Equality and Its Discontents

The most complex issues can be hidden in the simplest of statements.  We cherish the Declaration of Independence for its ringing proclamation that “all men are created equal.”  Did that include women and slaves? Not for a very long time.  Did that mean just equal in opportunity?  Did that mean only equal before the law, or include all aspects of living, from education to health care to income?  We’re still working that out.  Two items in the news today are a CNN series on the continuing issue of income inequality and a furor over whether the Affordable Care Act will require some people to lose or change their current health insurance.  It so happens they’re different faces of the same coin.

We’ve had this preference in American society that all the good things in life be the result of hard work.  It goes back much further than Jefferson, to the Protestant Ethic, John Locke’s Labor Theory of Value, the Jamestown colony’s “if you don’t work, you don’t eat”, and on past Aristotle to cave man days when the success of the clan required hard effort from everyone.  Exploring and taming the  new continent of America required that kind of ethic.  Other societies had not always gone that route.  In other parts of the world and in Europe through medieval times, economic success was based on land and other forms of inherited wealth, and the measure of an aristocrat was how well he used his extensive leisure. In such societies massive income inequality is the norm. If you’re bright but still a peasant, that’s just the way things are.  But when a person’s economic success is based principally on his/her labor, and everyone feels they work equally hard, relative income equality becomes a key ingredient in the glue that holds society together. That’s why even fiscal conservative Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot.”  You worked, so you’re entitled to eat as much as the next guy.  Nowadays, that’s not always the case. 

Some of us, including corporations and a part, but not all, of the one percent, have found a way, as Buddhists might say, “off the wheel.”  The source of their wealth is no longer their direct labor, but the income derived, through the manipulations of skilled technicians, from financial instruments.  Derivatives have replaced landed estates.  A man’s investment bank is his castle.  The problem, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, is that such manipulations do not produce goods and services that provide jobs or food (or health care) to others.  Instead, they siphon away investments from the activities that do.  Creating jobs is no longer the priority, nor is rewarding skilled labor.  A consequence of that is the re-emergence of income inequality, just as it had existed in the landed wealth based societies of yesteryear.  But in a society that is based on the premise that your labor is the key to success, including your access to health care, disproportionate access to the necessaries of life is intolerable.

One way policy wonks analyze legislation is in terms of equity, the extent to which a law equally benefits or harms groups in similar circumstances. Horizontal equity requires, for example, equal treatment of all people of a same income level or over age 65.  Vertical equity requires fair treatment across socioeconomic classes or age groups.  That’s what the big arguments about redistributing income are about.  Transitional equity requires that when a law is enacted, people not be unduly harmed simply by its process of implementation.  For example, when SSA, to save money, began mailing monthly benefit checks throughout the month rather than just on the 3^rd, deciding how to handle the first month of the change for the people who had been getting a check on the 3^rd but now might get it on the 15^th was a major transitional equity issue.  The problem is that the various equity considerations work against each other, and must be balanced.  The wider the population served by the legislation, the tougher the vertical and transitional issues are.  That’s why, for example, when Social Security was first enacted, farm workers were excluded.  And of course there’s politics, which brings in a whole other bunch of considerations.

The ACA furor is about the fact that some people may face loss of an existing health insurance policy because the standards for health insurance set by the law require better coverage by the insurance company, and the insurance company decides to charge significantly more for that improved coverage. Their coverage of course was poor because their low pay could not cover better coverage under the existing system.  But improved coverage is a major goal of the legislation.  The problem exists because vertical equity requires providing the same quality of health care whether you’re earning $15,000 or $150,000.  But horizontal equity requires as broad a population covered as is possible, and not everyone’s income covers the same medical care in our existing system.  And transitional equity says no one should be unduly damaged in the process of improving coverage.  And politics says it’s a bitterly factional issue where no agreement is possible.  It looks like an unsolvable problem until you realize the general problem already had a solution, and shouldn’t exist in the first place.

The existing solution, obviously, is Medicare.  Medicare Parts A and B cover all those over 65 eligible under Social Security for a flat monthly fee within reach of all.  While it’s based on prior work which was paid vastly different wages, its costs are spread equally over the whole population.  Extending it to all ages solves the vertical and horizontal equity problems at one fell swoop.  It would also invest the attention of the whole country in solving the medical cost containment problems we face.  The remaining equity problems are health care for those not employed, the transitional impacts on the insurance industry and the factional politics.  The same problems were faced and dealt with at the enactment of the original Medicare legislation.  If our politicians are sufficiently grown up to lead, they can solve them now.

