LECTURE 6: HOW TNC DEALS WITH SPECIFIC ISSUES
By Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind (source)
EDUCATION
For years, conservatives have warned that America's children are not learning to read, and indeed are not reading: the classics of Western literature are now largely unknown to them. The next conservatism will have to confront the results of this dual functional and cultural illiteracy. Specifically, it will have to face the fact that American culture is increasingly post-literate.
Nor is the problem simply a vacuum. The place of reading has been taken by the viewing of images, images presented on electronic screens. The image has displaced the word. An unread Plato is hoist on his own petard: for more and more Americans, reality is defined by flickering shadows on the cave wall.
This development is more profound and far-reaching than most people comprehend. One of the defining characteristics of Western culture has been its painful struggle, waged now for a good 3000 years, to replace the image with the word. That struggle has defined both Judaism and Christianity - Jerusalem - and arguably Athens as well, in the development of philosophy from the ancient cults and their myths.
What took 3000 years to achieve has been lost in 30 years. The consequences for our culture range wide, probably beyond anything we can perceive at present. Some of those consequences are, in my view:
o A people cut off from its past. The West's traditions are
mostly written, contained in its great literature, beginning with the Old and
New Testaments and the works of classical Greeks and Romans. When those written
works go unread, the content of Western culture runs out into history's sands.
If Western culture loses its content, then the West loses its culture, and
becomes . . . what? Probably extinct, something the West's birthrates point to
in any case.
o A post-literate culture will have little ability to think
logically. Reason and logic demand words; images, in contrast, feed emotions. It
should not surprise us that Americans no longer think but rather feel. Again we
find ourselves up against one of the bedrocks of Western culture; logic and
reason have been particularly Western characteristics. As that bedrock crumbles,
what will happen to the structure erected upon it, a structure we call the
Modern Age? Post-literate and post-modern may be cause and effect.
o A people
cut off from its past, largely unable to reason and directed primarily by
images, will be easy to manipulate. In fact, the people will be as easy to
manipulate and control as the images themselves. This is a phenomenon we already
see all around us, from the power of commercial advertising to the use of
television by the cultural Marxists to psychologically condition us. Want to
"normalize" homosexuality? Just run television show after television show where
the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual.
o A people that lives by
the image rather than by the word will easily become entrapped in virtual
realities, something again which we already see, especially among the very
post-literate young. Unfortunately, all virtual realities come from Hell; if
there can be more than one reality, there can be more than one God. On a purely
practical level, all virtual realities eventually collapse; the more powerful
they are, the greater the crash will be. America's crash could be of epic
proportions.
As Paul Weyrich has written in other columns, the next conservatism will have to grapple with some weighty issues, issues rather more difficult than marginal tax rates. The likely fate of a post-literate West is one.
But there is something the next conservatism can do now. It can call on all Americans to follow the old rule that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Turn off the television (or better, like Russell Kirk, throw it off the roof of the house). Unplug the computers, especially the kids' computers. Get out the old books, the books that convey the content of our culture, and start reading them again. It was not all that long ago that we stopped doing so. So far, at least, the books are still available (who knows for how much longer?). The home schoolers, thankfully, are doing just that.
At the heart of our culture lies the Word, the Logos. "In the beginning was the Word . . ." The next conservatism's duty is to conserve precisely that. It is time we recognized the post-literate, image-worshipping culture of the electronic age for the mortal danger that it is.
ENERGY
President George W. Bush was half right and half wrong about oil in his State of the Union speech. "America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world," he said. However, we can't "break this addiction through technology" alone. Two words conservatives should champion were missing from his speech: conservation and efficiency.
Current U.S. energy policy and the President's Advanced Energy Initiative are too modest and overly focused on the goal of increasing domestic production of oil and alternatives to support increasing oil consumption. This is futile and self-defeating because U.S. oil production is in permanent decline and world oil production will follow - perhaps disastrously soon.
