Signalling Through the Clouds

When I study the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade treaty being argued about these days, what comes to mind is that classic song,” Clouds” -  on my short list for greatest pop song of the 20^th century. “I’ve seen the world from both sides now, from win and lose, but still somehow, it’s life’s illusions I recall; I really don’t know life at all.” Proponents say the TPP perfectly enacts a containment strategy toward China, assimilating it into the regulated trading world while concurrently securing active trade arrangements with Japan and India, a keystone of the Obama “pivot toward Asia”. Obama himself argues that any job loss to Pacific trade partners will be minimal, since companies prone to move jobs elsewhere have mainly done so already and that any newly lost jobs will mostly be offset by increased exports. Latin countries included in the agreement, they argue, will have little impact on American jobs, while Australia’s and New Zealand’s impact will be positive. The supporters warn that a lack of Fast Track Presidential authority could create a real international mess, and there’s a lot of merit to that argument.

Populist opponents say they’ve heard that song before, and they are not buying illusions any more. Their big concern is all the secret negotiations with corporations going on that could weaken health and safety standards, stall climate change regulation, etc., and with provisions which could enable Foreign courts to force arrangements detrimental to American workers without recourse to American law. 

The negotiators say, “Relax, trust us.”  At the extreme populists sound like traditional protectionists, but toward the middle, they seem wise indeed. The cogency of arguments on both sides leave me casting around for a “pope’s mule”, an outside-the-box argument that can serve as a tipping factor one way or another.

My roving eyes alight on the recent UK election results, where an anti-EU David Cameron won a surprisingly large victory over his liberal opponents. My knowledgeable grandson attributes it to the British equivalent of gerrymandering – ages ago, the Brits called gerrymandered districts “rotten boroughs”, so they’ve been around awhile there – and says that the popular vote was actually anti-Cameron. I haven’t checked the numbers to verify that, but even if so, it just adds to the point that concerns me. That point was that the Cameron margin was an awful lot like a sigh of defeat for belief in the abilities of national governments to defend the lives of their people in complex international terrain. The Brits seemed to be saying to themselves, our representative government just can’t adequately support the people with the amount of sovereign authority it’s given up. The British gerrymandering argument just reinforces the belief in representative government’s ineffectuality – as the effects of gerrymandering likewise emphasize in the U.S.

That, to my mind, is an essential issue with the TPP. The quest for Fast Track authority is an admission of disbelief in the idea that open discussion of the issues in a representative assembly can be effective. That implies either disbelief in the efficacy of representative government in a global community, or belief that revelation of treaty provisions will show them to be unfavorable to the American people. I’m aware that lack of Fast Track authority could create a total mess, and might well doom the TPP. But it is a significant infringement on the principle of representative government and a signal that in a world as complex as ours has become, democracy is no longer considered effective. Our Congress hasn’t been helping its own case lately. The problem is, as Churchill stated long ago, that all the alternatives to democracy are worse.

I’ve said many times how international corporations and national governments are struggling for global dominance, and that the corporations are winning. The world will not be a better place for ordinary people if they do so. The British election was a no-confidence vote for the belief that sovereign states can protect their people in such an unregulated global environment. Greek threats to leave the EU are a similar sign. Rejecting Fast Track authority would be another such signal. Those signals need to be given. The international scene these days is too wildly unregulated for the interests of individuals to be protected. International corporations are not sovereign governments functioning for the betterment of all the people, and it is time the corporations ceased trying to substitute their interests for the interests of the people. If no sovereign authority is in charge, then corporate interests are. Stronger international institutions and treaties are needed, and the TPP might even be a step in that direction. But we cannot know that based on the current secrecy of agreements. Confidence can only be obtained though open discussions, not secret negotiations. The TPP has much merit to it, and it is time for that to be publicly argued without suspicions of secret reservations.

