Michael Goldeen: To tackle today’s problems, see yesterday’s causes

If the root causes for today’s problems, a stagnant economy, divergent incomes, a vanishing middle class, campaign finance, a deteriorating environment, war in the Middle East, terrorism and general global unrest, to name a few, lay in a forgotten past, then we would be at their mercy. Fortunately this is not so, but to address today’s problems with hope for any degree of success demands we tackle underlying dislocations and misconceptions.

In the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, the House of Representatives limited its size to 435 members. When the House met in 1789 it had 65 members, one for every 60,000 inhabitants (including slaves as three-fifths of a person), according to a 2011 New York Times opinion piece. In 1913 about the time of this legislation each member represented roughly 200,000 citizens, a ratio that today would mean a House with 1,500 members, the Times said. Today the average House member speaks for about 700,000 Americans. Nothing that anyone does to fix “campaign finance” will have any effect on the distorting influence of money brought about by this little piece of mischief.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born Dec. 28, 1856, three years before the start of the Civil War, a war fought to defeat a form of ethnic self-determination. Yet strangely at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 he promoted this idea which Lincoln had fought so hard to defeat, and which had cost us so many lives and so much disruption. It’s this clearly flawed concept that’s part of the core of so much of today’s turmoil, and if left unchallenged is going to bring us an interesting problem of which language we in these United States should speak once Hispanics are no longer a minority.

Wilson at this same Paris Peace Conference left us with one other disruptive legacy, and that’s we the people of these Untied States of America should strive to “make the world safe for democracy.” The real challenge is to make democracy safe for the world. It can’t be done. Athens tried it and failed. We don’t have a democracy, and we only confuse ourselves and everyone else to think we do. We have a government of elected representatives, and our success with that government depends on a level of intelligently informed vigilance not found in “undeveloped” or more primitive cultures. We must learn to accept this isn’t something which may be casually exported or imposed.

In 1931, an Austrian logician, Kurt Gödel, published a work on formally undecidable propositions in which he proved any logical (reasonable) system has always been either incomplete or inconsistent. This truth has serious implications foe those who would clog up the depths of their inner space with the concrete of certainty. It also presents serious questions for those who propose a “global economy,” for that’s a closed (complete) system and predictably destructive (inconsistent).

These, then, are some of yesterday’s causes we must address if we’re not to become mired in today’s problems.

Michael Goldeen is a Carson City resident.