03.31.08
Posted in Social, Politics at 4:18 am by steve
According to Lexington’s column in the April 4th (2008) edition of the Economist, there is a Mr. Brown at Syracuse University who discovered that conservatives are happier than liberals. Brown concludes
whatever their respective merits, the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one. Conservatives believe that if you work hard, play by the rules, you can succeed.
And that therefore you will be happy.
Correlation vs Causation
If one reads the article carefully, one is led to the conclusion that Mr Brown has committed the rather common error of mistaking correlation for causality. It happens all the time. For example: I, too, have been busy doing research. And I have discovered that people who drive very expensive cars such as Porsches and Maseratis tend to park their cars in remote corners of shopping mall parking lots. And I conclude that parking in remote areas is more amenable to owning an expensive car. It is, if I value its dent-free appearance. But were I to conclude that simply by parking my own ten year old Honda Civic in the same remote parts of parking lots, I too might succeed and having a Porsche or Maserati; and that by virtue of that success I might be happy, then only people with a fine appreciation for absurdist humor would keep my company. I refer to the idea that I might the “Porsche theory of causality.”
Brown’s mistake ought to be obvious. Why? because it is almost definitional. In the political process, the role of the liberal is to advocate for change. The role of the conservative is to advocate for stasis or retrograde motion. But in every respect, the arguments for change derive from a sense of dissatisfaction with the status-quo. Unless one sees some opportunity for improvement nothing can improve. In the political debate, the role of the liberal is to start with disaffection and reason toward improvement. The role of the conservative is to deny problems and argue against changes that might upset the status quo.
The argument in support of stasis derives from a sense that everything is pretty much okay. In terms of the political roles people play; it is necessarily true that the liberal must be more affected by his own troubles and by the troubles of others. For it is this ability to see things that are problemmatic and to be affected by them that creates favorable changes.
Ben Franklin suggested that “necessity is the mother of invention.” The saying applies no less to political innovations than it does to technological ones. Furthermore, an invention is not addopted unless it solves a widely acknowledged problem - sometimes in our consumer society in one we did not even knew esisted. But if an invention - whether political or technological - is to find any currency there must be some disaffection with the status quo. We suggest “disaffection is the father of change.” And, in fact, one might argue that the whole purpose of Worry Wart is to spread disaffection with things that we see as being real problems so that the political world can focus on making things better.
Thus, the political role of the liberal absolutely requires an ability to see problems, to be disaffected by them, and to lobby for change that might make things better.By extension, then, the conservative must be partly or wholly oblivious to the conditions that might result in unhappiness.
We note in passing that in any political debate about some governmental action, it is imperative that some party argues against the action. We will be making a long and impassioned argument about this soon. But suffice it to say that when two sides of an issue are not rigorously debated, bad things happen. We suggest, for instance, that a well contested debate on the war in Iraq might have uncovered a number of planning flaws such as the total lack of any plan for a post-invasion occupation.
The Voice of Reason
Given the definitional link between satisfaction with the status quo and conservatism, it is unsurprising that Brown found that the most conservative were the happiest. Somewhat surprising was that the most liberal of liberals were pretty happy, too. It was the people who stood on the middle ground that were the least happy, especially those who tended to be moderately liberal.
This is consistent with our model, too. Holding a set of political ideas sacred while being oblivious to the conditions that might bring them in question is, by definition a conservative practice. On the other hand; listening to evidence and moderating one’s stance in accordance with the evidence is by definition a liberal practice. After all, if there is no threat of change, one needs no reasons. If one is oblivious to the problems of others; there is never need for political change. This idea highlights the difference between liberal and conservative roles in political debate and the liberal or conservative nature of political ideas.
But in each case where one is to be capable of listening to evidence and moderating one’s ideas on that basis, one must be willing be wrong. One must give up a kind of happy, faith-based certainty. One must give up one’s most cherished prejudices to reason. This is not an easy thing to do. Among the reasons it is not easy is that it tends to make us less certain, more apprehensive about what we believe.
Prejudice, by contrast, casts us in some pre-defined societal role. And there is a kind of zen-like comfort that comes from the mindless execution of one’s social role. This comfort can sometimes be had even by advocating fiercely for politically liberal causes, regardless of the evidence about those causes.