The underlying issue is the reliance we place on good health solely as a reward for labor, when we are unwilling to reward the laborer adequately enough for him/her to afford it.  That’s why it comes back to that income inequality issue again.  We think of income inequality as a purely economic issue, when in fact it influences every part of our lives.  Everything from our health to our education to the transportation we take is better or worse because of it.  Other places like Scandinavia have tackled the issue and are better off for it.  International rankings say not only their health care but their general happiness is better than ours for their having done so.  We started this country off by declaring the equality of all.  It’s time we looked past our factions toward a common vision of what that means.

The Shapes of Things to Come

I once was taking classes at a school with two different locations.  While the composition of the students at both locations was similar, the “climates” were strikingly different.  At the first, let’s call it “congenial”, location, almost everyone was smiling and friendly with most other students, exchanged chit-chat, and really seemed relaxed.  At the second, ”distant”, location, students were focused only on class topics, engaged in few conversations with strangers, and were generally, as I said, distant.  After observing for a while, I concluded that a key, possibly The key, factor was the shape of the lunch room tables.  The distant location had only small 4 or 6 person rectangular tables, encouraging intimate conversation with old friends, but inhibiting meetings with strangers.  The congenial location had fewer large round tables, each seating 10 or 12, promoting mixing of all students, and it worked.  I thought of that the other evening having dinner with friends at a retirement community.  The dining room had a variety of sizes and shapes of tables, ranging from small square 2-person, which promotes intimate conversation, through medium to large rectangular, which promotes structured discussion led by a facilitator, to the moderately large circular table where my group was seated.  I thought “they know what they are doing here.”

One of the icons of public policy wonk history is Talleyrand, a French diplomat who served and survived the Ancient Regime, the Revolution, Napoleon and the restored Monarchy.  He obviously knew what he was doing.  As the French Foreign Minister at the Congress of Vienna which reshaped Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, Talleyrand had to fight tooth and nail for the survival of France in a room filled with people who had been at war with France for years and would have loved simply to dismember it; they wanted to exclude France from major discussions.  Protocol was important at the Congress, including who entered the room in what order and who sat at the head of the table.  Talleyrand skillfully refused to let the discussions proceed until a special room was built with a large circular table and separate doors for the simultaneous entrance of each country’s representatives.  Shape was important in setting the tone of the meetings, and he knew it.

That’s why I was encouraged to see a PBS program about the progress scientists are making in studying and copying the shapes of natural things to incorporate them into what we build.  What’s now being done is truly impressive.  I was not up to date on some current activity in my worrying previously about our over reliance on humaniform robots; we are not yet doing it large scale in America but our scientists are now creating robots of all shapes.  Some have arms like elephant trunks or that are fish shaped  – to facilitate lifting delicate things and allow danger free close-by human activity – or that bounce or walk on jointed legs like dogs to cross rough terrain, or that fly and swarm without a leader like a flock of birds to facilitate quick searches of large areas – getting around quickly and securely without depending on the dominance of one leader is important to birds.  Science is now focused on the importance of shape and relationships, and it is changing the world we live in.  Google has found that the placement of the free snacks it provides its workers affects both their nutritional health and their morale. The space we inhabit and the tools we use change the way we see the world.

For millennia, the shapes we live with and use were restricted mostly to those cheaply built by a carpenter with saw and hammer or by a mason or blacksmith.  That reduced the man-made world around us mainly to squares, rectangles and circles.  We devalued natural things as a world we had transcended.  There is so much more out there, and our scientists are now finding the value in it.  The importance of that is how it affects our relations with each other.  That dining room with small square tables inhibited getting along with each other; large circular ones made it easier.  One thing I emphasize is the psychological principle that our values follow our habits, the idea of  reducing “cognitive dissonance.”  As we make a habit of identifying the various values of the natural world, we are likely to find ways to improve how we get along with each other.  We can use a lot of that.

