Here are my thoughts on some wide social and political issues. While they seem like just simple common sense to me, some of them may be startling to others. I've collated what seem to me common sense thoughts about Iraq into their own separate page.
Our economy serves us by giving us a way to live and organize our society. Hints that it's the other way around --for example suggesting our whole society needs to change to match the new global economy-- have it backward. The economy serves the people; the people don't serve the economy. Our leaders should answer to us, not to the economy.
We should not let economic efficiency be used as the justification for everything, even things that don't make people's lives better. The economy should be the engine, not the driver. A hundred years ago the liberal champions of free trade strove for the grand prize of peaceful cooperation among nations, not for mere economic efficiency.
Consider for example slum populations. Viewed in the light of the people serving the economy, they're simply "extra bodies." But viewed in the light of the economy serving the people, they're evidence that something is dramatically wrong.
A split between the Sunni and Shia strands of Islam is becoming prominent in the Middle East. It may define the principal fault line in that region for decades to come. We'll be tempted to "choose sides", backing one or the other.
We've been here before. In the worldwide Cold War contest, the U.S. was the leader of one of the sides while the other side was led by the U.S.S.R. Back then we made loyalty more important than anything else, often supporting distasteful leaders. Our operative philosophy was "Yes x is an S.O.B., but he's our S.O.B.".
In hindsight those choices don't look so good. We got ahead in the short term and won the contest, but in the long term our support for non-democratic leaders came back to bite us. Many decades later we're reaping the negative consequences of those decisions.
Those experiences taught us not to just back the short-term winner. If what we really want is moderate regimes, we should simply back anyone who eschews extremism, even if they're on the "wrong" side. Sunni or Shi'ite shouldn't matter; what should matter is staying away from extremist tactics including terrorism.
We should support any group that has ideals similar to ours. Groups that eschew violence, participate in the political process, strive to improve the lives of many, and have popular support should be our friends. Let's not get hung up on subtle differences, lack of approval by the "official" government of that country, or on absence of an unswerving allegiance to "the West".
The highest praise for a government official these days is to characterize him/her as a good bureacratic infighter. For example a Google search for "bureaucratic infighting" turns up over 60,000 uses of the term. Apparently these days getting any old idea implemented matters more than the quality of that idea.
Not only has ability at bureaucratic infighting become one of the most important qualifications, the fighting itself has grown more vicious. Here's a recent quotation about our federal government: "Some engage in bureacratic infighting using slaps. Some use knives. ...."
Even wrong-headed ideas with great bureaucratic infighting behind them routinely trump better ideas. Currently in the USA the method of promotion is more important than what's being promoted.
Perhaps this is not how things should stand.
The jobs of "domestic president" and "foreign policy president" of the United States are more separate than we may prefer to think. Skill and experience at one don't imply much about the other. Most of our presidents have been good at one and poor at the other. Consider for example Lyndon Johnson who brought us the Great Society at home and Vietnam abroad. Or consider the presidential track records of former state governors. As the US makes domestic politicians their president, either US foreign policy has stayed in the "muddled middle" or the tiny professional bureaucratic foreign policy elite has gained inordinate influence.
And let's dispense with our old preference for military leaders as presidents. Sure George Washington was both a great military leader and a great president. But we're no longer well served by presidents with military backgrounds, most especially not for our "domestic president."
Perhaps our muddle about what sort of president we need stems from confusion about whether the USA is a nation or an empire. Does the US "lead the world" or not? Slavoj Zizek in "Iraq's False Promises" in the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Policy magazine says: "The problem with today's United states is not that it is a new global empire, but that it is not, i.e., that, while pretending to be an empire, it continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its interests. Indeed, in a perverse reversal of the old ecological slogan, the bumper sticker for the Bush administration's foreign policy could well be 'act globally, think locally.'"
In the computer game SimCity, the leader tries to make decisions that provide a satsifactory life to the entire population. One has to provide adequate fire coverage or the city burns down. One has to provide work for the citizens so they can pay enough taxes to keep the city going. And so forth.