What we have just argued does necessitate a distinction between political roles and political ideas. There is a strong, long-termed correlation between the two; but they are not identical. The difference is important; but we will not talk about it here. In the great arc of time since the Great Charter, we see liberalization as diffusing authoritarian power and conservatism concentrating it. These are the political ideals at work.
Temperamentally Happy
Intelligent people, if properly educated, might be capable of arguing for or against change, primarily on the basis of the evidence. But it is generally true that people are not strongly pursuaded by reason. There is some evidence that we decide first then construct rationalizations later. Reasons are not the objective stepping stones that lead to conclusions, they are the retaining walls to hold back a loose mound of unstable sentiment. For this reason, people tend to identify with liberal or conservative causes more due to their personal temperaments than due the impact of persuasive reasoning.
In other words, liberals tend to be worry warts. Conservatives tend to be the devil-may-care sort. A happy conservative may be totally incapable of empathizing with those who are unhappy. Think of Barbara Bush’s comment about Katrina victims
Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston. … What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this is working very well for them.
Very well, indeed. Their homes have been destroyed. Some of their loved ones have been lost. Their neighborhoods are underwater and may never be restored. The conditions from which they derive the most satisfaction, the connections to friends, family, and place, are all imperilled or destroyed. Their futures are uncertain. But hey, they were underpriviledged, so who cares?
There is a happy quality associated with being completely incapable of empathizing with people of lesser fortunes - whether those fortunes derive from geographic conditions, historical conditions, or biological conditions, or other hazards of chance. It is especially useful when their poor fortunes are a direct result of one’s own abusive treatment of them. This oblivious quality is the quality that allows conservatives, some of them, to be almost unconditionally happy.
One might discover that by putting a significant amount of Prozac in public water supplies one could increase the number of people capable of this sort of happiness. The population as a whole, then, could be temporarily saddened by events; but because brain chemistry of the person who is habitually happy simply renders him incapable of dwelling on unhappiness - especially the unhappiness of others - disaffection with social conditions would never spawn the kind of roiling discontent that threatens the power base of the powerful.
With enough of the right brain chemicals, we might all react the same way. People flooded out of their homes in New Orleans? Not a problem, they were due for home renovations. Insurance won’t pay? No problem, they can stay in Houston and be the new slave domestic servant class. Better for everyone. Genocide in Darfur? That’s Africa; what should you expect? And so on.
Perhaps we would all be very much happier if we could all adopt this “devil may care” attitude to all misfortunes that befall others. I am sure we would be temprarily happier.
Or I am sure that we could be if there were some hypothetical well-intentioned, well-informed, and all powerful someone else to identify the problems and take care of them. But there isn’t. Either we take responsibility for public policy problems as a people and choose leaders who reflect our sense of care; or we just vote to get our own piece of the pie and let everyone else do the same. To find out what would happen if we continue to vote for pie, just move to a place polarized by partisanship; Venezuela or Guatemala, for instance. The counterexamples ought to prove that, in the end, we need to start caring about each others’ problems.
We need to act like adults and start taking some responsibility for the misfortunes of others. We need to be capable of expressing this care in political dialogue. We need to work on policy that improves the lot of the least among us. For if, as voters in a democratic republic, we fail to care for the least among us, we shall stand on faulty moral ground. The moral authority of the system will crumble, and democracy will simply become nothing more than a competition for partisan power. Then all of us will lose: all but the people with the wealth and political connections of the Bushes or the Clintons. Then we might all need Prozac to bear the problems.
The world is collapsing around our ears.
I turn up the radio…
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03.26.08
Posted in In the Garden, Book Reviews - Non-Fiction at 7:29 pm by steve
Review of the Sunset National Garden Book, 1997 ed.
The New Yorker cartoon is so famous it exists as a poster. It depicts a New Yorker’s view of the world to the west. Manhattan is drawn in detail, street by street. It takes up more than half of the picture. Then there is the Hudson River. New Jersey is a sliver. What is west of NJ is given only sketchy, almost parenthetical treatment. At one level the cartoon is a laugh at the New Yorker who cannot see past the edge of Manhattan Island. At another level it captures a truth that challenges all far-ranging projects: we make careful distinctions about what we know well, but we make much less rigorous distinctions about things with which we are not familiar. The problem is as old and as pervasive as the distinction between “us” and “them.” The British tried to rise above this in their undertakings; but that tradition seems to have died out with US ascendency.
This issue crops up in many places. In this case, it is in gardening.
