We Are Killing Ourselves

But first, we are killing other animals. The recent news that the last male northern white rhinoceros died in Kenya has spread around the world. Who cares? For most people, the rhino is a freakish zoo animal, interesting but unimportant. After white hunters killed most of the rhinos in Africa and southern Asia, the remaining herds have been decimated by poachers seeking their horns, supposedly useful as medicine. At least 6000 rhinos have been killed in Africa over the past ten years.

Extinction is a natural process – witness the dinosaurs. Scientists say that one to five species die off naturally every year. But the Center for Biological Diversity estimates that we are losing dozens of species every day, thousands of times the natural rate. At that pace, by 2050, a third to a half of all species could be gone.

Our attention is attracted by the extinction of mammals, especially primates most closely related to humans. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global authority on conserving the natural world, estimates that half of the earth’s primate species are at risk of extinction. Of the 5500 known species of mammals, one-fifth are endangered, especially some marine mammals, including whales and porpoises.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has a long name and an important function. It connects the world’s governments to offer advice on the state of biodiversity. Its conference last week brought together scientists from 100 countries who have been studying the decline of biodiversity and what to do about it. Their reports are frightening.

Since Europeans arrived in America, about one-third of plant and animal species in the Western hemisphere have become extinct. Another quarter are at risk of extinction. Elsa Nickel from the German Environmental Ministry said, “Biological diversity is no longer an exotic idea for environmental activists, who want to save a few orangutans in the rain forest.”

The causes are well known: deforestation, water and air pollution, unsustainable consumption of resources, climate change, decline of coral reefs. Here’s another – convenience. Our advanced society conveniently removes the garbage that our wasteful lives produce and sends it out of our sight. Where does it go? A lot ends up in the biggest garbage dump on earth, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Ocean researchers have been aware of a giant floating garbage dump in the Pacific Ocean for a long time. Recently they realized it was much bigger than they had thought – an estimated 87,000 tons of floating debris, covering an area four times the size of California. Half of the mass of human junk in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing nets. Plastics made up about three-quarters of the diet of sea turtles caught near the Patch. “It’s like a ticking time bomb,” said Joost Dubois, a spokesman for the Ocean Cleanup Foundation.

Plastic has been replacing natural materials, which disappear harmlessly into the environment. Fishing nets are increasingly made of plastic because they last longer, which becomes a danger when they are abandoned in the water. More plastic was produced in the last ten years than ever before, about 320 million tons a year. Most of that mass eventually finds its way into landfill or the oceans. Better living through chemistry? Only temporarily.

When I was in graduate school in 1973, a friend and I distracted ourselves from studying by watching the film “Soylent Green”. The melodramatic plot centered on the attempt by a future policeman in 2022, played by Charlton Heston, to solve a murder in New York City, when pollution and global warming have led to food rationing. Surviving several assassination attempts, Heston figures out that the Soylent Green wafers that people are eating are made from human bodies, the only source of protein abundant enough to feed an overpopulated world.

The human race will survive well beyond 2022, but for how long? What will the earth be like 50 years from now, when my children are in their 80s? Despite remarkable advances in science, the earth is much worse off than it was 50 years ago – much more pollution, many more threatened species, disappearing forests and jungles.

Half-hearted efforts at recycling are not enough. Without significant changes in the way we interact with our natural environment, the human future looks frightening. The unwillingness of many in our society to confront the facts of shrinking biodiversity represents cowardice, selfishness, and stupidity. Among 18 countries surveyed by National Geographic, Americans are the most disbelieving about the science of climate change.

We have to change what we eat, how we travel, how we farm, how we consume. That’s especially true for Americans. We stand out in the world for our profligate consumption of resources and our production of garbage. With 5% of the world’s population, we use one quarter of the world’s coal and oil, and we create half of the world’s solid waste.

The only way to figure out what to do is to follow the lead of scientists. They have done their job of warning us that we are ruining our own future. Now we have to stop killing our planet and killing ourselves.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 27, 2018

Who Are The People?