Maybe we should expect our political leaders to act similarly. Maybe we could dispense with elections, instead having the candidates play SimCity against each other and awarding the winner the next term in office.
Why are the Palestinians so ticked off? Because someone stole their land. The widely promulgated misimpression that Israel was "empty" when Israel was formed simply isn't true. The phrase "Land Without People for a People Without Land" was great spin ...but not reality. (The truth is more like the all-too-common myth that the U.S. was "empty" when whites expanded, which trivializes all the unfairness and violence perpetrated on the previous inhabitants.)
But after all didn't "God give the land to the Israelites" making the Palestinians interlopers? That's what one learns in Sunday School. But that was well over 2000 years ago -- now the statute of limitations has run out.
Israel is a place where two very different styles of life are in direct contact. Folks who expect wild development and traffic jams live cheek by jowl with farmers who greatly value open land and olive trees. Even if there weren't already enmity between Israelis and Palestinians, this clash between city slickers and country cousins might be unbearable.
We haven't much noticed the incremental changes as our society has moved faster and faster. But just recently we've breached a significant barrier. Now everything becomes different in less than one generation. For the first time, most parents can't offer meaningful guidance to their own children because the world has changed so much since the parents were children that their own experiences are no longer relevant.
It's hypothesized that humans first began to dominate when the situation allowed both parents and grandparents to help a child grow up. But could you imagine gleaning useful knowledge about the way the world works from your grandparents? (Or do you just "humor them?")
We sometimes express fears of things like big government, multinational corporations, and political parties. What all these things have in common is they're large. The mere size of an organization may matter more to us than its purpose or direction. The scale of the organizations we're uncomfortable with seems to mis-match the scale of Homo Sapiens.
Largeness has effects in many ways. First, it's difficult to figure out how to control large organizations. It can easily seem that one's voice and effort are wasted, that some other people make the decisions for the organization some other way. Second, even if control were distributed equally, one individual is such a small part of a large organization that their vote effectively doesn't count. 1/999,999 isn't very different from 0. Third, the lag time between cause and effect can be so long that it's not possible to steer a large organization very well. Imagine if your car went whatever direction you had pointed the steering wheel in ten seconds ago. And consider the oil tankers that require a good fraction of a mile to make a turn. And fourth, the concentration magnifies the effects of direction. Just perhaps our schools would be more efficient on average if they were run more centrally, but a single poor decision at the center could impact an entire generation of schoolchildren and there would be no pockets of "savior" schools whose local decisions had kept them out of the debacle.
A common opinion is that government interventionism called "social engineering" is a bad thing. It says that government should simply get out of the way and stay out of the way. A frequently quoted example from the history of our own country is that our westward expansion was the sum of a lot of individual efforts which owed very little to the government.
But actually our government contributed significantly to westward expansion. To start with, the government bought or claimed and explored the land. Then the government paid for the technology and the huge effort necessary to survey all that land (all those neat squares a mile on a side aren't individual efforts). The government set up the land offices. And the government encouraged settlement both by advertising the opportunity and by giving land to the railroads expecting them to push settlement effectively. Some of those fiercely independent western ranchers wouldn't be there if it weren't for government pushing land through the railroads.
Also consider that government programs will have some significant effect no matter what. Sure, programs (especially brand new ones that have never been tried before) sometimes have unforeseen and possibly undesirable side effects. But that's no reason to do nothing at all; that's like discovering a car sometimes pulls to the left alarmingly when you turn right and concluding the best thing to do is to take your hands completely off the steering wheel. In this view "social engineering" is simply thinking through and directing the effect of a program rather than leaving it to accident. Stated this way it seems eminently sensible.
And the government clearly has a major effect on the economy. A free market economy would not work without the infrastructure such as theft laws, bankruptcy courts, and private lending that are encouraged and supported by the government. Government actions have either cushioned or extended recessions and depressions and even bubbles.
