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!

Beginning Immigration Reform

Like many Americans, but possibly for opposite reasons, I have mixed feelings about the recent immigration announcement from President Obama. I applaud the action as a simple statement of our common humanity. It is a stain upon our national honor that we separate children from their parents in the name of enforcing dubious law. I applaud it also as a forcing action to generate real reform activity in a Congress otherwise so caught in its own death spiral that it is no longer concerned with real legislation for real people. As a regulatory action Obama’s action was no more out of line than numerous Presidential actions throughout American history that are now regarded as marks of Presidential greatness. As a political action, it was a way of forcing Republican opponents to take a stand on a topic they have continually avoided.

But I take seriously Jefferson’s warning that creating an underclass of residents allowed to work here but without the benefits of full citizenship could only result in societal instability. The lessons of Europe today reinforce that warning. From France to Greece to Scandinavia, a semi-permanent migrant worker class is creating permanent social turmoil.  Obama’s action by itself leads in that direction: it can be healthy only to the extent it forces movement toward full citizenship available without severely limiting quotas and a twenty year wait. What will count is the reform action that follows, not the temporary Presidential regulations.

One of America’s great glories and equally great problems is its sense of uniqueness. America sees itself as unlike others in that it is a melting pot, a “nation of immigrants” as emphasized by Obama. At its best, America dares things no other nation will simply because it feels uniquely fitted to do so. At its worst America ignores the hard-earned experiences and valuable insights of other societies simply because they are not “made in America.” We are already into a global period of extensive labor migration, forced by the globalization of capital and commerce. When capital flows elsewhere, labor follows. The impacts are being felt around the world, from massive country-to-city movement in China, North-African emigration to Scandinavia and immigration out of Latin America into the U.S. Added to those are the migrations because of war that we term refugee movements. Not handled properly, as is usually the case, they create a vicious cycle of further war and migration that continues for decades.

Some of the migration experiences are positive: I marvel all the time at how quietly and successfully The Philippines has become a nation which funds much of its economy on the work its citizens do elsewhere: Philippine workers are so common in America that no one even notices them anymore; each one I’ve talked with is reasonably happy with what they’re doing but expresses the intent to return back to their family when finished here.  At my age I have numerous doctors; the majority of them are ethnic Asian or Middle-Eastern.  Neither group could be mistaken for a “standard” Northern-European heritage American, but has successfully blended into life here.  Viewed that way, the turmoil over Mexican immigration is an aberration.

Other migration experiences, like the turmoil in France over acceptance of Islamic workers or the Greek resistance to Albanian and Bulgarian workers, serve as hard lessons on how not to proceed. All these experiences, good and bad, are worth looking at when immigration reform legislation is being developed. Nothing like that is likely to happen.

In a larger context, global climate change will force massive migration throughout this century. Some nations may vanish while others become places of refuge.  There is unlikely ever to be a global plan for how to handle this. Humans just don’t operate that way. But we could do far better than we are setting out to do today.  Global migration needs to be a topic for the UN and for the G-20. Parameters should be set by international law about how to handle migration. It is a topic no one nation can handle by itself.  

Which brings me back to Obama’s immigration announcement. It is a step forward, but true reform will need to go well beyond simple arguments about building walls along the Rio Grande. Real immigration reform will need to get rid of the current quota system, redefine requirements and waiting periods for citizenship and speak to both the need of the country for a younger worker population, the global commerce issues that generate labor movement and the human needs that drive the waves of migration. It will need to look beyond our borders to what is happening elsewhere. We cannot wall out the world.

Chilhood's End

Arthur C. Clarke’s epic sci-fi novel Childhood’s End centers around the disappearance of all children from the Earth, leaving behind only bewildered adults. It turns out in the novel that the children have been transported into membership in a galactic civilization, a kind of Biblical “Rapture”, which the adults are deemed unfit to possess.  The supreme irony of course is that it is the children who have become galactic adults, while the human adults are left behind to squabble “like children” over the broken toys of politics, ethnic differences, finance, nuclear armaments, etc., all vainly  seeking to satisfy their own desires at the expense of others.  The children have gone beyond.

My sister-in-law, who struggled through life fighting the necessary battles of the “feminist revolution”, hates Freud.  She gets particularly irate at his many put-downs of women (a vice of his time and place), and derides his now substantially superseded views of the psyche. Many of Freud’s concepts do seem antiquated after 100 years, but it is a mistake to toss them all. Some are timeless, and his social psychology, particularly that in Civilization and its Discontents, is both memorable and dangerous to forget.  Freud particularly speaks to our current times by pointing out that civilization itself is based on deferred gratification, a term he coined.  I was reminded of that last night while reading an article by Paul Roberts in The American Scholar, entitled “Instant Gratification”, for it deals extensively with what Roberts sees as a vicious societal feedback loop in which we as a society are being trained by our own inventions to surrender to our individual impulses at the expense of the society itself. We, according to Roberts, are victims of our own successes in devising things that control us and that we cannot control.

Roberts’ article is actually a condensation of his recent book by the same title, and deals with the effects on American society of the accelerating pressures to act impulsively. Roberts places some of the blame on the pressures of the computer and the internet, but traces the beginnings back to warnings in the 1970s by sociologists such as Daniel Bell. Those first warnings were based on the emerging effects of mass marketing, which later were compounded by the efficiencies of the computer. He notes that the typical grocery store which in 1950 marketed about 3000 products became the 1990’s supermarket with a product list of 30,000 items (and is morphing into the online Amazon whose offerings become uncountable.)  When so many offerings compete, nothing stands in the way, especially scruples. Roberts emphasizes my old theme of runaway Capitalism operating without a brake and destroying everything it hits along the way (I must admit it gives me warm and fuzzy feelings for him.)

Roberts cites a Madison Avenue marketer as claiming that marketers have discovered the shortest route to your wallet is through your lower “reptilian” brain which evolved in an age of survival by blood, claw and dominance at whatever cost to others, and mass marketing is designed to stimulate this urge for dominance by aggressive action. The future is always discounted in favor of immediate personal reward through impulsive action.  Egged on by marketing, an addiction to impulse develops. When this mentality inevitably creeps into other spheres, then societal institutions cease to restrain unsocial behavior, and finance becomes preying on the weak. Roberts notes that management compensation has become inextricably tied to share value, and that – consequently? - between 1992 and 2006, the number of SEC filings implying a prior possibly fraudulent misstatement of corporate earnings increased from 6 annually to 1200. Peaceful solutions to global conflicts are discounted, climate change becomes part of an inconsequential future, politics becomes libertarian denial of mutual responsibilities or extreme statements aimed only at short-term wins, and community is replaced by isolated individualism.  In short, Freud’s deferred gratification as social glue no longer binds, and societal disintegration proceeds.

If that were the total picture, Roberts’ warnings could be discounted like those of Malthus and Marx as showing the right concern but the wrong long-term vision.  For new technologies like mass marketing and the internet force value shifts and always cause temporary societal upheavals berated by critics and lauded by advocates that later become merely another strand of living. Reading was a revolutionary skill after Gutenberg, and fueled the Protestant Reformation, the modernization of Europe and the writings of Casanova and Rabelais; now we take it for granted in a six-year-old. The new technologies are used well, like the use of mass marketing to support individuality, and poorly, like the appeal to the “reptilian brain.” Society adjusts to both. Roberts himself notes that millennials are beginning to react against some of the worst excesses, and hopes that points to a brighter future.

We have to take account, though, that Roberts is describing a problem of advanced societies, but we are emerging into a global society. He has pinpointed a cultural lag problem in one area of a world beset by differing cultural lag problems everywhere. While we struggle with mass marketing, Africa struggles with how to enable its cultures to handle AIDS, Malaria and Ebola, parts of the Middle East struggle with how to transform a 12^th century worldview into one viable in the 21^st century, and the whole globe tries to work on common problems like climate change, extreme hunger, migrations and ethnic hatreds which require communication and cooperation among all. We can no longer afford to “play alongside” other societies, like toddlers. That is the really big problem Roberts did not address – how to adjust, and help other societies adjust, to our own and their cultural lags as we integrate the globe. If we limit our own world view to the dominance through bloodshed perspective of the reptilian brain, we help neither ourselves nor the Middle East, and 30,000 grocery items are not a solution to world hunger. It is time to leave our societal childhoods behind. We have adult tasks to accomplish.

