Deconstructing Monsters

When I was growing up, I was taught that the common nickname for the devil, “Old Nick”, came from Niccolo Machiavelli, the author of The Prince.  I pictured him as red faced, with tiny hooves peeking out from beneath his robes.  After all, being called the devil is one thing; having the devil named for you something entirely beyond.  Then I came to read his works, and about him, and discovered he was actually an Italian patriot striving, vainly at that time, for the unification of Italy and independence from the domination of France.  And much of what he had to say made sense.

That sort of led me down the path of curiosity about other famous monsters – not in any way to excuse them, but to get a glimpse at what made them tick and created them in the first place.  For example, I discovered that Vlad Dracul the Impaler, aka Dracula, ruled amid constant threats of invasion from surrounding countries and chose to create his horrible reputation as a means of deterrence, and that Hitler blamed a Jewish surgeon for the death of his mother when he was an early teen, internalizing that as hatred for all Jews.  That in no way excuses Hitler, or Vlad, for their atrocities, but it does add dimension to the internal portraits of them that I carry about.

My wife and I just returned from a short visit with friends to Chautauqua, where the topic of the week was Pakistan, another monster we are busy creating these days.  Pakistan is the ally we love to hate.  We see Pakistan as just a little short of being itself a terrorist adversary, ruled by a fanatic military that shelters our enemies and threatens our military, while insisting we provide them with large foreign aid payments for their minimal and reluctant cooperation.  Little hooves beneath the robes are easy to imagine.  One of the fascinating things about Chautauqua though, is the speakers’ ability to provide insight by continually jumping beyond their topic.

Possibly the most interesting speaker that way was the last one, Karen Armstrong.  She is more known for her work on the interrelations of religion with culture than on things like foreign policy; in fact, she disclaimed any interest or expertise in the area, though she herself has visited Pakistan several times, serving at least as a sort of good will ambassador. She bounced her way through many topics, from the childhood of Buddha to the origins of modernity; on some I agreed with her and on others have my doubts.  Perhaps the strongest of her points was that we, as individuals and as nations, each have our unique history, not easily understood by others.  Pakistan, for example, was the home of Akbar the Great, roughly a contemporary with Elizabeth I of England; Akbar was the Mughal emperor who conquered most of northern and central India and ushered in a golden age.  He was famed for his tolerance, and though he himself was Muslim, his court advisors included Hindus and Jesuit representatives of the Pope.  Revered by Pakistanis as a founder of the nation, he himself struggled with pacifying Pashtu’s and with maintaining a delicate internal balance of power.  In other words, what we see as a contrary attitude on the part of Pakistan, they see as a way of life they have dealt with for centuries.  They have struggled with India through the ages. Though they have Islamic fanatics as they have had for centuries, they also have tolerant moderates, as they also have had for centuries.  Their internal priorities include maintaining a balance between them, which at times causes us to grit our teeth, and an uneasy peace with India.

The other key point Armstrong made was the importance, when thinking about the nation-state of Pakistan, of distinguishing between the nation and the state.  The nation is the repository of our national identity that stirs our patriotic passions; the state is the vehicle for the moderating rule of government that enables us to get along both with ourselves and with other nation-states without recourse to violence.  Our need in dealing with Pakistan is to strengthen the role of civilian government and to avoid creating vacuums that give chaotic outlet to national passions, in other words, to avoid abrupt departures or sudden changes in policy that destabilize their government; easier said than done.

A third point made by other Chautauqua speakers was that the real issue we are dealing with in Pakistan is our relations with China.  Any vacuum we create in the area of Pakistan and Afghanistan will be immediately filled by China, which is already seeking dominance of the area.  How content we are with that is the real determinant of our policy there.

So, we are uneasily tied to a monster.  But on closer inspection, it is a people with their own history and needs that we can partially understand and work with. There are even parts of their identity that we can appreciate and recognize as akin to our own.  That’s a starting point. 

