Consciousness & Social IQ – Page 45 – Public Intelligence Blog

2004/09/182009/12/04

Review: War, Evil, and the End of History

4 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Consciousness & Social IQ, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, History, Philosophy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, War & Face of Battle

Connects 9/11 to Long Era of Imperial Deceit & Predatory Looting,

September 18, 2004

Bernard Henri Levy

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to connect to more recent books.

There are some gems in this book, but it is *not* anywhere near the kind of blindingly brilliant, deeply philosophical work that the publicists would have you believe. He is a talented and very wealthy (inherited wealth) Frenchman of the Jewish faith who could be called the Bill Gates of French philosophy, fwith irst-rate marketing.

The author is clearly a courageous and inquisitive individual, and I would rank him third, after Robert Young Pelton and Robert Kaplan, in the “journalist-philosopher-adventurer” category. He has been to all of these places, he has seen with his own eyes, and he writes thoughtfully, if often tediously, about what he has seen.

The real gem in the book is the connection he makes between 9-11 and our deliberate ignorance of the many wars, genocides, crimes against women and children, torture, corruption, etcetera that we in the West have manifested. He writes with conviction and insight about the “meaningless war” across Africa, South Asia, around the globe, where entire regions have descended into a chaotic hell of kill and be killed, work and die, slavery or death, rape then death. His point, which I like very much, is that history does not end, it recycles, and in 9-11 and the global war on terrorism what we have is a “homecoming” of all these wars to America and its Western allies.

This is not, however, completely original, in the sense that the “Map of World Conflict & Human Rights” that I have been handing out to my adult students (thanks to Berto Jongman in The Netherlands for creating it, and to the European Centre for Conflict Prevention and Goals for Americans Foundation, among others, for funding its creation) ably documents all of this is a single compelling document, and many books in the 490+ that I have reviewed cover all aspects of these “ungovernable regions” in great detail.

The author is half absurd and half correct when he condemns the United Nations for its zealous pursuit of Israel as a racist and terrorist state, while the United Nations largely ignores the many genocides taking place from Russia and China to Indonesia and Brazil and Central America and onwards. He is absurd on the first count, correct on the second.

The book is fully worth four stars, definitely worth purchasing, for its articulation of a European view on “the heart of darkness” as it exists today. I was especially taken with his discussion of Buddhist versus Hindu terrorism and extremism and the use of child soldiers in Sri Lanka, since it makes the point that other religions, not just Islam and Christianity, spawn cycles of terrorism and ethnic violence.

The book concludes on a note worthy of the greatest philosophers, a reflection on the death of memory within Western civilization, the death of *moral* memory. Having just returned from Denver, where I was privileged to observe a two-week Office of Personnel Management course on National Security, a first-class endeavor, I was struck by the recurring theme, across virtually all of the world-class lecturers: “morality matters.” Morality has a tangible value in helping nations, organizations, and individuals “get it right.” The last two pages of the book are the best, and conjure up clear and frightening pictures of billions of dispossessed swarming over the European and US cities, bringing the despair we have ignored to our doorstep. Ignore history, ignore evil, and it will eventually, inevitably, come to your doorstep. We–or perhaps even more sadly, our children and grandchildren–will pay for our moral cowardice and our historical blindness. In these final reflections, the author does demonstrate a brilliance that requires us to attend to his future reflections.

More recent books supportive of this author's insights:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

2004/08/252009/12/04

Review DVD: Gandhi (1982)

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, DVD - Light, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Leadership, Religion & Politics of Religion, Reviews (DVD Only)

Basic Introduction to Achieving World Peace,

August 25, 2004

Ben Kingsley

Edit: The core point below is that clashes of millions of adherents of different religions, i.e. Catholic versus everyone else, Muslim versus Hindu, are not new, and the past does indeed demonstrate that force of arms is an ineffective means–indeed a pathological means that makes it worse–for addressing such schisms. Gandhi, and Gandhi alone, has shown the way with proven success at the level of Nations and Peoples.

9-11 focused some of us, but not enough of us, on the monumental issues of war and peace such as have not occurred since World War II–the Cold War being, as Derek Leebaert documents so well in “The Fifty Year Wound”, a false war, one with enormous costs to all mankind.