Practicing Liberty in a Dangerous World

Tom Friedman, a few years ago in The World is Hot, Flat and Crowded, remarked that if he could be dictator for one day, the problems of managing climate change could be readily solved.  He could have added “Dangerous” to that book title and generalized the remark to cover a number of topics and been even more correct.  In all major global problem areas, solutions are known to exist, but no one has the power to take the needed actions. In a world filled with terrorism, disease, ethnic hatreds, unknown challenges ahead from climate change, growing income inequality and global recession, there is a longing for the security in knowing that someone knowledgeable and wise is in charge who knows just what to do and has the power to get it done immediately.  Popular demand has just forced the White House to name an Ebola Czar. The President has quite responsibly called him a “point person” – a coordinator – but the message is clear: benevolent dictators are all the rage. And police are arming themselves like small armies, equipping themselves in advance for totalitarian rule.

How did the country that valued Liberty above all else – even above Life according to Patrick Henry – come to ignore Ben Franklin’s warning that “the nation that values security above liberty will soon find it has neither”?  It seems to me that it is because we have forgotten that Liberty itself has demands. Along with Jefferson’s price of eternal vigilance comes an even greater one – constant responsible action.  We have adopted the libertarian ideal of unrestrained freedom of action as our modern definition of Liberty.  We are free to do anything or nothing at all so long as some minimal law does not require otherwise. We are free to go routinely above the speed limit, to resist paying taxes to maintain the roads we use or to drive low-mileage SUVs in the face of pollution and climate change. We are free to deny civil rights to others, we are free to buy or sell radar detectors, assault rifles, etc., we are free to hop on a plane for a shopping trip to Cleveland while under Ebola watch, because no one told us we shouldn’t.  When the results become immediately and visibly catastrophic, we then want to appoint someone to tell us to do otherwise. We want a stern parent – the kind we avoid being at home these days.

Long ago, when I was a child, we had this weird course called Civics class where we were reminded of our responsibilities as citizens, and we had citizenship prizes to reward us for being good ones. Our society was wrong on many things back then, but we knew fixing them required our participation and the efforts ranged from civil rights marches to buying savings bonds to plain old voting. We had writers such as the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini to remind us that satisfying our obligations to others was just as important as protecting our own rights.  We still have government classes in our high schools but they seem more concerned with the mechanics of government than with its spirit.  Our Constitution is partly based on the writings of Montesquieu. He, for example, inspired the idea of the three equal branches of government and the bicameral legislature, and his 1747 The Spirit of the Laws argued that the most important element of a democracy is the spirit of responsible participation in governance among its citizens. Without that, a democracy is dead. But the view of government as the enemy is more rampant now than it was during Reagan’s time, and good citizenship is seen by many as finding ways to destroy government, not support it.  Perhaps, these days, an appropriate addition to the SATs would be a section containing case studies on responsible citizenship.

I don’t often agree with the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer.  But the other day he said, approximately, that the political processes of democracy involve balancing a continuing tension between the needs for executive action and for individual liberty, and he was right.  Right now, the tilt is far toward individual self-interest, and our democracy is sick. The center of the political spectrum should be promoting ways of achieving responsible liberty, and it is not there. We lack community.  The problem of course is that communities exclude, unless they can see beyond themselves, and we are seeking more and more as a society to be inclusive. But global terrors are interrupting our individual partying, and the pressures are rising for a fortress America that can party on forever.  Only it can’t.

We need a national dialogue about the responsibilities of Liberty. We need positive regulation that rewards responsible action instead of just punishing law breakers. For example, in Australia, gun laws permit the purchase of any gun, EXCEPT for the purpose of self-defense – that is a police responsibility. That enables hunting, recreational target practice, etc., but excludes such things as assault rifles. It recognizes both individual rights and community responsibilities, And the Australian gun homicide rate is one-tenth the per-capita rate in America.  I've mentioned before laws that decrease food inspection requirements for businesses with extended periods of non-violation. And we need citizenship training that emphasizes responsibilities for graduation from high school. Right now, new immigrants to this country seem to have a better sense of responsible citizenship than our average high school graduate. A mandatory public service requirement as is found in other countries may be an idea whose time has come.  In short, as citizens, we need to get our act together.  We live in dangerous times.

Nor Are We Out of It

Those are the lines Marlowe put into the mouth of the demon Mephistofeles in Dr. Faustus, “Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it.”  Sartre put it more succinctly in No Exit, “Hell is other people.”  And Sherman most precisely, with “War is Hell.”  So, we cautiously begin our benevolent journey to save one group of people by destroying another, and the air does once more grow dim and sulfurous. But we lack even Mephistofeles’ excuse, “Thinkest thou that one who has seen the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of Heaven can but suffer 10 thousand Hells in the memory of their loss?” – Hell loves company.  We resume again the Never-Ending War, and as we slog on through the 21^st century battling a ceaseless war in the Middle East with one hand and ceaseless climate change with the other, we may indeed come to remember the 20^th century as heavenly.

I know all the good reasons for re-entering the fray, and they are good. It is clearly intended as a humanitarian effort on our part to stop the brutal slaughter of innocents.  That supports the containment principle of firm resistance to any behaviors, like Assad’s use of chemical warfare, that are clearly contrary to international law.  The common assertion these days that we are inconsistent in our Middle Eastern policy stems from a failure to recognize what our policies actually are.  But it is also clear that a  significant part of that slaughter is a deliberate attempt to egg us on to enter the war and stir up the “arab street” against another incursion by the West into Arab affairs.  That is how ISIL’s brutality differs from that of Assad, and we have to take that into account.  I respect the cautious way we are proceeding, complete with vows of “No boots on the ground”, though our military seems already champing at the bit to stroll through desert sand again.  The one big reason to enter would be that it would make a difference.  If it does not make a difference, then even the principles of Just War do not support our being there. Our military seems to think it would, but of course every war in the history of the world has started with that premise. The big reason for not going in is that any success on our part that does make a difference will shift the power balances between multitudes of warring factions.  That will inevitably be perceived as taking sides in an internal war, and increase Middle Eastern resentments against us.  At best, it may result in collapse of a faction we don’t like, the “bad guys”, but that in turn would produce a premature pause without real resolution of conflicts only they can resolve. And that would generate only the seeds of continued conflict, not lasting peace.

So, what are we to do? Nuanced diplomacy does not seem to work with ISIL.  As with Missouri mules, first you have to get their attention.  But the rest of the Middle East will require a lot of the nuanced approach.  We need to respect the views of Middle Eastern governments, even those we don’t get along with like Iran. And part of our demands need to be a quieting down on their part of the bad-mouthing we are constantly getting; “public diplomacy” needs to be a big part of our arsenal.  On balance, the course proposed by the Administration seems as close to workable as we may get. But the generals may have to be told to stop their “Let, me in, coach” chaffing. They may be absolutely right that total victory cannot be achieved without “boots on the ground”, but sometimes total victory cannot be the goal. Total peace in the Middle East may not include total military victory on our part.  As Bismarck noted, sometimes “War is too important to be left to generals.”  

Learning an Outside Voice

One old joke I love is about the guy who kept getting hangovers from scotch and soda, switched to bourbon and soda, then to vodka and soda, still getting hangovers all the way.  So he gave up soda. It’s also a teaching tool in logic and methodology classes, like the story about the statistician who drowned wading a creek with an average depth of six inches.  The jokes remind you to look beneath the surface for hidden variables and to avoid simple post hoc – propter hoc (it comes after that, so that must have caused it) reasoning.  History classes taught me also that (in the words of one of my teachers), any theory that attributes historical change to one cause is wrong.  But it seems doubtful that many of our politicians have ever gotten those messages.

I’m annoyed that so many politicians, from both parties, are attributing the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the expansion of China in Asia and the multitude of conflicts in the Middle East all to a lack of firmness in U.S. foreign policy.  They seem anxious to violate all the precepts of logic and History at once.  An old colleague of mine used to warn during Cold War days of the “nationalities problem” Russia would face when the Soviet Union blew apart.  That’s just part of the problem Putin is taking on with Ukraine, and it will get much worse for him should he succeed there. It’s not the same problem as in the Far East, where China is flexing new-felt economic muscle like a teen-ager or new entrepreneur, or in the Middle East, where the birth pangs of replacing an ancient culture with a 21^st century globalism will probably be felt for another century.   But our politicians seem eager for the U.S. to take on a global governance problem by firm suppression of all age-old national strife, whatever its origin, wherever it occurs, using the outworn cold war strategy of knocking heads together.  They still seem in love with the Pax Romana.

One problem is the failure of both patience and continuity. Conflicts that have endured a thousand years, like the Sunni-Shiite strife in the Middle East will not end overnight.  And no outsider will resolve them, only the combined pressures of global change.  In other places, like Russia, the internal economic failures arising from repression will do the job, but not instantly.  In Asia, many of the issues are struggles for economic dominance papered over with flag waving. While China declares victory over Japan in WWII a national holiday, Japan and India reach out to each other in mutual trade and defense agreements to combat what India calls “expansionism.”  A modus Vivendi will be reached.  Globally, growing pressures from climate change plus increasing dominance of multi-national corporations will eventually generate “a new world order”.  We need to shape it, but we cannot determine it.

