Government obligations

We talk a lot about rights, needless to say. If we begin our training as debaters with basic philosophy, we learn pretty quickly what we mean by that. My favored validation of individual rights is that it is advantageous for humans to accept that there are fundamental rights inherent in humanity, and to act accordingly, and disadvantageous not to accept their existence and act accordingly. That is, I don’t have to base my possession of inherent human rights on some complex philosophical or theological premise, but simply on the idea that having these rights is more beneficial than not having them, so whether or not they are inherent, they are nonetheless a good thing. So, let’s presume their existence, because we’re better off with them than without them, at which point, it doesn’t really matter where they came from.

We are nothing as philosophers if we are not practical. After all, mostly what we are interested in is ethics, the practical application of morality, i.e., doing the best we can. Balancing angels on the head of a pin is for other scholars altogether.

Basic human rights are fairly few. We have the right to be alive, which means that our existence is self-warranted and therefore cannot be abridged by others. We have the right to do what we want to do, provided that we do not harm others or somehow interfere with their right to do what they want to do while they are not harming us. And we have the right to our stuff, the legitimate ownership of possessions and the benefit of the fruits of our labors.

As far as basic human rights are concerned, I wouldn’t want to go much further than these fundamentals of life, liberty and property because, already, they raise questions of the protection of these rights. Ownership of property and the fruits of our labors is hardly as simple as it sounds, for instance. There are varying cultural definitions of property that undermine to some extent the apparent universality of property rights, for instance. As for conflicting claims of liberty, when what I want to do comes in conflict with what you want to do, we can imagine problems here almost from the point when any two people happen to come in contact, ever. And one can always ask the simple question, does a murderer cede his or her claim to life by abridging someone else’s claim of life?

You can see that as soon as we have populations of people, rather than just one person hanging around in some metaphoric Garden of Eden, we have various rights claims that need to be adjudicated, and rights that need to be protected. To handle this business, we create governments and empower them to do that job. We establish law and order and processes of law and order, and to maintain them and make them viable, we have to give up a little something. If nothing else, we have to give up a little property, because governments cost money to run. We could go a lot further in explaining how rights are abridged for their own protection, but my point here is something else altogether.

Here’s what bothers me, and it bothers me a lot. We have a lot of systematic philosophical thinking on rights and their protection and the establishment of governments, and we can draw on that thinking pretty easily. That is certainly what Thomas Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence, when he paraphrased John Locke. (If you’re reading this in Texas, Jefferson was a President of the United States and the chief author of the Declaration, but unfortunately for you, he is in your no-fly or, I guess, no-think zone. Sorry about that.) (If you’re not in Texas, I’m not referring to any characters in “Lost” when I mention John Locke. Sorry about that, too.) We can argue handily about natural rights at a lofty, philosophical level, if we are so inclined. But government, especially government in the year 2010, is way more complicated than merely rights protection. We’ve got people literally marching in the streets complaining that government is going to hell in a tea bag, and that somehow it needs to be minimized because it just does too damned much. I’m hardly a deep commentator on the whole Tea Party movement, but it is clearly composed of a lot of complaints about the way things are in the present day, positing much of the blame on the government. Absent any political aspects of this—that in reality this is often one party trying to undermine another party, or in many cases racially motivated—it does play on fears and frustrations that real people really have. These real people aren’t at your local debate tournament, so for just one weekend, instead of hanging out in a high school cafeteria on a Saturday afternoon, hang out at the mall. Take a peep out of the cocoon for a moment. See what’s out there.

What we don’t have, unfortunately, is a handy, readily available theory of government that goes beyond basic rights protection. And this is a problem, because in reality, government does go beyond basic rights protection—way beyond—and we don’t have an acceptable, accepted ethical shorthand for discussing it. We have no ethical road map for how far governments can justifiably go beyond rights protection. We tend to have mostly opinions rather than metrics.

Let’s look at one example of government obligation beyond the protection of rights: roads. Literal roads. Individuals do not build roads, but roads are a requirement of our society. If all the roads in the US were immediately shut down and removed, we could not function. Goods could not travel very far, and if we did not have access to our own family farm, we’d be in serious trouble. (One could look at the history of roads in the US, and find that, with the invention of the car, roads became very much within the purview of government, because at the point where you need paving, a horse galloping across the fields or on a trodden path doesn’t work anymore. Additionally, in the 1950s, Eisenhower embarked on a system of interstate highways, transcending even local governments’ road-building in aid of a national system, reflective of the ubiquitous ownership of automobiles after WWII).

Roads are an example of government doing what individuals cannot do. Because individuals cannot do these things, and because they are required by society, we obligate government to do them. That is my basic premise for understanding extended government obligations. And the things that are necessary but beyond the scope of individuals are not limited to roads. International protection is another obvious job the government does that I cannot do alone. I look to the government to set up the parameters of discourse with other governments, up to and including the conduct of war. I may have opinions on the subject of whom we should fight, just as I have opinions on the subject of where a road should lead, and in a free government I have avenues for expressing those opinions, but ultimately it is the job of the government that I support, and which I am inherently a part of as a citizen, to conduct that business.

The question that is raised is the determination of the limits of what government should do that individuals can’t do. Additionally, one must consider in the mix what can be done neither by lone individuals nor the government but by non-governmental groups of individuals, be they corporate or otherwise. That is, there are jobs that religions do, for instance, that we believe are outside the scope of government (or that most of us believe should be outside the scope of government, but now we’re back in Texas where there is no separation of church and state because Jefferson, by not existing, never raised that pesky issue). There are jobs that corporations should do that we consider to be outside the scope of government. But the question is, which of these jobs are which? How do you argue that providing health care, for instance, is a government job? Or providing broadband? Or welfare? Or anything, even roads?

What you probably need to do is view the issue, first, from the perspective of what only the government can do, and assume that because only government is capable of it, government is obligated to do it, if we agree that it is an important enough benefit to society. Keep in mind that all government works have a cost, so if we consider that the government engage in a particular chore, we have to be willing to pay for it, which means that we need a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not to do it. Still, this is the easiest sort of obligation to fulfill, because there are no competing claims on filling it. If only government can realistically take it on, if we decide we need it, the government is obligated to get it. Our roads are a good example of this. Costs of roads are not insignificant, and in some odd vision perhaps some corporation could be created to provide them, but when all is said and done, it is worth it to pay for them and reasonable that the government be the agency to build them. Not a hard call.

Education is an interesting example. Our government has taken on the obligation of educating the young. We tend to make this an obligation of local governments rather than the vaster national government, but that’s an insignificant distinction. We are obligating our governments to do this. Why? I mean, there are plenty of people who believe in home-schooling. There are people who prefer religious-based instruction in at least primary education and often secondary education. Because we believe strongly in government-supported education, we allow for those not availing themselves of this education to get at least a share of it by also supporting home schools and parochial education, at least to some extent. And on top of this, we draw the line at providing college education to all as part of the basic education package, but still we provide state institutions underwritten by the government to compete with private institutions, and we provide government-underwritten loans. The thing seems to be, we value education enough to warrant obligating the government to provide it because, for the most part, if government doesn’t provide it, it will not be fairly accessible to all. If the government stopped providing public education, a lot of people would still be educated, but not all, and we consider this wrong.

From the education example we can begin to draw an idea of what government ought to do beyond the absolute essentials. Or, if you will, to draw an idea of what the absolute essentials are. One big thing seems to be not that only government can do it, but that only government can do it fairly. If it were not done, a lot of individuals would suffer harm as a result.

How about housing? Housing is obviously essential to our lives. Does the government have an obligation to provide us all with some sort of housing?

The difference between housing and education seems to be that, with the latter, the government provides an open door through which citizens can avail themselves of the service of education, whereas with housing, we would actually have to provide some sort of literal, physical object, a house or an apartment. What, exactly, would comprise a fair house for a family of five? Tough one. So while we believe, in a humanitarian sense, that people need a roof over their heads, we don’t literally set a claim that the government will give them one. Instead, we provide general funds through which people who are homeless can find some sort of shelter. We subsidize them, in other words. If you lose your job you get unemployment insurance, at some point you can get food stamps and things like that. We don’t get you an apartment, but we help you to pay your rent. Not much, though. You might end up moving in with family or something. You might lose everything. We grieve for you, but we don’t solve the problem for you in any specific way.

So what is the underlying reason we support education and not housing, the reason we have decided that education is a government obligation and that housing is a personal obligation, aside from the specificity of the property involved? I would suggest that we connect housing to something beyond and aside from the government. Our homes are a reflection of our lives as a whole, our income and spending, our jobs, our position in society. Housing is, to a great extent, tied into the capitalistic system of working for profit and taking a share of that profit to support ourselves. That’s what people do with jobs, and jobs are considered the fabric of the corporate capitalist system. To be a member in good standing in this system, you work. (Those who have lost their jobs in the recent recession talk a lot about the anomie that results from losing their positions in society.) If you don’t work, you are not a member in good standing, unless you are actively job hunting and therefore presumed to be simply on hiatus, a member in good standing in absentia. So if you don’t have housing because you don’t work, your position as a non-member of society in good standing deprives you of any potential entitlement to housing. Why should the government provide you with what you should be providing for yourself? This could also be tied into the idea that providing housing is in conflict with property rights. Government protects the property you have, but it doesn't get you property. Maybe housing cuts too close to the core of individual rights?

Mostly I think the difference between housing and education does, in fact, seem to point to a difference of fairness. While it would be unfair not to provide education to all, we do not perceive it as unfair not to provide housing to all, because while the former would be impossible for many to obtain, the latter, housing, would not be impossible if people just got a job and worked. Maybe, also, the numbers would be smaller. Not providing housing to all affects a small number, whereas not providing education to all would affect a vast number.