I bought this video recently–having seen it many years ago–to refresh my memory on the essence of Gandhi and his proven concept of non-violent resistance. The DVD capped several years of reading in the non-fiction national security arena (see my other 470+ reviews on war and peace), and has proven to be the ultimate primer as well as the ultimate Master's Seminar.

This is the movie to watch if you want to get down to fundamentals; Gandhi's three basic lessons of war and peace as shown so beautifully here are these: 1) the only devils are in our own minds; 2) the separation of Pakistan and India, like the separation of Palestine and Israel, violated the civil order between Muslims and Hindus, and destroyed all that Gandhi had achieved: peaceful coexistence of peoples within a single nation; and 3) in the end, after great pain, truth and love inevitably triumph.

Although I was tempted to fast-forward to the current six-front 100-year war between radicalized Islam and militarized America on the one hand, and between impoverished billions and corporate America on the other, I paused to reflect on the past first. It was the Spanish who first committed genocide against the American Indians, who expelled the Muslims and then the Jews, who sponsored the Inquisition and the Crusades. It was the British who stupidly pitted Muslim against Hindu in their attempts to assert their imperial will–nothing makes them look as stupid as the movie's coverage of how the “Empire” forbade the locals to take salt from their very own sea: the Indian Sea.

Now I fast forward to our current circumstances, with special reference to Jonathan Schell's “Unconquerable World,” perhaps complemented by Clyde Prestowitz' “Rogue Nation” (the US), and Chalmers Johnson “Sorrows of Empire”–and the other 470+ books relevant to war and peace today. Bottom line: boy, have we screwed this up. First off, invading Afghanistan made Al Qaeda stronger, not weaker. Second off, invading Iraq has made America weaker, not stronger, and inflamed the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Africa, the Pacific Rim, and the Muslim populations in the Americas.

We need a Gandhi. I cannot think of any modern leader who is even close, although the current Pope has certainly tried. This movie depicts, in terms stark and relevant, the opposite of 9-11–the clash of mobs driven by ideology or religion, completely oblivious to the core facts that Gandhi tried to teach: non-violence, love, truth, the Golden Rule. All else is evil.

If you have time for just one serious DVD, this is it.

2004/01/252009/12/04

Review: The Parable of the Tribes–The Problem of Power in Social Evolution

5 Star, Civil Society, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Tough Reading, Great Bottom Line, a Classic,

January 25, 2004

Andrew Bard Schmookler

This is tough reading, in part because the publisher's choice of paper and font are not the best. As one who has previously recommended such books as Lionel Tiger's “The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System”, Norman Cousins “The Pathology of Power”, and many other books on the pathologies of treating man as a “good”, of scientific objectivity as “value neutral” and therefore bad, of secrecy as counter-productive to “precautionary principle” decision-making, I immediately recognized this book as an integrative work, possibly supplanting all those other books by bringing the various arguments together in one place.This is indeed a brilliant product by a towering intellect, and it has the bibliography and index that one would expect from a world-class endeavor. I recommend it together with Philip Alott's “The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State”, Stewart Brand's “Clock of the Long Now”, and John Lewis Gaddis “The Landscape of History”.

The author's bottom line: not only must we come to grips with how power is managed in every nation and organization, but also we must manage at the *global* level if we are to succeed in optimizing fulfillment at the *individual* level.

2003/11/302009/12/04

Review: The Tao of Democracy–Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All

6 Star Top 10%, Civil Society, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Utterly Sensational–Basic Book for Humanity,

November 30, 2003

Tom Atlee

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links and comment.

New comment: Tom Atlee opened a door for me, and because of him I have joined the co-intelligence movement and will be publishing an edited work, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, both free in PDF form at OSS.Net/CIB, and on Amazon from mid-February.

I see so many things starting to come together around the world and through books. The Internet has opened the door for a cross-fertilization of knowledge and emotion and concern across all boundaries such as the world has never seen before, and it has made possible a new form of structured collective intelligence such as H.G. Wells (World Brain (Adamantine Classics for the 21st Century)), Howard Bloom (Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century), Pierre Levy (Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace), Willis Harman (Global Mind Change: The New Age Revolution in the Way We Think), and I (The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption), could never have imagined.