Meanwhile, American foreign policy is known in other countries for its short-term horizons, with wild swings that cannot be relied on based on our domestic politics.  Foreign Policy in practice takes place in obscure embassies and trading centers around the world.  It is not just speeches by the President or Secretary of State.  But at present, for example, Fareed Zakaria reports that 67 ambassadorial appointments are waiting in vain an average of 267 days for Senate approval because of filibusters. The proposed appointments include 40 for skilled career ambassadors in places like Africa, where there are currently 13 vacancies, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia. That creates vacuums in our foreign policy presence in key parts of the world. Tea Partiers are threatening not to renew funding for the Export-Import Bank at the end of September.  The Bank, similar to those in 60 other countries, is a key player in providing credit for exports. Such domestic partisan disputes enable countries like China to eat our lunch in places like Africa.  Terms of office for our agency heads are even shorter than those of politicians, and policy changes accordingly.  But we are living in an age of transition, as most periods of history are, where longer views and policies are needed, and we have to come to terms with that.  Our policy will be as firm as we allow it to be.

Another problem is the failure to recognize the changing nature of international power.  Power is based on dependency relationships, and as those change in a globalized world, so do the power relationships.  Scotland has its own source of income from North Sea oil, and its political relationships with the UK are struggling with change accordingly. Russia is seeing a sharp rise in its exports to China relative to the EU, and power changes are coming from that.  And as technological changes sweep the world they generate political change and strife.  The “Arab Spring” was accompanied by graffiti on falling walls thanking Facebook.  

A kind of blindness toward the realities of foreign policy – the “bust your opponent in the chops!” attitude of political activists and the herd mentality of journalists are obvious causes – exists as well.  When one looks at the world without such partisan lenses, the principles of current American foreign policy   are evident. Three principles, self-determination, multilateralism and containment, stand out as the guiding ones and are being practiced reasonably firmly.  The principle of self-determination is as old as this country, and should not be controversial.  But when practicing it means letting combatants in other parts of the world fight it out until one destroys the other, or both are exhausted, abiding by it gets much harder.   It requires the patience and long view I’ve mentioned we are so short of.  Multilateralism has to be the working principle in a multi-polar, global world, or else we force ourselves into becoming the new Rome; such empires are not lasting ones.  The third principle, containment, seems the hardest one for us to grasp.  During the Cold War, containment essentially meant confining the Soviet Union into its existing territory, something we still seek to do in Ukraine, and to some extent, with ISIL.  But its main meaning today in our foreign policy is more the kind of containment practiced by parents with multiple kids in the back seat on cross-country trips. It means confinement within acceptable norms of international behavior, a difficult process with kids in a car, and even more difficult with parts of the world which have conflicting traditional norms.  Beheading is as ancient as the Middle East, and is still practiced in Saudi Arabia, but it went out elsewhere hundreds of years ago.  Borders are transparent these days and sometimes almost meaningless.  Norms are important as the world gradually integrates into a global community.  The Obama Administration seems mostly to have grasped this, and to be practicing it with reasonable skill, though, as with parenting, there are successes and failures.  It has not yet articulated the principle in ways that can be seriously discussed.  In part, this is because often such containment has to apply both to opponents and allies, and sometimes between allies, and publicly telling allies they need containment gets awkward, as in the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.

The   biggest issue is the entwinement of both domestic and foreign policy.  In the old days, partisanship mostly ended at the border.  There was an American consensus that when the President was abroad, the country was speaking with one voice, even if we disagreed with parts of his message. Now it appears there remains no consensus on anything.  Everyone is an expert, and no one is.  Our domestic economic differences dominate our thinking about behaviors around the world.  As a nation, we need to stop, take a breath, and remember we are one country to the rest of the world.  We need to show that.

Reinventing War

There’s a fascinating little spot here in my town where a shed once stood. Now only a bronze marker remains to remind us where and when the rules on how to fight a war changed.  Torn down long ago, the shed was the spot where Lt.Col. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and British General Braddock met to plan the ill-fated attack on Fort Duquesne (located where Pittsburgh now stands.)  It is said that Washington and Franklin pleaded long and hard for Braddock to alter his plans to march his troops, bagpipes skirling, proud in their British scarlet, cumbersome supply wagons in tow, through the Ohio Territory wilderness to attack the French Fort. But Braddock, victor on European battlefields, knew better, and insisted on doing it his way. The Indian allies of the French taught him even better, too late.

The rules on how best to fight a war have changed many times, not just at Ft. Duquesne. The Romans learned from losses to neighboring Italian rivals the value of the short sword over the long sword.  The English long bows at Agincourt taught the French about missile warfare. I remain amused after 50 years at reading the remark in Froissart’s Chronicles (think of him as the blogger of the late Middle Ages) that “War has become so terrible that it is no longer possible.” Over centuries, we have gotten better and better, from skirmish lines and snipers to Atomic Bombs to predator drones, at the weaponry of war. It remains possible, and we think we Americans are the best at conducting it.  Even against widely dispersed enemies like terrorists in the Middle East, we think we are really good and getting better.  But we are now at a “Ft. Duquesne” moment where the nature of war itself is being redefined and the battlefields have become invisible.  And we are behaving more like General Braddock than like Washington or Franklin.

In a global age dominated by economic strength as much as military force, our allies, our opponents and our trading partners often  become the same thing and both visible peace and invisible war are waged concurrently.  In a May 30 article in the Washington Post, Dominic Basulto argues that we are entering a new age where shadow, “plausibly deniable”, perpetual cyber-wars are being fought among nations and shadow nations, who on the surface may be friends and allies.  The wars are perpetual, without beginning or end, targets are ambiguous, and participants are often indistinguishable from bystanders. And, as Basulto points out, even the allegiances of participants are often invisible.  The wars themselves are only part of invisible power struggles which may be more economic and corporate than military and national.  Success is measured not by military victories, but by the relative health of whole economies.

  China, for example, one of our largest trading partners, is stealing us blind with cyber invasions aimed at obtaining business secrets from our corporations.  They are doing the same with Germany, with whom they just entered a trading alliance.  The U.S. is accused by Germany of bugging Merkel’s phone. Russian hackers, government backed or on their own – who’s to say -, are supposed to have stolen millions of passwords from U.S. websites. Simultaneously, Russia is working with us against the ISIS terrorists while opposing any U.N. action against Hamas and is sending a humanitarian – or is it? –convoy into Ukraine.  ama.HIs a Cold War II occurring?  Are these allies or enemies? No one seems quite sure.

We have entered a period when military superiority is often only a small part of the power equations, but the General Braddocks in our Congress haven’t caught on yet. The new solutions to global conflicts will rarely be only the application of military force; sometimes military intervention will be needed and at other times our worst choice.  Both hawks and doves need to learn that, and it’s a hard lesson. Often, both victories and defeats will remain hidden, not available for review.  

We may already have victories to cheer, but don’t know about them. Defeats tend to be the ones heard about. On the surface, it appears we, particularly our representatives in Congress, are off to a shaky start and need to study harder. For starters, we need to learn that Middle Eastern problems, from Gaza to Afghanistan, are not going to be solved by military force – that’s been tried many times and always failed. And that successes of America domestically count as much or more than military victories abroad.  And that diplomacy is nuanced as never before.  Traditional American jingoism will never solve our problems.  The McCains who never saw a fight they didn’t want to join, like the Braddocks, are dangerous leaders into this new wilderness.

Corporations and Orangutans

You don’t expect an interesting analysis of a major public policy issue in a humor column, particularly one by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post Magazine, a master of the art of real silliness.  Imagine the surprise to find his analysis of the “Hobby-Lobby” Supreme Court decision both hilarious and thought- provoking.  He first pointed out the obvious that the decision was based on assuming the personhood of a corporation, then went on to the silly conclusion that it would expedite the normalization of same-sex marriage.  But along the way it was a fascinating skim over the slippery slope of personhood.  For example, given the constitutional prohibition against slavery, can one own shares in a “person”? Is there a minimum age for participation in the election process as there is for human “persons”? Is the merger of two corporations a form of marriage?  Is a hostile takeover equivalent to rape? Does a corporation have gender?  All good silliness which points to the problem of how one declares a corporation to be a person without being able to define what a “person” is in the first place.