Soviet graduate students commonly had a very hard time understanding the economies of the west because they'd learned that completely free market economies couldn't possibly work over the long term without huge boom and bust cycles. (Many here thought similarly during our Great Depression.) The soviet graduate students reasoned that the relative lack of exaggerated economic cycles in the west must have meant that governments were steering their economies behind the scenes with a "guiding hand." And indeed they were (although the "guiding hand" was not as heavy as many believed).
If acting in ways to improve the lives of average citizens is not the job of government, what is? And discharging its responsibility means "social engineering." Our government has done this ever since it was founded. What's new is the objection.
Society should be constructed to provide a truly satisfactory life to the vast majority of the citizens, not just to keep them alive. After all, what would you think if you were kept in conditions where you didn't own much, had little control over either your daily schedule or your life, and relied on food and water that was provided by a relief agency. Would you be satisfied being treated like a farm animal ...even a well-treated farm animal?
People that are only "alive" but not "meaningfully alive" are ready to join radical or fundamentalist movements that promise them something more than just existence.
It's almost reflexive in some circles to demonstrate one's progressiveness by agreeing with the Darwinian view that man is just another biological organism. But many don't recognize and come to terms with the deeper implications of that statement.
If man is truly just another biological organism with no special properties, there's no mind-body dualism: no soul, no afterlife, no levels of consciousness. There's no end of the world due to divine intervention. Spirituality's demoted to a meta-phenomenon without intrinsic meaning. Man's dominion over the earth is not because of any spiritual grant, rather simply a recognition that man is much better than any other organism at controlling the environment. Man needs to take care of the earth in such a way that it will support him indefinitely.
An intelligence from another planet trying to understand the earth might view Homo Sapiens as just another pathogen or disease and report "the world has people." Former UK environmental minister Michael Meacher said "If we carry on with activities that destroy the environment, then we are the virus." The view that Homo Sapiens is a virus may make us uncomfortable, but it's what being just another animal can imply.
Even though we're less special than some wish to think, we are in a unique position among species and no one knows what will happen next. Homo Sapiens is the first and only organism to cover the whole globe. Homo Sapiens is the first and only organism to take nearly as much energy from its environment as crops can get from the sun. And the pace of our cultural change, which continues to increase along with our population, may outstrip the ability of an individual to adapt to it. None of these things has ever happened before.
Truly accepting that homo sapiens is just another animal is well on the way to the deep ecology idea that humans have no greater right to existence than any other form of life.
It's certainly quicker and easier to redirect large institutions or countries by limiting decisions to a very small group of people who control the levers of power. Even in the USA the discussions in Washington often have no relation to the arguments broadcast to the larger populace. Tiny groups can make decisions for the whole that have only lukewarm support among the rank and file. (Consider the current foreign policy of the USA and how it's controlled by people and ideas the average citizen doesn't even know about let alone understand.)
Yet the cost of involving only very small groups is decisions that are "brittle" -- they can be inadvertently crossed by underlings who don't understand them, and they can be all too easily thrown out. It takes plenty of time and effort to convince every individual, but the advantage of reasoning to a broadly supported concensus is robustness. The organization will continue in the same direction even if its leaders are removed. And the direction will be stubbornly pursued rather than casually changed.
As an example consider all the environmental consciousness we've been feeding to USA schoolchildren for many years. A big concensus is building up, and there will be no way to stop the juggernaut. Only a crazy person would float environmentally unaware ideas in the USA a generation from now.
Very different skills are needed to excel in a certain environment and to re-create that environment elsewhere. Developing nations need time and help to grow from where they are, not advisers that treat them like they're already on the leading edge.
Efforts need to be consonant with the general level of development. A great example is chinamen who struck it rich in the Californa gold rush, paid to take an automobile back home, then watched it rust away over the years since there was no gasoline. Without the appropriate infrastructure an independent achievement isn't useful. There may be a stage where the biggest boon to industrial development is a distribution network for spare parts for hand trucks. First world experts who advise third world countries should think in the context of the country they're advising, not in the context of the developed country they call home. Their goal should be to help the country they're advising grow up rather than to integrate it into a global economy at any cost.