How the Other Half Lives

There’s an old statistician joke about the statistician who drowned wading a river with an average depth of six inches. It comes to mind when comparing the  “average” American’s wealth against that of citizens of other countries . A 2013 comparison of per capita wealth in 20 “advanced” economies showed Americans had an “average” net worth of $301,000, good enough for fourth internationally.  Switzerland was first on that scale – not all Swiss bank accounts are held by foreigners. But America was 19^th on the median net worth scale, at $45,000. Only Israel was lower, and its average net worth was also low. Interestingly, Australia was first in median net worth and second in average net worth. They are doing something right there.

Average net worth just counts wealth, and is influenced heavily by the wealth of people like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and, I suppose, Donald Trump. Median net worth is literally the egalitarian standard. It measures the half-way point at which as many people make less as there are people who make more. In this case, it means about 157 million Americans have less than $45,000 in net worth. The difference between $301,000 and $45,000 says a lot about the American economy. For one thing, it says something about how well those baby-boomers reaching retirement age are really prepared to retire. They aren't. It also says how limited that glittering life style that seems the norm on TV actually is among Americans in general. People with a $45,000 net worth do not buy $45,000 cars or $500,000 houses. For another, the U.S. spread between average and median wealth is by far the largest among “advanced” nations. We are doing something wrong here.

But the actual picture is much worse than that. In a recent analysis of Federal data by CNNMoney of spending patterns by the bottom 30% of the U.S. population, the “poor” –  numbering 92 million in 2010 and almost 100 million now, have average annual incomes of $14,000 (including subsidies)  – less than the typical urban “living income” of $15,000. They spend 182 percent of their incomes just to keep afloat, and consequently have negative savings and high debt loads. They spend on average 72 percent of income on housing, 28 percent on food and 28 percent on transportation. As you will have already noted, that adds up to well over their income, without consideration of things like clothes and medical care. More than 17 percent of Americans –that’s over half of that bottom 30 percent, or about 53 million people – said in the survey they had lacked money to buy food at some time in the previous year. These are the people Kansas wants to prohibit from going to the movies. The legislators shouldn’t worry – the poor can’t afford that any more. The 100 million people treated like dirt by the legislators are more than the entire population of the U.S. when the Constitution was enacted, yet “promoting the general farewell” for them is never part of the legislative agenda. The typical “one-percenter” whose desires set the agenda has never even had a conversation with one of the 30 percent.

Those in the middle of the income picture – the middle class –seem to fare not much better. The survey reveals they earn $54,000 on average but can save only about $6,000 per year after living expenses, not a good basis for planning retirement. Meanwhile the top 30 percent have incomes substantially in excess of living expenses and continue to have an average of one-third their income disposable.

The question remains of how legislators, in Kansas and in Washington, D.C., can remain so oblivious to the state of 100 million Americans. Ideology has blinded them to the situation of the actual people they serve. The top one percent nationwide amount to slightly over 3 million people, yet legislators act as though they are the only ones worth legislating for. For each one “worthy” citizen, there are 24 they ignore.  Then they are shocked, shocked, when the 24 begin to protest. As protests grow, they will have only themselves to blame. Ted Cruz was recently quoted as saying that the first thing one had to lose on going into politics was a sense of shame. His and other’s success at that is obvious.

Seeking the Unexpected

John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole of the Bailey series, commented in an essay that a thing he hated was to enter a room full of people whose words he would know before they opened their mouths. I feel the same way about books. I opened my Internet browser to CNN this morning and found four ads from Sears for items I had viewed the day before on Amazon. Aside from the invasion of privacy implicit in their presence, they offered nothing new, except perhaps price, beyond what I had seen the day before. You can choose whether you want liberal or conservative TV news by picking between Fox and CNBC. A prime goal for Internet publishers these days is to provide you with a personalized news service that presents you only with information they know you are interested in and will enjoy. I am appalled at the idea.