That’s one of the big unappreciated problems of our century.  Corporations are far from the only issue. Robotics is racing ahead toward the development of an intelligent, autonomous humaniform robot? Would owning one constitute slavery? Should it be able to vote? PBS just presented a program on the heart-wrenching story of an orangutan raised like a human child, taught and able to converse in an extensive sign language, coining his own words, treated as a member of the community for many years and then sent back to live in a cage with other orangutans in the zoo for many years. He fell into deep depression which was ameliorated only when his original trainer was able to rescue him.  How close to a person is he, and what happens when a genetically modified “animal” becomes able to behave in even more human ways, as is likely being worked on somewhere now? Anyone who has seen the recent movie “Her” knows the direction in which intelligent software is, perhaps inexorably, evolving.  The traditional Turing Test for intelligent machines, that they be able to converse remotely without the human on the other end of the line being able to tell they are talking to a machine, was officially passed recently, with some controversy, for the first time. We have all inhabited the early space age enough now that we are not shaken with the idea of green-skinned, three-armed space creatures being people. And again, just what is a person anyway? A 19^th century answer just doesn’t work anymore.

Perhaps though, our heritage does provide some partial answers.  When Columbus discovered the new world, there was a long argument in Europe about whether the inhabitants had souls; in today’s terms, about whether they were persons. The conclusion was that they were capable of knowing right from wrong and behaving that way and therefore they were in fact persons. To be sworn in as a witness in court involves presumptions of possessing moral judgment, knowing the difference between truth and falsehood and being willing to act in accordance with that knowledge.  Teenagers are not allowed to vote until they reach an age when some moral judgment can be presumed.  Prisoners incarcerated for some morally heinous crime are not allowed to vote. They are considered to have flunked the morality test. Historically, the “moral being” test seems accepted as the basis for competency in the legal process.  That seems to me also a minimum test for participation in the political process.  Orangutans may or may not meet that test –the evidence is still shaky on that.  Robots could possibly eventually be built with that capability. Corporate advocates argue that for-profit corporations are prohibited from acting morally; their sole obligation is to maximize profits for their shareholders.  By their own advocates’ argument, corporations fail the “moral being” test for personhood.

So, corporations must develop a conscience or not allowed in the political process.  There are other, possibly better reasons for excluding them, but failure to pass the “moral being” test is certainly a start. It could  be applied to politicians, too. Thanks, Gene.

The Purpose of Liberty

After all the unpacking and picture hanging of moving to a new place, I got down to re-reading, for a book club and to celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, John Stuart Mill’s great essay, On Liberty.  Though published in 1859 in England, it contains ideas on every page relevant to the hot-button issues of current American public policy, from the Snowden affair to how to deal with education.  I don’t always agree with Mill, but I’m always challenged by him.  

It reminded me of what we, liberals and conservatives alike, have lost through our incessant squabbling, and how the current mess got started in the first place.  Yesterday, I got 10 emails from various liberal groups, and seven of them included personal attacks on either McConnell, Boehner, the Koch brothers or the conservative members of the Supreme Court.  Had I been on conservative mailing lists, I’m sure I would have gotten just as many diatribes against Obama, Reid, Pelosi, etc.   It was Mill who commented that remarks offensive to us are not only acceptable in political debate, but necessary to shed light on our opponents point of view and possible truths in it that we may not have recognized. Mill further stated that the only statements really offensive and reprehensible were those that are personal attacks  on an opponent.  They shed no light and generate only anger.

One of our book club members commented that she didn’t know whether Mill was liberal at all, that he was not like any liberal she knew today and was, she thought, more a libertarian.  I got a little inward chuckle out of that because Mill not only is known as “The Great Liberal” and the “Father of modern liberalism”, but also included in the expanded versions of the essay, not shown in all editions, reference to the “dubious indifference to the lives of others” of the libertarians of his day, who had lost sight of the fact that liberty is not an end in itself but has a purpose; it is not an unrestricted license to do as you please, but a best means of improving the lives of all.  Preserving liberty requires social responsibilities toward others.  That in fact is the heart of liberalism.

That is why the book club member was partly right and rightly confused.  Mill was also skeptical of big government as likely to induce excessive conformity and loss of the individualism needed to find solutions to difficult issues.  He supported standardized testing in education but freedom for parents to decide how their children would be taught; he probably would have supported both “No Child Left Behind” and Charter Schools but would have been against “Common Core” standards.  His specific solutions may or may not work today, but his goal was to ensure children got a good education, not to standardize how it was taught.  He did not believe that government action was always the solution or that, in fact, there was one right solution.  Mill is like few liberals today, just as few conservatives today are like Edmund Burke, the “Great Conservative” who was Mill’s conservative counterpart.  Burke believed that the good things of the present should not be sacrificed for the promises of an uncertain future, but few conservatives today would state issues that way.  Goals instead are things like keeping a budget always balanced or limiting immigration or preventing gun control.  Why those are the goals is rarely asked.  It is interesting that Alfred Keynes cited Burke’s maxim as his basis for unbalancing the budget temporarily in order to infuse money into the economy to prevent the economic deprivations that were occurring during the Great Depression, yet he is hated by today’s conservatives as the inventor of socialist economics. Both conservatives and liberals have started to enjoy the fight so much that they no longer remember why the fight is worthwhile, or how to get things done.  They have lost the vision of their fundamental purposes.

I could trace the root causes probably back to the primary system and gerrymandering (though George Washington was already warning against factionalism and political parties in his day.)  The unfortunate consequence, however it arose, of the constant fighting is like being in a run-away carriage headed for disaster while fighting each other furiously for control of the reins.  The disasters today range from climate change to economic inequality that tears our country apart to endless, senseless killings, but we ignore them for the joy of the fight.  We could use a bucket of cold water.

We are faced with a dilemma.  Liberty requires diversity of opinion and approaches.  But solutions to major problems require solutions acceptable to at least a majority..  We need that diversity of ideas Mill sought as a product of liberty and we need also a national commitment to solutions.  That is an impossible dream without recovery of our vision of why liberty is important.  I share Mill’s view that a nation is made up of people and the purpose of liberty in the first place is that it is the best way to improve the lives of all the people.  All subsequent political goals and solutions should flow from that, and anyone’s idea of how to do that merits consideration, whether through government or whatever else that works. It’s time we dropped the labels, and the recriminations and character assassinations that follow from them.   I have begun automatically rejecting any pleas for political funding that include personal attacks on opponents, no matter how much I agree with overall stated goals.  If enough people begin to do that, perhaps it will add up to a bucket of cold water.  Other ideas are welcome.

Force, Morality and Collegiate Date Rape

An old friend of ours in Greece, a child during the WWII Nazi occupation, likes to say, “What could we do? They had the gun. We had nothing.”  It is also his response to a lot of different current situations, like bank takeovers in the EU, as a kind of resigned recognition that Might, whether moral and legal or not, commonly justifies itself simply by its superior force - “Might makes Right.”   Victimhood becomes a natural outcome of weakness, whether physical or financial or military, and an acceptable social norm.  In fact, challenging that norm becomes a dubious revolt against nature and an act of social rebellion.

George Will has taken a lot of flak, and rightly so, for his comments on June 6 in the Washington Post criticizing the victims of collegiate date rape as glorifying victimhood and “being a survivor”; in effect, he labels them as whiners wallowing in the privileges of a rapidly shifting and nuanced moral scene on college campuses these days.  He seems to equate the problem with the misbehavior of children, best policed by the stern parenting of the college itself - by the way, has anyone seen “in loco parentis” around lately? I haven’t in years - and such campus shenanigans as beyond the interest of the law.  An excellent analysis of Will’s core argument was done by Alyssa Rosenberg on June 11 in the Post, and many other opinion pieces on the subject are busily unraveling the many other weaknesses in Will’s argument.  But the fact is that Will’s argument is perfectly consistent with his general libertarian principles.  He’s applying the same kind of logic to date rape as he would apply to the activities of Goldman Sachs, and in the process laying bare a fundamental social issue.

I’ve commented before that American Libertarianism is based mainly on a misty-eyed memory of a past that never existed, where solitary heroic figures struggled with gun and plow against nature, hostile Indians and outlaws.  Hobbes was referencing the early American frontier when he described life outside civilization as “short, mean and nasty” and that’s how the frontier was perceived from England.  In real life pioneers travelled, lived and struggled together in groups.  The town names of places like Syracuse New York, Rome Georgia and Athens Texas show that thoughts of civilization were never very far away.  My great-great-great grandfather, who migrated from Virginia to Georgia to Alabama, with mostly the same neighbors in each place, lived to 77 – a good age even by today’s standards.  I have a diary of the trip my family made along with a dozen others by wagon train from Alabama to Texas in 1868.  Pioneering was a community venture.  Our volunteer fire departments are a truer heritage from our pioneering forebears than Marlborough Man.  Libertarians who think they did it all themselves and owe nothing to others discredit both their neighbors and their ancestors. 