Polarizing America

Back in the 1930s, I had a deeply conservative first cousin congressman, angry opponent of FDR’s New Deal, who was defeated for reelection by another strongly liberal first cousin, who became one of the pillars of FDR’s New Deal support in the House of Representatives.  My father was an anti – New Deal Republican, while my mother worshiped Woodrow Wilson and FDR.  That liberal first cousin was also, like my mother, the child of a share-cropper. That was the way politics was back then; political squabbles were as much within as between families.  But it is not just politics that has become polarized in recent years.  The American family is also showing signs of deep structural changes along race, class and educational lines. They reflect growing differences between, rather than within, families.  And that of course produces political polarization.   Political fights are now more than the province of the dinner table.  A report released in September by sociologists led by Zhenchao Qian of Ohio State University revealed sharp and growing divisions in family structure which the sociologists attribute to the increasing income inequality across America.

Family diversity is the name of the game these days in America.  It has always been so, as the report recognizes.  Even back in the 19^th century, sharp divisions in family structure existed between rich and poor, but the 20^th century brought better education and a booming economy with steadily rising wages that created a convergence between rich and poor family structures and ways of life.  The sociologists’ concern is that structural diversity is again sharply increasing, and falls increasingly along the lines between the haves and have not’s.  Wealthy, well-educated Americans are much more likely to be married, to stay married, and to have children who do not live in poverty.  Poor families are much more likely to feature single parents, divorced parents and children raised by grandparents.  A child you can’t feed is sent to be raised by grandma.  But immigrant parents are much more likely to be married and stay married than U.S. born families.  Over half of U.S. born white families featured children living with dual-income married parents, while only 24 percent of African American children lived in such arrangements.  37 percent of African American children lived in families with never-married or divorced parents.  The report found that such a living arrangement was closely correlated to poverty.  And all these differences have been sharply increasing since the 2000 U.S. Census.  Rich and poor families again, as in the time of Disraeli’s England, live in different nations that do not understand one another.

As someone whose father was a descendant of the town founders and whose mother was a child of a share-cropper, I have a keen sensitivity to how different the world looks from each direction.  I grew up with my father’s sense of naturally earned entitlement by  hard work and my mother’s mantra of “beggars can’t be choosers.” With prosperity comes a sense of social acceptance and an entitlement that has been earned by effort and determination; being poor is some kind of failing which should not be encouraged by acceptability. What others might consider thoughtless wastefulness is simply a convenient way of life, made possible by hard work.  With poverty comes a sense of rejection, oppression and a necessary but unloved frugality.  Poverty has been enforced by being held down, and the oppressors have only contempt for those they ignore and mistreat; it is that sense of oppression that leads to picket lines, strikes and eventually to social revolutions. 

What the sociologists have documented is that a common perception, that poverty is the result of family instability and lack of determination, is not always right.  In fact, much of the time it is the relative poverty that produces the family instability and the sense of oppression that generates lack of effort.  I throw in “relative” with the poverty to emphasize three things.  First, even the poorest of Americans is living at an income level several times that of the poor in the rest of the world.  That is why we are continually surprised by the apparent easy acceptance by newly immigrant families of incomes and living conditions that we in general regard as abject poverty.  And it’s part of why immigrant family structure remains stable in the presence of that poverty.  We blame immigrants for being unwilling to assimilate when in fact they are clustering in family groups that make that initial poverty more tolerable.  Second, the driving dynamic is relative income inequality, not absolute levels of income.  A small town family making $10,000 that is surrounded by families making $50,000 feels about as poor as a big city family making $50,000 that is surrounded by families making $500,000.  And third, continuing poverty is as much as anything a state of mind generated by the sense of oppression and of rejection by the relatively more prosperous.  After my father died, I and my family were not poor; we were “temporarily out of funds” as the psychologist Eric Bern used to say.  We were buffered from the rejection that makes us “poor” by our long term connections to the town from my father’s side of the family, which enabled us to share in the benefits of our “home” town even without money.  We were accepted and respected as members of the small-town “family.”  Long-term poverty in a large urban area destroys that.