American Shell Oil scientist M. King Hubbert identified "peak oil" in the mid-1950s. He discovered oil field production follows a bell curve rising to a maximum capacity, or peak, when about half of the oil is extracted, after which production declines. U.S. oil production peaked in 1971 and has declined every year since. The U.S. has only two percent of world oil reserves. We contribute eight percent of world production. But we consume 25 percent of world oil production. We're pumping our reserves four times faster than the rest of the world. U.S. natural gas production has also peaked. The United States is now the world's largest importer of both oil and natural gas. From importing one-third of the oil we use before the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973, we now import about two-thirds of the oil we use.
Hubbert was right about the U.S. What about the world? Oil production is declining in 33 of the world's 48 largest oil-producing countries. Experts agree global peak oil is inevitable. Many predict it is imminent. Oil prices have not predicted peak production. Neither high oil prices nor technological advances have reversed production declines after peak. Despite periods of high prices and new technologies, world oil discoveries have steadily declined for 40 years.
With U.S. oil production declining, increasing oil consumption will make America more dependent upon oil imports from foreign sources such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Nigeria and Venezuela. Increasing oil consumption will increase competition and potential conflict with other energy consumers, such as China and India. Increasing oil consumption will make us less prepared and capable to overcome the inevitable challenges of global peak oil.
Peak oil will cause a crisis in transportation because there
are no ready liquid fuel substitutes of comparable quality or quantity. We can't
fill gas tanks with coal, wind, solar or nuclear fuel. A February 2005 report
commissioned by the Department of Energy, Peaking of World Oil Production:
Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, concluded that a crash program to
produce liquid fuel alternatives at the maximum feasible rate must start twenty
years before peak to avoid significant supply shortages. Oil prices haven't
promoted those alternatives. In the Wall Street Journal on January 10, 2006,
Marc Sumerlin, formerly Deputy Director of President Bush's National Economic
Council, noted that investment in alternatives to oil was stymied by $20/barrel
futures market prices for oil between 1986 and 2003 and fears of a repeat of the
1998 plunge down to $10/barrel.
$70/barrel oil and $3.50/gallon gas will
seem cheap after global peak oil. In its September 6, 2005 report, Oil
Shockwave, the National Commission on Energy Policy & Securing America's
Future Energy projected that a sustained four percent global shortfall in daily
oil supply would raise oil prices above $160 per barrel. Prices that high would
inflict a ruinous worldwide recession.
Technology and alternatives are important. However,
unless we also use less oil, we won't reduce America's oil imports. Delayed
gratification and self-sufficiency are traditional conservative values. That is
why the next conservatism should champion policy changes to use less, not more
oil through conservation and energy efficiency. Conservatives should recognize
that unless we have a national energy conservation program with the commitment,
breadth and intensity of the Apollo moon mission and the Manhattan Project to
create the atom bomb, our country is unlikely to achieve the goal of replacing
"more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025" and even
less likely to break our oil addiction.
CONSERVATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The next conservatism, like conservatism today, should regard environmentalism warily. Environmentalism is on the verge of becoming an ideology, if it has not done so already. That means environmentalists twist facts to fit their preconceived notions. All ideologies do that, which is why conservatives don't like ideologies.
But conservation is another matter. The words "conservative" and "conservation" come from the same root, conserve. As conservatives, we believe in conserving traditions, morals, and culture, but also clean air and water, farms and countryside, energy (much of which must be imported), and the soil itself, on which we all depend for our food.
Conservatives don't like waste. Reckless, frivolous, unnecessary consumption is not a conservative virtue. Like many conservatives, I grew up in a household where nothing was wasted. We used everything until it was used up, or until we passed it on to other people poorer than ourselves. We seldom bought things we did not need. That is a good way to live, regardless of how much money we have. A society's real strength comes from production, saving and investment, not consumption. Earlier generations of Americans understood this and lived accordingly.
In my opinion, conservation needs to be part of the next conservatism. This will be particularly important as energy becomes more expensive, and as some traditional sources of energy such as oil become relatively scarce.
