What is the Value of our Humanity?

Posted on | November 25, 2024 | 4 Comments

Mike Magee

The image of William Westmoreland, speaking direct to the camera in the 1974 documentary “Hearts and Minds”, is stark and unapologetic. He addresses the interviewer’s question about extensive loss of civilian lives during the Vietnam War this way: “Well, the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as the Westerner. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.”

Thinking of him and those years again, which in many ways I’d sooner forget, and realizing that to some extent, we have managed to repeat our mistakes, and embrace the same types of biases, well, you can understand why I sighed a bit for the human race last evening.

And yet, out of the same era, from another clearly morally compromised President, Richard M. Nixon, came the historic 1970 Clean Air Act. It passed the Senate 73-0, before gaining the President’s signature, and created the Cabinet level Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that, if some had their way, would  be on the chopping block come January 20th.

And yet, history has shown that clean air and water are pretty popular on Main Street and in the halls of Congress. In 1990, another Republican president, George H.W.  Bush, signed legislation that further strengthened the law after 89 senators, including Mitch McConnell supported the changes. Of this action, the then new incoming Majority Leader, who later decried actions of the EPA as attempts to destroy “Big Coal”, stated, “I had to choose between cleaner air and the status quo. I chose cleaner air.” President Bush’s action allowed the EPA to first begin to measure levels of ozone and mercury in our air.

The EPA has been up (Obama and Biden) and down (Trump/2016) since then. It drew a 28 page chapter in the Project 2025 playbook. Trump’s 2016 director of the EPA, Mandy Gunaswkara (originally a staffer on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under the late Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe) says she’s good to go again. As she put it, “The biggest difference is we have a plan from Day One, we’re going to start implementing it, and we won’t be as susceptible to process problems that really sunk a couple of those final regulatory proposals and actions we took at the tail end of the administration.”

Heritage Foundation’s Trustee, Kevin D. Roberts, is all in. As he recently wrote, “…economic freedom is not something Americans should apologize for, but harness, spur, and give free rein—for our own sake, and everyone else’s, too.”  Their opinions on governmental guardrails and regulation are similarly strong, but in reverse. “America is over regulated. Every facet of daily life, from what cars we drive to what food we eat is subject to government’s regulatory reach.”

According to the Heritage Foundation, AI has arrived in the nick of time. To listen in on their planning, there is still time to register for the December 4, 2024 conference, “Digital Tools for Modernizing the Federal Permitting Process.” As they describe it, “The report tackles the obstacles created by the lack of transparency in the federal permitting process which needlessly increases the risk to investors while obscuring accountability in the democratic process.”

The Pew Research Center covered the same territory a few years back.  Alexander Cho, a digital media anthropologist, was not surprised by the Heritage Foundations current focus on AI.  He says that “‘digital’ acts as a magnifier, accelerator and exacerbator of historical conduits of power that may have not been as obvious to folks before.” What we are experiencing in the wake of this election cycle are “social and civic conversations that are not new but that have been catalyzed through digital media.”

Chair of Environmental Studies and Science at Pace University, Melanie DuPuis, on the same Pew centered platform, recalled David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglas, and left open the possibility of a painfully long policy winter. In her words, technology back then was an accelerator as well. “Of course, it was technology that made Douglass’s words visible to a civic public: newspaper and, interestingly, train travel…I don’t think he would have guessed that the darkness would continue so long. I think American darkness will continue but that civil society will eventually reemerge, as it has in democratic countries over the last two centuries.”

Another participant added this, “Individuals will have to reevaluate their lives and their prospects. Whether the responses to change are successful or not depends on multiple factors, such as the current sophistication of societies, the perceived place of a shared morality and the level of education and awareness. The risk is the emergence of a disposed and disenchanted digital ‘proletariat’ whose response to change will be violent rather than reasoned.”

Others predict a backlash. One said, “The reign of Trump and other nay-sayers will lead to a countermovement that will bring about sweeping changes in the digital world. We will see a privacy set of laws similar to Europe. We’ll see the breakup of monopolies like Google that will generate new innovations.”

Where’s the common ground? All agree the debate has been engaged, and AI assisted information technology will likely fan the flames. What remains to be determined is what sprigs of new life will emerge from these ashes. We shall see what is the value of our humanity.

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