That is why the sociologists credit growing income inequality for the increasing family instability.  And that is why I am angered by the refusal of the “one percent” to fund increased pay for workers to keep up with their productivity gains or accept a reasonable share of the taxes needed to make a complex modern society viable through public education and infrastructure development, though I am a retiree who is not out of pocket either way.  And it is why I am angered by the financial corporations’ over-reliance on the use of derivatives to make money, creating the incentive for the rest of the one percent not to make productive use of their capital by job creation.   They collectively drag society down, uncaring about how they destroy the home in which they live, all in pursuit of their private interest.  They forget, and must be reminded, that financial obligations include our responsibility for the family in which we are a part, and that extends far beyond the walls that separate us.

The Economics of Despair

Back in the 1840s, when De Tocqueville was writing about America, there was no disagreement about its future, only about the best route for getting there.  It would span the continent, build better ships and mouse traps, provide new homes for the huddled masses of Europe, and grow.  The advice of the day was to go west and grow up with the country.  De Tocqueville noted that the essential formative influences on the American character were the wide open spaces and unbounded resources of the new continent; the main requirement for success was confidence.  Political disputes focused on social issues like slavery, on expansion issues like the Mexican War and on who would build things, not whether they should be built.  Would America be different in the future?  Of course it would.  So what?  The common vision was that it would be better for all. But the times have changed.

It is interesting that the entire recent hullabaloo in Washington has focused on the politics and economics of despair versus confidence.  Ted Cruz and the Tea Party say we have two years to get things right (meaning back to the elm-lined streets of the early 20^th century or to a 19^th century fantasy that never actually existed except in plantation houses) before we go over a cliff – to an unknown future?  What’s new about that?  The liberals say we need to build new things like infrastructure and green technology to meet the challenges of that future.  What’s new about that?  Henry Clay was saying much the same sort of thing back in the 1840s.  What is especially interesting is that the people who avow that they seek to preserve the values of the past, the conservatives, are the ones who despair, while the liberals, facing forward to the future, are the ones who exude the primary American value of confidence.  The conservatives are really lamenting a lost culture of the past, but in their vain denial of cultural change, they risk denying the potential for a brighter future.

Two side-by-side opinion pieces in the Washington Post, one by Robert Samuelson and the other by Larry Summers, reveal the economic roots of those differing visions.  Samuelson gloomily looks forward to a future of slow economic growth marked by increasingly bitter class disputes about how to split an ever shrinking pie.  He attributes that to shrinking labor force participation, lower high school and college graduation rates, lessening capital investment and lessening innovation.  He sees little or no prospects for the rapid growth of the past.  He fails to see that all those factors he cites are byproducts of a loss in confidence in an expansive future, occasioned both by the recession and by the unwillingness of the one percent to promote growth.  I suspect he also unconsciously believes growth requires adding space and is haunted by the vision of a lost frontier.

Summers instead focuses on the need for growth strategies, lamenting the undue concentration on budget deals which serve only to limit growth.  He points out that, in addition to solving real challenges like failing infrastructure and climate change, growth strategies reduce or eliminate budget deficits, improve the educational base of the work force, create jobs and make the rewards of the economy less unequal.  His is the “go west and grow up with the country” call of the 21^st century.  He points out that “If even half the energy that has been devoted over the past five years to ‘budget deals’ were devoted instead to ‘growth strategies,’ we would enjoy sounder government finances and a restoration of the power of the American example.”

It’s more than time for conservatives to give up their despair, and to pick themselves up, shake themselves off and regain the American confidence in the future they have lost.  As Summers points out, ideas for resuming growth can come from all sides.   All can profit.  That is the American example to which Summers refers.  The future is there.  It may not involve more space, though the planets are there for our pioneers, but it will involve more community.  The shape that future takes depends on what we do now, and the confidence with which we proceed.  It requires primarily that renewed focus on growth about which Summers writes.  Our future will be limited only by our vision.

Climate, Ready for Departure

I always chuckle when physicists start talking subatomic measurements and the conversation turns to oogles and oogleplexes, barns and sheds.  Scientists frequently have vivid ways to describe their findings, and it can be fun listening.  The latest addition to that language, though it’s not nearly so much fun, comes from scientists at the University of Hawaii, who have coined the term “Estimated Year of Climate Departure” (EYCD) to describe the findings of an extensive study of temperature trends globally.   It sounds rather like a fond farewell at the airport, doesn’t it. The study identifies the year when, for many major cities in the world, the lowest annual average temperature is expected to exceed the highest average annual temperature for that place in the years between1860 and 2006.  In other words, when the weather is no longer ever what it used to be and it starts getting really hot!