“We Are The People” is a powerful phrase often used to support revolution against tyrannical authority. It may first have been employed by the German Georg Büchner in his 1835 play about the French Revolution, “Danton’s Death”, shouted by a revolutionary citizen. The idea that the people are the ultimate political authority was itself revolutionary in the late 18^th century. Against the inherited power of kings, who claimed sanction from God, revolutionaries in France and America asserted the right of the people to govern itself.

The men who signed our Declaration of Independence acted “by Authority of the good People of these Colonies”.  “We the People”, written in enormous letters, begins our Constitution. Not all people were part of The People. Our Constitution refers to slaves as “other persons” counted as three-fifths of a full person, most Native Americans did not count at all, and women were not mentioned anywhere.

Since then, the argument that the people are the only legitimate authority has spread across the globe, used both to defend democracy and to justify dictatorship. Extremes of right and left claimed to represent the people, but used exclusive definitions of who the people were. The Nazis said they were creating a “Volksgemeinschaft”, a “people’s community”, which only included genetically healthy “Aryans”. All others should be killed. After World War II, Communist China and most Eastern European Communist states called themselves “People’s Republics”, but the only people who counted were Party members with the correct ideology.

When crowds in Leipzig began demonstrating against the East German version of communism in 1989, they adopted the slogan “Wir sind das Volk” to convince the heavily armed police not to shoot at them. Within a week, the number of protesters in Leipzig reached over 100,000. They and tens of thousands of marchers in other East German cities carried banners saying “Wir sind das Volk”. This claim of ultimate sovereignty, backed up by mass demonstrations, brought down Communist governments in Eastern Europe.

This version of “the people” echoes earlier struggles against authoritarian governments, bringing together people from below to fight the powers above. “We are the people” united classes, genders and ethnicities to collectively look up at rulers and attack their legitimacy. The 21^st-century liberal consensus is that unity of all kinds of different people is the correct goal. The people is an expansive and welcoming body in the sense of the verses inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that the people is a fixed and homogeneous category, defined by nationality, biology, and heritage. Those who don’t belong can never belong. The genocidal methods of 19^th-century American governments towards Native Americans, expanded by the Nazis and their allies in Europe, are no longer acceptable. Conservatives these days prefer deportation, which was the Nazis’ favored method in their first few years in power, when hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews were forced out of Germany.

Under the guise of “populism”, conservatives seem to attack “elites” from below, but actually focus on attacking social groups regarded as different from above. In Trump’s America and in many European countries, right-wing political formations of white Christians attack immigrants, those with darker skin, Muslims and sometimes Jews as not belonging to “the people”. In these cases, “we the people” look down on already subordinated groups, blame them for the ills of society, and try to exclude them.

The far right German group Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA, has adopted the slogan “Wir sind das Volk” to support their attacks on Muslims. Their founder, Lutz Bachmann, called immigrants “trash” and “cattle”. The right-wing Alternative for Germany attacks the large Turkish minority. The new conservative German interior minister said that Islam does not belong in Germany.

Closer to home, two women were arrested in Arizona last week after they filmed themselves insulting Islam and stealing items from a mosque. They shouted at a man coming out of the mosque, “We’re coming after you, we the people. That’s right, you guys are on your way out.”

Many Republicans appear to believe that the minority who support them are the only legitimate people. Rick Saccone, candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania, spoke last week about “the other side”, the Democrats: “They have a hatred for our president. And I tell you, many of them have a hatred for our country....They have a hatred for God.”

Saccone lost, but I looked in vain for any Republican politician who rejected Saccone’s comments. No Republican leader has the courage of John McCain, who corrected a supporter who said she couldn’t trust Barack Obama because he was an Arab. McCain said, “No, ma’am.... I want everyone to be respectful ... because that’s the way politics should be conducted in America.” When a man at a Trump rally in 2015 said Muslims were a problem in America and Obama was a Muslim, Trump responded, “Right.”

That’s the way politics are conducted by conservatives in America today. Only we the people can change that.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 20, 2018

Promise and Flaw in Organized Religion

Last year was the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 1517 proclamation of objections to Catholic Church practices. At age 33, Luther, chair of theology at the University of Wittenberg, wrote a scholarly treatise titled “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”, later called his 95 Theses. He sent it to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz and Magdeburg.

