1995 19:28:04 -0400 (EDT) 

Date: Fri, 5 May 1995 19:28:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: Vigdor Schreibman - FINS <fins@access.digex.net>
To: Vigdor Schreibman - FINS <fins@access.digex.net>
Subject: Revolution and Morality
Message-Id: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950505192543.19380D-100000@access5.digex.net>


----------------Original Message Posted in Multiple Lists----------------- 
------------------------Republication Authorized-------------------------- 
  
FINS: Communicating the Emerging Philosophy of The Information Age       
FEDERAL INFORMATION NEWS SYNDICATE                    
Vol III, Issue No. 9 (119 lines)                                May 8, 1995
    
     
                  READ THIS ISSUE OF FINS TO CONSIDER:      
                                                             
                *   Growing danger of superfluous masses of people 
                                          
                *   Reforming the moral structure of free enterprise
    
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CLOSING THE "VALUES-GAP": 
Revolution and Morality
By Vigdor Schreibman 

	As the old way becomes obsolete and the new way is yet incomplete,
out of the current wave of technological revolution many souls are getting
left behind. And people are growing even more alienated from each other
and our institutions than resulted during all prior history from the
traditional structures of narrow sectoral development.  We have found the
path to technological change and innovation not merely of isolated ideas
and human relations, affecting odd lots, towns and cities.  Also under
attack is the entire man made basis of human thought and action, and the
sources of power impacting upon all our institutions and the biosphere of
planet Earth. 

	So what's in store for a civilization that would leap into the
future willy-nilly, guided not by careful collective search for a
desirable human existence but by corporate centers of power and "zealous
one-eyed prophets" bent on serving their own material self-interests at
everyone else's expense? This process renders superfluous the masses of
the people by forsaking, without their explicit consent, the blueprint for
existence that is deeply nested in the cognitive structure of their minds. 
The outcome will most likely lead to a catastrophe.  Individuals "cannot
live sanely," without a subjectively satisfactory frame of orientation, a
wise psychologist once warned [Fromm, 1955]. Where there is life without
shared spiritual ideals or firm social structure, the need of all human
beings for some frame of reference--regardless of whether it is true or
false--becomes desperate. 

	In the "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), Hanna Arendt observed: 
     The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that
     today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the
     increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous
     if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms.... 
     Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian
     regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up
     whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or
     economic misery in a manner worthy of man.  

	Out of the underclass, rendered superfluous by the breakdown of
families and urban disintegration, America is propagating a new
counter-culture devoid of respect for human life, emulating the instinct
of a natural killer, deliberate, vicious, bereft of social consciousness. 
We're talking about children, of course: murderers, rapists, robbers, and
assailants; the ones who account for the fastest growing segment of
arrests for violent crime in America, according to the US Department of
Justice [Fins-PaN-041]. 

	Moreover, this is only one segment of the violent images that
pervade the existence of the American people.  The attempted assassination
of Ronald Reagan, the assassination of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy,
Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X, pervasive drug abuse and drug
related violent crime raging beyond the control of civil authorities,
images of the god-father, hit men, and serial killers; urban terrorists,
over-the-counter terror, wilding gangs, sky jackers, airline bombers, the
Unabomer, right-wing hate radio, and the Oklahoma City bombing (dubbed the
"OKBomb" case by the FBI), continuously assail our perception of reality. 

	James Q. Wilson, acclaimed editor of Crime and Public Policy,
writes: "There are only two restraints on behavior--morality, enforced by
individual conscience, or social rebuke, and law enforced by the police
and the courts. If society is to maintain a behavioral equilibrium, any
decline in the former must be matched by a rise in the later (or vice
versa)."  However, Wilson warns, "the enlarged spirit of freedom and the
heightened suspicion of the state have made it difficult or impossible to
use the criminal justice system to achieve what custom and morality once
produced" [Commentary, Sept 1994]. 

	In short, a mature morality is the only effective path to social
peace.  Nevertheless, the old self-interest that has dominated the
American free enterprise system since the beginning of the industrial
revolution has all but doomed morality [Fins-PaN-17].  That pattern is
exacerbated by the destructive propensity of the technological
civilization, and the advent of large scale systems change (e.g., the
information revolution) that virtually guarantee, experience shows, the
most despicable outcomes [Warfield, 1990]. 

	Development of a global information infrastructure that will
likely transform the world civilization, according to prevailing wisdom,
could also establish a setting for individual and social purposes,
organizational values and instrumental systems that will guide morality. 
All hope for humanity could be smothered if this development is governed
by a new Robber Baron era, lacking sound balance with society and a life
sustaining Earth, as proposed by legislation introduced in the US Congress
[S. 652; H.R. 1555].  While the initial proposals are alarming, the
ultimate results are not yet in.  Indeed, serious opposition to those
proposals has been asserted by the Clinton administration.  Moreover, last
week reconsideration began by the Republican leadership in the US Senate
Subcommittee on Antitrust, Business Rights, and Competition, raising
serious questions about the viability of those bills. 

	A challenge is under way.  But to end the cycle of violence and
sustain social peace, Americans must reform the moral structure of free
enterprise. 

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