The Hawaii scientists reported on their findings last week in Nature, and their results are  summarized in the chart above.  Their study assumes a constant steady trend in temperature according to historical averages prior to 2006.   The results have been reviewed and validated by other scientists and found precise within plus or minus five years, but it should be noted that recent acceleration in temperature changes may make departure sooner rather than later.  Even assuming only the long-term historical trend, the results surprised the scientists themselves.  The EYCD “tipping point” came much earlier than expected, particularly in the tropics.  The tropics are significant, because tropical species from monkeys to banana trees are used to constant year round temperatures and much more sensitive to temperature variation than moderate climate species.  First in line for boarding are Kingston, Jamaica (not shown on the chart) and cities in Indonesia.  But my neighborhood, Washington DC, boards in 2047 and  San Francisco in 2049, and Anchorage Alaska only gets to enjoy polar bears until 2071.

A separate chart depicts EYCD if vigorous climate change mitigation is pursued.  It turns out that climate change mitigation efforts delay EYCD in most places by about 30 years, but eventually it happens everywhere.  We’re in for a hot next several hundred years (unless Tipping Point Theory kicks in and the melting of all the glaciers, halting ocean currents, produces both extreme heats and extreme colds with mega-storms in between.)  Meanwhile, sea levels are rising at a rate the UN science panel now says will produce a 10 foot rise by 2100.  It should be noted that most locations in New York City currently vary between three and eight feet above sea level.

The policy question is what to do about it.  Should we invest heavily in defensive infrastructure or withdraw from coasts, air condition everything and wait several hundred years for climate rebalancing to occur.  Either way of course we have to stop pouring more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  These are the things we should be discussing now in DC, not defunding ObamaCare.  Ken Burns, in his PBS series about the dust bowl, noted how many in Washington in the 1930s saw the situation in Kansas and Oklahoma as hopeless and wanted simply to abandon the Midwest, leaving it as a desert.  FDR wisely chose otherwise, and government-funded advances in agricultural sciences made dust bowls a thing of the past.  I’m inclined to go FDR’s route of hope and expect breakthroughs in our science, but the challenges are immense and we need to get working on them right away.  The “Ready for Departure” is already sounding.

Creeping Austerity

Remember when the pejorative of choice for American conservatives was “creeping socialism”?  That was the label given to everything from fluoridating the water to Medicare.  Now liberals can have a turnabout with cries of “creeping austerity”, only this time it’s a worldwide trend arising at just the wrong time for hundreds of millions of struggling people everywhere.  The “German Disease” has spread rapidly from the EU to developing countries, with the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) as its current focus.  Smaller countries will follow.

The new growth projections by the IMF for this year show a worldwide drop in GDP growth to 2.9 percent from the 3.2 percent projected back in 2010.  Their 2015 projections show a drop for China from 4.0 percent to 3.5 percent and a drop for Brazil to 3.2 percent from 4.1 percent.  That’s a relative drop in growth for China of 12.5 percent and a relative drop for Brazil of 22 percent.  Worldwide, economies previously expected to double in size in 10 years are now only expected to achieve half that growth.  That represents a lifetime of continued misery for millions. 

The IMF blames “structural problems” like budget constraints and slackening of demand and is worrying about whether the changes are permanent barriers or only a cyclical phenomenon.  Apparently unmentioned are the slowing of investment from countries like Germany and the U.S. as they tighten their own belts.  Those investments are a major factor in driving the economies of developing nations, and their slowing generates the creeping austerity I mentioned. The IMF’s proposed remedies are to tackle the “structural problems”, presumably through a managed austerity as in Germany, and to follow the lead of the U.S. economy.  The American economy, fighting its way through intense pressures for austerity with its stimulus programs, has so far managed to remain the most robust of the large economies.

I call the austerity the German Disease, though it’s not particularly that for Germany itself.  Germany has made strides to a 21^st century economy with an educated workforce, high-tech manufacturing processes, modernized infrastructure, etc.  The “disease” is the idea they’ve demonstrated in the EU of believing the same path can be followed by economies nowhere near that advanced.  The Germans through their austerity have been reaping the benefits of productivity gains that the developing nations are years away from achieving, if ever.  Following the German path elsewhere leads only to high unemployment, reduced services from budgetary constraints, and a general increase in misery for the poor.  That lesson has already been demonstrated in places like Greece and Spain, and is now appearing in the developing nations.