After my father died when I was two years old and my mother worked long hours as a seamstress, my after-school babysitter was the public library.  It was a delight to roam the stacks, constantly encountering new and totally surprising knowledge. There were no categories of what I had been interested in previously, what I would enjoy reading or what would be suitable for me. I tasted a bit of everything from Rabelais to Relativity, from Mein Kampf to Machiavelli, from the Crimson Pirate to science fiction. Some things I hated, but all things taught me at least what to ignore. Later on, browsing in my very good college library for background readings on Renaissance politics, I stumbled on the Memoirs of Casanova. I still chuckle over that. Learning comes from reading the unexpected, not the expected.

The Washington Post this Sunday published a review of a recent book on the future of the public library in the Internet age. Unfortunately, the book reviewed was by the chief librarian of the Harvard Law Library, a lawyer himself. His lament was that libraries were falling behind the technology of the internet, and that nostalgia over the past was an impediment to bringing them up to date by making them more efficient information scavengers. That would be suitable for specialized institutions like law libraries, but it misses the point of the general library entirely. The general library is meant to be an entrance to the hallways of knowledge, not an exhaustive source of knowledge on any particular subject. The good library is at its best when it surprises you.

I have commented before about how our current culture is separating us into tinier and tinier bubbles, where no one really can experience and understand the lives of others outside their own group. The rich and poor used to shop side by side and attend the same schools, except in the segregated South. We had no interaction with far off countries. Now,we do not understand where countries with whom we must deal, such as those in the Middle East, are coming from, just as our police and the angry protesters surrounding them do not understand each other. The wealthy do not understand the lives of the poor. Those things in turn are major contributors to the pervasive empathy gap which creates so many of our social and political problems.

Karen Armstrong, in her recent book, Fields of Blood, points out that the Indian word Moksha, which we often translate as enlightenment, originated in ancient times as the military term for breaking through a hostile encirclement. That to me is in fact what enlightenment is about these days. We are surrounded by technological and social pressures that hem us in to our particular niche in a complex society, that know what interested us yesterday and force us to see only that again today, that deny us knowledge of what the world is about outside our particular niche by deluging us with knowledge “appropriate” to our place. Enlightenment comes from breaking that encirclement to enter the glorious chaos of surprising knowledge. That, not efficiency, should be the goal of our librarians, as it should be our own.

Punishing the Poor

When I was in elementary school, we were living on my mother’s income of 50 cents/hour earned by working in a sweat shop seamstress job after my father’s death when I was two years old. In an otherwise limited and dreary existence, the brightest spot each week was going, in the company of most of my friends, to the double feature cowboy movies, with a cartoon and serial in between, on Saturday afternoons. At a 60th high school reunion I just attended there were numerous references to those Saturday afternoon movies with their preceding yo-yo contests. After the movies – which cost 10 cents - I would spend 15 cents on a chocolate ice cream soda. It made my week!  The 25 cents for my weekly orgy was scavenged by my mother from the $20 total her work brought her. She thought it worthwhile and always found a way. We were never on Welfare, but never far away from it either.

Vincent Van Gogh would have understood. In his youth, Van Gogh was a devout Dutch Reformed Church missionary among abjectly poor coal miners. He felt so passionately about their plight that he sometimes would take clothes off his own back to give to a miner in need. On hearing of this, his Church, which held the stern Calvinist view that the poor were poor because they deserved to be, kicked Van Gogh out, and he became a painter. The great art we admire today was a product of that stern insistence on the unworthiness of the poor. I wish I could say something else good was a product of that attitude, but I can’t.

The Dutch Reformed Church was replaced recently by the State of Kansas, when the Kansas Legislature passed a bill barring people on Welfare from using their money to go to the movies or buy ice cream. Kansas also restricted welfare recipients from withdrawing more than $25/day from their welfare account, even though opponents noted some subsidized rentals were as much as $600/month, which by itself would require $20/day be withdrawn. Going to a swimming pool while on welfare was also prohibited. The expressed goal of legislators was to get poor people to spend more responsibly.