Because it is so difficult to establish meaningful parameters, we argue endlessly about what the government should do just about everywhere. Libertarians want the least amount of government possible, leaving life to one’s own devices. Socialists want the most amount of government, creating a system of the most achievable fairness. Most of us are somewhere in between. If we could only devise a mechanism for measuring when the actions of the government are balanced by the fairness of the results of taking those actions, we would have a reasonable blueprint for action, and a reasonable guide to when those actions are obligated.

And that is how I would address a resolution calling for the government to take on the burden of any action above and beyond protecting basic human rights. That is, I would, in my case, set up a mechanism for measuring when the actions of the government are balanced by the fairness of the results of taking those actions, compared of course to the results of not taking those actions, and I would use those results as the tool for mandating or not government actions. Yes, it is absolutely consequential, but one can reasonably argue that virtually all government actions must be weighed consequentially, since they exist in the real world and not merely in philosophical papers. More to the point, the government “must” inherently do only a handful of things that are intuitively obligated, or if you prefer, deontologically obligated, at least by the definitions of government we use in basic political science. But as I say, all government actions are, by definition, real world, and therefore subject to real world analysis. They must satisfactorily meet the criteria of desirability and achievability according to a real world test (there can be no absolutes in politics, only presumptions based on reasonable data).

This is not relevant to CatNats and "soil rights,", but mark my words: these resolutions will come. If not in LD, then every time you turn around in PF. Unfortunately, people in PF rounds often don’t provide the underlying thesis analogous to LD’s V/C, giving judges little to go on. (See my PF notes, elsewhere.) If at the very least you can begin with a political model of some sort, and then measure how action plays out in that model, you’ll give me something I can follow and understand and, as a judge, measure. It’s worth a try. But the bottom line is, when you venture out of protecting basic human rights, you venture alone, without the body of literature to support you, that is, without an accepted ethical framework forged over centuries. You are forced to provide your own ethical framework, your own rationale why this must be done, not because it's good but because it's obligated. Plenty of things are good, but that doesn't make them government obligations. Constructing and deconstructing government obligations is a big job. But as government gets bigger and bigger, somebody's got to do it. Often, that somebody is us.

Have fun.

Break out the German dictionary, fraulein

Last night we talked mostly about Nov-Dec on the TVFT podcast. I should get it posted late tonight, after the Sailor meeting. Good stuff. Bietz was in Las Vegas playing Gai Pow Poker winning the WWE Meadows belt, and he heard a lot of rounds, and he brought back plenty of fuel for the rest of us. Interesting stuff.

One thing I’ve got to do is put together my religion pieces into a single essay. As soon as I get a minute… Very interesting that Levi-Strauss, the inventor of structural dungarees for savages, died Friday when the final posting went up. Who knew that he was a member of the VCA? I guess he felt that he could finally let go, knowing that I’d be carrying on for him. I’m obviously intrigued by structuralism, and find it a useful tool for understanding human nature. It doesn’t necessarily answer questions, but it does provide a methodology for asking questions, and that’s a start. To be honest, though, in college we studied CLV for the literal content of his cross-cultural studies more than anything else. That’s what anthropology did in those days. Do they still have anthropology in colleges? My guess is that it’s been pomo’d into a bloody pulp, but I may be wrong.

I was looking at the new PF ballots that Apple Valley is sampling this weekend. They look pretty clean to me. The biggest problem in PF is, always, getting judges to fill out the ballots correctly the first time. They are inevitably the most heavily crossed-out and corrected that we see. I’m amazed that we don’t make more tabbing errors, to tell you the truth, ballot format notwithstanding, given the fluidity of the rounds and who’s doing what. Anyhow, I guess at some point we’re all going to have to go 2 minute Final Finagle, but we haven’t done it anywhere yet where I’ve tabbed. The TRPC ballots still have the old 1 minute, of course. I guess I’ll have to upgrade at some point; I’m in March of 08 (in more ways than one). No doubt the CFL will maintain it’s own version of the whole business. I can just see old Benny the Pope sitting there talking to his forensics-liaison Cardinal (a Jesuit): “Ve gotta keep them Pfffters in line, meine Rote Vogel.” Catholics caught Pfffting NFL (non-Catholic Forensic League) style are immediately marked for eternal damnation. That always has been the downside of the CFL. Break an NFL rule, and people blog about it. Break a CFL rule, and you go to hell.

Tough business, this debating.

Religion, Part 3 (conclusion)

So far we’ve established that religion is a concept based on non-rational thought that is, by its nature, at the core of believers’ perception of reality. At which point you say, okay, this is all well and good, but what does it have to do with debate?

I’m taking off from a particular reaction to the Nov-Dec topic, but that reaction was not limited to this topic, and has arisen in the past where there have been religious areas in play in a resolution. The issue at hand was a religious objection to immunization; the reaction was, “That’s just stupid.”

The one thing you’ll notice in this series I’ve been writing is that I haven’t addressed the content of religious belief. Nor will I. Because of the nature of religion, one can never address the content of religion as a starting point for discourse. You can’t argue about it, in other words, not only because of the close holding of the belief but also because of faith’s lack of rational structure. You cannot argue against something that does not respond to argumentation. As I said initially, religious beliefs are a-logical, outside the realm of logic. Argument is a tool from the realm of logic. Arguing about religion is like using a power saw to play the piano. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

This is why we don’t use religion as the warrants for our claims in debate. If we are arguing a moral question, most likely our religion provides clear warrants for a particular position. But to make a claim and warrant its truth as its being the word of God would not allow for much subsequent discussion. If I quote Joe Biden and you quote God, then pretty clearly your source outranks my source. So what we do is look for ways of making ethical judgments other than our religions. Good ethical judgments grounded in secular thinking ought to be roughly what our religions tell us. Good ethical judgments, for instance, tell us not to kill and steal and so forth, with no appeal to religious doctrine. We can make ethical determinations, in other words, without appeal to religion that are nonetheless congruent with religion.

Still, we do come up against issues where we are arguing about religion. In these cases we cannot argue religion’s content (in the case in point, the reason a religion might object to immunization), because that is irrelevant to the discussion, and impossible to change (because, being religious, it’s non-rational and core). What can be argued in any situation I’ve ever seen where its come up, is the role of religious versus secular concerns. That is totally debatable, and we see examples around the world of almost every possible combination of religion and secular in different cultures ranging from the totally separate to the totally intertwined. To evaluate what they mean, we need to step back from the content to the structure, to look not at what is being said but how its being said. We must look at the religious and the secular as societal structures, and evaluate their interplay abstractly, with an understanding of what religion is and what society is, absent a concern with the nature of a particular religion or a particular society.

Are you feeling structuralist yet? Are you doing the Caveman dance? The pulling away from the study of content to the study of structures was one of the milestones of 20th Century scholarship. And as far as I can tell, it’s the only way for debaters to meaningfully address issues of religion in society.

Back to the example. The X people won’t be immunized because it is against their religion. Responses?
1. “This is scientifically wrong because immunization yadda yadda yadda whatever.” Not a good response. Why? You’re arguing the content. The X people don’t give a crap what science says, and all the science in the world won’t change their minds. So even if you’re right, you’re not solving the problem.
2. “Society must prioritize public health concerns over private religious concerns.” A much better response (although I’m not necessarily saying it’s the correct one). Here you’re allowing for the X people to believe whatever they want to believe, but addressing the issue in a “what do we do when secular and religious conflict” mode, regardless of the content of the conflict.

I hope you understand what I’ve been trying to say. In a nutshell, I’m suggesting that you, first, understand what religion is, and, second, begin to think about ways of addressing it that take that understanding into consideration. Your beliefs or my beliefs or anyone’s beliefs are beside the point, but the role those beliefs play in arenas outside of the purely religious are very much the point. You can’t argue religion, but you can argue about religion, in other words. That’s the bottom line. And considering the religious nature of the society we live in, it’s probably good advice. People can believe whatever they want to believe, and they do, in vast numbers. That’s fine. When their beliefs cause a conflict beyond the boundaries of religion, that’s not fine. And that’s the ground on which we can stand as debaters.

Religion, Part 2

As we said, religion is both primary and transcendent. What you believe about your religion probably takes precedence over all else, and it probably provides meaning or context for all else. Religious belief is mental ground zero. And as we also said, because religious belief relies on faith rather than logic and experience, it is different from most of our empirical approach to life in general.

This might be a good analogy. Imagine that you have a headache, a pounding in the back of your brain that won’t go away. You visit the doctor, who performs all the possible tests and discovers that, beyond any doubt, there is nothing wrong with you. What happens when the doctor tells you this? Does your head stop hurting? Of course not. Whatever you feel, you feel, and someone telling you that you don’t feel it is patently absurd. That you feel the pain is incontrovertible, even if, objectively, there is no reason for you to feel the pain. Just because you’re not sick doesn’t mean your head still doesn’t hurt.

Philosophers have juggled around the complexities of what is objective reality and what is subjective perception since the first powwow in the cave lo those many years ago. We intuit that there probably is an objective reality, but we realize that each individual brain may perceive that reality differently. Each individual brain has no ability to know anything beyond its own perceptions. Thus we piece together what we think might be objective reality by pooling our subjective perceptions. (And this can, at times, not be a good thing: study your Foucault, for instance, if you want to understand the nature of relativism in the 20th Century.) We are each a relativistic brain possessing its own share of objective reality.