But there is a larger aspect to conservation, one that ties into a central idea of the next conservatism, the importance of local life. Globalism, which is a dominant idea among the Washington Establishment, preaches bigness. We are supposed to welcome a "world economy" where virtually all our manufactured goods come from overseas, our energy comes from massive, often international networks, our food from huge agribusinesses. The Globalists seldom talk about how vulnerable this leaves us to events in other parts of the world. Nor do they talk about the consequences for the lives of ordinary Americans, who are left both dependent on and in competition with other people all over the world.
In my view, the next conservatism's conservation needs to point away from Globalism and toward a new focus on local life. Here, some new technologies may be helpful. In the future, it may be possible to produce energy locally, from solar or wind power or in-home fuel cells. And even with current technology, there is much we can do to reduce our dependence on big systems by reviving old ways, something conservatives favor. In much of America, we can eat food grown locally and use local products much more than most of us now do. Often, the quality is better, and if the price is somewhat higher, the money is going to our neighbors rather than to some international mega-corporation. As I have said before, the quality of our lives is not determined by how much cheap junk we own.
There are two conservation movements that represent the sort of things I think the next conservatism should support, sustainable agriculture and organic farming. Both attempt to restore and maintain the fertility of the soil itself, as opposed to relying on ever-greater doses of chemicals and genetically engineered crops. The nation's soil is perhaps our most important resource, one that we should feel honor bound to pass on in a healthy condition to the next generation. These two movements, in turn, tie into efforts to promote local foods through farmers' markets and cooperatives and to restore family farming as a viable way of life. Those also make sense from a conservative perspective, because they strengthen local life.
I have suggested previously in this series that "think
locally, act locally" needs to be a principle of the next conservatism, if we
want to steer our country away from Brave New World. Conservation, in turn, is a
logical part of thinking and acting locally, because if we do not conserve our
local land, water and air we degrade our own neighborhood. As conservatives, we
should not fall for environmentalism or any other ideology. But we should
conserve, in the way we live our own lives and relate to the people around us.
The next conservatism, like all real conservatism, is ultimately a way of
life.
LAW AND LAWYERS
That oft-cited standby of lawyer and layman alike, BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY, contains almost three small-point columns defining kinds of torts. Suffice it to quote the first, and basic, definition: “A civil wrong for which a remedy may be obtained, usually in the form of damages; a breach of a duty that the law imposes on everyone in the same relation to one another as those involved in a given transaction.”
In simpler and more pragmatic terminology, that means if one harms another or another’s property and does so negligently or grossly negligently, or sometimes merely when one had a “last clear chance” to avoid the harm, one has committed a tort, and, hence, is a tortfeasor. It isn’t necessary that the tortfeasor concurrently has violated a law (although sometimes he has).
Torts lead to litigation. As Hamlet (and lots of others) said, “Ay, there’s the rub.” As the multibillion dollar fiasco of tort litigation gone wild spreads like an economic and cultural “dumb-down” version of the deadliest Medieval plague, conservatives must lead the charge - and a rather militant charge at that - in attempting reform. Fortunately, if adequately organized, there are millions of Americans who do not think of themselves as conservatives, or often as of any other “label,” who would join the cause.
Hyperbole becomes reality in evaluating the cost in dollars, to the social order and to the culture of the spread of this ubiquitous virus. No measure is easy to quantify. Perhaps the least difficult is the economic. The most recent Tillinghast Survey (March 16, 2006), for example, estimates the gross cost to Americans of torturous damage to have been $ 260 billion in 2004, projected to rise to $ 315 billion in 2007. For irrelevant reasons (relating to Tillinghast’s inclusion of types of costs) the estimate arising from litigation probably is nearer 43%, or $ 112 billion, yet a staggering and unacceptable sum, higher as a GDP percentage than that of any other country.
The cost to the culture and social order, as noted, is the more difficult - indeed, probably impossible - to quantify. It is obvious to those who look about that there is a rather pervasive victimization mentality: If some ill fate befalls me, wholly or mostly not my fault, somebody must pay me - and pay me big time. Never mind that maybe it was nobody’s fault.