Deeper down, libertarianism as practiced by some is Cain’s rejoinder to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  It is a trained lack of empathy with the needs of others, self- justified by the excuse that you shouldn’t interfere with the lives of others and they shouldn’t interfere with yours.  Their problems are their own business and you shouldn’t intrude.  Sometimes, it is mere moral laziness. But, like Cain’s response, it is often a cover-up for having done harm to others that you are ashamed to admit.  You have used force of some kind, whether financial, legal or physical, in a way that you know is morally irresponsible.   And to excuse yourself and be consistent you have to excuse others for doing the same thing, and excuse the enabling things like laws stacked against the poor that allow it to happen.  Letting that predation go unanswered simply spreads the problem throughout the entire community.

That is what makes it a social issue.  We today have the same kinds of dangers as did our pioneering ancestors.  For raw nature, substitute climate change.  For building a town, substitute infrastructure development.  For battling French and Indians, substitute a wild and bewildering array of foreign policy challenges. And for outlaws, substitute individuals and institutions from big corporations to collegiate rapers that prey on the weakness of others, sometimes by getting the laws changed to enable doing it more easily. And community responses are required for community dangers. Things like “big government” are our community vehicle for exercising countervailing force against the dangers we all share.  The more complex the tasks to be done, the more complex the organizations to get it done need to be.  Ignoring the dangers doesn’t make them go away.  

 We live today in a social environment of religious differences, income inequality global economics and diverse life styles that drive us apart in ways never experienced by our ancestors.  Our greatest danger is the splintering of our own society.  A new Pew poll reveals that the majority of those polled would not want a family member of a different political party, and that liberals and conservatives don’t even like the same kind of housing.  Activists in each party regard a victory by the other as a national disaster to be avoided at all costs.  We’ve got to get past those dislikes or disregards of others or we will become victims of our own misdoings.

We need the same kind of community spirit that our ancestors had to get the many things done that desperately need doing.  And we need more effective, not less, government as a tool to do the job.  Cain’s rejoinder won’t get the job done.  And solitary battles against our own neighbors won’t either.

Constructive Passion

The last few weeks have been a blur as my wife and I prepare to move to a retirement community.  Downsizing has been every bit as difficult as we were warned it would be.  So, as the American holiday Mothers Day arrived, complete with visits to and from children and grandchildren, it was nice to pause and recall “Whistler’s Mother”, the classic American painting of a seated elderly woman known more formally as “A Study in Gray.”  For it is both a loving appreciation of the artist’s mother and a beautiful expression of all the artistry found in combining mostly varieties of gray into one composition.  Emotional art you could call it, that refreshes at multiple levels.

The policy arena these days looks like the palette for such a work.  In foreign policy, China is both our trading partner and our rival, the Middle East includes allies who are bitter enemies of each other, and Putin and Ukraine are a swirl of competing grays.  Putin is both a traditional Russian who would like to reclaim the centuries when “The Ukraine” was as integral to Russia as our “the Midwest” is to us – Time magazine depicts him as Czar this week- and a power monger who uses tactics reminiscent of Hitler’s moves against Czechoslovakia. Ukraine itself is torn apart by competing factions. And there is no agreement about how to handle any of the issues.  In the domestic policy arena, people identify themselves not by what they are for so much as by whom they are against.  Anything positive said by one side of any debate is immediately denounced and derided by the other.  Spin doctors rapidly distort it into a mass of corrupt garbage.  The cynicism that used to be the province only of world-weary reporters infects everyone. Unfortunately the result is that the emotion in the current policy palette is mainly a virulently destructive anger.

As an old adage goes, leadership is the ability to proceed boldly when you have no idea where you are headed.  FDR in the 1930s was the great exemplar of that.  He unabashedly admitted not knowing the solutions to both foreign and domestic policy issues, but proceeded openly by a policy of experimentation – and the people followed him.  He did so by speaking not to their intellects but to their emotions.  His fireside chats, in an era before television, were accepted as his way of entering your living room and speaking with you personally.  His cheerful “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” heartened millions, including my mother.  That a blue-blood aristocrat from upper New York State could connect with a share cropper’s daughter from rural East Texas was remarkable.  She, among millions, was willing to try anything he thought worth trying.

Fareed Zakaria wrote the other day about the emotional vacuum in foreign policy.  He blames much of the current confusion in foreign policy on the lack of a passionately expressed American point of view.  I think he is on to something.  We are missing that “can do” willingness to follow leadership that got us as a nation through equally difficult times in the 1930s.  And we are missing the emotionally compelling  leadership to follow.  The closest we’ve had to that in several presidencies now is the good-old-boy “I share your pain” of Bill Clinton.  George Bush was a good old boy, but not gifted at sharing your pain.  The closest we’ve had to the FDR comfortable familiarity is Joe Biden, and it’s not he who leads.  Barack Obama is a problem solver with the right instincts and intellect to search out solutions to our issues, but his TV persona is that of one haranguing crowds, not sitting in your living room chatting with you one-on-one.   That TV is a much less “warm” medium than radio hurts.  And the overly cynical press corps and spin doctors don’t help.

But deep down, the problem is one of legitimacy. That vacuum Zakaria writes about in foreign policy comes about because there is no “American” point of view.   We lack the shared vision of America they had back in the 1930s that leads to a legitimate American point of view in foreign policy.  We each have our own vision of America as it should be, and our visions each exclude a multitude.  We are rapidly losing the “United” in USA.  We cannot all follow a leader because there is no leader acceptable to all of us.  The incumbent of the presidential office, whether liked or disliked, of our political viewpoint or opposed, friendly or distant, is no longer accepted as leader of the country by all. 

That is often blamed on a national cynicism following Viet Nam and Water Gate, but it’s more likely the pace of change that is so different in parts of the country that it constantly widens our individual differences.  Swelling demographics and rapid changes make even parts of the same city alien to each other.  Some of us inch slowly forward in a rapidly changing world in a perpetual hysterical denial, while others have become neighbors in a global village whose local ties grow vaguer every day.  I can’t really go home again to my East Texas home town; it has become too strange to me.  We need to find ways to take a deep breath, reclaim our heritage and relearn how to pledge allegiance to the same things.

The next two holidays are Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, perhaps a good place to start remembering that we all share more than just a continental landmass.  Find ways to reach out to those who oppose you politically and whose policy views you detest, to remind them and yourself that we have more in common than we have differences.  We need a common passion for our country far more than a common hatred of those who oppose our views.  Constructive passion won’t reenter our national policy agenda until we put it there.  Washington won’t lead us through current messes until we all can look to it for leadership.

Revisiting the 20th Century

The world’s history book is speckled with experiments that failed, though generally not much is remembered about them.  Etruscan civilization had many appealing features, but Rome almost managed to wipe its memory entirely from the history books.   From the lost colony of Roanoke to the state of Franklin, America has its own set of vague recollections about things that might have been, but just didn't pan out.    Now it appears that the whole 20^th century is being reexamined to determine whether it was a success or failure, and either way, who deserves the credit and who the blame.  In a December speech to the Russian parliament, Vladimir Putin tried to depict the 20^th century as a temporary triumph of Western barren and neutered “so-called” tolerance that was nothing but a slide into immorality.  He proclaimed Russia’s role as a bulwark against such tolerance and a model for “the organic life of different people living together within the framework of a single state.”  In such a view, Western “anything goes” tolerance, liberty and democracy are merely paths to inevitable decline.  One could imagine a similar speech being given in ancient Sparta about the inevitable failure of Athenian democracy.

One way of examining the 20^th century is to see it as an enactment of the democratic ideals proposed in the 19^th by thinkers such as Mill and Arnold, and the struggle of those ideals against the traditional ideals of governance by elites, whether they be a nobility, a plutocracy or a Communist party.  The fall of the Soviet Union is seen in this light as the final great victory over elite governance as an ideal.  Not so fast.  The current critique by Putin is a renewed attack on democracy itself as lacking the order, aesthetic values and moral values provided by the imposition of elite ideals.  An unwitting ally of Putin is George Will, who recently created a small flurry in the Washington Post letters to the editor by attacking democracy from the other direction, arguing that democracy is the enemy of liberty.  To Will and his gang of fellow libertarians, unrestricted personal liberty is the basic promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – though the Preamble to the Constitution only mentions liberty in its final clause as providing blessings which must be secured.  Instead, the Preamble to the Constitution refers to the collective ideals of forming a more perfect union, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare and securing those blessings. 

That is consistent with the idea stated later by J.S. Mill that true liberty is a collective value requiring responsible participation by all.  To Mill, liberty without responsibility is simply another name for anarchy.  He criticized the libertarians of his time for desiring a purposeless individual liberty with only negative value.  And his idea itself was an echo of the earlier ideas of Hobbes, a thinker well known to the founding fathers, who regarded the limitless and irresponsible liberty available outside civilization as accompanying a life “nasty, brutish and short.” 