The nature of knowledge, meanwhile, is variable. For instance, I know that Nightingale McQueen played Prissy in “Gone with the Wind.” You come along and tell me, no, it was Butterfly McQueen. I realize that you are right and I was wrong. Henceforth, I will store Butterfly in my brain instead of Nightingale. The thing is, this is just some random piece of information in my brain. I have no investment in it’s being correct or incorrect. I don’t really care. It can be this fact, or that fact. Whichever. It is just an item on the shelf, replaceable by another item, if the need arises. I do not define myself by what is one these shelves; they’re just storage areas for data.

Another form of knowledge is derivational. That is, I have worked it out on the basis of various premises. It is the result of my own active mental processes. For instance, I have studied anthropology, and know all the various branches of early hominid. I can name every fossil line from the missing link to Sarah Palin. The problem is, all of a sudden they discover a new skeleton in the Olduvai Gorge, and the whole schema of human evolution needs to be rewritten. Now, this may be harder for me to accept than the Nightingale Butterfly problem, because while that was just some random fact, the process of evolution is one that I have studied in depth and one on which I have reached various conclusions. Still, when the new skeleton comes along, I can rethink everything I’ve thought before and work that new piece of information into what I already know. After all, the accumulation of knowledge about this subject before I know about that skeleton was also a process of adding new information and evaluating it, and I’m just continuing the process. Even when it requires a total paradigm shift, I can handle it. It is the rational part of my brain doing its job, which is reasoning: new information, new thinking or perhaps rethinking. Whatever. It may be harder for me to make the shift for the new skeleton and a total new picture of evolution than it was with Nightingale Butterfly, which was simply a substitution of one fact (erroneous) for another (correct), but I can do it eventually. My investment in my prior knowledge was deeper than N/B, in that I had worked for it, but it was not self-definitional. Even if my job were anthropologist, I could make the shift, because that’s part of an anthropologist’s job, to update the paradigms when a new skeleton is found. In fact, it’s the so-called scientific method, to test ideas against the evidence at hand. The scientific method pretty much explains how the brain does its rational thinking on a philosophical level, whether or not we’re talking about science.

So, we see two types of knowledge, simple and complex. But both are flexible. Unlike the pain in my head, which I felt, these were simply pieces of information in my head, mere thoughts that I knew. Tell me that they’re not there, so to speak, and I have no problem with it. But tell me that the pain in my head is not there? Sorry, my head still hurts. Even though it is only what I think rather than what I have had demonstrated to me as true, my brain still accepts it as true, and more to the point, true beyond analysis or refutation. If I feel the pain, the pain is there.

Religious belief, based as it is on faith rather than rational process, is like the pain in the head, not because it’s real or unreal (that’s not my point) but that we feel it rather than rationally deduce it. At the point where we move from reason to faith, we leave reason behind. We believe what we believe because we believe it. Religion is not random facts like N/B, or knowledge we’ve worked out like science. It is things that we believe because we believe them, and because we choose to believe them. And, because they are prime, transcendent beliefs, they are probably even more unshakeable than that pain in our head. What it boils down to is, not only is religion the most important thing to many people, it is also a thing that is not subject to rational evaluation. This is why you can’t argue with someone about their religion. People believe their beliefs because they believe them, and they are of primary importance to them. You come along with some mere rational objection, and the religious person doesn’t care. Their beliefs, formed by faith rather than rationality, are not subject to rational evaluation. It’s pointless to attempt such an evaluation. You’re the doctor telling me my head doesn’t hurt. Sorry, but it does hurt. You can’t tell me otherwise.

Remarkably enough, despite the fact that religious belief is non-rational (it is not irrational, which is something else altogether, which I’m not going to go into because I’m not arguing about the content of religion but the nature of belief, which are two different things entirely), most people on the planet are religious, and do hold religious beliefs. This is rather curious, in a way, and points to a few possibilities. Maybe there’s something about being human that requires spirituality, or maybe spirituality is an objective reality and our religions are our ways of approaching that inherently unknowable concept. It doesn’t matter. The point is, most people do believe, whatever it is they believe in, and whether or not what they believe in is true.

With one tiny exception. There are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes. But, damn, there are an awful lot of atheists in debate rounds. Ask these people to evaluate something with a religious aspects, and they’re at a total loss. They simply cannot get past the rational/objective: “You believe in what? That’s preposterous.”

Well, yeah. It’s faith. It is non-rational, by definition. But, young padowan, you’d better get it into your head that this doesn’t make it any less real to the people who believe in it (who, by the way, might be right). And so often non-believing debaters want to attack the belief rather than the structures that contain it.

In this path lies madness.

[To be continued.]

Religion, Part 1

There’s a lot of interesting material for discussion in a subject area we normally tend to shy away from. As a general rule, that area is not only divisive but, I would imagine for many teachers, potentially dangerous. They could lose their jobs over it, in other words. As the saying goes, you can’t argue religion or politics. In our world, we just can’t argue religion. I can’t say that I’ve talked about it all that much myself, at least here. My goal is to inform and/or entertain, not to piss people off. So I’ve avoided the subject because of all its landmines.

So much for that.

The debate world, by default, does not make arguments that appeal to religious beliefs. Our task is to employ a combination of evidence and logic in aid of reasoned discussion of issues. Religion, on the other hand, employs neither. Therefore, an appeal to religion would not result in a reasoned discussion of issues because that is not what religion is about. Religion is about faith. Faith, by its very nature, is a suspension of logic and empiricism as the mind accepts as true ideas that are not logical and for which there is no evidence. Faith, therefore, appears to be a very special aspect of human thought, because unlike most human thought, it runs on a track that accepts things unquestioningly versus a track that questions everything. Abraham’s willingness to kill his son at the command of God is one of the great examples of faith over all else. There is no way Abraham can do this without a most powerful faith (and trust) in the Almighty. This faith and trust is notably rewarded when God relieves Abraham of this burden after he has proved himself worthy.

So faith does not rely on logic. But the point is not that faith is illogical. It’s a-logical. It’s in another realm altogether. It is not measured by the tools that measure logic or facts. It is not thought of in those terms. There is much writing by religious people on this subject; there are plenty of teachings in, for example, the Roman Catholic religion on faith that are very much along these lines. Having faith asks you to accept things because you accept them. You accept them not because you can prove them but despite the fact that you cannot prove them. That’s what faith is all about.

The need to maintain faith without resorting to logic seems to apply to all religions. The study of the role of religion in human society (absent the truth of religion in human society) demonstrates a number of things, chief among them being that the vast majority of people in the world do maintain a belief in religion. We can extrapolate from this a number of possibilities. One is that people have some sort of need for religion in their lives, and therefore invent religion to fulfill that need. Another is that there is indeed a spiritual world, and the variety of religions extant in the world are our attempt to understand that spiritual world. That spiritual world is, by definition, beyond our limited human understanding, so we do the best we can trying to figure it out. Often we have what we consider divine revelations to help us along, i.e., books or signs that we interpret as the emanation of the divine. Some religions like to think that their revelations are somehow the true ones, and everyone else’s revelations are untrue. Other religions take a more ecumenical view, trusting that most revelations are indeed divine, and simply different from culture to culture because, as I said, the spiritual world, while it does exist according to their thinking, is beyond our limited human understanding. This sort of thinking leads one religion to respect another religion. Thinking that your religion is better than someone else’s religion, on the other hand, leads to things like holy wars (the ultimate oxymoron).

Faith is not only logic-defying, but deeply held. One is not a proponent of their religion at the same level that one is a proponent of, say, their local baseball team. The latter is an arbitrary commitment that can take on an appearance of depth, but is never more than just fandom, even when engaged in rabidly. There are a lot of the trappings of religion, though. One is a fan of a team for reasons that defy logic, and one supports one’s team over other teams through thick and thin. But, ultimately, it’s just being a sports fan. It is subscribing to belief in an alternate universe (sports) for the purpose of recreation or, perhaps at its deepest level, self-identification because that sport is, for the self-identifier, the key pastime. It can even be an obsession, but it is never comparable to religion even when it is metaphorically a religion. Religion holds the power of eternal life and death, of explaining the mysteries of the universe, of connecting the human to the divine. For even the biggest sports nut, none of these are possible returns on fan investment. Comparing sports fandom to religious fervor merely allows us to begin to understand the sports fan; it does not make sports and religion identical.

As I say, religion is the realm of eternal life and death, of explaining the mysteries of the universe, and of connecting the human to the divine. There can be nothing of greater importance than these ideas to the human mind. From a structuralist perspective on secular society, the hierarchy of concern is self then immediate family then extended family then friends then community, etc., in the long line of formative moral binds (although, at times, they can be juggled, for instance when a soldier gives his or her life for country). Religion is the transcendent idea preceding even the self, taking the structuralist to a level beyond secular: the divine, then self, etc., etc. By definition, therefore, nothing can be more important to the individual than religion. And religion not only tops the hierarchy, but it transcends all the other levels.

Religion, in other words—i.e., belief and faith—is, among those who possess it, an absolute primary. Is it any wonder, therefore, that we don’t want to argue about it?

[Continued next time.]

Fortune-telling (with a WTF/TOC zing, various cultural references just to be cute, and O'C's obsession)

WTF has begun their countdown to the Tournament of Coffee. We here at CL will be battening down the hatches waiting for the storm to pass, confident in our belief that a balloon is only as big as the amount of hot air used to inflate it.

(Wow. That’s a really good metaphor, and I think I made it up all by my lonesome. I’m impressed.)

So, no TOCs here, bub. And my house is empty again, so I have no further Non-F stories to relate (much to the chagrin of Dan Cook’s father). And I have no interest in getting involved in discussing the self-immolation process known the Democratic Party primaries, not to mention that my recent comment on Miley Cyrus’s autobiography has preemptively used up my allowance of stories on that particular subject (thank God). So it would seem that I am excluded from the blogosphere completely. What else is there left to talk about?