This book is better than all of ours, for the simple reason that it speaks directly to the possibilities of deliberative democracy through citizen study circles and wisdom councils.

The book is also helpful as a pointer to a number of web sites, all of them very immature at this point, but also emergent in a most constructive way–web sites focused on public issues, public agendas, new forms of democratic organization, and so on.

Still lacking–and I plan to encourage special organizations such as the Center for American Progress to implement something like this–is a central hub where a citizen can go, type in their zip code, and immediately be in touch with the following (as illustrated on page 133 of New Craft):

1) a weekly report on the state of any issue (disease, water, security, whatever);

2) distance learning on that issue;

3) an expert forum on that issue;

4) a virtual library on that issue including links to the deep web substance on that issue, not just to home pages of sponsoring organizations;

5) a global calendar of all events scheduled on that issue, including legislation and conferences or hearings;

6) a rolodex or who's who at every level for that issue;

7) a virtual budget showing what is being spent on that issue at every level; and

8) an active map showing the status of that issue in time and space terms, with links to people, documents, etcetera.

I cannot say enough good things about this book. If the authors cited above have been coming at the same challenge from a “top down” perspective, then Tom Atlee, the author of this book, gets credit for defining a “bottom up” approach that is sensible and implementable. This book focuses on what comes next, after everyone gets tired of just “meeting up” or “just blogging.” This book is about collective intelligence for the common good, and it is a very fine book.

Five other books (all I am allowed to link):
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World

2003/10/282009/12/04

Review: Dude, Where’s My Country?

4 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics

Great Detail, Lacks Index,

October 28, 2003

Michael Moore

Although there is some repetition from “Stupid White Men” and there is a clearly a hot publishing trend in pushing out “liberal left outrage” books, the level of detail in this book on specific things that have gone wrong and specific lies and misleading communications from the Bush Administration make this an extraordinary reference work. Michael Moore has done the Democratic's political research for them.Unfortunately, the book suffers from no index. Had the publisher taken one man-week to do a decent index of specific topics and statements that the author has superbly researched and foot-notes, this book could have moved a Nation–as it stands, it will merely incite the already upset.

Do buy the book–the details are wonderful and every American needs to understand the degree to which most public statments and most public reports about the Administration's policies are outright deceptions.

2003/10/282009/12/04

Review: The Health of Nations–Society and Law beyond the State

6 Star Top 10%, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Government), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, History, Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Public Administration, Secession & Nullification, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

One of a Handful of Revolutionary Books,

October 28, 2003

Philip Allott

Edit of21 Dec 07 to add links and reassert importance of this work.

Of the 1000+ books I have reviewed on Amazon, this is one of a handful that can be considered truly revolutionary. Three others that come instantly to mind are those by Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life.

This book is not an easy read. The author, a Professor of Law in the University of Cambridge, wrote an earlier work, Eunomia: New Order for a New World, that has remained similar obscure, and that is a pity, for what I see here is a truly brilliant mind able to suggest that the Congress of Vienna, the current law of nations, and the de-humanization of state to state relations, isolating the internal affairs and inhumanities of state from global public morality and indignation, are the greatest travesty in human history.

The author joins William Greider in suggesting that the state as a corporate personality is as immoral (and irrational in terms of natural law) as is the corporate personality that allows corporations to treat humans as “goods.” In this book the author sets out to do nothing less than logically overturn centuries of absolutist amoral power institutionalized by elites in the form of state governments with sovereign rights divorced from and with eminent domain over their subjects (vice citizens), and to propose a new form of globalized human society that restores the human aspect to relations among peoples and among nations of peoples.

This is a book that requires patience. It must be slowly and methodically absorbed. The footnotes are quite extraordinary, as is the summative and explicatory survey of many different literatures over many different historical periods.