Hobbes, and Mills to some extent, were arguing for civilized, collective behavior, not necessarily against elite governance.  They were, after all, living in a monarchy.  It was Matthew Arnold who pointed out that society consists of groups and social classes with differing visions and values who must act together to make society work.  That requires some shared values and a lot of compromise.  Arnold’s vehicle for making that happen was the English public school system, which he had a major hand in founding.

 In America, Jefferson had held the same educational vision later espoused by Arnold in England.  Jefferson felt that a good education was a cornerstone of liberty.  And that is where our democracy needs work today.  There was some truth about what Putin said regarding “Western tolerance” sliding into immorality.  We have only to read the papers or watch TV to confirm it.  A democracy where “everything goes” and everyone is following their own bliss without regard to the needs of others is not a pretty sight.  The dystopia depicted in the movie “Her” is not a pleasant prospect.  Putin’s solution was regulation by elites, the Communist Party and the KGB.  The 20^th century has already proved that doesn't work.  A better approach is to go back to Jefferson, Mills and Arnold and teach our children the requirements and responsibilities of liberty.  A common literary canon used to help tie us together, but has fallen victim to divisive arguments about which reading is most, or least, important.  Restoring a core canon of readings on liberty should be a goal of the public education process.  Responsible behavior and respect for others – including the need for avoiding unnecessary offence, conflict management and the other arts of democracy, ought to be a part of every curriculum.  That is not necessarily the responsibility of our schools only.  A public service requirement for all, like that found in other countries, would be of great benefit.  A citizenship test for high schoolers like that administered to applicants for citizenship would be a good approach.  There’s no reason any citizen should know less about our government than those newly admitted.  Responsible citizens open to each other and to the future should be the norm, not the exception.  And there is no reason our society should merely copy the anarchy or oppressions of the past.  We have learned from the 20^th century enough not to repeat it.

Profitable Aid

Oh dear, the U.S., among other rich nations, is under pressure to aid poor countries facing starvation and drought and flooding from the effects of the climate change induced by the rich nations’ profligate use of fossil fuels.  The latest UN report in late March had the World Bank report of the need for $100 billion annual aid to ameliorate climate change effects in poor countries removed from its executive summary, though still contained in its body, because of fears from rich countries that such language would force a doubling of their foreign aid during a time of depression.  Let’s see, that would mean for the U.S. an increase in foreign aid from .19 percent of GDP to .38 percent of GDP. What excessive generosity!  Why that’s the current percentage level of foreign aid giving of France or Germany, though it would be somewhat made up for by the fact that much of foreign aid will really be spent in the U.S. itself..  And it’s almost one-fifth of the annual growth in global soft drink consumption, which, by the way, also contributes to starvation by raising the global price of corn.  How dare anyone suggest such an idea!  The prognosticators are not giving increased aid by the U.S. much chance for success.

Sorry for the sarcasm. But it’s hard to avoid when such attitudes prevail in the face of a common crisis.  And that’s what the latest UN report highlights, that climate change is rapidly involving all nations, from Mediterranean droughts to melting Himalayan glaciers to sinking Polynesian islands.  There’s increasing likelihood of food shortages, which means the poor will, as usual, suffer most from the rising costs.  It is also increasingly likely that temperatures will soar above prior determined dangerous limits.  That’s why the focus of the report is on the need for immediate action.  Meanwhile, the “not my SUV crowd” is making it an article of faith that such warnings should be ignored, because they are bad for business.  According to them, the thousands of scientists who compiled the report can indeed be wrong, and are probably secret conspirators anyway.  Has anyone attended a scientific conference lately?

As for the unpleasantness of foreign aid, longer memories than most rampant libertarians seem to possess would recall that 90 percent of the original Marshall Plan aid money was actually spent on things built in the U.S., and helped boost the U.S. economic recovery from WW II as much as Europe’s.  The roaring times of the late 40s and early 50s were in part due to that.  Other contributors to a booming economy, by the way, were that big-government infrastructure boondoggle the interstate highway system and big government at its worst, the G.I. Bill.  Even libertarians don’t even have to feel generous to appreciate that.

Tuesday, Justin Lin, the Chief Economist for the World Bank, warned of the danger of the whole world falling into economic stagnation and depression because of faltering global demand.  He called for a world-wide Marshall Plan for $2 trillion from rich nations to be spent over five years to prevent that, noting that stimulus of poor countries will produce faster, stronger results than stimulus in less consumption-intensive rich countries.  Poor economies don’t just stash away cash in Swiss bank accounts; they go out and spend, creating multiplier effects. Lin suggests things like building new roads, bridges and ports to facilitate trade,  But what better things to spend stimulus money on than ways to handle climate change?  Numerous businesses around the world are already discovering that battling or adapting to climate change can actually be profitable.  It is in fact good for business.  The twin focuses of the new plan could be both trade and climate change.

I've mentioned before that the better way to deal with all the conflicts around the world (including the rich vs. poor nation type) is to treat them not as zero-sum games where one side must lose for the other to win.  Instead, the real winning approach to a better world is to treat the process like a jigsaw puzzle, where differing pieces are gradually put together to create a winning big picture for all.  Sometimes, looked at that way, putting together two problems creates a solution. This rich versus poor controversy could be a classic example.  Instead of fighting each other over a dwindling pot, we need to find ways to help each other and benefit at the same time. The new Marshall Plan proposed by Lin with an additional focus on climate issues is just the sort of project that could benefit all. 

The Future of Plutocracy

What strange bedfellows History makes.  It turns out that Joe Stiglitz, Aristotle and, eventually, Sir Isaac Newton are congenial companions after all.  A new study by a Paris-based economist Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, an economist at Berkeley, examines the growth of capital through history in various countries and concludes that it leads inevitably to excess concentration of wealth - plutocracy - correctable only by political means.  Piketty essentially argues that at certain levels of accumulation, capital growth detaches itself from the GDP growth of the surrounding economy.   Wealth grows as a function of inheritance or financial instruments rather than through production of goods and services. The concentration of capital away from production causes stagnation of the middle class, whose income is based on production, and the GDP growth of a national economy lags more and more below growth of the capital assets of the wealthy . Historically, this wealth accumulation outpaces growth in production until major technology change, crises or political means correct the imbalance.  In Europe, historical growth of invested wealth has been about 3 to 4 percent annually while growth in national GDPs has averaged 1 percent.

Capitalism per se lacks an internal mechanism to correct its own problem, and must always be corrected from “outside the system.”  Moral restraint by capitalists just doesn't seem to do the job.  Piketty and Saez argue for example that the vigorous growth of the American middle class in the 1950s was stimulated by the negative impact of World War II on the concentration of wealth and its positive impact on production of goods.  So also was the “Downton Abby” lifestyle described by Jane Austin curtailed by the Industrial Revolution and the Ancient Regime of France destroyed by the French Revolution.

Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz’s prior analysis of the modern American economy had already led him to that conclusion.  Stiglitz’s conclusions are based on the gradual accretion of small non-competitive advantages, “rents” in the language of economists, acquired through manipulation of, among other things, the political process to provide things like favorable legislation or regulation. The heaping up of small advantages eventually produces enormous imbalances that destroy the market. That is, wealth is accumulated not through superior production but through manipulation of non-market advantages.  Stiglitz, like Piketty, sees the result as eventual decay and decline of the economy, starting with decline of the middle class. History shows that the plutocracy that emerges is always corrected eventually by social revolution or societal transformation.  

Interestingly, Aristotle saw the same kinds of processes, though couched in considerably different terms, about 2500 years ago.  First, he saw the middle class as the key to the health of the nation; in fact, he invented the term ”middle class.”  He essentially saw the middle class as enabling political stability along with its economic role. Second, he warned against wealth not tied to the production of goods.  In his language, money was naturally barren, and the increase of it not tied to the fair value of the production of goods and services was an unnatural evil.  He seems more right all the time, though he lacked the tools of modern political economics to put his ideas into a comprehensive framework.

And Isaac Newton continues to remind us that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  One can extend that to political economics as well as physics.  The continuing efforts of plutocrats to create economic “rents”, uncontainable within an already broken market system, inevitably produce backlash through the political system.  The stamp act, navigation acts and tea tax, “rents” for the British plutocracy, which set off the American Revolution are just one example.