You misunderestimate me, Mr. Bond. (Which reminds me of the best Bond exchange of all time, from Goldfinger. “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.”)

(But first of all, I awoke Saturday morning to a message from O’C that, while suffering from debate withdrawal, he had just purchased 7 new Star Wars figures. If you’re wondering, they were: Bubba Fett (football-playing clone), Brudda Fett (Hawaiian ukulele-playing clone), Bobo Fett (bourgeois bohemian clone), Bugger Fett (you-don’t-want-to-know-what-kind-of clone), Baba au Fett (rum-soaked clone), Feta Fett (Greek salad-eating clone), and Fetid Fett (debater-who-forgot-to-pack-clean-underwear clone). Needless to say, this knowledge made my day. We all handle debate withdrawal in our own fashion.)

I listened this morning to a Philosophy Bites interview with Thomas Pink. (If you Google him you first have to sort through a lot of haberdashery.) The subject was free will. An argument was proposed to prove the lack thereof by proving that all actions are predestined, and it goes something like this. All statements of fact are either true or false. The statement “You are going to take a walk this afternoon” is therefore either true or false. Your walk, or lack thereof, is a fait accompli before it takes place (or doesn’t take place). Your walk, or lack thereof, is therefore predestined. Now the only way you can attack this conclusion is, apparently, to attack the single premise, that all statements of fact are either true or false, but that is, needless to say, a mug’s game.

Of course, to me, this whole discussion is a mug’s game. Even though I can accept both the logic and the premise, I know that the conclusion is nonsense, and that the whole thing is mere wordplay. If I were a more sophisticated philosopher, perhaps I could successfully rebut the wordplay, but I can’t. And worse, as an unsophisticated post-contemporary philosopher, I find the entire exercise specious at best. Have these obviously intelligent people nothing to do with their brains than to waste them on conundrums? Were they out of Wii consoles at the local electronics shop that week? Because I see little difference between a video game and this kind of analysis, except that at least the Wii gives you a little pseudo-exercise to go along with your killing of time.

I know. My yabbo flag is now waving in all directions.

I equate much of the nonsense in pomo writing with this sort of thinking. One isolates an idea that makes sense if you squint at it just right, and then tear off and build a whole universe of conclusions based on that idea, and that entire universe of conclusions looks like pure idiocy to anyone who doesn’t buy into that particular brand of squinting. And those non-squinters tend to be the majority of the world at large. Not to suggest that the majority is right merely because they have the numbers, but that accepted processes of thought and analysis should be able to withstand all changes of thinker and analyst. Science is like that. Something is either a proven fact, or it is not. One can hypothesize till the cows come home on conclusions to be drawn from the proven fact, but until one’s hypotheses themselves become proven fact, by the same rigorous process that led to the original proven fact, they are not accepted as true. Wouldst that philosophy, or what passes for philosophy, worked the same way.

And if post-contemporary philosophy is correct, it does. The mind and body and the universe do not work one way for philosophers and some other way for physicists/biologists/psychologists. The former create metaphors for what the latter prove empirically. And some day in the distant future the two groups will no longer be disparate. Unfortunately, I doubt if any of us will live long enough to see that happen. [Sigh...]

Toward a workable definition of art

Traveling the path toward understanding art is a fairly treacherous business. Once upon a time the only thing one needed to know was how representative of nature a work of art was to be able to evaluate that work. At least this is what, I gather, Plato and Aristotle say on the subject. One recalls HAL, the computer in 2001, remarking on the drawing the astronaut has done by saying that it is a very good likeness. A very good likeness would make something a very good work of art, from a Platonic, Aristotelian or a binary AI point of view. It is, if nothing else, an objective yardstick. The more real, or the more realistic, and therefore the closer to nature, the better the art. Unfortunately, even without stretching our brains too much, we are able to discard this particular art theory no later than the middle of the 19th Century, and perhaps a lot earlier (e.g., Turner). But to pick a most famous moment, around the time the Americans were fighting their Civil War, a handful of French artists were inventing Impressionism, at which point there is no question, at least in our 21st Century minds, that art need not be realistic/natural to be good.

Our problem is that, as we flash forward to the present from the 19th Century, we get progressively more complicated in trying to analyze the works that are presented as art by artists. The artists refuse to cooperate in our investigations by going off in one unified direction, and we get all sorts of movements and styles, and we have to contend, for instance, with the rather realistic Hopper and the rather fanciful Picasso who, if we were to hang their works on the gallery walls by chronological order, are right next to one another (they were born a year apart). How do we create an overarching explanation for everything we see at a museum of modern or contemporary art? How do we evaluate everything we see at these museums?

For a long time now I’ve been wrestling with aesthetics. Needless to say, I have found it impossible to find an aesthetic explanation, much less an aesthetic appeal, to much of what seems to inarguably be art, if one is to accept the word of artists that their work should be claimed as such. One could subscribe to Baudrillard’s conspiracy of art (which is reasonable enough) and say that art has become what the co-conspirator manufacturers (artists) and profiteers (art dealers, curators and critics) claim it is, regardless of any objective evaluation. But even if that is true, it is not as if there is any competing claim to art that trumps it. Art is that stuff all around us that is put forth as art. Our challenge is to understand it, not to disregard it.

Given the vast panorama of what is called art, it may be too much (or too little) to attempt to define it by what it is. It is certainly impossible to evaluate it merely by what it is. Let’s say we went with a simplistic definition that art is the creation of an object with no practical purpose. I don’t particularly like this definition, and it’s awfully close to the definition that art is the creation of an object that is a work of art, which even more obviously begs the question. I don’t necessarily believe that art is objects, or that all art must have no practical purpose. For that matter, one could question the human inherency in the creation of art: if a computer, or an elephant, paints a painting, is the result not art by definition? In any case, one can toss together various collections of words more or less like this definition, leading inevitably to both arguable premises and arguable conclusions. These arguments would allow us to waste much ink on art theory, intelligibly in some cases, unintelligibly in many others, and in the end we would be not much closer than where we started. Not that I don’t enjoy reading (some) art theory, mind you. I just don’t believe it holds the solution we’re looking for.

The good news is, there is no law that forces us to define art descriptively in order to understand it. Rather than taking a deontological approach, therefore, I will take a consequentialist approach. I will explain art not from a categorical perspective of its having certain aspects, but rather from its results. Art, I would say, is any created work that enhances human experience. Of course, there is an immediate problem with this, because one could easily say that the practice of medicine enhances human experience, but that’s why I include the word created, or better yet, use the phrase created work. We need to get a sense of somebody—an artist—doing something creative, of manufacturing something, whatever it might be, for the purpose of that thing being a work of art. My guess is that there is a better way to put this, but I don’t think the sense is unclear. On the other side of the sentence is the consequence: the work enhances human experience. Here I would mean it enchances the beholder and not the creator, and that art can not be measured by its intentions alone; i.e., if it has no effect, it is therefore a failed piece of art, however lofty the intentions of the artist who created it. Enhance may be a dicey word, human experience may be an overly general phrase, but again, I think we have a clear statement. Art is any created work that enhances human experience. That leaves only the determination of what we mean by enhancing human experience.

I think we can look to Aristotle here on what he says about drama, in that its goals are to provide emotional catharsis for the viewer, and to expand the knowledge of the viewer about the world. This is a simple emotion/intellect breakdown. I would say that enhancing human experience is exactly what Aristotle says, either providing an emotional arena outside of the self, or educating the mind from outside the self, or both. Either is okay, both is better. If Art is any created work that enhances human experience than it either heightens our emotional sensitivity (or gives it a thorough cleaning via a good solid workout) or it expands our knowledge of life, or both. I can now measure the success of art (or at least its relative success, vis-à-vis myself as the beholder) by its effect on my mind or my soul.

There’s more to it than this, but this is a start. Questions arise about meanings that are not the intention of the artist, for instance, but that’s a fine point for argumentation and not a deal-breaker. This definition, if you will, allows us to look at the most luscious Monet or the most improbable Smithson pile of dirt, and evaluate their effects and therefore accept at least that both may be art, even though they do radically different things. I mean, say what you will about the pile of dirt, it does make you think (if only about the conspiracy of art, but that’s beside the point). A book that makes you think about a lot of things would, in this analysis, be more of a work of art than a book that merely entertains you. You could indeed suggest that the book that is merely entertainment is no work of art at all, and perhaps make comparable arguments about paintings of lighthouses that are sold by the pound at tourist resorts. Of course, even the success of these low level attempts at art are tangible, if an emotional reaction (excitement at reading a good adventure story, a sigh over a pretty landscape) is all that is required (and perhaps it is). The more I work with this definition, prescriptive though it may be instead of a more satisfyingly descriptive approach, the more I like it. It could be improved in its actual words, but the point is, I think, on the money.

On moral relativism

I recommended Philosophy Bites recently, and was listening to an installment this morning that was worth mentioning, Simon Blackburn on moral relativism. What he says seems to apply to the occasional LD case.

It is not hard to think of examples of one culture believing something is morally correct, and another culture thinking that same thing is morally incorrect. For that matter, even within a culture, different people can view the same act as right or wrong, depending on a variety of criteria. But I’m more interested in the idea of cultural differences in morality at the moment because often resolutions encompass multiple cultures, and the differing moral viewpoints of cultures are called into play in peoples’ arguments. The problem is that people will argue that when there is a discrepancy in moral views, we must respect the other culture’s views, to which they have some sort of cultural entitlement. The relativist, in other words, claims that all cultural views are equally acceptable.

