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.