I realize it’s ridiculous in a modern scientific sense to apply physics and classical philosophy to political economics, and I have made angry companions in arms of both physicists and economists (philosophers are a calmer breed.)  That’s partly what creates the problem.  We sit in our modern intellectual cubbyholes optimizing ROI without thinking about how the world really fits together and what our actions are doing to it.  Eventually the weight of our accumulated wealth collapses the floor (or climate, or middle class) beneath us, and there are no carpenters left to fix it.  There’s a sizable group of plutocrats these days who need to take a harder look at the future they are creating.

Five Old Men

Traditionally, American political parties have had a congressional wing and a political wing, often at odds with each other over priorities.  Now it appears the Republican Party has added a judicial wing, with only 5 members in it, but totally in harmony with the rest of the party.  Unfortunately, that constitutes a majority of the court, a legacy of the Gore/Bush decision.  And that could be the ruination of the rest of the country, for the “five old men” of this Supreme Court, like the “nine old men” of the 1930s Court, seem intent on wrecking any attempts at controlling the excesses of the radical conservatives.  Their decision today to give big money unlimited sway over elections is itself another nail in the coffin of the individual liberty they purport to defend.  Their solution to all the issues of our 21^st century world is to close their eyes and wish they were back in 1910 Kansas where all decisions were in the hands of wise old bankers and Rotarians.  And like their 1930s counterparts, the “five old men” seem divorced from understanding the actual lives of real people.  I’ve previously characterized that problem, in my post on Ernie’s Mannequin, as carrying around two centuries of archaic decisions like a dummy, believing the dummy is alive.

Franklin Roosevelt dealt with that problem in the 1930s by threatening to raise the membership of the Court until it was ”packed” with sufficient justices still in contact with reality to accept progress.  It was amazing how quickly some of the justices thought better of their prior positions.  That’s how the Social Security Act got accepted as constitutional.  Packing the Court is unrealistic today without prior Congressional reforms, but it surely is tempting.

It’s interesting that the “five old men” are, in fact, all men, while three of the four progressives on the Court are women.  The inclusion of women into positions of power has been a hallmark of progress throughout society in the last 50 years.  And the age of the justices means they lived much of their formative years in the era before that became a significant part of our lives.  Perhaps the “five old men” are a better portrayal of the world of “Madmen” than what’s on TV.

However the situation came to be as it is, it’s time for a change.  A court mired in the past, and fiercely defensive of it, cannot deal with the issues of the 21^st century.  Five old men cannot continue to deny progress to an increasingly restless and diverse citizenry without disaster.    The elections this autumn could be a major pivot point, forward or back.  This version of “Madmen” should get no reruns.

Confronting Barbarians

Vladimir Putin is in danger of becoming nekulturny. It’s the Russian word which is translated as “uncultured”, but which is a far worse insult in Russian than it sounds to an American ear.  You might get a bit closer by translating it as “barbarian.”  That’s what George Will correctly (surprise!) calls Putin for telling the Russian parliament that Crimea is all Russia “needs.”  Will points out that when something is what you need or desire, thinking that creates an unfettered right to it constitutes the mark of a barbarian.  That understanding actually goes back to Freud, who in Civilization and Its Discontents defined deferred gratification as the enabler of civilization itself.  To that list we have since added taming the horse, brewing beer, roast beef, Dionysian revels (substitute Mardi Gras or October Fest) and a variety of other things, but recognizing that just feeling you need something does not entitle you to grab it out of someone else’s hands is in fact what separates us from barbarians and toddlers.

Any parent has probably at some point had an instant urge to smack their toddler for that grabbing, but instantly knows better than to do so.  It’s a learning process for both toddler and parent.  The problem gets harder when you’re dealing with a barbarian holding a spear.  You may have multiple bigger spears and feel perfectly justified in using them.  But is there a better way?  Being civilized imposes a need for deferring gratification on you even if the barbarian does not share that need.  You probably impose some intermediate response like making the size of your spears really clear while trying to slightly improve the barbarian’s understanding of what being civilized really means – you know, it’s like dealing with a teenager.  That’s graduated response and essentially what foreign policy in these situations is all about.

The problem is that part of you feels ashamed from backing away from a fight in a good cause you know you could win.  That’s the situation Robert Kagan describes this morning in the Washington Post.  Polls show that Americans clearly prefer a foreign policy embodying a graduated response to Putin with a minimum of spear shaking and a maximum of non-violent alternatives like economic sanctions.  The polls also show a dip in Obama’s popularity for following that approach.  On a broader horizon, Americans clearly elected Obama to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce our military commitments and pursue a more nuanced foreign policy, and they now show disapproval for his doing just that.  Kagan ascribes these paradoxes to that sense of shame for having done something sensible rather than something more gallant.

That’s of course the feeling any parent of a teenager knows – it accompanies “staying cool and conserving your ammunition.”  It’s also one of the discontents of being civilized.  It has its limits of course.  Exceeding those limits was what got Europe into trouble with Hitler at Munich.  Failing to preserve limits leads to disaster.  You’ve got to know when and how to say “That’s it!”  But mainly you need to know how what you do sends the proper message.  It’s best when that message is, “Welcome to civilization; you can put away that spear now. And no, you can’t have what you just grabbed.  That’s not the way we do it here.”

Translating that message into foreign policy moves can be very messy.  It’s hardest when hotheads maintain positions carved in stone.  The lesson for grabbing should hurt but not hurt to the fighting mad” point, and when people are already fighting mad, that gets very delicate.  The Obama Administration seems on the right course for now.  It’s not getting much credit for that now, but credit in complex situations generally comes as hindsight. 

The results will be measured by outcomes, and that’s what remains, perhaps deliberately, fuzzy.  Is the takeover of Crimea to be considered a fait accompli? If so, what happens with the Tatars?  The wrong answer to that question could lead to protracted bloodshed.  What about Russia’s possible future “need” for a guaranteed land path to their naval base at Sevastopol?  Or their opposition to being surrounded by states like Poland with ties to the EU and NATO?  We want neither surrender to barbarians or a return to Cold War days. This is a time when our foreign policy people need support, not disparagement.

Fondness for Battle

Standing on the bluffs above Fredericksburg, watching futile Union charges uphill into his thundering cannons, Robert E. Lee observed, “It is well that war is so terrible; else we should grow too fond of it.”  I’m afraid we have, nowadays in the pitched battles waged daily between our political parties.  Neither blood nor ink is spilled any longer in these unceasing wars – it’s so much easier to pour out the mutual hatreds and slanders via the internet – but the consequences remain terrible.  Families go without food stamps they need for feeding their children, drinking water is polluted, health care is lacking, diseased poultry is uninspected, businesses are bankrupted, future disasters are precipitated by current inactions.  The parties each charge the other with actions designed not for the benefit of the country but to promote the party’s own fortunes.  And both parties are right about that.

The problem is that large amounts of money must be raised in our current campaigning by advertising mode of electioneering.  The days are long gone when campaigning was done by shaking hands and kissing babies and issuing occasional quotes.  Now, due to the length of the election cycle, the numbers of people to be reached, and the Citizens United decision, endless cash is required, and it is easier to raise money by instilling hatred of an enemy than by seeking a common goal with those who differ.  Party professionals know that, and hatred is their daily product.  I get at least half a dozen political fundraising emails every day, and none of them is even close to the “love your enemy” message I get in church on Sunday – even when the political email arrives on Sunday morning.  They have grown too fond of their warfare.

George Washington’s farewell address included his famous warning against letting the strife of “party factions” undermine the Republic that he and the other Founding Fathers had devoted themselves to building.  Washington went on to say “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.”  More recently, John Dingell, announcing his retirement from Congress after 58 years, proved Washington right by saying he did so because Congress had become “obnoxious” in its partisanship.  Dingell pointed out that the current Congress had set a record by passing only 57 pieces of legislation and blamed a common “disregard of our country, our Congress, and our governmental system.”   That 57 pieces of legislation going to the White House was less than the number of times the House passed a repeal of the Affordable Care Act knowing in advance it would go nowhere in the Senate.

G.B, Shaw wittily observed that a nation is created by people divided by a common language and united by a common enemy, but when the common language is mutual hatred, the nation can also be destroyed.  We live in dangerous days.  Everything from class warfare to climate change to global terrorism to unending economic stagnation threatens us.  In some possible outcomes, our survival as a democracy is indeed threatened.  Those dangers can be both a threat and an opportunity to us.  One more quote – Aristotle was the first to get into the act of combining “common” and “enemy” into one sentence by writing “Even the bitterest of enemies can be united by a common danger.”  Our fondness for battle has got us into the wrong wars against ourselves.  We need to raise our sights to see the dangers we share and to relearn how to work together on them.  Politicians need to remember, like Dingell, why they set out into politics in the first place.  If it was purely from hate, they are in the wrong business.