On each little spot of earth, the specific cultural practices that are required for the successful cultivation of the vast array of farm, garden, and landscape plants is so overwhelming that no single person can hope to learn all the cultural practices for all the cultivated species grown, say, in all the continental US. Each location is different. Each offers opportunities and challenges for each cultivar. It is a daunting task to describe which cultivars will thrive where.
From the perspective of the gardener in Northeastern US, the first great challenge was cold hardiness. This is a concern that descends partly from British Victorian days when plants from the tropics were imported to England on a grand scale. And it is reinforced by the fact that much of the gardening land in the are lies to the south. If one is writing from NY or Boston and one covets cannas, jasmine, and pelargoniums, this is the challenge.
To address this challenge the USDA published the Cold Hardiness Map some decades ago. It was a great success because it provided simple, common language that people could use to talk about which plants would grow where. Every plant lable uses this system. More recently, there has been a heat index map. This adds a little new information because, while there is a general trend of places with warm winters getting hotter summers along the east coast, the moderating effects of oceans is diminished in, say Nouth Dakota. Brutally cold winters give way to blistering summers. The cold hardiness index proves to be ever less useful in determining summer heat index as one moves west. In fact, Colorado - two or three USDA zones warmer in the winter - can be cooler than South Dakota during the dog days of summer. And this is not reflected in the USDA hardiness map.
What we learn, if we look carefully at the regions west of the Hudson River, is that there is a great deal of variation in climate that arises from different east-west locations. The variation arises from proximity to oceans. It arises due to the prevaling west winds. It occurs because of variations in elevation. It occurs because of differences in rainfall. And it occurs because of differences in soil. As a result, the USDA zone system is not ideally suited to garderners in the west. If the USDA system works well, it does so on the east coast. It has some breakdowns by the time one reaches the Mississippi. By the time one gets to California, things look different. It is always so.
The Sunset Garden book is designed to address these problems. It is designed for the gardener in the west. By west, here, we mean two things. a) west of the Mississippi River and b) California. The question that rightly ought to arise is this: Are a) and b) the same or two different things?
Overview
The Sunset National Gardening Book derives from the idea that a host of factors influence the kind of flora best suited to a location. It considers: winter temperatures, elevation, summer temperatures, total rainfall, how rainfall is distributed throughout the year, winds, soil, even how cool night air moves in relation to hills and valleys. By considering all these factors, it makes a great number of distinctions about gardening zones. It defines twenty four gardening zones west of the Mississippi and twenty one zones east of it. And it lists horticulturally important plants from hundreds of genuses, providing the zones in which a plant will thive.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section describes 45 gardening zones in Contintental US and Canada. It provides maps showing where these zones exist. It briefly sketches the kind of vegetation one can find. And it tells of how one species or a group of species have been used to define zone boundaries. For example, it distinguishes zone 1 from zone 2 with the example that the MacIntosh apple tree will grow happily in zone 2 but not in zone 1. And it distinguishes the bottom land in California’s central valley from the hills that edge the valley by describing precisely why members of the citrus family do better in the lowest hills.
The idea of defining zones by what will grow there we find to be an inspired, practical idea. It is a common, age old practice to define lands this way. Deserts, for instance. Or savannah. Or swamp or rainforest. The list is long, supporting the intuitive strength of the idea. What Sunset is not quite so good at doing, however, is providing a list of plants used to make the distinctions. Nor do they provide a rigorous list of climate criteria - temperature, rainfall, etc.
One is given some rationale for comparing a zone with its typical neighbors; but one is left not understanding the vital measurable criteria that define a zone. This matters, because it is not the zone numbers that the plants themselves care about; it is the physical properties that characterize the zones. If one lives near a zone boundary or if one has a property with microclimates, or if one experiences unusual weather understanding the physical distinctions is vital.
The overall arrangement of the 45 climate zones is very roughly arranged as a clock but running counter-clockwise. The center of the clock is not far from Dodge City, Kansas. Zone 1 stretches north from here into Canada and west to the warm, damp western fringes of Washington and Oregon. The damp, warm ocean-moderated fringes of these two states and their river valleys rate three or four more climate zones. Then it’s on to California. In California, almost every one of the twenty four western climate zones of the west exists. Zone 10 is reserved for western Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The rationale, here, is that whereas California gets dry summers, these areas get most of their rain during the summer, making certain kinds of agriculture possible.