We all read about the staggeringly large jury verdicts which jurors return and judges, at times only because required to do so, sustain. Somebody smokes himself into cancer; it’s Big Tobacco’s fault. A baby is born defective; it’s the obstetrician’s fault. Somebody drives recklessly, something mechanical fails in the combination of speed and other recklessness; it’s the manufacturer or the dealer’s fault. A patient acquires an imperceptible staph infection at the hospital; it’s the hospital’s fault. A compulsive or indiscriminate eater eats himself into obesity or illness; it’s the restaurant, drive-in or other merchant’s fault. Somebody takes ill from asbestos exposure before science discovered the risk in asbestos; it’s the fault of the distributor, homebuilder, end-user, whoever. So on. Of course, there may be exceptions but the exceptions are so rare as to be statistically insignificant.
Whether individual actions (that is, plaintiffs suing) or class actions (that is, large numbers joined together by plaintiffs’ lawyers to sue), the claims abound. Billions are paid out by insurance companies (raising premiums for all of us); more billions are handed out by jurors, the so-called “Trial Lawyers” (that is, plaintiffs’ contingency-fee attorneys) not uncommonly raking in more than the plaintiffs. Goods and services cost more; shareholders, the employed and the self-employed all net less income.
Who are these jurors? It’s not “politically correct” to characterize a group of people. Yet in analyzing a group, as distinguished from analyzing individuals, some profiling is essential. Jurors in these civil tort cases must pass investigation by, and usually Q&A (“voir dire”) with, the attorneys trying the case. Plaintiffs’ contingency-fee attorneys by and large are a competent coterie, especially skilled at analyzing, and playing to, jurors. People-skills are vital; many of them are “working psychologists.” The ideal plaintiffs’ tort juror is (1) a sympathetic or charitable individual - “good” guy or gal; (2) susceptible to a skillful emotional pitch; (3) without demanding employment, hence able to sit through days, weeks or months of testimony (often retired or a worker whose employer pays him or gives administrative leave); (4) somewhat low on the assets and income scale - and more particularly, with scant comprehension of the value of huge dollars; (5) inexperienced in business, medicine or whatever the defendant’s activity; and (6) somewhat intelligent but not bright enough to see through to the realities, much less to understand anything sophisticated, technical or otherwise complicated - a person nobody would hire to perform a task related to any profession, skill, technology, business or pursuit involved in the tort case.
When the Framers provided in the Constitution, Article III, § 2, and Amendments VI and VII, for jury-trial rights, they did so in the context that most Colonial and English jurors had been, and would continue to be, responsible citizens of some substance, often landowners - the trite phrase, “one’s peers.” Furthermore, life was simpler. They likewise legislated in the prevailing context that a judge had considerable discretion in speaking to the jury.
The biggest single stumbling block to civil justice is the standard of proof. In a criminal case it’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil case it’s merely a preponderance of the evidence - i.e., the plaintiff “victim” churns up a little more evidence than the defendant. The adjective “punitive” indisputably refers to punishment. Punishment derives from criminal, not civil, conduct. Thus, in effect if not in nomenclature, a tort defendant is convicted as though a criminal yet he often has violated no law, never is entitled to the presumption of innocence and is assessed “punitive” damages as though he were a criminal - and all upon the basis of a mere preponderance of the evidence.
The next biggest stumbling block is excessive damages. The Federal Judiciary, and more particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, have tried to downsize damages but the result is only modestly helpful, often inapplicable - and much of the problem is not the judiciary’s business anyway but that of legislators.
A third, and much lesser, stumbling block is the unrealistic limitation upon a trial judge’s role. In probably every other country, including England (whence derives our jurisprudence), a judge can comment to a jury upon the evidence, sometimes even upon the reliability of a witness, sometimes with no limitation other than the judge’s ultimate instruction that the jurors must make up their own minds. By contrast, the voices - even the gestures and body language - of American judges are curtailed to almost nothingness.
These rectifications of the rampantly reckless tort system must derive from Federal and State legislation and, in some instances, from State constitutional amendment. The next conservatism must seek to return reality to tort litigation. Basic fairness and our economy in an increasingly competitive world demand it.
READING FOR THE NEXT LECTURE