Guns and the Constitution

It used to be said in the early days in this country that the only books you really had to have were the Bible and Shakespeare.  Tucked in there, too, must have been some ancient history, for growing up in East Texas, I was surrounded by town names like Athens and Carthage and Palestine, and the Sabine River ran not far away.  Rural and small town people were knowledgeable both about ancient times and what was going on elsewhere in the world right then, for after all, the rest of the world was not all that different, and the technology for transmitting news, a rider on horseback, was equally available to all.  The big places, like Washington and Boston, were towns of about 25,000, the best size for a place according to Aristotle, and the lowest limit for calling the place a city according to the Census.  The Bible is still standard issue, but somewhere along the way the Shakespeare and the history and the urge to stay current seem to have gotten misplaced.  For in parts of this country, rural and small town culture is a static thing, deliberately and desperately clinging to the past.

In his fascinating mini-series on public television, about the Prohibition Era, Ken Burns brought that to the fore as an underlying force that generated the prohibition movement.  In the early 20^th century, cities were becoming large and filled with new immigrants from strange places like Poland and Lithuania (there is no Krakow, Texas), who drank a lot.  Prohibition, in addition to all its other dimensions, represented the first major battlefield in what has become a more than 100 years war in this country between urban and small town culture.  The repeal of prohibition was a major victory for urban living and a grudgingly conceded defeat for the countryside.  Where I grew up, the joke was that Tyler would stay dry as long as the Baptists and the bootleggers could stagger to the polls.

A sadder victory for rural culture has been the long-term fierce allegiance to guns.  For guns, highly useful when protecting against rabid raccoons and snakes in the country, though useless as a modern missile defense, have no rightful place in a crowded urban movie house.  Yet the right to keep and bear arms, on the farm or in the movie house, continues to be a standard tenet of and a major victory for a small town culture that reveres all things from long ago.  The tragic consequences of this week’s shooting in Colorado will most likely again be ignored as “just the act of a madman”, when the real question is why the weapons were available in the first place.

From studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, I know full well that the language of the second amendment supports the right to bear arms, though it was intended, according to the Federalist Papers, to support their regulation for efficiency of militia operations.  That was in a time when opposing armies bore muskets, and bears and Indians were a real threat.  There were no crowded cities where a single person bearing a musket could pose a significant threat. The countryside’s fierce allegiance to a right that is no longer viable in urban culture is both misplaced and terrible in its consequence.  I am in general reluctant to consider changes in the Constitution; it is one of the great monuments to human progress and continues to serve us well.  But it is time to change or repeal the second amendment.  It is the relic of a violent past, and a promoter of a violent present.

Entrenchment and Inequality

Alexis de Tocqueville, found shipbuilding one of the more revealing of American occupations.  In Europe, shipbuilders used scarce wood (Europe’s forests were already rapidly thinning) to repair defects in existing ships; American simply scrapped old ships and built new, faster models using their unlimited wood supplies.  He was describing America’s “throw away” culture at its birth and noting its role in fostering innovation.  It also was a key in the development of our egalitarianism.  If you didn’t like the way you were treated at work, you could just take advantage of the abundant resources of an as yet unsettled continent to start your own business, or move further west. New ways of doing business were easy to discover. A study I monitored years ago found that expertise in new technology among subordinates forced more democratic management styles among supervisors.  It’s tough to be arbitrary when your employee knows more about stuff than you do. Technology works well as an agent of democracy.

 Rapid incremental innovations leading to quantum leaps are a hallmark of American culture.  We like to think of ourselves as discoverers of basic things, but most American inventions are exploitations of scientific discoveries made elsewhere; Einstein was German, Curie French, Fulton English, Watt Scottish, Bell Canadian, Marconi Italian and genetic engineering an outcome of the English discovery of the structure of DNA. We worry that our scientists are not doing enough basic research, but that has never really been our special talent.  We import that.