Florida gets zone 25. The zones 26-45 between Florida and northern Minnesota and Maine range in great arcs that generally parallel the Appalachians. As a person who has lived in three or four of these zones and driven through many more, I can say that the system seems quite sensible in the way it makes zonal distinctions. And if one tests this against the zonal lists for plants, one tends to get reasonably good predictive results.
The second section of the book is an accounting of commonly cultivated plants and how they fare in these zones. It is arranged alphabetically by genus. Where a genus offers a large variety of cultivars with subtly different cultural requirements, the pages of the book will usually offer a table with each cultivar getting a row entry and columns listing zones and describing requirements.
The Details
The guiding principle of the book is that a really useful zone system makes really useful distinctions that flawlessly and seemlessly guide a gardener in the selection of plants for a local garden. There can be little question that the book has done a laudable job for California gardeners. The map of the Los Angeles metropolitan area painstakingly shows at least ten separate climate zones. Similarly, the boundary delineating Sunset zone 7 from colder alpine zone 1 is painstakingly drawn to indicate each little creek valley that extends into the Sierra Nevadas. The kinds of distinctions the Sunset system makes are ideally suited to California gardeners. It makes those distinctions sensibly and communicates those distinctions clearly.
Similarly, the climate zones east of the Mississippi make careful and useful distinctions based on summer and winter temperatures, humidity, soil type, elevation, and so on. The zone boundaries rarely address issues of microclimate; but the local variations in climate east of the Mississippi are generally much less geographically dense than they are in the West. In California and Arizona, for instance, one can drive from warm, subtropical weather to hot desert or to snow-capped mountains in a few short hours, crossing many zone boundaries. In the east, one needs to get on an airplane to cross so many boundaries in so little time.
The Sunset zone system, when judged by its implementation in California and in areas east of the Mississippi, is sensible. It is an improvement on the USDA system for these parts of the nation, frequently a vast improvement.
The next step in a usable system, then, is for all plants to be rated according to this system. Sunset has undertaken to do this. And for most plants they do a good job. Entries for each genus will list sun and shade requirements as well as water requirements. And they list which zones they thrive in. Where these vary significantly within a genus they are listed by species or cultivar.
Of Russell Hybrids Lupines we read:
Perennial Zones 1-7, 14-17, 34, 36-45. Not suited to hot climates. Best in cool areas of the West Coast, Pacific Northwest, New England, northern tier states, and southern Canada.
In my own limited experience, in zone 34 without supplemental water they tend to dry out, even in the shade. We observe that the Sunset zones are defined in such a way as to make it possible to communicate precisely where these lupines will not grow, even without the additional text. In the case of lupines, the limitation is much less about cold hardiness than it is heat tolerance and drought tolerance.
Artichokes, we are told, do well in zones 8,9, 14-16, 18-24, and especially 17. Those of us who have lived in Texas, in Michigan, and in the Northeast will happily divide the country into two sorts of artichoke - growing zones; where they grow and where they do not. The zone in which artichokes do grow is tiny. They have peculiar and exacting requirements that include cool summer weather, adequate moisture, and extremely mild winters. Of the arable land in the world, perhaps not one tenth of one percent is suitable for artichoke production. Perhaps it is not a tenth of this. After all this, it rates twelve separate climate zones!
While the Sunset Garden book is an improvement on the USDA zone system for eastern gardeners and while evidently makes finely honed distinctions needed by California gardeners, there is some concern that the quality of the distinctions it makes is not uniform over the nation.
There are compelling economic arguments for the appropriateness of this fact, were it so. California has a lot of gardeners. Also, it is large; and it is capable of growing a lot of plants. Other places are less well suited, perhaps. California, for example, is this nation’s vegetable garden. If a food is not derived directly or indirectly from corn, there’s a good chance that it was grown in California. So making good distinctions is not just about happy gardeners, it is about successful agriculture.
The Zone 1 Problem
That said, we cannot help but be skeptical about a single climate zone that lumps together such far flung places as Taos NM, Casper WY, Vail CO, Fort Collins CO, Bend OR, Great Falls MT, Truckee CA, and Minot ND. Sunset places these in zone 1.
