The Third Meltdown

Elderly care home residents died after suffering 'severe neglect'

It's not a crime, its a matter for a quango: the Nursing and Midwifery Council

Verdicts of natural causes were recorded in all five deaths, but the report concluded they died from causes "considered to be consistent with the effects of severe neglect". Health and social care staff who went into Parkside in July 2009 reported "grave concerns" and the remaining residents were removed.

The home's registration was later cancelled by the CQC and yesterday the watchdog said seven members of staff and the owner of the home had been referred to the Nursing and Midwifery Council ...

Guardian  06 Oct 2010    No such thing as society    

C.I.A. Steps Up Drone Attacks on Taliban in Pakistan

Can you believe that? Pakistan is taking troops off the 'war on terror' to help flood victims?!

As part of its covert war in the region, the C.I.A. has launched 20 attacks with armed drone aircraft thus far in September, the most ever during a single month, and more than twice the number in a typical month.

This expanded air campaign comes as top officials are racing to stem the rise of American casualties before the Obama administration’s comprehensive review of its Afghanistan strategy set for December.

American and European officials are also evaluating reports of possible terrorist plots in the West from militants based in Pakistan.

The strikes also reflect mounting frustration both in Afghanistan and the United States that Pakistan’s government has not been aggressive enough in dislodging militants from their bases in the country’s western mountains.

In particular, the officials said, the Americans believe the Pakistanis are unlikely to launch military operations inside North Waziristan, a haven for Taliban and Qaeda operatives that has long been used as a base for attacks against troops in Afghanistan.

Some Pakistani troops have also been diverted from counterinsurgency missions to help provide relief to victims of the country’s massive flooding ...

NYT  28 Sept 2010    Police State Britain    War on Terror

US Army Apologizes for Horrific Photos

Pakistan drone attacks kill nine

The first point to note about this definition of ethics, is the use of old-fashioned terms like "good", and "right conduct", but when it goes on to talk about "the life worth living or life that is satisfying" it opens the door to a system of ethics that veers towards hedonism.

Definitions of hedonism use words like "pleasure" and "happiness" which don't necessarily come along with phrases like "right conduct", which also carry the implication that my behaviour might impact negatively on your life, and yours on mine.

Kant's Categorical Imperative is helpful in focussing on the real issue here:

The first formulation:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

The second formulation:

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means"

Kant goes on to a proposition most normal people recognise as a worthy aspiration:

The ethic of reciprocity or "The Golden Rule" is a fundamental moral principle which simply means "treat others as you would like to be treated."

It is arguably the most essential basis for the modern concept of human rights.

Principal philosophers and religious figures have stated it in different ways.

Wikipedia

With relevance to the present site, this page of Wikipedia also quotes a perversion of the Goldern Rule:

The Golden Rule of Economics

"He that has the gold, makes the rules"

Lyndon Foreman

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber described two ways of treating other people which are highly relevant when considering the ethics of neoliberalism:

Ich-Du

Ich-Du ("I-Thou" or "I-You") is a relationship that stresses the mutual, holistic existence of two beings.

It is a concrete encounter, because these beings meet one another in their authentic existence, without any qualification or objectification of one another.

Ich-Es

The Ich-Es ("I-It") relationship is nearly the opposite of Ich-Du. Whereas in Ich-Du the two beings encounter one another, in an Ich-Es relationship the beings do not actually meet. ...

In the Ich-Es relationship, an individual treats other things, people, etc., as objects to be used and experienced.

Essentially, this form of objectivity relates to the world in terms of the self - how an object can serve the individual’s interest.

Buber argued that human life consists of an oscillation between Ich-Du and Ich-Es, and that in fact Ich-Du experiences are rather few and far between.

In diagnosing the various perceived ills of modernity (e.g. isolation, dehumanization, etc.), Buber believed that the expansion of a purely analytic, material view of existence was at heart an advocation of Ich-Es relations - even between human beings.

Buber argued that this paradigm devalued not only existents, but the meaning of all existence.

The 'objectification' of others has, like conflict, been with us from Day One.

It became articulate, formalised, intellectualised, by the Reformation, and Cartesian "Dualism".

We humans are separate from nature, I am separate from you, the mind is separate from the body.

We can subjugate nature, I can subjugate you.

Relationships are degraded from Martin Buber's "Ich - du" ["I - Thou"] to "Ich - es" ["I - it"].

You become "it": you are stripped of your personality, your humanity.

You are 'over there' - to be exploited, used, and discarded.

