Are We Trainable?

Here is the USA, a mighty military machine trying to make the same square peg fit in the same round hole in Iraq where others have failed- some quite spectacularly- before us. In fact, we have failed ourselves several times in the last 30 years to produce tender feelings of devotion in populations that we insist on beating into submission to our will. In looking at the stupid mistakes we human beings repeat over and over I wonder if the quality of growth of a civilization can't be determined by the speed with which it learns from its mistakes.

I continue to discover new surprises about history that were left out of my school texts. For instance I just learned that at the onset of W.W.I. the US was neutral and fancied that it could serve as peacemaker between the British and the Germans. That was until the British sabotaged the undersea cable serving as the communication line between Germany and the US. Suddenly all European perspectives had to be channeled through London, where they were cleaned up to align with official British dogma before being forwarded to the US. By 1918 Americans, fed on years of British propaganda, harbored a vitriolic hatred of Germans that resulted in the Sedition Act, which imprisoned Americans for uttering a single sentence questioning American participation in the war or not buying enough war bonds to support it. (Recently in Montana, my home, our governor posthumously pardoned 78 such 'criminals', almost 100 years too late. See: http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=1519811)

The world, including many shocked Americans, watches in horror as our government carries out the same programs of silencing our detractors, including secret imprisonment and torture. The Patriot Act is simply a rebirth of the Sedition Act of 1918 . We travel the same road of self-deception for short-term PR at the cost of long-term success. The refusal of our leadership to hear the truth, indeed to listen to dissent of any kind, does not change reality but only postpones its inevitable consequences.

Ours is not a stupid nation. American civilization has learned many valuable lessons: the inhumanity of slavery, the value of a free education, that human rights is a natural resource, etc., etc. We are capable of learning and permanently improving our values and thus our behavior. We are not a lost cause.

I submit that the level to which our culture rises in the eyes of history will hinge on how quickly we learn. Some may say it makes no difference whether we learn nonviolence this century or next, but as can be seen with the stakes of dealing with global warming, learning some lessons may be the difference between whether we are judged by future generations or if there will be any to do the job.