Luther’s criticisms were well founded. Representatives of the Pope traveled around selling indulgences, the right to confess all sins on the death bed, thereby giving the buyer complete absolution. Some Christians were not confessing their sins in church, because they could buy this right to confess everything at the end. In Wittenberg, indulgences were advertised as paying for the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, but the funds were used by Archbishop Albrecht to pay debts from purchasing his archbishopric from the Pope. Luther wrote, “Any Christian who is truly repentant has a right to full remission of all penalty and guilt without any letter of indulgence.”

Luther swiftly broadened his attack on the Catholic Church and the Pope as its head. In his pamphlet “To the Christian Nobles of the German Nation” in 1520, he argued that the Church does not need worldly possessions and that a congregation should select its own priest. He later wrote that a Christian achieves salvation by faith alone, without needing a hierarchical church structure, and that the Pope does not have the exclusive right to interpret scripture.

Luther was forced to defend himself before Papal representatives, who demanded that he recant, and at the Diet of Worms, an assembly of many German states in the Holy Roman Empire. When the Pope issued a papal bull threatening to excommunicate him, Luther publicly burned it. He was excommunicated and forced to hide from arrest.

Unlike others who had challenged the Catholic Church and the power of the Pope, Luther masterfully used the new technology of printing to spread his ideas. Courageous and determined, he successfully appealed to common Christians. Communities across northern Europe and, more important, their local rulers adopted his religious reforms, transforming Europe by splitting the Protestant North from the Catholic South.

Luther’s followers in Wittenberg created a community chest administered jointly by town, church, and congregation to feed the hungry, allow poor students to study, and offer credit to poor artisans. Luther believed that everybody should be educated to read the Bible in their native tongue, so primary schools were expanded, including for girls.

At first, Luther appeared to be sympathetic to Jews. He wrote in 1519, “What Jew would consent to enter our ranks when he sees the cruelty and enmity we wreak on them—that in our behavior towards them we less resemble Christians than beasts?”That behavior was publicly exhibited at Luther’s own City Church St. Mary’s of Wittenberg. High on one outside wall was a “Judensau”, a relief depicting Jews suckling at a pig, with words degrading rabbis and Jewish ideas about God. It had decorated the Church for two hundred years.

Luther was a great reformer of Christian religious practice and social thinking. But the religious community he wished to create was welcoming only for those who followed his lead. Luther condemned in the strongest terms anyone who refused to give up their religion for his. He named the Pope the Antichrist. He pronounced the harshest sentence on Jews who remained true to their beliefs. In “On the Jews and Their Lies” in 1543, Luther advised his followers to burn their synagogues, confiscate their valuables, take away their holy books, forbid them from owning houses, and prevent their rabbis from preaching. That year, Luther wrote a pamphlet defending the Wittenberg Judensau as correctly depicting the source of Jewish holy books in the pig’s anus. Good Christians must prevent Jews from living as Jews.

Many organized religions represent communities of exclusivity, where insiders are promised glorious rewards and outsiders suffer unending torment. For centuries after Luther, Protestants and Catholics warred against each other. Christians only stopped killing Jews a half century ago. Muslim Shia and Muslim Sunni kill each other in the Middle East. Despite powerful moral exhortations about non-violence, Buddhists attack Muslims in south Asia. After suffering near extinction in Europe because of their religion, Jews destroyed Palestinian communities in the 1940s.

A highway billboard near our home in Wisconsin says I will go to hell, because I don’t share a particular form of Christian belief. Orthodox Jews have enough power over Israeli politics to enforce religious rules which exclude me and my children.

Religions are the strongest propagators of peaceful messages, but religious communities have killed millions of people who follow other beliefs. The contradictions in Luther’s teachings eventually forced the world’s Lutheran churches to disavow his writings about Jews, but only after the Nazis had put into genocidal practice his written instructions.

Even such disavowals often come with caveats. The official statement of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church about Jews deplores discrimination, but is mainly concerned that Luther’s words could provoke anti-Lutheranism, and ends with the hope that Jews will finally see the light and convert.

Luther was a great and flawed man. Like all human creations, religions can raise us up or bring us pain.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 13, 2018