Unfortunately, that creeping austerity is doing its best to consume the American economy also.  Long-term sequestering, severe cutting of entitlements, refusal to fund infrastructure and new manufacturing technology, failure to support educational innovations, etc., are all part of that austerity beloved by conservatives.  And in advance of actually achieving a modern 21^st century economy, they are premature.  Reaping in advance productivity gains by belt-tightening and layoffs leads only to high unemployment when the workforce is not trained for new skills needed and the new jobs have not been created yet.  Steps taken prematurely lead backward, not forward, and just make the journey harder.

The leadership of the U.S. is important.  Already both the G-20 and the IMF have expressed concerns about the global impact of the debt limit and government shutdown crises.  The lives of hundreds of millions of people will be changed by what we do here and now.  But thanks to that creeping austerity, we are foundering at the task.  We need to move past forlorn distractions like sequestering and shutdown to the real tasks of creating a modern economy.  It will not be an economy of wagon makers and corner grocery stores.  A wishful nostalgia and zealous struggle to recover the past will not create a successful future.  It is time to move on.

The Shores of Tripoli

What we did in Somalia and Libya was wrong.  Not the operations themselves, which were carried out with precision and discretion.  Not in the intent, which was to carry out a “hot pursuit” with the purpose of preventing both immediate and subsequent loss of life.  The raid in Somalia was aborted after gunfire showed it could not be completed without loss of life to “civilians” and causing killing of rather than capturing the target, and the Libyan raid was accomplished after first rejecting a drone strike because it would have caused civilian loss of life.  What was wrong was the failure to operate clearly within a protocol which recognized, and caused others to recognize, that we were both determined to capture those who had murdered our citizens and to do so in a way which honored international norms regarding respect for sovereignty.  The ex post facto explanation given was that we were operating under the authority of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Al Qaeda.  It was the first explicit use of the AUMF since its passage, and The President himself in May had spoken of the hope of eventually repealing it.  It had been passed by Congress in a lather following the 9-11 attacks, and was controversial even then.

Remember 2002?  It was a time of heated discussions, not only of whether to invade Iraq (I supported going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and was firmly opposed to invading Iraq), but also of how to designate the whole situation – pursuit of criminals or “War on Terror.”  Rather than just an empty exercise in semantics, it was an important distinction in international law.  Criminals are outlaws and can, in “hot pursuit”, be followed across boundaries.  They merit no respect on either side of an international line, nor do they merit protection.  A government that shelters them is perceived as lacking in the rule of law.  For example, the Somali “pirates” were criminals, and the navies of several nations congregated off Somalia to capture or kill them.  There was no controversy.   Back around 1800, we invaded “the shores of Tripoli” in pursuit of the corsairs, and were justified by the international perception of Tripoli, the predecessor of Libya, as itself an outlaw nation.  Terrorists in a “War on Terror”, on the other hand have had imputed to them a strange kind of sovereignty, a kind of floating nationality which merges or conflicts with the sovereignty of any nation where they happen to be located.  Is an attack on terrorists in Libya an invasion of modern Libya?  Is it a hostile act against the Libyan government?  At the least it is an offense to Libya’s sovereignty.  What has been the Libyan offense that merits such action?    When we invaded Afghanistan, we were in hot pursuit of criminals, and first warned the Afghani government that we were doing so.  We consequently had full international support for our action and at least the token support of the government of Afghanistan. 

We now inherit the consequences of declaring a “War on Terror.”  By raiding without any noisily public effort to have Libya jail or expel the Al Qaeda leaders we are after, we become perceived in the Arab world as not respecting the sovereignty of Arab nations, a kind of outlaw ourselves.  We seek to position ourselves as a standard bearer for Liberty and the Rule of Law, yet fail to live up to the standards we espouse.  We have an obligation to do better than that.