The author is critical of universities for failing to develop the public mind, and offers a lovely exposition of how sanity, insanity, and public consciousness are all subject to the mythology of capitalism and the manipulation of the elites–in this he would find fellow travelers (smile) in Chomsky and Vidal. He concludes that diplomacy (and statecraft) as an articulation of the public mind and public interest have *failed*, and looks instead to some sort of social re-ordering from the bottom up.

This book, apart from offering an enlightened vision of the law as a living thing able to encapsulate changes morality and changing interests among parties, does nothing less than reconceptualize international relations. This author is to the law of nations what Vaclav Havel was to communism.

He touches on a point Henry Kissinger makes in the last of his books I reviewed (Does America Need a Foreign Policy? : Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century), and specifically that “The risk now facing humanity is the globalizing of the all-powerful, all-consuming social systems, without the moral, legal, political and cultural aspirations and constraints, such as they are, which moderate social action at the national level.” The world, in essence, has become much too complex and much too volatile and much too dangerous for archaic state-level forms of mandarin governance.

In the middle of the book, the author's review of how Germany previously collapsed into a patchwork of insignificant nations sounds all too much like the United States of America, where citizenship is losing its value, tyrannical minorities are in isolation from one another (and from reality), and the sense of national identity is too easily captured by a handful of neo-conservatives (modern Nazis). Interestingly, as with Havel, he notes the importance of art and culture as a means of synthesizing national identity, and would probably agree with E.O. Wilson (“Consilience”) as to the humanities being vital to the context and conduct of the sciences. His list of national “diseases” is both disturbing and timely.

He joins Jefferson and the founding fathers in focusing on the health and happiness of the people as the ultimate organizing principle (some would translate “happiness” as “fulfillment”, a more accomplished and less frivolous objective).

On page 137 he is quite clear in suggesting that capitalism as it is practiced today, is nothing less than a form of totalitarianism, and he goes on to say on page 139 that social evil is the greatest challenge facing humanity today. Instead of socializing individuals into the reduced status of “goods” we should be socializing the state into a representative and general democracy by rehumanizing humanity and rehumanizing the organizations that are supposed to provide collective voice to the people.

In following pages the author provides a brilliant catalog of the ills of democracy, reconceptualizes democracy as being based on the rule of law (for all) rather than on who rules (for the benefit of the few), and he explicitly condemns the largely unaccountable forms of concentrated power (by which we take to mean the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and other devices for perpetuating immoral capitalism irrespective of local needs).

The full force of the author's thinking comes into full stride in the concluding portions of the book as he integrates new concepts of international law, history, social relations, and new forms of intergovernmental relations truly representative of the species as a whole and the people as a moral force. He laments the manner in which an extraordinarily global elite has been able to “separate” people from morality and from one another, leading to a common acceptance of five intolerable things: 1) unequal social development; 2) war and armaments; 3) governmental oppression; 4) physical degradation; and 5) spiritual degradation.

The author concludes by proposing a new view of the human world, and his remarks must be read in the original. He ends, as do Will and Ariel Durant in their summative “The Lessons of History,” by noting that the necessary revolution is that which must take place in our minds, not on the streets.”

This is an utterly brilliant book that has been badly marketed and is grossly under-appreciated, even by the so-called intelligencia. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to cast off their slave clothes, stop being a drone, and live free.

More recent books that fully validate this superb work, with reviews:
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Underminded Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions – and What to Do About It
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

2003/09/132009/12/04

Review: The Soul of Capitalism–Opening Paths to a Moral Economy

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Economics, Philosophy

Parts the Seas, Restores Hope & Morality to the American Way,

September 13, 2003

William Greider

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links.

The author has written a book that outlines an implementable vision worthy of the Nobel Prize.

If you buy just one book this year, if you read just one book prior to voting in the primary and general elections of any country, this is the book. It combines common sense, a deep understanding of the flaws of a capitalist system that has been hijacked by unethical elites, and an extraordinary diversity of interviews and sources that I found compellingly sensible and straight-forward.

Politically and economically, this book offers the citizen-voter-consumer-stockholder an objective and balanced account of exactly what is wrong with the existing American way of capitalism (both at home and abroad), and how we might, over time, fix it.