Kansas is not alone. Somewhat similar restrictions are being pushed for by conservatives in Missouri and Yew York. Emily Badger wrote recently in the Washington Post about the double standard that creates, discriminating against the poor. Four times as much is spent by the government on the home mortgage interest deduction as is spent on subsidized housing, but subsidized housing is visible while the deduction appears mostly as a refund regarded as payback of taxes already paid. Welfare payments are visible, but the many subsidies to the wealthy often take the form of items simply not listed as income on the tax return. The result is placing inordinate burdens on the poor. Back when I was looking at the subject some years ago, a $25,000 farm subsidy required a one-paragraph application, while a food stamp application required three pages. Badger calls this the effect of visible versus submerged government spending. We see only the visible, not the invisible.

I have a harsher view. I call it punishing the poor. It is a byproduct of the Protestant Ethic we need to get past, and a direct product of the American Empathy Gap that I’ve mentioned before. In Calvin’s view, being wealthy was a sign that God had blessed you because you were destined for Heaven. By contrast, the poor obviously had moral failings condemning them to Hell and deserved punishment along the way. Our frontier heritage produced the empathy gap with the myth that rugged individuals survive without help from others, and to need help is a sign of weakness not deserving support. We think they are poor because, at the least, they lack good judgment and are incapable of making decisions on their own about when to buy ice cream, and don’t deserve ice cream anyway. The effect of an ice cream cone on the life of a child is not worth considering. The facts belie that. The great majority of the poor become poor because of adverse circumstance, not moral failure, and to think otherwise is simply to demonstrate moral blindness. Somewhere around 50 percent of women who are widowed, like my mother, or divorced have incomes below the poverty level in the years immediately following. We are entering a period as a nation where large numbers of baby boomers will enter retirement without adequate incomes after a lifetime of stagnant wages, the retirement often forced in the form of permanent unemployment. Our needs for community support of the poor will increase drastically and innovative ways of doing it are needed, not harsher punishments. We are a better people than that.

Seeing Beyond

This being poetry month, it’s hard, try as I might, not to think about Shelley. He is not my favorite poet. In fact, in high school the only grade I got less than an A came from an English Teacher who adored him, and who reacted quite negatively when I poked fun at the line in Ode to a Nightingale, “Bird thou never wert.” I called it the worst line of poetry in the English language, and her forbearance snapped. But Shelley was far better at explaining poetry than, in my regard, he was at writing it. His essay, “A Defence of Poetry”, which I highly admire, is the work which best gets at the essence of what poetry is all about.

In his essay, Shelley contrasts poetry with philosophy and poets with philosophers. Specifically, as a kind of tongue-in-cheek Irony, he finds Homer a better philosopher than Plato. It is Shelley's reasoning that gets to the heart of things. He sees that both philosophers and poets seek to find and express the transcendent. But while philosophers seek the transcendent “beyond”, for Plato in a world of Ideals, poets find it in the ordinary. Whitman was speaking to that in titling his work, "Leaves of Grass." You can see explicit expressions of it on my Poetry by Others page in Mark Doty’s poem, “A Green Crab’s Shell” or in Eamon Grennan’s poem, “Wing Road.”

Shelley’s insight goes beyond poetry. A trivial example was on view last night at the NCAA Basketball Championship when a tame eagle was released during the National Anthem, flopped around a bit and settled on his trainer’s shoulder. It was a kind of performance doggerel, illustrating our need, successful or not, to see something “beyond”.  Silly or not, it temporarily elevated vision beyond the event itself. We need that sense of beyond to counter the grinding down we encounter each day from the world around us, and both poetry and religion, in different ways, provide it.  Else we fall prey to seeing all those around us as simply complex heaps of dirt. Seeing only the dirt, we miss what Joseph Campbell called, “the light within the light bulb.” And that kind of devaluation of others is the underlying cause of many of the problems of the world.

That is reason enough to celebrate poetry – that it contributes to making the world a better place. Can you think of any great villain who was also a great poet? One famous critic’s definition of a good poem was that it is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Argentina has found that music, so closely related to poetry, has, as a standard course in school, made the school a calmer place and reduced teenage violence. Who knows what a poetry course might do? But of course, one doesn't write either poetry or music just to achieve a social purpose. A good poem is an end in itself. Write one, and see.