Dead Souls and the Global Press

“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!” Tennyson seems to have got his query answered with the emergence of “The Global Press”, a title self-bestowed on his paper by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian.  It used to be the Manchester Guardian, a British newspaper for about 150 years, beginning about when Tennyson penned that line. The Guardian now aims to hover, first only partially, eventually totally, in the Internet with companions like Wikileaks and ProPublica.  It is their answer to the falling circulation of print newspapers.  Their target audiences are global citizens, who, like them have no particular attachment to any old-fashioned country. In their words, their readers are “engaged, anti-establishment” world citizens.  They now have the third-largest circulation on the internet of any English-language newspaper in the world.  Their larger aim seems to be to serve as a sort of global conscience, curiously identical to their own and curiously indifferent to the circumvention of the laws and needs of old-fashioned countries like England.  I wonder what their solution will be to the declining fortunes of England.

The Guardian is at the core of the Wikileaks and Snowden espionage incidents (for that is what they are).  The Guardian depicts Snowden as an earnest citizen striving to do Good, who nevertheless sought refuge, stolen material in hand, with the chief rivals of the U.S. and Britain.  They also laud him as a protector of information so highly skilled that the intelligence services of the world would be unable to crack his safeguards on the information, hardly the mark of a naïve private citizen shocked beyond endurance by its contents. The British Prime Minister pleaded for the material not to be printed, and the head of American intelligence warned them that its printing would put blood on their hands, yet they kept on publishing until, in their own words, “even our allies told us we were going too far.”  By then, they probably had.

The history of the Guardian’s involvement is carefully recounted without comment in an article in the October 7 edition of the New Yorker magazine.  Newspapers and magazines are careful about treading on the “free press” rights of other publications, but the New Yorker history speaks for itself.   In their rush to spill the beans about the Snowden and Manning revelations, the Guardian loosely allied with Wikileaks and the New York Times.  The Guardian’s purpose was to enable publication of the material in whatever jurisdiction had the lowest resistance to its publication.  The legitimate security needs of the U.S. and of their own nation seems to have been their lowest priority.  There is no international law against espionage or treason, and some grand vision of a global “need to know” appears to dominate their thinking.

The Guardian’s actions, and the Guardian itself, appear to be based on the evolution of the “floating world” I have mentioned, a world of people ranging from CEOs of major corporations to international intelligentsia to simply the massively wealthy, who form a global society that feels disconnected from and immune to the sovereignty and needs of any one country, even that in which they were born and raised.  They’re the crowd that comes together at places like Davos.   Newspaper reporters like The Guardian’s editor, Rusbridger, have now begun to feel at home among them.  Rusbridger’s personal history as recounted in the New Yorker seems to show he has spent as much time out of Britain as in.  There are virtues in the emergence of such a global culture, like sensitivity to human rights everywhere, but there are dangers also.  Only personal morality is a guide in such a culture; social norms are of every variety and there are no laws against anything that cannot be circumvented somewhere.  Thinkers and reformers from Socrates to Wesley have warned of the perils of relying only on individual conscience; it is undeniably self-serving and must be examined in the light of the rules of surrounding society, and the examination must include the views of others.  Else, as in this case, virtuous intent can produce unvirtuous action.  In the name of freedom of the press and to increase circulation, the laws of multiple countries are skirted and it produces “blood on the hands.”  It forms a kind of Libertarianism of the mind, a cheerful indifference to the needs of others in pursuit only of one’s own vision.  And it erodes that civic virtue hailed by Montesquieu and Mills as the glue that holds democracies together, for civic virtue includes not only Liberty, but respect for the laws and for the institutions that execute the laws.  

The laws of countries assume an alignment of the individual or the corporation or of institutions like the press with the interests of the country.  Corporations began as creatures of the sovereign, carrying out his intent; they no longer are.  People were genuinely tied to the country and to its interests; patriotism was assumed, and exile was a legitimate punishment.  Those ties no longer bind.  Now a “Global Press” is emerging, pledging allegiance to no country, and inhibited only by the views of like-minded allies.  Yet the laws of most democracies rightly protect freedom of the press as a necessary enabler of democracy itself.  Unlimited freedom requires responsibility, and that so far is lacking.  Freedom of the Internet is a clarion cry these days but responsibility for consequences is lacking.  Unless the Global Press grows up to exercise its freedoms responsibly, it simply becomes another set of self-serving multi-national corporations, dead souls preying on the nations that engender and defend them.