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.)
We Created Our Own "Illegal Immigrant" Problem
These days we're very concerned about "illegal immigration", principally from Mexico and Guatemala. But it's not reasonable to just chalk up our problem to bad luck, or to consider it somebody else's fault; in fact our problem was caused by our own earlier actions.
We made it awfully difficult for people to continue living at home. The coup we backed in Guatemala stopped and reversed their Land Reform, leading to a population having no land and no jobs. Eric B. Ross, in The Malthus Factor described the situation almost two decades ago this way (and a lot more has happened since then):
[T]he unresolved lack of access to land or productive employment has impelled an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans to seek refuge and work in Mexico, the United States or elsewhere.And rural society in Mexico has been largely destroyed by "modernization" attempts, commercialization, multinational agricultural corporations, and (something that's not one of the "usual suspects") the Green Revolution. With little to keep them at home, many fled to either the urban areas (hence Mexico City's huge population) or the United States. Again The Malthus Factor describes this:
Thus, Escobar et al. describe the seventies and eighties as a time of "rural collapse"[emphasis added] when increasing numbers of the poor fled the traditional agricultural sector.And we got people in the habit of moving to serve as temporary (often harvest-time) labor in the United States. The Malthus Factor describes both the intention and the local consequences of temporary migration:
By 1924, the US Border Patrol had been established to help maintain a convenient influx of "illegal" migrant labourers from Mexico to serve the fluctuating demands of farmers and industrialists in the United States.The net effect of out-migration was a labour shortage in some households during crucial times in the local agricultural cycle.The Malthus Factor sums up the situation this way:
The dramatic pace of legal and illegal immigration from Mexico during the 1940s reflected a marginalization of subsistence agriculture which reduced demand for rural labour and transformed rural Mexico into a labour reserve for national and international capital.
Poverty Isn't The Same As No Money
One of the subjects of the documentary film 'Good Fortune' is the schoolteacher of a village in Kenya. The film's sketch shows these recipients of "aid" complaining they're being harmed rather than helped.
Further conversation with producer/director Jeremy Levine fills in the backstory details. Judged simply by monetary statistics, that area of Kenya is indeed the poorest of the poor. But those people themselves are saying: we drink clean water, we eat nutritious food, our society is stable, we don't feel poor, we didn't ask for anything; why are they "helping" us?
Eric B. Ross, in The Malthus Factor describes how similar situations turned out when the Green Revolution was applied to Mexico:
[T]he Ejido Bank began to encourage the use of new wheat varieties, forcing ejidatarios to use costly inputs of fertilizers and insecticides. The rapid process of capital intensification of wheat production served the interests of the private companies which supplied such inputs, but it also imposed terrible debts on the ejido sector, which disintegrated under the strain.In the end, the Green Revolution has done very little for the Mexican poor. Large farms, many of them tied to foreign capital, were the chief beneficiaries of the new agricultural regime. While investment in irrigation fed the growth of commercial agriculture, small-scale, rainfall-based farming became virtually obsolete. The increasing mechanisation of large farms, moreover, meant that intensive farming had little need for the labour of the rural poor.We say our real goal is ensuring people have a quality life, not integrating them into any commercial economy. If so, for starters we need to measure poverty rather than measuring money. At such low levels, all money tells us is simply whether or not those people are integrated into the commercial economy, not whether or not they are "poor" and need aid.
Environmental Harmony Doesn't Guarantee Success (Unfortunately)
As we increasingly live in harmony with nature, our society will grow and prosper. Or to say the same thing another way, the societies that do the best at restoring the ecological balance will come out ahead in the 21st century.
? Right ?
Many -me included- fervently wish this were really true, that living in harmony with our environment and succeeding as a culture always went together. But unfortunately the truth is most likely the opposite. Daniel Chirot, in his book How Societies Change, describes what usually happened in the past:
Perhaps some were happier than others, had an easier time with their environment, faced few predatory human migrants, and learned to control their birthrate so that they did not overcrowd their land. They stagnated while societies stimulated by greater pressures adapted, changed, and eventually spread because of their technological and social advances. Eventually, the happier few who existed in balance with their environment were overrun by the anxious many who had developed stronger cultures in order to cope with the challenges presented by their environment.In the long run, inexorably nature will rip apart societies that overexploit it. But in the long run, we're all dead. And in the meantime harmonious societies may be out-competed by larger and more aggressive and less balanced neighbors. Darn!
Efficiency Not Paramount
In her book The End of the Long Summer, Dianne Dumanowski writes
The logic of long-term survival is not an efficient one.In other words what's most efficient and what contributes the most to survival aren't the same thing. The two foremost recent concerns are:
- globalization
- "just-in-time" delivery
Survival of at least some regions is more likely if all the regions aren't so connected to and dependent on each other that failure of one will drag down the others. And survival is more likely if each region can call on its own local stocks of emergency supplies. Perhaps we should encourage diversity and self-sufficiency, rather than giving priority to "comparative advantage" and its ilk.