The planet becomes "it": a 'thing' to be exploited, used, and - oops - we can't discard it can we?!

Sounds familiar?

It's the modus operandi of Anglo-US_Corporate_Capital.

It's the modus operandi of the 'celebrity' culture. Who's dating who, who's splitting from who, who's cheating on who? (Dystopic role models to envy, emulate and despise.)

It's the modus operandi of the TV reality show in which contestants are set up like gladiators in some digital coliseum, and expected to tear each other to shreds.

It's the paradigm of our relationship with "Gaia" - the only home we've got.

"I - it" relationships are easy to trash; it's what we do best:

One day in January 2005, an elderly couple was driving down a road in Mosul, Iraq, when without realizing it they passed through a makeshift US military checkpoint.

The checkpoint, recalled a sergeant who came upon the scene, was "very poorly marked." Yet, he said, the soldiers "got spooked" and opened fire.

The bodies of the couple sat in the car for three days, the sergeant said, "while we drove by them day after day."

That incident was no Haditha or Abu Ghraib. It was a fairly typical day for Iraqis under US occupation. ...

The Nation 11 July 2007

The question is: Why are some people's 'mental circles' virtually non-existent - like Hitler's - or enlarged, like Martin Luther King's?

• The individual knifed, or shot, for reasons of criminality;
• the workers thrown on the scrapheap because Chinese labour is cheaper;
• the elderly woman who is a victim of her "carer's" cruelty;
• the child bullied to death because he's "a bit simple";
• the groups ejected from their homelands - as in Darfur - or massacred - as in Rwanda - in struggles for power and resources;
• the list of the victims goes on and on ...

All are outside the mental circle of those who have power over them. That mental circle which - Steven Pinker makes clear - is part of our evolutionary inheritance, along with belief systems which reinforce, restrict - and justify - a lack of empathy, an absence of concern for others.

We have arrived at the bedrock of humanity's problem.

Recent reports have highlighted:

• The plight of Child Slaves trafficked into the UK;
• The plight of a woman dying of cancer, but still deported: IND
• The plight of women in Afghanistan;
• The problem facing disabled people caught up in closures at Remploy;
• The plight of refugees from Darfur;
• The plight of poor families paying a 'poverty premium';
• The plight of victims of the ongoing war in the Congo.

Finally, and not currently 'on the radar', is the continuing plight of the victims of the Bhopal explosion which took place 23 years ago.

According to who we are, and where we are, some of these reports may be outside our 'mental circle', but they all involve suffering, and the extent to which that suffering can be ameliorated will depend on the 'mental circle' of others.

The case of Afghan widows is - to me - the most problematic, since it involves deep-seated cultural and 'religious' beliefs, but does not seem to involve the 'Hobbesian' motivations behind, say, Darfur and the Congo, or the greed involved in globalisation - Bhopal/Congo - or the 'Standortkonkurrenz' involved in the cases of Remploy, and the poor paying the 'poverty premium'.

Basically, the C4 film showed widows begging on the streets who were outside the 'mental circle' of the men in their own, er, society - I use the word at its loosest - who looked on in contempt, and who could not understand why women who they clearly despised were being filmed.

Greed really has become a part of America’s value system. Get as much as you can, while you can, and don’t worry about the other guy.

Corporate greed often exploits the poor for greater profits.

Political greed makes promises never meant to be kept in order to achieve position.

Personal greed sets us free from a sense of responsibility to the community, and establishes love of self as the greatest commandment.

Joe Thorn.net

Greed: An Online Essay

International Finance: Is greed good?

City bonuses hit record high with £14bn payout

Footsie firms pay directors an average of £1.2m each

How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves

Objectivism holds that there is mind-independent reality; that individual persons are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that human beings gain objective knowledge from perception by measurement, and form valid concepts by measurement omission; that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or "rational self-interest"; that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure, consensual laissez-faire capitalism; and that the role of art in human life is to transform abstract knowledge, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that one can comprehend and respond to with the whole of one's consciousness.

Objectivist ethics

Hobbes ... analysis [writes Steven Pinker] is more subtle, and perhaps more tragic, for he showed how the dynamics of violence fall out of interactions among rational and self-interested agents ...

"So that in the nature of man we find three principle causes of quarrel.

First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.

The first, maketh men invade for gain; the second for safety; and the third, for reputation.

The first use of violence, to make themselves master of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle;

the second, to defend them;

the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other signof undervalue, or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name."

The Blank Slate, Page 318