No one, of course, seriously believes this. But in certain circles, the truth of an argument, i.e., the acceptable reasonableness of a position, is beside the point.

But the issue goes further. Take female genital mutilation, for instance. Some cultures do claim that this is morally correct. Others find it morally repugnant. At the point where the cultures on both sides come into contact, then there is a conflict. If we were to take a morally relativist position, as Blackburn says, we would be unable to resolve the conflict, but the problem is, we have a serious issue that must be resolved. We can’t avoid it: We must resolve the conflict. We must find a satisfactory moral approach that transcends any cultural bias. This asks for a morality that transcends culture, and while it may be hard to determine such a morality, it does make sense to me that any conflict resolution between morally disparate cultures must transcend those cultures. At some point, some things are simply right or wrong, regardless of where you are. At the point where anything can be right and anything can be wrong, and it doesn’t matter what they are because where you are takes priority, then we have moral chaos.

The process of globalization is often vilified as the imposing of (usually Western) culture on other cultures. Certainly one impact of globalization is the spreading of the globalizing culture. Everyone around the world drinks Coke, eats at McDonalds and watches Jon Cruz Tom Cruise movies. There is certainly an impact of cultural leak, at the very least, from the globalizer to the globalizee. Often this is argued as cultural hegemony (bad if we want to maintain sovereign cultural integrity, good if we want to boss everyone else around). And so it is. Subjectively, the globalizer might like to think of itself as civilizing the savages, but imperialists always like to think that they are benefiting their wards. But changing a taste for crocodile steaks to a taste for Big Macs, while perhaps culturally damaging, is nonetheless morally neutral, or at worst, morally so-so. Morally suspect, but not really high up on the immorality hit parade. To a degree, this process just may be a fact of life (and, I hate to say it, go back and read your Old Baudleroo for more on the subject). Cultural studies seem to tell us that we are going to globalize whether we like it or not, at best holding on to a simulacrum of our original cultures. That is, Norway will no longer be Norway, it will be a Disneyfied Norway where Norway-ish materials create the illusion of it being Norway, but for all practical purposes, aside from the whale cutlets, you might as well be in Bayonne, New Jersey.

But serious questions of right and wrong are not addressed by glib analyses of cultures homogenizing, or of some neutral vision that everything every culture does is right because of an inherent warrant that cultures are entitled to do what they want because they are a culture. Culture is not a warrant for any action whatsoever. What the relativist tells us, even if the relativist does not agree with an action, is that because cultures are different, they will do these different things. True enough. But as an ethicist, and as a debater, one ought to seek more than just an obvious descriptive. One must look to prescriptive measures.

In other words, don’t tell me life sucks and walk away. Tell me life sucks, and give me some idea how to make it suck less.

This is not an art essay

I want to tell a story...

I think my problem with art is that I’ve been approaching the subject from an aesthetic point of view. As any number of relativists would tell me, my approach to a work of art to a great degree determines my response. I measure the pile of dirt on the floor according to the same criteria I measure a Monet painting. By those criteria, it is not surprising the pile of dirt does not do the job for me.

It may boil down to my looking at all art as if it were painting, or at least measuring all art by the same criteria I use to measure painting. Which, when I think about it, is rather surprising, in that my exposure to Fine Arts is come-lately, compared to my exposure to literature and music. Or maybe it’s not surprising, because the come-lately aspect has been limiting my vision. I don’t know enough yet, and I don’t even know what I don’t know.

Literature may be an easier way into this analysis. As a reader, I approach a given book on the terms of that book. I know the difference between simple entertainment and an attempt by an author to do something else. And in the area of that “something else,” I know the difference between, on the one hand, writing that is mellifluous and poetic, words strung together in such a way that they celebrate the stringing together of words, of the joy of words, the joy of language, and on the other hand, writing that is attempting to explore human nature, expand my experience, touch my soul. This is not to say that some books can do both, but the wordplay that teems in Nabokov is not the same as the explorations of humanity in Dostoevsky. The two writers are doing different things, aiming at different goals. When I read Nabokov, or other wordsmiths, I am reading on that level. When I am reading Dostoevsky, I am reading at that level. Dickens may be one of the great (and few) examples of doing both. Melville is a great example of trying to do both, and ending up doing both alternately (and also providing lots of simple entertainment, in his time and place). My point here is that sometimes there is writing to appeal to me aesthetically, and sometimes there is writing to appeal to me intellectually. They may or may not overlap, intentionally or unintentionally, but I clearly and easily know the difference. After all, I’ve been trained to read practically since birth, I’ve studied reading throughout my entire academic life, and taken up reading as a profession. If I can’t do it by now, I need to change the Day Job.

So what I’ve been doing in evaluating art is evaluating it entirely on the aesthetic level. I like the way something looks, or I don’t. The philosopher would go into great detail about what that means, but I won’t, because you and I probably both have the same general idea without a lot of heigh-dee-ho. (If you care, I do follow Kant on this, but I can’t for the life of me remember exactly what he says. Do we need to define clearly what aesthetic sense is and how it works, when we all know intuitively what it is and how it works? Unlike Kant, we’re not being paid by the hour.) But the modernist movement in painting, and from there art in general, was a move away from aethestic appeal into works of an intellectual nature. Metaphorically, the artist was no longer attempting to connect with my heart; the target became the brain. Art became not a thing in and of itself, aesthetically pleasing or not aesthetically pleasing, but it was now about something. About the artist’s journey into his or her own soul or vision, about the state of art, about the state of the world in general. Andy Warhol’s painting of a can of Campbell’s soup is not about a can of soup, but about the nature of art. Interpret it as you will, and theoretically its success or failure as a work of art is measurable to some degree on how well it is interpreted in line with the artist’s purpose, which we may or may not know. (No wonder much art criticism reads like random typing.) Baudrillard tells us that this painting is about the breakdown of the difference between art and commerce. Maybe. Or it could be about a breakdown between artificial and intended aesthetics. There’s lots of ways of looking at it.

The pile of dirt is a clearer example of…something. When I say pile of dirt, I am not speaking metaphorically. Aesthetically speaking, the work is mute. Intellectually speaking? Well, it got me to write this, didn’t it?

But...

And so ends our little story.

The problem with the thesis presented above, that painting/art has migrated from aesthetic appeal to intellectual appeal, is that it completely misrepresents both the aesthetic appeal of painting and the historical place of painting in intellectual life prior to (arguably) Fountain in 1917 (or whatever other point you want to draw the line between modern and pre-modern). Painting/art wasn’t at one time entirely intended to make you feel good, to appeal to your aesthetic sense, and then evolved or switched over into something else. Art is rooted in intellectual ground. Art has historically always had something to say. The fact that some art has done so in an aesthetically pleasing way is, perhaps, merely coincidental.

As Caveman points out, the history of art is a history of narrative. Art exists because the artist has something to say. In painting, what the artist has had to say was usually pretty obvious. Since the nature of being an artist required money and training, artists had no choice but to go where that money and training was, which was to a great degree the state. That is, there was for centuries and in various locations the idea that most art was funded by the state, either in the guise of the literal government of the state, the patronage of the rich people of the state, or the religious establishment of the state. Few artists worked as private operatives. The messages made by this art were, to a great degree, the messages of the state. What do we see in surviving ancient Egyptian art? Pharaohs and tomb paintings and the tschotkes of the rich and famous. With Greeks and Romans it’s gods and goddesses and emperors. What do we see in pre-Renaissance and Renaissance art? Church decorations. Paintings of bible stories. Art that tells the story of religion. In 19th Century France, the art that the Impressionists were reacting to was art that was directed to tell a story of historical/moral significance. Art was, by social definition, instructive. And given the machinery of creating art—being trained, obtaining materials and making a living at it—the social definition ruled. There was no one to buy art who wasn’t a part of the society defining what art was, whether a part of the rich or the powerful (included in which is the capital C Church).

Then, for a variety of reasons, including the underlying intellectual strains of the Romantic age celebrating the individual, the rise of the middle class, the invention of photography—all manner of things on all manner of fronts, painting began a revolution. The evolution of art (compare the portraits of the 15th Century to the portraits of the 19th Century) was reaching its teleological conclusion, both in its own abilities and in the challenge of photography (which would ultimately replace the need for realistic representations of what could simply be photographed). Art, or at least some art, was taken back by the artists, and was for sale to the people at large. Art no longer had to tie into the cultural metanarrative. Whether it did or didn’t would be entirely up to the artists and the people who chose what art to buy. One could that that this was true for all art forms, for roughly the same reasons, and be relatively correct. The tides of romanticism and, later, modernism, affected sculpture and writing and music just as much as painting. And to a great extent, all art forms made that same perceived leap from aestheticism into intellectualism. This is not to say that all artists made the leap, but that the ones that seemed to get all the interest did. Since “all the interest” means, to a great extent, critics and curators and others in a position of power over art or whose power depended on art, we might withhold judgment on the value of this interest. In other words, just because a critic or curator says a pile of dirt is good art doesn’t objectively make it good art, which raises the question, what, then, is objectively good in art?