The topic of efficiency vs. survivability is getting more environmental attention recently. Use the terms "resilience ecosystem" to search for blogs and articles and essays and books.
Maybe Not A Good Tradeoff? Fewer Highway Deaths⇔More Binge Drinking Deaths
Because of tragedies caused by drunk drivers, currently nationwide our law allows alcohol only to those over 21. But the cost has been quite high!
Because 21 doesn't come until our kids are either in college or living on their own, parents have lost the chance to teach their own kids to use alcohol safely and responsibly. Our kids now learn to use alcohol from other kids ...not a particularly good source of common sense or of experience. And when once in a while our kids find some way to circumvent the rules, they "tank up". The effects of binge drinking -including death- have gone from being practically unknown to being a major issue.
If you are bothered by binge drinking, read this summary, then consider signing the accompanying statement. Current efforts to change the way our youth approach alcohol are proceeding under the umbrella of the Choose Responsibility organization.
Descent into War is a One-Way Trip
We usually accept uncritically the old bromide that war is merely the continuation of politics by other means. We give our own meaning to words that might have meant something quite different in their original context. We don't usually think very deeply about these words, beyond knowing they're the words of a military person (Carl von Clausewitz).
But the way we typically interpret them, these words have some disturbing implications:
- There is nothing fundamentally different about resorting to violence and killing. We're still just pursuing our politics.
- We have some control over the course of a war just as we have some control over any other aspect of a dispute.
- We can pull back at any moment even though we've dabbled with violence and killing.
- We can get out of a war as easily as we get into one. We have a choice of means to pursue our politics, sometimes we choose war and other times we don't.
When things are spelled out this way, do we continue to agree quite so uncritically? Although the original statement sounded pretty innocuous, its implications seem rather controversial.
Experience suggests that once there's been violence and killing, a society is fundamentally changed and can't just go back. Once family members have died and refugees have been moved and teenagers have been forced to physically defend their family, violence takes over and civil society is greatly weakened. Violence and the threat of violence engulf everything else. Young men with guns call the shots. Ideology becomes a life and death matter; tolerance goes on holiday. Groups that have lived side by side for centuries can't coexist any more. Real power resides in "warlords".
The situation becomes similar to effective control of a neighborhood by a "gang", or to "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, which was plagued by random violence for three decades.
Once that's happened to a society, it may take a whole generation -or even longer- to recover. Liberia was engulfed in violence for fifteen years, and predictions are its slow recovery will continue for a long time. The city of Sarajevo fractured after hundreds of years of coexistence and is only now recovering. Somalia dissolved and never came back. Even after four decades, Afghanistan hasn't reemerged from warlordism, and there's no indication it will any time soon.
It's not so obvious that it's more important to be "right" than it is to avoid this one-way trip to the dissolution of society. Was it really worth it to expel the "Islamic Courts" from Somalia even though it seems to have added another decade or more to the anarchy? What would a foreign policy that thought it was more important to avoid social chaos than to be on the "right side" look like? What would a foreign policy that thought it was more important to get rid of nuclear weapons than to "win" look like?
Valuing non-violence even more than justice would sometimes be counter-intuitive and uncomfortable. For example Alex de Waal, probably the world's foremost authority on Sudan, argued against bringing war-crimes charges against Omar Hassan al-Bashir in the International Criminal Court, because of the likelihood of so many negative effects on the local situation. He said "When peace and justice clash, as they do in Sudan today, peace must prevail."
People Aren't Focused on the Sun Anymore
For centuries people spread out fairly uniformly over the landscape. They made their living by harvesting the sun's energy (mostly by farming). And the sunshine was spread out, so people spread out too. Marvin Harris expressed this a third of a century ago in his book Cannibals and Kings: "Before the fuel revolution, plants and animals were the main source of energy for social life. Scattered about the earth on millions of farms and villages, plants and animals collected the energy of the sun and converted it into forms appropriate for human use and consumption."
An example illustrating the same thing is road maps of New York State. A road map of New York State in the 1800s shows the roads forming an even mesh that doesn't make anyplace more important than anyplace else. People did concentrate to some extent back then, but usually around natural features (a river mouth, an excellent harbor, a mountain pass). Even so, the overriding impression was of people spread out pretty much uniformly everywhere. Nowadays the road map is different, with smaller roads joining bigger roads joining even bigger roads, like river tributaries streaming into the cities. Now, for the first time in history, more people live in cities than in the countryside. The location of cities doesn't have much to do with natural features any more. Rather where cities are is now largely an accident of history; if there was a city there in 1900 there may still be one there.