We understand that two issues seriously limit plant growth and viability in zone 1: cold temperatures and lack of moisture. And we understand that, to some degree, these places all suffer from a lack of at least one of these elements. Compared to Los Angeles, all these places get cold. But that is like saying, compared to Bar Harbor, ME all of the US has hot summers. If one is obsessed with lupines and gives not a whit about any other plant, such a point of view is not seriously limiting. But if one’s gardening aims extend beyond the lupine, one will want to make more finely honed distinctions.
If Sunset were to make distinctions that correspond a little more clearly to how we perceive a location and its vegetation, they would make some meaningful distinctions within the zone they call zone 1. Take Taos NM, for example. The town lies at the western edge of a national forest. In town, the streets are lined with towering trees. Many yards have the normal sorts of grasses and flowers. One gets the sense in driving up from Albuquerque that the town towers high above a brutal, dry desert plain. Nor does this relative lushness evidently rely totally on irrigation systems as do, say, the verdant lawns of Orange County. If one drives not half an hour west of Taos, one will be on a flat plain that seems to stretch out many tens of miles in every direction. Nothing grows here. Almost nothing. It is flat and stark. While it may take a trained eye of a horticulturalist to distinguish even three different climate zones in LA, a four-year-old could distinguish the plain from the forest or the town.
Analogously, the plain east of Ft Collins is farmland. It does get some irrigation - which it needs to produce corn reliably. But this plain, arguably, is categorically different from the plain west of Taos. One might be able to grow barley here without irrigation. Probably the same is not true at Taos.
Much colder in winter and hotter in summer, but about as dry, is Minot ND. It’s hard to understand how anyone could confuse Minot’s climate with that of Taos, unless one is simply lumping together all the things that are categorically different from any one of LA’s ten zones.
Similarly, the climate of the mountains of Colorado is categorically distinct from the climate of its flatland. On the plain, plant culture is most severly limited by lack of moisture. In the high lands, moisture is frequently less of a problem than temperature. This distinction is crucial. Again, drive west of Fort Collins for one hour and the plant life is markedly different. It is ironic that the very people who fail to make the distinction depend so heavily on water that originates in these very highlands to irrigate their farms and gardens.
The alpine ranges of California, too, get cold winters. Large swathes of upland northern CA lie in USDA zone 5. That’s as cold as Pittsburgh. Almost as wet, too. That makes it categorically distinct from either Minot, ND or the plain west of Taos. In between these extremes is Bend, OR. Here, rainfall is precious, but the air temperature is much less extreme than it is in Minot, ND. Many types of grasses and trees are wll adapted to the region. With just a bit of supplemental watering, gardens can be quite glorious. It is a little difficult to believe that it is indistinguishable from Ft Collins since its rainfall pattern is markedly different; but it does, at least, share a common USDA hardiness zone.
How seriously one considers the zone 1 problem depends on how one looks at it. A huge portion of the commercial and recreational plant cultivation takes place in zones other than Sunset zone 1. Not many people live in this zone. And, almost by Sunset’s definition, plants do not grow there. So in most practical senses this is not very important.
Still, we have difficulty swallowing this argument. Sunset zone 1 covers perhaps 25 percent of the Continental US, maybe more. Each location offers a different combination of difficulties. By treating the whole vast space as a single zone one must either believe that the same things grow throughout or that nothing does. One is tempted to believe nothing does. The dry land farmers of eastern Montana and the Dakotas might not believe it - not every year. Nor would the people whose Taos yards sport 100 ft tall trees. Given the kinds of distinctions used for artichoke-growing zones, it’s hard to understand the almost complete absence of fundamental distinctions within Sunset zone 1.
While we must laud Sunset for doing an enviable job on California zones, and for refining the zone system in the east, we expect that the gardeners of what is now (was in 1997) zone 1 may hope for a system that is as careful about distinguishing verdant, chilly upland areas from blistering, dry, northern plains. The rigors that were used to arrive at the almost two dozen zonal distinctions Sunset made within California might well be applied to their own zone 1. This would produce two kinds of zones; one in which vegetation is typically water limited, and one in which it is typically coldness limited. This is an absolutely essential distinction. Probably one could subdivide Sunset zone 1 into at least half a dozen truly meaningful, distinct zones.
In some ways, our concern is less about the practical than it is about the symbolic. There is a sense in which the Sunset system projects a kind of provincial self-absorption. And this strikes us as being serious flaw in a work that shows as much practical promise as this work does. It is a little ironic since the left coast is treating the central states even more parenthetically than the right coast treated them with the USDA zone map.