Objective analysis of art is where we are on firm ground aesthetically. Or at least less unfirm ground. We have rules about aesthetics. Granted that these rules are not quite immutable physical laws (although one or two come close), they at least quantify aspects of art in such a way as to allow a qualitative analysis. That is, if there is a great enough quantity of these aspects, we say that the quality is higher than a work with a smaller quantity of these aspects. We have rules purely for beauty, expressible in the so-called Golden Mean. We go so far as to look at a person and make a judgment about their beauty, so it is no trouble for us to make judgments about paintings. We have rules for composition and perspective. In music, we have rules for harmonics. (The musical rules, where Western scales are radically different from Eastern scales, lead one to ask which came first, the rules or the music, for which there is no answer. There is no answer whether the Golden Mean determines a face we think is beautiful, or whether a face we think is beautiful determines the Golden Mean. For that matter, lately there’s been interesting discussion going on in popular analysis of physics asking, even there, which comes first, the laws or the mechanics.) The thing is that, culturally, we generally agree on aesthetics. I do not think that, culturally, we generally agree on intellectual ideas. So we can, as a culture, say certain art is good aesthetically, and all go line up to see it in a museum, but we are much less likely to get a clambake going when the art is not meeting aesthetic guidelines. Or, let’s put it this way. You can’t swing a cat in the Metropolitan Museum on a Saturday, not no-how, while you could have a Patriots game up at the Dia in Beacon, with room left over for the Giants and Green Bay to boot. And that crowd at the Met is your general hoi and polloi, while that crowd at the Dia all looks like renegades from Tribeca, and you get extra point if you spot any of them wearing anything but black. Similarly, no doubt the crowds attending classical concerts are a lot bigger for Beethoven than for Cage, or at least there’s a lot more Beethoven concerts than Cage concerts. And there’s probably a comparable metaphor for the nature of the different audience to the one I drew for the art museums.

My point, if I have any, is that art, and art appreciation, exists on a continuum. Some art is rather easy to understand, and some is rather difficult, and beyond understanding, some is rather easy to claim as “good” while some is rather impossible to make any value claim for whatsoever, unless you are part of the art establishment who has no choice but to make such a claim. Baudrillard’s essay is discusses a conspiracy of art for a reason, because at the point where we have no quantifiable methods of making quality judgments, the quality judgment is sent down from on high, a conspiracy of collectors and critics and curators and those claiming to be artists, all of which may be totally unintelligible to the average schmegeggie on the street. For any of us to learn about art, we need to actually learn about it. I find that lately I’m learning about it like crazy, mostly because I want to. Which brings me to the suggestion that I hope you want to as well. The educated person is not merely someone who knows their parochial set of facts and leaves it at that. That’s technical training, regardless of the nature of the parish. If artists have something to say, if artists have had something to say, if artists will have something to say, and if we believe that artists have a special voice, or at least if we allow, as a culture, artists to have a special voice, then as participants in that culture it behooves us to attempt to listen. The narrower we are as individuals, the less individual we actually are. The more we know, the better. Given art’s special place in culture, knowing more rather than less about art has to be a good, beneficial thing.

What I’m trying to do here is look at stuff and talk about it, out of some fear that you might not be exposed to it elsewhere. My interest in this proselytizing started with the Caveman analysis of modern thought. All of modern thought is connected. All thought exists in its time and place, both in the past and in the present. The more you know about any of it, the more you know about all of it. Elvis concerts, via the film 2001, used to begin with the strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Elvis, somehow, meets Nietzsche. And Kubrick/Clarke. And Richard Strauss. Somehow all of our culture comes to its apotheosis on the stage of the Las Vegas Hilton!

Makes you really want to qualify for NatNats in Sin City this year, doesn’t it?

Sunday, sweet Sunday, with nothing to do: a pot pourri

Forgive me an uncharacteristic weekend post, but:

Pinker wrote about the moral instinct in today's Times.

O'C is wearing an apron in his new Facebook picture, thus sanctioning my apron picture as the beginning of a craze that will only end when Hillary Clinton starts baking cookies again. Gentlemen, start your ovens!

Coachean Life is no longer a part of the under-construction Debaternation, which is like consternation, in that neither and/or both are cured by Ex-Lax. I hope that the WTF crew will keep that hard hat handy when they go live. Something tells me they're going to need it.

I tab-errored two people on my own team at Regis Saturday. Of course, I blame Vaughan. Still, anyone who skips a round check (as we did, due to time pressures), deserves what they get. No man is a hero to his valet, as they say. I understand the Sailors are planning a coup for this week's meeting. I hate when that happens. If you see some bald guy looking for work coaching Declaimers Wednesday, now you'll know why.

The two best words in Scrabble for the week are megahits and boner. Explaining the meaning of the latter to a nine-year-old was the high point of Regis. FYI, per Web 11: 1) one who bones; 2) a howler. End of story, you spalpeen.

O'C wants to challenge me to a new game of Scrabulous. I don't blame him The game we are playing now, for him, will not go down in history as a megahit. As for boners, however...

The Lex RR wants to know if my judges are willing to eat meat. Presumably this is in aid of keeping them interested in the rounds. Give a judge a vegetable, and who knows what will happen.

We talked about experimenting with 4 rounds at next year's CFL events. Positive response. But Newark this year looks like a traditional three-be, due to restraints on the real estate. I know that problem well.

Wedro, winner of more tournaments than I can remember, is heading to San Francisco for a new job. Bon voyage! Thank God debate was there when he was a high school freshman thinking that there had to be something more to life than football.

I have dived into the Goy for the greater honor and glory of NatNats. I should be competent in it by the end of the week. We'll see.

I gave judge training at Regis for the PF parents and only forgot one little thing, to wit, the coin toss. This is like training people to sky dive and forgetting the parachutes. [Sigh.]

There are 257 teams in Harvard PF. Rumor is that the TOC bid is at registration. What is this, every Pfffft team in the country? If you really think PF isn't getting off the ground, mosey up to Cambridge in a couple of weeks.

You say either and I say it's spinach and the hell with it

Thinking about Caveman reminds me about Relativism, which may be the underlying convention of modern thought, for better or worse. Most of history, actually most of human existence, has been the seeking of the objective truth of the reality around us. Lately we’ve been taking a more “whatever” view of reality, as if there may not be any objective truth, or at least no way for any two of us to agree what that objective truth might be. That this is counterintuitive and perhaps pure sophistry never seems to bother anybody, because the counterintuitive sophist relativists counter that relativism explains away our intuitions as biased at best and deranged at the worse, while the objectivists (i.e., everybody not in the philosophic professions, to wit, 99.999% of the universe) don’t give a rat’s patootie. And it is an interesting question whether any two of us perceive any one thing exactly identically. Given my post-contemporary approach, and my claim that science and philosophy ought to be, ultimately, identical, my answer is yes. Unfortunately I can’t prove it. Yet.

The Regis CFL tomorrow will be a blockbuster. Sometimes I think these CFLs and MHLs are underappreciated. I mean, we put a hundred or two hundred debaters into action on pretty much every week there isn’t a competing regional invitational (and occasionally even when there is a competing regional invitational, if that invitational has nothing for younger competitors), which is an awful lot of forensic churn for very little buck. I’ve gone so far as to suggest that the MHL be free, but that would eliminate trophies, and the prevailing wisdom is that the low cost for the value of swag (all the money does, indeed, go into supplying tin) is worth it both for the competitors and the administrations, both of which see the taking of tin as an elemental part of any competitive activity. Anyhow, we’ve got maybe 250 of New York’s Windiest going at it tomorrow, and the weather report is agreeable, so it should be fun. And we won’t have those pesky Speecho-Americans to slow us down, which is always a problem at CFLs. Last week at Newburgh we had awards starting at 5. That has to be the gold standard of efficiency. We’re shooting for 5 again tomorrow. Anyone who gets in my way—obdurate judges, confused parents, lost debaters—will face the wrath of Menick! Slow me down and I guarantee you there will be Baudrillard books in your stocking this year, you spalpeen. See how you like that!

After that, I look forward to a week off; even the Day Job knows when not to bother. I’ll be seeing relatives, debaters, in-laws, friends, and Sweeney Todd (and note that this list was not prioritized, otherwise Sweeney would have probably come first, or maybe tied with my daughter, who I know places Sweeney higher than seeing me, the little serpent’s tooth). I’ll read science fiction and play Zelda and clean up the chez office and edit some photos and do a lot of cooking and prep Caveboy (the condensed Parsippanic version of Caveman) and generally entertain myself and others. Sounds quite soothing. I can’t wait. But of course, this being a relativistic universe, you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Geopolitics Part 5: Justice (conclusion)

We began by saying we would address the issue of justice on an international scale. We said we understood (sorta) justice on a national, social contract level, but didn’t have the resources for making normative statements on the global level. Well, we still don’t have the resources for making those normative statements, but at least now we know what the issues are.

Justice is protecting national sovereignty on a non-military level: That is, one can make an argument that a polity needs to protect itself, and that part of the contract of individuals with their government is the guarantee by the government of this protection. The government is obliged to provide this protection. And this goes beyond, or transcends, the military level. A polity needs to protect its culture. If a nation is, say, very conservative, it would be a government responsibility to prevent other countries from coming in with offensive materials. A government is just in protecting the important interests of its citizens, and if those important interests are social, than protecting those social important interests is a just act on a contractual obligation level.

Justice is maximizing individual welfare: That is, one can make an argument that a government’s obligation to its citizens includes guaranteeing, as best it can, a decent quality of life. A government is obligated to relieve poverty, develop infrastructure, bring in investors who will help develop the country. The government of a developing nation that uses all the money it can get its hands on to build palaces for the rulers is not living up to this obligation. The government of a developing nation that seeks international economic partners, encourages sustainable development without harming the environment, etc., is living up to this obligation.

Justice is defending citizens on a military level: Individuals in a nation cannot defend themselves from attack by outside agencies. This is the job of the government. It would be just for a nation to build a strong defensive military, or seek support from strong military partners. It could also be just for a nation to build, and use, a strong offensive force. The US certainly does, despite any protestations to the contrary: make a list of the countries we’ve invaded since WWII, even if those invasions were “defensive.”