Now the economic activity of a metropolitan area grows faster than its population. As the cities grow bigger and bigger they become better and better too. Scientists call it "superlinear scaling". In Boston you can see so many people you can scarecly find a place to sit down. Not too far away you can drive an Interstate through rural New Hampshire or Vermont and not see a single sign of human habitation for tens of minutes at a stretch.
It's certainly "different" ...but not clearly "better". Just what are the plusses and minuses anyway?
Control of Energy is the Key
To help understand why societies and civilizations rise and fall, look at their energy budget. (In fact, Joseph Tainter hypothesizes energy is the only significant factor in the development trajectory of most civilizations.) A clear description of how control of energy equates to control of quality of life for entire societies is provided by Marvin Harris in his book Cannibals and Kings:
[W]here water could be controlled, plants and animals could be controlled. Further, since plants and animals were the main sources of energy, control over water was control over energy. In this sense the despotisms of hydraulic society were energy despotisms—but only in a very indirect and primitive way.
The fuel revolution has opened up the possibility for a more direct form of energy despotism. Energy is now being collected and distributed under the supervision of a small number of bureaus and corporations. It comes from a relatively small number of mines and wells. Hundreds of millions of people can technically be shut off from these mines and wells, starved, frozen, plunged into darkness, rendered immobile by the turn of a few values and the flick of a few switches.
Small Is Beautiful
The rise of democracy in Western Europe was made possible by each small group being able to make its own decisions. Centralization -even in the name of "efficiency"- is inimical to democracy.
Anthropologist Marvin Harris said this over three decades ago in his book Cannibals and Kings:
Only by decentralizing our basic mode of energy production—by breaking the cartels that monopolise the present system of energy production and by creating new decentralized forms of energy technology—can we restore the ecological and cultural configuration that led to the emergence of political democracy in Europe.
Financial Investment Tends To Be Overly Individualistic
Whenever money is at stake, individuals tend to minimize the societal consequences of their actions.
Revered Abigail Adams, the wife of our early president John Adams, over the years made the investment decisions that created the family fortune. We gloss over just how "sharp" her dealings were; none of them were outright illegal, but they were seldom selfless or community-minded either. She took full advantage of her privileged position, allowing her to do things most people couldn't do. One example: her scheme to repatriate her husband's ambassadorship earnings from Paris by shipping trunkfuls of sewing goods took advantage of diplomatic communications channels to skirt a de-facto trade embargo. Another example: a questionable investment in Vermont land was so close to the edge of legitimacy that her husband remonstrated, asking her not to do anything similar again.
After Andrew Carnegie decided to donate his entire fortune to cultural institutions like new libraries, he felt fully justified in refusing every last nickel of pay to his employees. He effectively arrogated to himself the decision that money was better spent on his favored projects than on the income of working class families. Many of those employee families didn't agree with his financial priorities, but they couldn't do anything about it.
Our society weaned Ivy League college graduates away from feeling "entitled" to great wealth simply because of their birth, only to have them feel "entitled" to great wealth because they're smart. With our financial system being large and complex enough to obscure the not-always-fully-legitimate sources of money, such a feeling of entitlement is all it takes for individuals to drive our economy off a cliff without a second thought. It was worrisome when so many Ivy League undergraduates, who don't even get the broader context —let alone the careful ethics training— of Business School graduates, started going directly to Wall Street several years ago. Sure enough, the feared economic implosion happened not long afterwards.
Economy Serves People (Not Vice Versa)
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 not for mere economic efficiency but rather for the grand prize of peaceful cooperation among nations.
Likewise we should not let overall production levels be used as a primary justification, even for things that degrade the quality of life of most affected individuals. The "Green Revolution" for example brought higher overall food production, but was often implemented in a way that left most of the existing rural population landless and jobless. Even though there was more food, the net change in quality of life was down rather than up. Increasing the urban industrial labor force may be good for the economy, but destroying existing rural societies in order to do it isn't good for the people.
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.
Sunni/Shia vs. Moderate/Extremist
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".
Bureaucratic Infighting
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.
Domestic vs. Foreign President
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.'"
Serving The Population
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.
Israelis and Palestinians
Why are the Palestinians so ticked off? Because someone stole their land. The phrase "Land Without People for a People Without Land" was great spin ...but not reality. The widely promulgated misimpression that Israel was "empty" when Israel was formed simply isn't true; 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.
Cultural Speed
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?")
Society For All
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.
Homo Sapiens Just Another Animal
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.
Convincing the Rank and File
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.)
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.
Developmental Expertise
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.
Money Not Everything
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.
Richness of USA
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.
Two Countries
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.
Elites Somewhat Circumscribed
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.
War on Terrorism
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.
Power Politics vs. Human Relations
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.
"Commander In Chief" an Anachronism
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?
History Informs Foreign Policy
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.
No Historical Document Has All The Answers
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.
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