The Premature Demise of War

There’s an old story about a preacher, sermonizing about the evils of hate, who asks rhetorically, “Is there anyone who doesn’t hate someone?” An ancient man sitting at the rear of the congregation rises feebly and says, “Pastor, I don’t hate anyone in the whole wide world.”  The astounded preacher asks him, “What is your secret, sir?” At which the man exclaims joyfully, “I outlived them all!” Reviewing the daily news from the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Asia, it’s hard not to think of that old man. We seem everywhere some days to proceed toward Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios, enjoying every step of the route. The saddest part of the picture is the crowd, including many members of our Congress, cheering along the way.

I wrote a couple of years ago, in “War and Peace and Money”, about how our proclivities for killing each other were very gradually being reduced by the increasing costs of warfare. Armies once totaling in the thousands were now measured in the millions, rifles replaced by million-dollar rockets. All this was to the profit of the military-industrial complex, but strangely enough, also to the profit of peace. Periods of no war had increased by almost 50 percent, the number of wars per century had declined, and the numbers killed were also dropping, all because of the expense of war. Fewer and fewer nations were able to afford it – it had become a luxury item. Even international standards to prevent war were gradually improving. But perhaps the news of war’s demise, like that of Mark Twain’s, was premature.

Alas, some in the complex seem to have seen the handwriting on the wall and have begun correcting the problem.  Their most notable achievement to date has been the development of drones. Devastation can be spread so much more cheaply! It’s an everyman kind of tool, as also, in its own way, is biological warfare. War has been downsized to become more affordable again. Researchers are also talking of such advanced notions as body-enhancement armor, warriors genetically modified to improve their killer abilities, robotic soldiers, etc. Eventually they may succeed in producing the situation where one former-human is left to crow triumphantly, “I’ve done it! They’re all destroyed”, - followed by a very long silence.

A saving grace is the emergence of cyber war. It’s so much cheaper it will likely be the favorite for the international corporations which some predict will soon overwhelm the already declining nation state. And there’s less likelihood with it of large-scale loss of customer base. Even lone terrorists may come to enjoy it. And perhaps the greatest, though distant, grace is the evolution of altruism. Biologists like E. O. Wilson are pointing out that forms of altruism are actually a product of advancing evolution. “Reciprocal cooperation” is also a trait anthropologists note that arises in harsh “prisoner’s dilemma” situations.  The lack of any concerted intelligent response to climate change is pointing toward more and more such harsh conditions as the next few hundred years wear on. Compassion has also been found to be a genetic trait shared at least in limited ways among all species that rear their young. As human “childhood” becomes more and more extended because of the learning and skills required in advanced societies, is it possible that greater compassion will evolve?

So, an emerging prospect, though not yet certain, is of a very grim 21^st century, followed by the as yet faint glimmer of a happier distant future for humanity. But we are creatures of the 21^st century, as likely are our children and grandchildren. In such a long-term future, we are all dead. The situation reminds one of the science fiction story by C.S. Lewis in which an astronaut finds himself stranded on, I think, Venus in what is a veritable Garden of Eden. And the garden includes an Adam and Eve being tempted by a Satan. The despairing astronaut cries out, “God, do something. Don’t let that happen again!” To which God replies, “I did. I put you there.” Perhaps, at this Easter season, with Spring blossoming all around us, and the prospects, with work, of a still possible better future facing us all, that’s a good thing to remember.

The Global Rorschach Test

The Global Inkblot Test

As the old joke goes, a psychiatrist was administering the Rorschach Inkblot Test to a patient.  You remember that’s the test where the patient is asked to look at swirls of ink on a set of cards and tell the doctor what he sees in each swirl. This particular patient keeps seeing an obscene picture on each card, until the doctor bursts out, “Don’t you see anything but obscenities on those cards?” The patient responds, “I can’t help it, doctor. You’re the one who gave me the pornographic cards.” The joke of course is that the Rorschach cards are totally without any meaning except that which the patient puts into them in interpreting them.