Foreign aid should be guided by the old principle "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime." Foreign aid should not be passing out fish, distributing the commodities needed to keep men passively alive --like cattle. And it should definitely not be simply a dumping ground for whatever surplusses we produce.
Human happiness is due to a combination of many factors, including health, clean water, stability, education, and culture. Unfortunately it's all too common in the USA that if something isn't measured in dollars it's invisible. The financial sector should be just one of many voices when making domestic and foreign policy decisions; unfortunately all too often it outweighs other considerations.
I remember my puzzlement on first discovering that many of the toll roads and bridges in New England still have human tolltakers rather than machines. The explanation was that considering society more broadly, the jobs provided for tolltakers had a value too, one that in many cases matched or exceeded the value of automating toll collection. In my youth I thought that was hopelessly anti-technology and retrograde. I've since though come to agree that valuing something should take into account its whole effect on society, not just the dollars spent or not spent by one particular government agency.
Joseph E. Stiglitz makes this point in Globalization and its Discontents, writing "What is needed are policies for sustainable, equitable, and democratic growth. This is the reason for development. Development is not about helping a few people get rich or creating a handful of pointless protected industries that only benefit the country's elite; it is not about bringing in Prada and Benneton, Ralph Lauren or Louis Vuitton, for the urban rich and leaving the rural poor in their misery. ... Development is about transforming societies, improving the lives of the poor, enabling everyone to have a chance at success and access to health care and education."
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) doesn't seem to be a very good measure of well-being. Consuming more brings more happiness only up to a point. Once consumption reaches a threshold of "sufficiency," the correlation pretty much disappears and enabling even further consumption doesn't increase happiness much. Other measures besides GDP, such as Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) or Wealth per Capita are probably better at measuring well-being.
It's easy to conclude that "rich" comes from being "right," that the USA is powerful because it has the correct system of government.
But until fairly recently both the rest of the world and the USA itself saw the USA as a bunch of "rubes" with a single-minded --boring-- focus on business. It was still necessary less than a century ago to go to Europe to get a good post-secondary education in the arts or the humanities. And even today one pragmatic recommendation to Arab intellectuals is to regard the US as a business enterprise that acts solely on the basis of its strategic and economic interests.
So why did the USA turn out so well? Just maybe "virtue" didn't have all that much to do with it. Just maybe it was a combination of almost limitless land for homesteading, wise decisions by a few founding fathers, the virtual annihilation of the natives by disease, having oceans for borders, and lots of good luck.
The USA that grew out of the Roosevelt years is very very different from the USA of the founding fathers. This country has inherited two histories rather than just one.
The founding fathers never imagined "the industrial revolution" and had no concept of a "social safety net." They considered working for wages unthinkable; a common opinion held that slavery was less of an evil than wages. Slavishly returning to the originating documents now would be like changing horses in the middle of a river. Mario Cuomo describes the second USA in his book Reason To Believe.
Why not --as Everett Dirksen and others have proposed-- call a Second Constitutional Convention to update the document to our current reality? Perhaps we should. Why hasn't it happened? Perhaps because once our constitution is opened up for any reason, no matter how well intentioned, it would be impossible to get the needed agreement.
Reserving high office for members of a small elite rather than making all offices open to everyone equally has both disadvantages and advantages. Sometimes we in the USA are so focused on the disadvantages we forget there are advantages too.
One disadvantage is it's obviously unfair to other people and can generate a lot of resentment. Another disadvantage is that semi-hereditary elites tend to be overly conservative, often making plans more appropriate to the problems of their father's generation than the current situation. A third disadvantage is that good ideas that aren't present in the culture of the elites tend to never be considered -- the whole country is condemned to live in the same box as the elite.