With its cold hardiness map, the USDA failed to make all the important distinctions that affect plants. But the problems were at least rather more uniformly distributed across the US. Problems that arose were typically due to the fact that garden writers in the east were thinking in eastern terms and writing primarily for eastern audiences. If one lived on the west coast; one quickly learned that summer moisture was an issue. And if one lived between California and Kansas, one learned that water was a problem in general. Within these parameters, the USDA guide was a great deal of help, even in California.
The Sunset climate zone system was started as a local system for California gardeners. Then it was extended to include more of the US. Actually, it seems that for the west it was more projected than extended. The question was less “how do we treat climate west of the Mississippi as we treated California climate?” than it was “how do we project the zones defined for California onto other areas?” Sometimes when this rendered nonsense new zones were defined. But not often.
Outside zone 1 Sunset does a good job - frequently an exemplary job - of making important distinctions, distinctions that are really meaningful to people who garden or farm. The great irony of this is that once one gets outside California, the Sunset guide’s treatment of the west may be even less suitable than the USDA’s treatment. At least the latter will tell you that it gets colder in North Dakota than it does in Taos and Bend. Sadly, if we start out hoping it was designed to serve all regions of the west equally well, we end up seeing its designers as making the same sorts of errors as the New Yorkers depicted in the cartoon.
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03.18.08
Posted in News Commentary, Politics at 3:15 am by steve
We cannot forgive former governor Eliot Spitzer for wrecking his personal life; but we can forgive a president for wrecking his nation. Is there something wrong with this picture?
The question we need to ask is “Why is it that we can forgive one but not the other?” Why is it that when Dubya and the company he works for wreck a nation - when they wreck its free press, its military, its financial system, its system of justice, and its standing as a moral leader in the free world - we yawn and say “goodnight, Johnboy,” as if that’s precisely what is supposed to happen. No big deal, right?
We might argue that Dubya was too stupid to wreck the nation. If it is true, then it suggests that we prefer in our leaders a kind of sheer gross incompetence that, is capable of wrecking a nation to the kind of weakness that is capable of wrecking little more than a marriage. Or we prefer presidents too stupid to recognize when policy is in the public interests. Wrecked marriages are terrible; but when a politician’s marriage breaks up it does not mean another hundred thousand people out of work or another million people cast out of their homes for failure to pay the mortgage. Moral perfection is ideal in political leaders; but to paraphrase Bill Buckley, “as reality approaches the ideal, the costs become astronomical.” We may need to choose our flaws.
Just as poor moral character is a symbol suggestive of a person unfit to hold office, so too is the advocacy and promotion of the village idiot to run the free world. If Bush is an idiot; then the neocons need to be thrown out for good. Alternatively, if Bush is savvy and smart and if he is representing neocon policy, the neocons ought to be thrown out for good. In either case, neocon policy owns the failure.
We might argue that nobody could forsee the consequences of the policies. But this just seems silly. The problems caused by these policy problems have occurred many times before in history. The principles violated by these policies are at least as old as the Great Depression; some are as old as western civilization.
- The people who regulated banks after the Great Depression forsaw the consequences of a) an over leveraged financial system and b) the integration of banks with other financial service institutions. They made a body of laws that stood from the early 1930’s until 1996 when banking deregulation was passed by a Republican Congress and a conservative President. This one Dubya doesn’t own; but his neocon ventriloquist does.
- Foreign occupations have gone badly when the cultures in question were not like the US culture, and where the fundamental institutions that are required for success either do not already exist or are systematically dismantled. This, Vietnam should have taught Americans. Adventures in Latin America might have done the same thing. Or perhaps we could have learned something from Napoleon’s successful campaign in Russia or Hitler’s successful campaign in France.
- Preemtive strikes are morally questionable; any nation that engages in them loses the moral high ground. And this makes them inherently less trustworthy. That’s not a problem for a nation that neither has any trading partners nor needs any; but most of our raw materials are imported, and a large portion of our finished goods are as well. Trade is not axiomatic or automatic. Access to raw materials is not guaranteed. Preemptive strikes destabilize the world, turn nations against our own, and make commerce both more risky and more expensive.
- Arguably, $100 per bbl. oil is one of the consequences of destabilizing Iraq. And in light of the arguments above, it was forseeable. A cynic might argue that it was all so predictable that any fool would see that the purpose of the Iraq war was not just to secure oil but to drive the price up. Perhaps there is a moral problem with that?