Our real talent for innovation owes a lot to low entrenchment, the weight of infrastructure tied to existing technology that must be overcome for a new innovation to be successful. Trains have rail beds, cars highways and gas stations, all-electric homes a national network of power lines. The entrenchment of TV actually helped spread the internet, as cables laid to increase TV coverage became also a vehicle for the internet.   And there are social entrenchments too.  Just think how hard it is to sell mass transit and car pooling to a public hooked on solitary drives to work and the status tied to a sporty sedan.  But just as rapid innovation begets egalitarianism, entrenchment can also slow change and  beget inequality.  The owner of scarce, required resources acquires an edge, and hates to lose it to something new.  The economic capital of the country belongs to owners of the existing technology, who fight losing it to something new.  That’s how the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.  Samuel Morse got his idea for the telegraph from a semaphore system in Europe and struggled for years to have it patented there; it was too big a change from the status quo for the French.  Meanwhile, it got rapid acceptance in America because it solved a problem and wasn’t replacing anything.

The current recession owes a lot to the struggle between innovation and entrenchment.  I am one of those scruffy, disreputable technologists who place credence in Kondratiev “long wave” economic theory; American mainstream economists look down on it, partly I suspect because it’s of Russian origin, even though Kondratiev was executed by Stalin. They argue that it sees patterns in economic data where none exist; but it’s held in higher regard elsewhere.  I appreciate the skepticism, but find the basic logic of the theory persuasive, without regard to details of the length of cycles, relative strength of credit versus technology cycles, etc.  All those things can vary without destroying the fundamentals.  Kondratiev theory in the form I accept posits that our economy is historically characterized by a succession of driving technologies that at any given time dominate major sectors of the total economy.  Think lumber followed by railroads followed by steel followed by autos followed by oil followed by computers – you get the picture.  Each of these dominant technologies has its own cycle which begins with a highly productive expansion followed by mature exploitation followed by a bubble as efficient limits are hit while capital investment continues to flow into the sector followed by stagnation and recession. I’m greatly oversimplifying and leaving out things, but again, you see that the basic idea is that economic cycles arise out of the dynamics of changing technology. The recession serves to transfer investment interest from stagnant sectors to emerging technologies that will begin the new cycle.

The recession phase is where entrenchment and inequality rear their ugly heads.  The quickest way through such a recession is rapid redeployment of capital to emerging sectors of the economy.  In the present recession, for example, fossil fuels are hitting their efficiency limit as the costs of extraction rise higher and higher, housing is facing a demographic wall as baby boomers retire and finance is facing a crunch as the overuse of broad monies such as derivatives and swaps forms a bubble.  The logical alternatives are investment in renewable energy, exploration of nanotechnologies, particularly in medicine, mass transit systems and investment in renewal of America’s failing infrastructure.  But over-entrenchment of oil and autos, for example, is slowing or preventing the rise of such alternatives.  And the excessive wealth of those invested in the status quo insulates them from immediate consequences.  In a significant way, that is at the heart of the current election debates.  Obama is spokesman for economic change and the transfer of support to emerging technologies; Romney, for continuation of the status quo. The result of the election will shape the economy of America for the next decade.

Esoteric Piracy

Most people don’t realize how relatively brief the reign of Caribbean piracy was.  When I was growing up, enflamed by the swashbuckling glories of Errol Flynn movies like Captain Blood and The Crimson Pirate and the lurid tales of Bluebeard and Captain Hook and Henry Morgan, I imagined piracy to have been around forever.  Perhaps I was right, but the peak of the Caribbean form lasted only about 25 years.  Many of them justified their piracy as part of England’s never-ending hostilities with Spain, including in their attacks Spanish treasure cities like Porto Bello, Cartagena and Maracaibo, and were licensed to do so by letters of marque designating them as privateers.  While active, the piracy did form a serious threat to the treasuries of Spain by converting the valuable cargoes from the New World into contraband, but it also wrecked havoc on the cargoes of other nations.  Then the British found the solution by hiring Henry Morgan as Governor General of Bermuda with the mandate to catch and hang all the other pirates.  It worked.