An advantage is those in high office are relatively free of overweening ambition. They haven't had to claw their way to the top, and are not so likely to "elbow first, discuss later." Another advantage is those in high office tend to be embedded in a large strong matrix of family and social connections with people who aren't deferential. One result of this is they're more familiar with at least a little bit of diversity of opinion. Another result is they have a built in circle of intimates not entirely of their own choosing who will let them know right away if they propose something crazy. A third result is they tend to have a longer term view, carefully considering the effect of proposed policies on their descendants. And finally a code of conduct is bestowed on them rather than letting them construct whatever ethics fit the current situation conveniently.
If someone is very angry at us, beating him up is unlikely to solve the problem. More likely it will make him even more angry and make him look for chances to hit us when we aren't expecting it. Our schools teach our kids methods of "conflict resolution" so violence can be avoided. We should use the same approaches internationally we recommend to our own kids.
If someone is so angry and feels so hopeless they're willing to die (suicide bombers, airplane crashers), threatening to "bring them to justice" doesn't do much. How significant is the threat of death to someone who's ready to die anyway? Force or the threat of force isn't going to change their behavior. We can see this clearly in the case of a convict who's already in jail and murders someone else. We should apply the same reasoning to terrorists.
A couple of people who called in to --as well as a guest on-- a talk radio show on WBUR expressed more clearly than I could one of my own thoughts:
The administration is completely focussed on "power politics" and takes no account of the relationships between people. It has no understanding of why a person could feel so ticked off about being disenfranchised that they resort to violence. The real shape of the problem of terrorism isn't even on the administration's map, and they don't have any way to talk or think about it as it actually is. Their "solutions" are wildly off the mark --maybe even counterproductive-- because they don't really understand what they're dealing with. Good intentions go only so far when the fundamental problem isn't understood.
Although it may be fashionable to concentrate blame on the former Secretary of Defense and perhaps also the President, doing so is neither fair nor accurate. The entire administration --not just one rogue cabinet member-- did a concerted sell job on the American people. It's interesting that conventional wisdom picks out Colin Powell as the most dovish one and the one who was out of step with the rest of the administration. Colin Powell actually has impeccable conservative credentials, and seems dovish only in comparison to people on the extreme.
There was a time when the military leader of a nation and the civilian leader of a nation were routinely the same person. Napoleon led the government of France. Napoleon also led France's armies.
Our constitution was written during that period. The then-current practice of having the civilian leader and the military leader of a nation be the same person was frozen into US custom. Other countries don't do it anymore --for good reason. The ideal nowadays is full-time professional military officers who take their orders from the civilian government. But in the USA the old one-person arrangement continues because it's enshrined in our founding documents.
It's just a historical accident. Why do we insist on it?
We all know that those who refuse to learn history are doomed to repeat it. Our foreign policy should be more aware of history. We ignore the specifics of places and times at our peril.
For example consider that Fallujah was the starting point of the Iraqi revolt against the British in the 1920s. What happened there in 2004 may have as much to do with the history of western imperialism as it did with current events.
Many dismiss Islamic militants whose answer to everything is simply "Sharia." That answer seems naive in the extreme, characterizing as mere complexities what we think of as fundamental reality. And that answer simply ignores any elements of the current situation that were't imagined earlier.
Can such people really be serious? Why should we pay any attention to them? Where's their thoughtfulness?
But simply referring all questions back to "The US Constitution" --as some of our citizens do too easily-- is just another example of the very same thing.
Garrison Keillor's We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore expresses my opinions well.
|
Location: N42 40.86' W070 50.35'
(North America> USA> Massachusetts> Boston> North Shore> Ipswich) Time: UTC-5 (USA Eastern Time Zone) (UTC-4 summertime --"daylight savings time") Email comments to Chuck Kollars |
|
All content on this Personal Website
(including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works),
unless otherwise noted,
are available to anyone for re-use
(reproduction, modification, derivation, distribution, etc.)
for any non-commercial
purpose under a
Creative Commons License.
|