I can’t help but think of that as I read and hear about all the troubles going on around the world. I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about Ukraine lately, from news articles, magazines, talking heads on TV and from a talk I attended recently by one of our former ambassadors there. The West is, depending on one’s point of view, either steadily eroding Russia’s sphere of influence, which it regards as a necessary buffer against a Europe that has launched two invasions its way, or it is struggling to contain an expansionist NovoRussia seeking to regain status as a superpower. Looked at one way, Putin is being an old-fashioned slavophilic Tsar, just seeking to consolidate his borders and maintain access to the sea against what he sees as a northward march by NATO and a “Westernization” of Russia.  Another view is of an adventuresome former KGB agent seeking to re-instigate the Cold War. Another interpretation is of a valiant new democracy in Ukraine going through its Valley Forge winter, striving to survive the continual pressure of “King George” Putin. Another is of a bunch of rascals on both sides milking the situation for their own individual benefit. One claim is that the recent cease fire is a cynically begotten failure from the start, another that it is reasonable progress toward a resolution. Yet another view is that it’s all just a necessary shaking down of northern Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which will probably take a quarter-century before each party is reconciled to their situation. Meanwhile, of course, it’s the common citizen who will suffer through all of whatever it is.

A similar ambiguity pervades the Middle East. Each nation there, and its leaders, is a villain, a hero, or a hopeless dupe, depending on your point of view. The mutual executions and bombings going on, the continual exchange of threats and insults between parties too numerous to count , etc., lend an air of unending chaos to the whole area. And a similar debate goes on about the financial situation in the EU. Each of the world’s areas these days is a card depicting either obscenities or angels, depending on your point of view.

One of the insights of social psychology is that we each construct our own “history” of events and facts in our lives which leads us to label ourselves as victims, survivors, successes, failures, etc., and that self-labeling directs our future actions to perpetuate itself. Victims remain victims, survivors somehow manage to survive. The psychologist Eric Bern used to say that some people without money are “poor” while others are “temporarily without funds”; poorness and richness are states of mind, not factual conditions. So, often, is hostility.  An analogous, though obviously not exact, interpretation can be applied to our views of the various messes around the world.  John McCain seems to sense every situation as an opportunity for a good fight, John Kerry as an opportunity for a negotiation.  Over time negotiations may lead to more problem resolutions than do fights, though on occasion fights are necessary.  Viewing yourself, as Netanyahu seems to, as a permanent target of a permanently hostile Iran does not lead to resolution other than by total destruction of at least one of the opponents. Both Israel and Persia have been around a very long time, living along side each other sometimes amicably – after all, it was Persia which returned the Hebrews to Israel after their exile by Babylon, and it was Islam which provided refuge for Jews persecuted in Europe during the Middle Ages; it’s quite unlikely that either party will disappear. Current hostilities will pass; it’s a matter of how best to make that happen. The new Finance Minister of Greece has been described as a highly skilled professional making inroads into a disastrous European financial mess, or as an idiot on a fools errand, depending on which school of economics claims your allegiance.  The same can be said for Angela Merkel.

In short, we the people, whose views will shape the preferences of the decision makers, are being administered a kind of global Rorschach Test. What we see says as much or more about who we are as it does about what is actually going on. The lives of millions, and of our grandchildren, will be shaped by the images we see in highly ambiguous situations and events. Look closely, and don't be distracted by the shouting. This is a test we don’t want to flunk.

The Complexities of Ingratitude

At the end of the Napoleonic wars, a foreign diplomat remarked to the Austrian foreign minister that Austria should be grateful for the efforts of other nations to free Austria from Napoleon. The response was, “The world will be astounded at the magnitude of Austria’s ingratitude.” We hear echoes of that in the current jaw-clinched impasse between Germany and Greece over German insistence that Greece maintain a severe austerity regimen despite 27% unemployment or have its loans revoked by German controlled banks. For Germans seem to have forgotten completely the days following WWII and the Marshall Plan.