Most importantly, the author destroys all of the myths and lies about the rising American standard of living, and demonstates that when one revises the Gross Domestic Product calculations to substract rather than add the negative products such as prisons and health care stemming from unsafe products and practices, the over-all national economic indicators have been steadily declining for over thirty years.

The author is brilliant–truly brilliant–in studying the work of others and putting together a case for redefining capitalism and the financial accounting for capitalism to include social costs and benefits as part of the evaluative calculus. He excells at understanding and explaining the benefits to be had by introducing long-term sustainability, worker-friendly labor and management cultures, and balanced work force composition (save the middle class) and compensation (end the looting of America and its pension funds by an out of control corporate elite).

In discussing the soul of capitalism, the author is in fact discussing America's soul. His book is not only a handbook for grassroots and collective bargaining actions by all communities and assocations, it is a reference point by which Americans specifically, but all national in all nations, should be judging their political and economic and social leaders. People *can* take back the power, but first they must understand that the existing economic situation is so unstable and unhealthy that it virtually guarantees life on Earth will end within the next 100 years.

Although the book clearly mandates a reordering of both the American economic and the American political systems, and the author addresses those, he placed the bulk of his emphasis at the grass-roots level, and discusses how specific organizations and communities across America are “by-passing Washington” and establishing revolutionary new covenants for community-based, labor-friendly, sustainable economics.

The book as a whole draws a clear distinction between what one might call Bush Economics (loot the commonwealth, enrich a very tiny elite that already has most of the wealth) and Dean Economics (recover the $500 billion a year in unwarranted corporate subsidies and financial fraud, restore the social side of the capitalist value system, share the wealth, sustain the environment).

The author is a man of faith. Throughout the book, but especially when discussing the Social Gospel movement and reform theologians with close ties to extreme suffering in communities that have lost everything, he can inspire tears of both sadness at what we have done to ourselves, and joy at the possibilities for the future if we the people take back the power.

At every turn in the book one reads about the connection between capitalism and democracy–between corrupt capitalism and the falseness and injustice of American democracy and foreign policy (see our reviews of Paul Krugman's “The Great Unraveling”, Jonathan Schell, “The Unconquerable World”, and Mark Hertsgaard, “The Eagle's Shadow”)–and between moral capitalism and democracy restored.

Drawing on the work of David Ellerman, William Greider discusses the master-servant relationship between corporate employers and human employees, and concludes, as does Ellerman, that all of the injustices of capitalism are based on a legalized fraud. “The ‘fraud' is the economic pretense that people can be treated as things, as commodities or mahcines, as lifeless property that lacks the qualities inseparable from the human self, the person's active deliberation and choices, the personal accountability for one's actions.”

Three additional notes (this review barely scratches the surface and cannot do justice to the wealth of knowledge the author is communicating in a very effective manner):

1) If the labor unions come together to use their pension funds as sledge hammers, they can do a great deal of good in both reforming Wall Street and nurturing labor-friendly and environmental-friendly corporate behavior.

2) The retired population in America represents an untapped national asset–a wise President would find ways to use this virtually unlimited pool of social and functional talent to revitalize communities, schools, families, businesses, and non-profit endeavors.

3) Both the corporate governance model and the enforcement model are so severely flawed that they must be over-turned. Corporations should not have legal personalities that eliminate accountability for the individuals managing them, and the enforcement process needs to be turned on its head, focusing on incentives for higher social performance rather than punishments for the occasionally prosecuted rogue corporation.

In relation to foreign economic relations, the author provides a superb complementary reading to Clyde Prestowitz's book, “Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.” As he puts it so nicely, in today's world walls do not work and there is no place for corporations to hide once the anger of the people is aroused. America must not only clean its own house, but in so doing, in restoring the morality of capitalism and the realiy of democracy, America will again be a land of ideals instead of hypocrisy, a land of liberty instead of looting, a land that inspires the world instead of corrupting it.

America, and the world, are at a turning point. I pray that no fewer than 50 million Americans will read this book, and I urge every faithful Amazon customer to buy 5 copies of this book and give them out as part of re-engaging every adult in the vital process of restoring democracy and restoring morality to capitalism.