But piracy endures, often in much more esoteric forms.  This week, for example, the news is full of the Libor scandals of Barclay’s Bank, which is now spreading to banks like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Deutsche Bank, HSBC Holdings Plc, UBS and the Royal Bank of Scotland, and of the settlement of the suit against Wells Fargo Bank for predatory lending.   Libor is the London inter-bank offered rate, used for determining many other key interest rates, including those for mortgages, student loans and variable rate loans to individuals, institutions and governments. The banks are accused of manipulating the rate by hiding key data, thereby raising the costs for their customers and the profits for themselves. The costs, for example, of bonds to the city governments issuing them are said to be raised in some cases by millions of dollars, causing the cash-strapped governments to have to cut back on police, fire, school and other municipal services in order to cover their lending shortfalls.  Barclay’s itself settled for $450 million, but the criminal investigation of employees continues. Wells Fargo settled for $175 million the charges brought by Baltimore that Wells Fargo targeted minority customers for mortgages at exorbitant rates that they knew the customers could not pay, leading to foreclosure.  The foreclosures spiked the cost to Baltimore of city services generally, especially police and fire services, of course in the process devastating the lives of many.  Both banks deny wrongdoing.  Before them it was the Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs raid on Greece, the JPMorgan derivatives scandal, etc., etc. 

What these present pirates share with pirates of the past is their proclivity for pillaging the rich cargoes of the world while flying the flag of legal activity, while concurrently starving governments of their revenues, devastating cities and earnestly proclaiming their own virtue. They just have more sophisticated deniability.  Where they differ is that the wealth of prior pirates often at least partly benefited the poor. 

We truly have entered a new golden age of piracy.  Interestingly, the New York Times points their finger at a cause for this that I have mentioned before, the growing disparity between rich and poor.  In the America of 50 years ago, the ratio of CEO compensation to average worker pay was 40, and the Harvard Business Review tut-tut-ted about it.  Today it is over 140, and many aspiring managers are desperate to make the leap into CEO consideration.  The temptation to make money and a name by skating at the edge becomes overwhelming.  It is a price for inequality we should not be prepared to pay.

Rational Ignorance

In one of the great moments of Star Trek, Captain Kirk explains how he became the only cadet ever to solve the Star Fleet Academy’s ultimate challenge: he cheated.  And millions of Star Trek fans simultaneously muttered, “Oh No!”, and “Yes!”  That’s the way we humans are, torn between our desire to follow the rules set by others and our instinct to win, by hook or by crook, our own personal victories.  Edward O. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, attributes this to a divided nature engendered by the evolution of genes both for selfishness and for cooperation.   Philosophers and theologians have from ancient times attributed it to a divided, multi-level soul, or Original Sin, or the temptations of Satan; Freud described it as a struggle between a primitive Id and a rational Ego; and Carl Sagan theorized it as a vestige of brain evolution that simply piled social “mammalian” structures on top of tooth-and-claw “reptilian” brain foundations.

Whatever its root causes, we have developed many mechanisms for making our divided nature work for us.  One major one is our ability to compartmentalize our world into mutually exclusive views that we can handle neatly with one part of our nature or another:  sacred versus secular, Oktoberfest versus the rest of the year, business versus family, rational versus emotional.  Cheating is ok on government regulations but not ok on the golf course.  We shoo away “the better angels of our nature” in order to calculate our personal profit undisturbed.  We blame others as responsible for their own problems when in fact we have initiated them, the “not my problem” defense.

One form of this compartmentalization is what economists call “rational ignorance”, the tendency not to bother to learn about or to ignore what does not affect us personally.  It’s a kind of cheating.  We cut problems down to a workable size by ignoring large parts of them.  It makes reporters think that our only concern at election time is the impact of our choices on our wallet.  It makes us ignore the impact of our agricultural, environmental and energy policies on the poor of Africa or of Southeast Asia.  It makes us not care about the locations of Pacific island countries that may be drowned by global climate change.  But as our world has shrunk and our technology become gigantic, the need for cooperation has escalated, the groups which must cooperate for survival grown larger and the meaningful relationships become ever more complex.