- Then there is the Constitution. Dubya may be the only president in history to say “sure, I broke a law. I broke a lot of laws, so what?” The fact that he broke the FISA law and has not been prosecuted sets the precedent for a president who is above the law. This functionally means that the Constitution is not fully functional. The restraints that Congress properly ought to place on the Executive are not being enforced. And if it is the start of a trend, then Dubya’s administration will mark the point that tyranny became permanently established in the highest levels of the land.
The list could go on for pages. In all of these cases there is simply no question that something would break as a result of the policy. The questions were when and how badly. And who would pay. Neocons have arranged a cozy relationship with major parts of the press; and therefore, these policies were not critically examined in most major publications. The reason Joe on the street did not know of the risks was twofold. 1) He wasn’t very interested. 2) It was not in the interests of the neocons that he should know. Americans might plead ignorance.
In final analysis, the most likley reason we forgive Dubya for wrecking a nation while we cannot forgive Spitzer for wrecking his marriage is that we can clearly understand what Spitzer did. We understand what is morally wrong about Spitzer’s actions; but we do not understand the moral failings of the neocons’ policies.
We might reason that a person who is not of sound moral judgment and discipline is unfit to hold public office. This is fine reasoning as far as it goes; but there are a number of really big problems with applying it exclusively to Spitzer.
One is that the type of weakness Spitzer had is not so very uncommon among the people of power. As one government official put it during the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio, “If every Washington politician or bureaucrat who has slept with an aide were to be forced from office, it would be a great deal easier to find good parking spaces downtown.” When it comes to this particular sort of moral problem, the consequences it has on personal life may be material; but the affair is private and the effect on the public is symbolic, at best. In similar cases, the French try to just hold their noses and ignore minor personal failings.
Another problem in applying the moral argument only to Spitzer is that the argument presupposes that it is not some moral character flaw that motivates the bad policy of the neocon. Whether this is so depends, in part, on correctly distinguishing between Adam Smith’s idea that enlightened self interest, operating in a society of educated and ethically sound people - tends toward good results … in certain kinds of trading situations, and the blanket theological proposition upon which “neoconomics” is built that “greed is good.”
It may seem like a quibble; but a great deal of important stuff lies in the distinction. It is analogous to the difference between personal liberty in a well run western style democracy and personal liberty in an anarchic society such as post-invasion Iraq. In the former case laws and law enforcement sanction social behavior that is eggregiously destructive. In the latter case a total absence of governmental form and function was fundamentally anarchic - it allowed an unprecedented level of freedom. But the anarchy also caused violence that preyed on the weak or unfortunate.
Similarly, there are moral reasons not to invade nations whose natural resources one covets or for other arbitrary reasons.
And if one objects to moral arguments informing political discourse, all one need do is to set about trying to understand how cooperation, trade, and trust are what makes things work in a vast, interconnected, specialized society. Moral reasoning is concerned with preserving these qualities. Societies that fail to preserve trust and cooperation experience serious impediments to economic development. Or, if they are developed, they tend to fall into decline.
If one understands the moral arguments it is not difficult to see that the moral ground upon which most of the neocon’s economic and foreign policy agenda is built is not just swampland; it could barely support one of those little waterskeeters that skit across the surfaces of quiescent summer ponds. It’s little wonder that we frequently find our boots full of muck, and we sometimes feel in danger of drowning. Most of political policy since 1980 is built on this kind of moral reasoning. It is built to capitalize on short term trends by mortgaging and not maintaining assets of all sorts: capital, skill, goodwill, institutional, etc. It’s the perfect prescription for long-term societal failure.
The fact of Spitzer being out of office while Bush remains in office suggests that we are incapable of evaluating the moral implications of bad policy, even after it has borne bitter fruit. It is like seing adultery tear apart a million families and saying “So what? Why should people not do as they please, regardless of the consequences to the people involved?” That, after all, is the public policy purpose of laws prohibiting prostitution. In a public policy debate, that is the moral mandate for the law Spitzer broke.
If we persist in believing that the most productive way to operate a society is for Spitzer to be out of office and Bush to be in office, then there is neither much question about why our system of government is so broken nor is there much hope we might live to see it get any better. If we cannot understand arguments about huge policy issues, and if we are satisfied with that state of affairs, there simply is no hope that democracy might serve the public interest.
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