Justice is a government working to maintain its nation’s dignity on the international level: Since only a government can act on the international level, all the actions a government takes on that level can one way or another be tested for justness. If a government works to make its nation a recognized participant in world events, this would probably be just action, whereas if a government works to isolate its nation, this would probably not be living up to its obligation. It is easy to make an argument that in today’s technological, multinational corporate world, a nation must be part of the community of nations to participate in the benefits that derive therefrom.

Justice is protecting the citizens of your nation above the citizens of other nations: Since we have a social contract within our borders, and no social contract outside our borders, our governments only have contractual obligations to their own citizens. On the other hand, we could make claim that our governments have moral obligations to other citizens that also must be taken into consideration. That is, we don’t give up our ideas of right and wrong the minute we cross the border.

Justice is the application of a social contract on an international level: Since geography is accidental, national sovereignty, while valid as a political concept, is not the ultimate determinant of the worth of citizens. Individuals exist as human beings before they exist as citizens of a particular nation, and their human worth transcends their nationality. Creating an international social contract, i.e., a “federal” state of all nations comprising the individual nations, with transcendent laws at this federal/international level overriding local laws, allowing for a framework of individual rights protection within the context of differing societies, is a just action. In other words, a UN that worked, with actual power, is a reasonable goal of just action on the international level.

From these blocks, I could put together an argument that Iran is justified in putting itself forward as the leader of the Moslem world, requiring the international respect that comes with leadership, that this requires a nuclear capability, and that this is beneficial to its people on a social, economic and military level. From these blocks, I could also put together an argument that the US is justified in preemptively preventing its enemies from acquiring nuclear arms, because the protection of citizens within a nation is just. From these blocks, I could do all sorts of things.

But I don’t have to. You do.

Have fun.

Geopolitics Part 4: Firepower

The history of warfare, from the perspective of strategy and tactics, is to some extent the history of firepower. Our definition of firepower will be “offensive power applied from a distance.” From the dawn of time, whoever can amass the better firepower tends to win the battles. While there are examples of great strategists who have managed to overcome better firepower with a clever plan, for the most part, if I’ve got better weaponry, and more of it, I’ll probably come out on top.

The study of firepower is also the study of the advancement of weaponry. Let’s look at our ancestors in the caves.
Step one: fists.
Step two: tool use and rock throwing.
It doesn’t take a genius to see how throwing a rock has some advantages over throwing a fist. I don’t have to get so close, so if I have rocks and all you have is fists, I win. Similarly, if my tool use brings me to a knife, and all you’ve got is a fist, I probably win then too. But the further away I can get from you while still launching an offensive attack, the better chance I have of harming you while not being harmed myself. A bow and arrow is better than throwing rocks, because I get better accuracy and better results. I can kill better with an arrow than with a rock. I can be further away from my enemy than with a rock (or, of course, than with a close-range weapon like a sword/knife/mace/battle-axe). A gun is an improvement over the bow and arrow (once guns get to the point of rifling, at least): better accuracy, more distance, more deadly. In war, if one side has guns and the other side has swords, the guns will probably win because the gunners will never be in range of the swords, but not vice versa.

So, there’s the history of world warfare in a nutshell. Add to this developments in artillery so that guns become cannons, and you’ve made it about as far as the American Civil War. But we miss something here, which is who, exactly, are the combatants. For most of Western history, the combatants were professional soldiers. One batch of professional soldiers fought another batch of professional soldiers, and there didn’t tend to be too many of them, and they played by various accepted rules, and then the kings found out who won and that was that. Very civilized, in a manner of speaking. The American Civil War can be said to have introduced a new concept, the standard-issue non-professional soldier. Not that there weren’t volunteers, but the Union had the resources of factories (for war materiel) and population (for soldiers) and drafted the latter to attend to the former. Small elegant battles went away during the Civil War, and bloodshed on a mass level was introduced. (It was perfected in the trenches of WWI.) But still, it was soldiers fighting soldiers.

Artillery fire can do serious damage. I can shoot you from very far away, and make a very big bang. Start thinking battleships, where I can deliver the artillery anywhere on the water. Start thinking airplanes, where I can start dropping bombs from the sky. Develop aircraft carriers, and you’ve got one of the greatest advances ever in the history of firepower.

Planes start to make wars very dicey, primarily beginning during WWII. Previously the world was a contest of our firepower vs your firepower, with whoever shoots the most from the furthest having the advantage, but at the point where we start dropping bombs from airplanes, beginning with military targets, it isn’t long before we find ourselves firebombing Dresden.

And then we take the giant step, and we’re bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki to demonstrate the ferocious power of the atomic bomb.

At the point where we have nuclear weapons, we have taken a quantum leap in firepower (no pun intended). Provided we have airplanes or long-range missile launching capabilities, we can launch our weapons virtually from the comfort of home. And we can kill everyone for miles around. We go beyond military targets almost by definition. Nuclear weapons take out cities, not military targets. War, as a result, is totally redefined.

The technology for creation of nuclear weaponry is complex and expensive. The US had the bomb in 1945; the Soviets were right behind us. Even before WWII ended, US Foreign Policy had determined that the USSR was the next enemy, and the USSR took a similar view of us. These two major powers were the only ones in a position in the wake of WWII to develop and afford these weapons, which is why they were the ones who had them. Before long, we had them pointing at each other. But we didn’t use them. We came close once or twice, but we never pulled the trigger.

We now start to see why nuclear weapons are different from other weapons. With nukes, there’s no longer even a pretense of attacking military targets. Pretty much any analysis you can find on the justness of war will tell you that attacking civilians should not be on the program. It’s bad enough that many of our conflicts nowadays are urban, with that wonderful euphemism of collateral damage, i.e., we took out an orphanage when we took out the suspected insurgents headquarters. But nukes take it to the next level. Their destruction is beyond even the intended military. One of the special aspects of the US and USSR facing off with nukes was that they both had enough in their arsenals to destroy each other, so if either of them did start a nuclear conflict, it would assure the end of both of them. This became known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, to indicate to anyone what the problem was. A subset of the problem would probably be that, if any nuclear power attacked another nuclear power without as much of an arsenal—say, Israel attacked Russia—the bigger player would still nevertheless destroy the smaller player. In other words, Israel might take out Moscow, but Russia would take out Israel.

The destructive power of nukes is so great that their existence theoretically negates their use; Baudrillard talks about this. As soon as you’ve acquired these weapons, you’ve backed yourself into a corner of being unable to use them. If only that were true.

Over time, a handful of national players have managed to acquire nukes. The thing is, possession of a weapon of such power is a magical thing. If the progress of warfare is the progress of firepower, than nukes are a giant step in that progression. And that leads to some issues to consider:
1. Countries that have nukes have a vast advantage over countries that don’t have nukes.
2. Countries that don’t have nukes whose enemies have nukes are at a vast disadvantage. If a conflict were arise, conventional warfare could lead to nukes, and a guaranteed outcome.
3. Countries that have nukes demonstrate that they are in a position of power on the world stage. For instance, even if, theoretically, the US never plans to use its nukes, it possesses them, and could use them. The enemy never knows. The same holds true regardless of who the possessor is.

What gets thrown into this mix is the idea of nuclear non-proliferation, that is, the idea that no countries who don’t have nukes should acquire them. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty says that people who have them won’t use them and people who don’t have them won’t get them, and that we will eventually all disarm. That is, the nations of the world have agreed that nuclear warfare is bad, period. It breaks the rules of warfare. It is the line drawn in the sand by civilized society.

Too bad all society isn’t civilized. Thank goodness the technology is complicated and expensive, and the preexistence within a nation of conditions supportive of those complications and expenses logically connects with a responsible government and the Baudrillardian construct that you would have to be insane to use these weapons and their very possession is an indication of sanity. Maybe. But as technology advances, no doubt nuclear technology will also get cheaper, just like HDTVs. One year only the rich can afford them, a couple of years later every schmegeggie has one. And look at the incentives! If you have nukes, you get to be a player. Instead of being poor old backwater Boogaboogaland, you get to be a member of the nuclear fraternity, just like the US and France and the UK. American hegemony must end! Death to all yankee dogs!!!

And we begin to understand the nature of the geopolitical scene today. There are no easy solutions to the economic problems that exist. Poor countries with nothing to offer don’t want charity, they want to be viable economic entities with a solid balance of trade with other nations. Achieving this usually means alliances that are occasionally disturbing (which is something we didn’t go into, but is certainly the case today as China and non-Communist Russia invest in developing nations for their own benefit, especially in Africa, without necessarily paying any attention to human rights issues, but then again, count up how many dictators has the US supported in strategic situations, including Saddam Hussein). Countries with chips on their shoulders over the disposition of land in the past or for any other reason historical or social, want to get even or change the status quo. At the point where these issues are dealt with conventionally, they are probably within the realm of acceptability, if not necessarily desirability. Stuff will happen that we may not like, but there’s a limit to how bad it can be. But when you insert a nuclear option into the equation, you go beyond the realm of acceptability. At the point in the future where someone uses nuclear weapons, we will be living the nightmare we are only now beginning to drift into.

And that’s the way it is in the world today. Firepower changes everything.

Welcome to the Bahamas!

Geopolitics Part 3

(Keep in mind that our goal here is not to provide a particular explanation of certain geopolitical actions, but to provide a framework of understanding of geopolitics, and a springboard to further analysis as makes sense with the particular subject you’re pursuing. In Jan-Feb, that subject would be the possession of nuclear arms. We’ll only be touching on nuclear issues in this essay, and not evaluating them in the preemptive strike context.)