It’s easy to do: you have to be over 65 to have been there when it was all happening.  Angela Merkel would have been just a baby. But back then was when Germany was reeling with the agonies of recovery from WWII, and those who had just defeated her not only forgave half her foreign debt, they specified repayment of the remainder only as a portion of proceeds from Germany’s exports, then proceeded through the Marshall Plan to rebuild German infrastructure and stimulate the German economy with cheap imports to gain the health it enjoys today. And Greece, just devastated itself by Germany, was one of the 20 nations who joined in doing so. Talk about magnitudes of ingratitude.

Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post wrote today of those wild and wooly times, an instructive reminder of how Germany itself, and all of post-war Europe, was saved by the opposite of austerity. He doesn’t mention, though, an equally instructive part of that tale that the Germans back then would not have been necessarily aware of. For in the U.S. itself, leading the charge to restore the German people and the German economy generated a boom which, added to the post-war baby boom, helped stimulate the American economy for a decade. To some extent the golden 50’s were a product of helping Germany. As was the European Common Market, predecessor of the EU.

Germany today is struggling with its own stagnant economy – a partial product of self-imposed austerity.  And it is struggling to save the EU, severely fractured by the bitter divide on austerity. What better way to stimulate its own economy than by funding a recovering Greece to enable purchasing imports. It doesn’t even need to be half as forgiving as Greece was to Germany. And healing the divide is at least as important.

Of course, the issues and solution apply far beyond Europe. The World Bank worries about a stagnant world economy. Some economists worry about a century of declining economies. I’ve mentioned before that third world economies are being starved of the ability to continue expanding by the reluctance of the Deutsche Banks of the world to fund them. It’s the EU austerity problem writ very large. And solutions are similar.  Not long ago the World Bank president spoke of the desirability of a Marshall Plan for the world. Think about it.

The Price of Stereotyping

A friend once, at Christmastime, commented that in Boston, Christmas lights on Protestant houses tended to be multi-colored while Catholic houses tended to have white lights. I noted that in Maryland it tended to be the opposite way, with white on Protestant houses and multi-colored on Catholic. We both of course were stereotyping. It’s so easy.  It was even easier to do so by religion rather than by location-based cultural differences, though those too would be stereotypes. It was harmless for us, since no malice was meant or perceived by either of us. But the Charlie Hebdo situation reinforces how costly such stereotyping can become.

I have emphasized my views about the strains of modernization tearing at the Middle East. A proud culture had its golden age torn apart in the 13^th century by the Crusades, the Mongol and Turkic invasions, and immediately thereafter by the Black Death, which killed a higher percentage of the population there than it did in Europe.  It was natural to blame faithlessness and foreign influences for everything – after all did not the Torah blame the Babylonian Exile on faithlessness also? -  and the Arabic culture withdrew into a shell lasting for centuries and eventually resulting in Sunni Wahhabism. Now western modernization has reached the Arabic Middle-East, and the backlash against that modernization has produced the terrorism by small Islamic minorities akin to the KKK movement in the southern U.S. after the American Civil War. For make no mistake, there is an Arab Civil War raging now, akin to Europe’s Thirty Years War, which eventually will give way to a modern Middle East. Nowhere are the dangers of religious stereotyping better illustrated than by modern Indonesia, the largest Islamic nation, whose modern Islamic culture is further removed from that of Wahhabic Saudi-Arabia than Liberal Episcopalians are from Primitive Baptists in America. Yet we, and many Muslims, persist in harboring grudges against Islam or Christianity as though each were a gigantic monolith.

Stereotyping makes us cast the Charlie Hebdo tragedy as Mohammed versus Freedom of Expression. Yet Fareed Zakaria points out that most Islamic scholars agree that there is no reference to or repudiation of blasphemy in the Koran, and that picturing Mohammed as an offensive act is a tenet of Wahhabism only, not Islam in general. And when we teach our two-year-old to use an “inside voice” or our older children not to use profanity at the dinner table or grade movies as X or PG, are we not limiting Freedom of Expression? The price of stereotyping is that it limits our awareness of the nuances of behavior and our sensitivity to the need to respect differences.