By itself, of course, just hating each other less is not enough.  We need to try out things that have worked elsewhere, like the British practice of severely limiting the election cycle, or requiring media to provide free or low cost political ads as a requirement for licensing.  And Citizens United, and the underlying definition of corporations as political people, needs serious rethought. When you need lots of money to campaign, the temptations of lobbyists and PACs are too great.  And “here there be tygers.”  The need for money to get elected has itself become one of our greatest dangers.  Defeating it should unite us.

The Voices of America

One of the interesting aspects of the current wide-ranging discussions about Ukraine is that there seems an American consensus about the topic and a shouting match in the discussion of it.  The consensus is that Putin has gravely violated the sovereignty of Ukraine, that he must suffer serious consequences for doing so, and that while military confrontation must be avoided, economic and political sanctions of all kinds are appropriate.  But you couldn't tell that from the shouting.  President Obama is talking about the costs Putin must bear, while apoplectic senators like McCain are screaming from the podium and senior statesmen like Kissinger and Albright are urging calm. Talk show hosts are, as usual, frothing.

Years ago I sang in an excellent A Capella chorus whose director kept impressing on us that one of the most difficult things in choral music is to sing in unison, “with one voice.”  We were very good at that, but it took hours of practice.  In American politics it’s much harder and may never be achieved.  It’s part of the American culture.  The first CEO of General Motors was known to break up a meeting in frustration because everyone agreed on an important topic.  He treated consensus as a sign that not enough thought had been given to the subject.  It’s part of our history: Massachusetts even threatened to secede over the War of 1812.

What makes it unduly hard these days is the perceived need of politicians of both parties for consistent disagreement with others. It reminds me of the teenager stage when constant disagreement with parents is an imperative.  But they grow out of that.  Emerson noted that ”a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, and I suppose the minds of some politicians are as little as any.  Politicians in our history had no such need.  Henry Clay was a notable hawk during the 1812 War but strongly opposed the Mexican War, as did Abraham Lincoln, who later led us into the Civil War.  And their eloquence did not require shouting.

This of course is just wishing on my part.  As noted, cacophony is part of the American makeup.  Speaking nonsense is one way we exercise our freedom of speech, and we could not endure it if it were gone.  But sometimes it is important that others not part of our culture understand what we are saying, and that is a responsibility that should be understood and accepted by all public voices.  What turned the opposing voices of our past into an American harmony was realistic principle which agreed or disagreed as necessary, without regard to positions taken by the other political party.  It’s been said that part of the current crisis is that Putin does not really understand America, and our political voices are not helping.

It used to be that in an international crisis, domestic political voices quieted down and left the talking to the President.  Talking stopped at the shore line.  It’s not that way anymore, but I can wish that some of our political voices old enough to remember that era would think to bring it back.

Irrational Knowledge

Little side moments in life sometimes tell you more about yourself than a deep analysis.  I remember practicing just from curiosity with pastels, when suddenly the total mess of colors on the page came together to somewhat resemble the picture I’d set out to draw.  Wow!  Or that time I got to emote in the class play. Or that time I really had fun, broken glasses and all, in a college game of hand ball.  Political speech writer and columnist Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post the other day, told about the moments he enjoys reading about cosmology even without a clue about what the equations are saying.  That’s all useless knowledge, the kind you can’t earn a dime from and that economists contrast with rational ignorance.  But it surely is fun, and a vital part of what makes us human.

Actually, it turns out that it can be quite useful, only in ways you’d never expect.  Argentina has discovered that making music a required course in school has resulted in significant reductions in juvenile trouble-making, and has improved the general education skills of their children.  A nephew of mine turned a youthful interest in art into a career in helping troubled youth via art therapy.  The son of friends of ours took occasional breaks from his work as an electrical engineer to enjoy theater, until he discovered that his real love was backstage engineering work in theaters, and made a career of it.

That’s why it troubles me that so many public school systems are managing penny-pinching budgets and the costs of increased security by eliminating courses like art, music and theater.  Instead of using art and music to soothe the savage breasts of teenagers, they are hiring more guards.  That they are also limiting the life chances and pleasures of living for their future adults is of no account.  How many future architects and artists and singers are being lost?  Who knows?  But from a utilitarian viewpoint, those are jobs, too.

The problem mostly doesn’t exist in private schools.  They know the value of those “soft” courses, and make them an integral part of their education.  I’m grateful that the private school where my grandsons attend makes music a standard requirement, right along with the fine math, science, history and literature courses they provide.  They know the value of such courses and are willing to pay for them.

The problem is that necessary penny pinching  of public schools.  School boards and county commissions are often stocked with hard-nosed business men who never had a music class and see no need for others to have one either – not at the taxpayers’ expense.  And career educators, who should know better, try to please their bosses.  That was the message of that really good movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus.  That a shy teenage girl had been turned into a future state governor by the experience of studying music was meaningless; Mr. Holland’s job as music teacher was still eliminated.

Yes, better readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic need desperately to be taught and cost money to do so.  But so do music and drama and art.  And they too must be paid for.  And as is obvious from the private – public school contrast, it’s the poorer kids who suffer when they’re not.  The well known reason is that the costs of public education are funded by the property tax.  Poor neighborhoods lack the high property values that enable good education.

There’s a lot of talk these days about education reform, from charter and magnet schools to core standards.  There’s value in all those things.  But no real reform is going to occur until public schools are better funded, and that requires reforming the property tax system.  Economists and other pennypinchers go on about the rationality of ignorance, but that doesn't work anymore in our 21^st century world.  It’s time we started celebrating the irrational human beauty of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and started digging into our pockets to provide it.  Our children, and our futures, deserve it.

The Theology of Climate Change Denial

When Galileo obtained one of the first telescopes from its Dutch inventor, he set busily at work examining things like the surface of the moon and discovering the moons of Jupiter.  The response from the Inquisition was fascinating.  The telescope, they declared, was a creation of the Devil designed to lure faithless souls to damnation by presenting them with false images of worlds not in accord with scripture.  If science contradicts belief then science, not belief, must be in error.  That of course is the mark of the “close your eyes and believe harder” branch of theology that we thought abandoned soon thereafter.  Not so.  Only one hundred years after the Scopes trial, the hard facts of science are once again being challenged, this time by the theologians of the “Don’t blame my SUV” community.

Twice this week, I have been astounded by the theological bent that climate change denial has taken.  By the way, personal note, I am a person both of faith and of science; I find no conflict between them.  The first experience this week was after I gave a short lead-in about the recent IPCC report before a group discussion on the impact of climate change on world food supplies.  A participant announced firmly that he could not accept climate change because 1) a friend back in 1980 had predicted a six inch rise in sea level by 2000 and been wrong, and 2) Eisenhower had warned against grant-seeking scientists at the same time he warned against the military-industrial complex.  I tried to encourage the “regret-free” approach recommended by the IPCC, and hope I at least left him thinking, but I’m doubtful.  Theology is a hard mistress.

The second experience this week was reading the column by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post in which he chastised climate change action advocates on the basis of the inherent uncertainty of science.  This is of course much like the Inquisition’s position in 21^st century language.  The science behind climate change has to be a fantasy created by the Devil.  Krauthammer, for example, accused advocates of attributing climate change as the cause of every extreme weather event.  In fact, climatologists and other knowledgeable advocates have been very careful to state that no one event can be attributed to climate change with any certainty.  Instead, they look to the frequency of extreme events as one of many measures of change.  He also criticized over-reliance on computer models, when in fact many of the findings are things like long term (thirty years or more) temperature changes, changes in ranges of species and glacial melting, all observable fact.  And all the findings in the IPCC report are very carefully annotated with degrees of certainty, many of them over 95 percent.  Aside from that, has Charles stepped outside lately?  My brothers on the gulf coast have warned me not to go there between the end of April and the end of September because of the increased heat.  Those moons of Jupiter are really there, Charles.

Theology is a language for talking about sacred things.  When one encounters it, a natural question is, what is the sacred thing?  A charitable explanation is that it is the classical conservative position that the present should not be sacrificed for an uncertain future.  All well and good.  But advocates these days, perhaps too conservatively, are not arguing unreasonable sacrifice; they argue for “no regrets” actions proportional to observed change which will result in good outcomes whatever eventually transpires.  Unfortunately the sacred word that pops to mind in many cases is “Mammon.”  The actions which in many cases are required to ameliorate or adapt to climate change are often community wide, not for the direct personal benefit of any one individual. Personal treasure is threatened, and that is intolerable.

The IPCC report notes that climate change will require cultural and social adaptations as much as it does technical ones.  Perhaps the greatest of those is that we are really going to have to learn how to work together, often altruistically often for the benefit of unborn grandchildren.  In our modern, “follow your own bliss” American culture, that will be very hard for many.  We need to work on this.