This week the newspapers report that African famine has led to a sharp rise in the forced marriages of young girls as families “dump” them to lower family food costs, that neo-Nazi anti- immigrant clashes have risen in Greece because of the societal unrest produced by the European debt crisis, that it took two separate multi-national teams, each of 3000 scientists, to confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, that Kansas faces rising deficits because of prior tax cuts meant to reduce the costs of state government, that China will by 2050 have a shrinking population with a median age of 50, higher by 10 years than the median age of the U.S. and no longer able to function as the factory hands of the world, that Russia faces “a wall of water” from torrential rains, and that Midwestern farmers, the breadbasket fillers of the world,  face declining crop yields as the U.S. endures the warmest twelve months on record.  Which of these is "not my problem"?

I doubt the mind exists that could fathom the growing complexity of global relationships, but one thing is clear.  We need ways to cut down on our rational ignorance and care more about what is happening elsewhere.  Our neighborhood is now everywhere, and our neighbors’ problems are ours. We can no longer cheat on the situation by just ignoring the pains and issues of others.  Ignorance is no longer rational.  A renewed emphasis and funding of higher education is needed, and we need to lean more about our world every day. .  Concern for "our neighbors" in the lost parts of the world is needed more all the time; it means a lot, not only to them but to us as well.  Think about that as you make your political and economic choices this year.

Getting a Life

One of the most, for me, provocative little essays I have ever read was one years ago in The American Scholar, about an orange Nehru shirt and a brown knit suit.  The author, whose pseudonym was Demosthenes, wrote of a recurring nightmare in which, on a visit to Los Angeles, he was killed in a car accident, and remained unidentified. The nightmare was that he was then buried wearing that orange shirt and brown knit suit.  Demosthenes’ point was that we get so wrapped up in choosing life styles (Nehru shirts and brown knit apparel were endemic at the time) that we forget to choose actually living and, in the process, lose our real identities.  Living involves far more than a fashionable suit.

On this day after Independence Day, fresh back from a week at the beach, I am intrigued by how we as Americans so focus on the right to Liberty  enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that we forget it was only second on Jefferson’s list, sandwiched in between Life and the Pursuit of Happiness.  For after all, what is Liberty without Life, and what is the meaning of an unhappy Liberty?  Jefferson was writing about the functions of government, and since then, we’ve all agreed that he basically got it right. Nevertheless, politicians and columnists still ponder whether the role of government is to provide safety nets, or stay out of the way of business, or provide a properly regulated environment, or whatever.  The answer of course is “all the above.”

Following Jefferson’s thoughtful construction, we can see that a primary function of government should be to help enable each person’s living a life best suited to their own skills and goals and vision of happiness, in part by standing protectively in the way against things like poor education, bad health care, and inadequate access to all the shared goods and services that together form our modern civilization; in other words, to protect the right to live your own life as best you can.  We sometimes forget that the author of the Declaration of Independence felt that his greatest achievement was the furtherance of public higher education.  That view is a broad definition of safety net that goes beyond the limited poverty elimination usually associated with that term.  Equality of incomes or of outcomes is not implicit in such a safety net, but a far more powerful role of government is, beyond the “defense only” view of libertarians but short of the equality of everything views of radical egalitarians.  Much more of this broad function of government is contained under the “promote the general Welfare” clause of the Preamble to the Constitution than we often are willing to accept.

Such a broad view of the role of government as that possessed by the founding fathers cannot be achieved without cooperation and accommodations from all.  That is the task now before us as a nation: to move beyond a nearly blind focus on “Liberty as no restrictions whatsoever” to recognition of Liberty as a shared enabler of all of us living better lives together.  We have for too long chosen a radical individualism life style at the expense of our identity as a people.  It’s time to wake up.