A January 14 article in the Washington Post by Yasmine Bahrani, a Journalism Professor at the American University in Dubai, and today’s comments by Pope Francis both speak to that need to respect differences. Bahrani writes of how stereotyping causes her students, who largely are “modern Muslims” who feel shame at backward practices like segregating women, to take seriously such claims as that the CIA organized fake vaccination drives in Pakistan and that the prosecution of Tsarnaev in Boston is a set-up. To them, America lacks credibility – and they are the Arabs who should be leaning toward, not away from, us.

Pope Francis speaks to the essence of the Freedom of Expression issue when he, like Giuseppe Mazzini long before him, reminds us to look not to our rights, but to our obligations to others. The killings at Charlie Hebdo were inexcusable and tragic, but the killings by a small minority of Muslims do not justify giving deliberate offense to what we believe, erroneously, are the views of all Muslims in the name of Freedom of Expression. Just as we might avoid challenging an elderly relative’s views on FDR or Reagan at the Thanksgiving dinner table both to be civil and because we love them, we need to remember our obligation to respect cultural differences. Yes, you have a right to Freedom of Expression, and yes, you have an obligation to avoid speech which you know is deliberately and unnecessarily offensive. J.S. Mill, the “Father of Modern Liberalism”, wrote that the only political speech that is truly offensive is a personally derogatory remark about an opponent. When stereotyping both on your part and on an Arab’s part causes both of you to regard picturing Mohammed to be offensive, then you have the right to do so anyway, but you have the obligation to respect cultural sensitivities. The relationships between all parts of an increasingly complex global society need to be strengthened, not attacked. We share the world together.

George Will and Santa

Well George, it’s that time of year again. Sleigh bells ring. Are you listening?  When I think of you at this time of year, I can’t help but recall my favorite seat cushion, “Dear Santa, I can explain.” You have a lot of explaining to do this year, and Santa won’t be happy. Perhaps that’s ok with you – after all, there are a lot of desperate people in mid-winter looking for heat, and selling coal by the lump could be quite profitable. And besides, your model for behavior, Ebenezer, never used to think much of Christmas either. Nevertheless, we worry about you.

Some of what you did this year could have been sheer absent mindedness. For example, when you were busy chastising dentists for enforcing dentistry practices the way doctors do, you called it an abridgment of freedom as the evil economic practice of “rent seeking.” The fact that you support rent seeking all the time when corporations do it must surely just have slipped your mind. And the increasing gun volleys outside your windows from the freedom to keep and bear arms you so strongly support must be so far away – you live in the quiet part of town, after all – that you just haven’t noticed yet. I’m sure Santa will understand. He can’t be too happy though that Christmas has become the biggest gun buying time of year: it frightens the children, and some of them miss their parents terribly. Besides, coming down that chimney has become a real hazard.

Santa must have notes on his list though about some of the other things you did this year. Your continuing full-throated opposition to raising the minimum wage is a lot closer to the old Ebenezer than it is to Christmas Present. How do the children get presents? They can’t all come down the chimney. And your opposition to the Justice Department’s insistence on a rule in Wisconsin that would require all schools to provide adequate facilities for disabled children must have upset Tiny Tim.

Your criticism of young women on college campuses who had been raped, for enjoying playing the victim, will really require fast talking when Santa arrives. Everyone noticed that one. However, you are good at fast talking.  Even Santa may admire the way you managed to support your opposition to Obama’s action to prevent children from being separated from their parents in the name of enforcing immigration law. You claimed Obama’s action upset “a planetary balance akin to that of the solar system” between legislative and executive powers. You really know how to transcend reality! But Santa may not be fooled. That balance wasn’t making his job any easier.

So, all in all, it hasn’t been a good year George.  I know you hate to be tethered to mere reality, but try looking around you at what’s actually going on in the world and it may give you some ideas of how to do better next year. Perhaps Santa can arrange a visit from Christmas Future. Have a glass of syllabub and think about it. Merry Christmas!