As we said in the last section, the world does not neatly fall into a pattern of cooperative trading partners, nor for that matter does the world fall into neatly fitting economic pieces that only want for a master puzzle solver to put them together. But more importantly, there is more to international relationships than economics and trade (although there do seem to be some who believe that open trade is the panacea for all the world’s problems). Nations are, by definition, groups of people with something in common (and if that’s not the loosest definition of nation ever, than listen to my podcast on Sovereignty, or read the accompanying pdf on my podcast page, or eventually here on the Coachean Greatest Hits). There are numerous schools of thought about why nations come to exist, and what it is that makes a group of people a nation rather than just an odd conglomerate of individuals accidentally in one place. Of course, geography is certainly a prime determiner. Island nations are the easiest example of this. One of the easiest ways to get a nation going is to set an area off from other areas, and an island is the best way to doit. Other examples are mountains and rivers and deserts, but nothing seems as pure as an island. An island has a natural protection against invasion because of its surrounding water (more important historically the further back you go), so the people on an island, if they come together as a cohesive group, immediately gain one of the first benefits of nationhood, which is defensive safety, not only in this case safety of numbers but safety of geography. Usually islanders are there in the first place as already connected tribes or families or political groups, maybe emigrating from some other nation originally, and one way or the other they are of a piece. Islands in other words present a uniformity of polity that, at least in theory, seems clean and refined. It’s not necessarily true in reality, as some islands are split between two or more unique political entities, but you get the picture.

So we begin to perceive a nation as a physical place. Some places actually feel a physical determination be be a nation. An island feels like it should be a nation. A large area entirely surrounded by mountains feels like it should be a nation. An area set off by rivers should be a nation. Whatever natural boundaries exist add to the feeling of national determination. In the US, our national determination is given the name Manifest Destiny, meaning that we were “destined” to become a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. National determination, therefore, may or may not be a reasonable longing.

Shared ethnicity is another aspect of national cohesion. It’s hardly essential but historically it’s been quite a biggie. Think of the concept of a homeland. Who is it that wants that homeland? The Jews want a homeland. The Palestinians want a homeland. The German Third Reich wanted an ethnically cleansed homeland. Every nation at the Olympics has an anthem proclaiming the existence of (and often the primacy of) homeland. The French are the French, the Italians are the Italians, the Brazilians are the Brazilians. Their ethnicities are a combination in various measures of race, religion, history, and any other generally shared beliefs or traits, which can include a shared belief in non-uniformity of all traits, i.e., freedom to be or believe anything, which is what the US is theoretically built on. (The proof of the viability of this American concept is the belief held in some nations that the US is evil, based on its lack of a pure religious underpinning, that we are godless entities with no belief except in the almighty dollar–all right, the formerly almighty dollar nowadays–that we are anti-them at the core and therefore they must be anti-us at the core, for whatever reason.)

So now we begin to see a few items that we can mix and match in our understanding of geopolitics. There’s the pure economic well-being of a nation. There’s the physical location of the nation. And there’s the nature of the people of a nation. What do these items describe?
1. Poor nations want to be less poor. Rich nations want to stay rich. Everyone at any level either wants more or doesn’t want less, which means something’s got to give. Conflict! Rich nations can use poor nations to stay rich. Poor nations will view charity in a different light from investment. But who would invest in a poor nation, with virtually no likelihood of a decent return on investment? Resource-rich nations can use that richness as a bribe or a threat.
2. People are where they are physically sometimes for reasons those people do not approve of, or other people do not approve of. Multiple entities claim that spot as their historical possession. Israel and Palestine. The Alsace-Lorraine. Native American land. Tibet, Taiwan, China. Northern Ireland.
3. We don’t like you, and/or you don’t like us. Islamic vs Western nations. Endless Catholic/Protestant battles in Europe for hundreds of years. The French vs the English. All the historical European conflicts involving dynasties you can barely remember (although these also usually included land grabs and even fiscal goals).

In the world as a perfect place, the nations would peaceably coexist despite these factors. But the world is not a perfect place, and so we have seemingly endless conflict from the dawn of recorded time. Our globe today is definitely Islamic and non-Islamic nations at various levels of conflict, Africa a horrible mess that includes warlords ripping off the populations of their own nations (or the neighboring nation), China positioning itself for future superpowerhood, Russia reinventing itself presumably with regained superpower status, the US held hostage in the hands of an unpopular regime until 1/20/09, independent non-national (or rogue nationalist or separatist or whatever) movements resorting to terrorist techniques to achieve their goals… What a mess!

One clear thing from a geopolitical perspective is that few nations feel that everything with their position is fine. And even the happiest of nations would not be dumb enough to think that with all this confusion going on around them, they don’t need to protect themselves just in case. So everybody has arms, buys arms or develops arms. Or, they obtain protection from a country that already has arms. Japan, for instance, is not particularly well-armed and if, let’s say, they were attacked by North Korea (which would be likely if North Korea wished to attack “the West” since that’s about as far as NK’s missiles could reliably fly), it would be up to the US to respond as Japan’s protector (cf. WWII); NK, Japan and the US all know this. Some countries feel a need to defend themselves against the US, which is why NK develops its arms in the first place. Countries that perceive of the US as an enemy act accordingly. Any country that sees any enemies anywhere acts accordingly. Everybody makes sure that they can defend themselves.

And some countries go even further, and attack somebody offensively. Some attack people within their own borders, i.e., ethnic cleansing. Some attack across borders, e.g., the US in Iraq or Al Qaeda on 9/11 (Al Qaeda being an ad hoc country, but we won’t bother to analyze the extraterritorial nature of terrorist organizations, and we’ll simply accept that terrorist organizations share most traits of nations short of national boundaries, which they are usually seeking to attain or regain).

All of this military action, defensive or offensive, is overlaid on the very complex issue of firepower. And that will be our next installment.

Geopolitics part 2

The so-called geopolitical state of nature cannot be seen as a state of constant warfare, in the Hobbesian sense. It is pretty obvious what war is like between nations, and war only occasionally describes the way things are. The geopolitical state of nature is probably better seen as an arena of power, in which each nation seeks a certain amount of that power for its own benefit. If the powers among or between states are in a mutually satisfactory equilibrium, this balance of power is construable as peace. If the powers are not in equilibrium, then we are either at war, or in danger of being at war. The question then is, what exactly comprises a mutually satisfactory equilibrium?

All countries do not share the same goals, and the goals of each are rooted in its culture. But one would be hard-pressed to claim that countries today can exist in isolation, or that they should exist in isolation. Our technological abilities allow us to share resources on a global level; oil is a perfect example of a commodity that is used globally but possessed unequally by its users. Some countries have oil, others don’t. Some countries have great agricultural capabilities, others don’t. Some countries have great technological capabilities, others don’t. In some of these cases of possession of a natural resource, it is where it is and there isn’t much you can do about it, while in cases of an artificial resource (e.g., brains, which are outsourced from India for US industry customer support) it is more situational. Labor works similarly. A poor heavily populated area can be seen as a resource for unskilled labor, an unpopulated area of any economic class would be seen as not much of a labor resource. And so on. While politically one could categorize nations at various levels of have and have not, it might make more sense to categorize them as having some stuff and not having some other stuff. What they have and don’t have, combined with their culture, defines them as members of the community of nations, and marks what is different between India and France and Ecuador, et alia.

As I say, our technological abilities allow us to share resources on a global level, so it stands to reason that, if we are so inclined, we can provide the resources that are missing from a country to that country, and presumably that country can provide the resources it has a surplus of to yet some other country that needs that resource. In other words, one can envision a utopia where all countries trade what they’ve got for what they haven’t got, and presumably everybody’s got something, so it will all work out. But utopia is the operative word here. Some countries really don’t have anything, and others really do have everything. The US, for instance, has just about everything except really cheap labor. We even have a lot of our own oil, although not enough for our actual usage (putting aside the necessity of that usage). Countries like Malawi or Somalia don’t have much of anything, and don’t really offer any particularly attractive resource for other nations on a reciprocal trade level. These countries would have to be transformed at their cores before they could become viable trade partners. So in reality, we have countries that don’t need all that much, countries that can probably trade well and equally, and countries that don’t have anything.

The countries in the middle, the ones that have something to trade, and do so, can be seen as sort of neutral on the geopolitical scene, if things are working out for them fairly well. France has wine, Germany has beer, they trade, everyone’s happy. This is not to say that life in these countries is ideal, but it’s pretty good. Modern-day Europe actually is a good example of this middle area, as the EU demonstrates. They’ve even developed a common currency, which has benefited some countries quite a bit, providing a backbone of economic security that transcends local fluctuations. The fringe European countries all want to be a part of the EU, for all the benefits it secures.

There are bigger issues at the top and the bottom. There is a question of whether the power (however you define it) of the US bestows on it extra responsibilities, which most people answer in the affirmative. There is the problem of how to bring the bottom countries around, making them viable players. And here is where this analysis, which has been primarily economic, begins to fall apart. If it were only just a question of moving piles of money around, with guaranteed results from the movement of those piles of money, everything would be fine. But what happens if you provide aid to a country, and that country’s oligarchy absconds with the loot? Or what if the political structure of the country is so unstable that even with the best of intentions the aid doesn’t make it to the people who need it. And aid in times of need is one thing, but what’s really needed is engines to permanently improve these nations, a combination of political and social determination hard to come by. And most of all, what about countries who are not looking at the world as mere finances, but have other goals, either territorial or cultural, regardless of their size or stability or economics?

That’s when things start to get complicated.