Author: George Papaioannou

Escape to SCOTUS-Land

I entertained several titles for this blogpost before I eventually settled on this one.  I believe it captures the reality, sad in my opinion, of American politics over the past fifty years.  Unable to resolve a host of important but controversial issues, from abortion to guns, and from voting and civil rights to matters of church and state, both parties and behind them the American public have turned the Supreme Court into a proxy battleground.  That has brought the cynical politicization of the Court, the call for litmus tests concerning the selection of candidates and serious spillover effects into electoral politics.

Depending how the majority of justices appears to tilt toward the right or left, the decibel of groans and the degree of anguish grow predictably and correspondingly in the ranks of liberals and conservatives.  With the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg last week, it is the liberals singing the blues as they anticipate the inevitable shift of the Court to the right.  I happen to believe that our reliance to the high court to resolve our political differences is one more indicator of our dysfunctional and divisive politics and it is time we think more soberly about the real roots of our problems.  Without being a legal expert but still with the interest a citizen ought to have about such matters, I will try to offer a dispassionate perspective on the role of the Supreme Court.

Separation of church and state.  The main intent of the establishment clause was to prevent the US government from favoring any specific religion or sect at the expense of others and thus avoid the sectarian wars that had marred Europe. *  I don’t see anything in the radar to suggest this clause is in danger.  As far as I know, several recent Supreme Court cases decided in favor of religious entities had to do with the doctrine of equal treatment whereas others have opposed the use of public funds for religious instruction.  The Hobby Lobby decision granting the company the right to deny insurance coverage for abortion (on the basis of the religious beliefs of the firm’s owners) is an interesting case that has its roots in an American peculiarity concerning health insurance.  The US is unique among advanced economies in making health insurance conditional on one’s being employed, thus giving employers a voice in various collateral matters.  The way out of this unconventional arrangement is (in case you disdain a single payer system) a public option insurance plan free of faith-based restrictions.

Political money.  By granting the right of speech to corporate entities in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court indeed allowed additional cascades of money into politics but again it was forced to decide on something Congress had failed to regulate.  More than any other modern democracy, the US has institutionalized the role of money in politics with all its distorting and corrupting effects on elections and policy making.  It boggles the mind that Americans are willing to spend billions of dollars to recruit senators and representatives whose job performance rarely satisfies more than 20% of the electorate!  However, the argument that political money favors conservatives at the expense of Democrats is without merit.  There is plenty of money on both sides and only the degree of largess of prospective donors determines how much flows to each side.  Just recently, billionaire Mike Bloomberg committed a cool one hundred million dollars to the Florida race to defeat Donald Trump.

Voting rights.  Do we know of any other Western democracy where the courts are as extensively engaged as in the US in resolving disputes around voting rights and procedures?  Notwithstanding the lack of any credible evidence of voter fraud, cases of eligibility to vote, gerrymandering decisions, and mechanics and methods of voting are frequently before the courts, including the Supreme Court.  The states, which have jurisdiction over voting, and Congress have been proven unwilling or incapable of putting an order to the system.  And a disruptive president has exploited these disputes to claim the possibility of voter fraud when, thankfully, this is not what ails the voting system in the US.  You can stack the Supreme Court with nine all liberal or conservative justices and there is little they can do to take us out of this morass.

Civil rights.   This is an area where much more can be accomplished by the force of public attitude and behavior as Americans move – and the movement is in the right direction – to a more inclusive society.  It has been generally observed that in matters of civil rights, like those related to racial equality and sexual/gender orientation, the Supreme Court has tended to move along with rather than against the public sentiment.  Thus, a Court shift to the right may not prove as injurious as it is feared to the advancement of civil rights.

Guns.  Another difficult controversial matter left to the Supreme Court to fix.  Consider the absolute tenor of the Second Amendment: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” And yet, state courts and the Supreme Court have found some wiggle room to place some regulations.  But in this case as well, Congress has failed to take the lead despite the overwhelming evidence that counter to the lame argument of the gun lobby “guns don’t kill, people kill,” gun possession is being proven to be extraordinarily deadly to Americans. 

Abortion.  At the risk of sounding repetitive, let me again say, the US stands out among modern democracies as the country where abortion generates such fervor and fanaticism.  In Western Europe, even in strongly Catholic Ireland, the people, not necessarily the courts, have found ways to adopt abortion rights without the histrionics we see in the US.  They have mostly adopted a middle solution away from the American extreme positions of pro-choice and pro-life advocates.  Are all these people morally compromised one way or another compared to Americans?

I do not wish to minimize the implications of a Supreme Court tilting to the left or to the right.  But let’s look at the political reality.  A president willing to exploit, even abuse, his executive powers to his personal benefit; his party unwilling to provide the checks envisioned by the Constitution; and a Congress chronically ineffectual in legislating matters out of the hands of the courts.  And a citizenry with a significant fraction given to the voracious consumption of disinformation and conspiracy theories. 

To expect in this environment that nine mere mortals seated at the Supreme Court have the power to save us from the failings of the other two branches of government and ours is delusional and a kind of escapism from our responsibilities as citizens. 

* The CARES Act passed by the Congress to combat the economic fallout of the pandemic allows the extension of the Paycheck Protection Program to churches for the payment of clergy salaries.  This is one of the most direct uses of public funds by religious establishments ever allowed.  And it did not come from the Supreme Court.   

Thirty million infected; almost one million dead; economies in tatters; incomes and livelihoods devastated worldwide.  Then there are the children.  And the first thing that comes to mind is how much knowledge they have lost.  But I say think first how much of their social growth has been retarded. 

Since last spring, schooling has been mostly on line.  This fall, children are returning to classes but even when instruction is in-person, social distancing will continue to keep children from meaningful face-to-face and activity-based interaction. 

Social isolation is not a natural condition for humans.  The experts warn us that being deprived of social life can afflict us with anxiety, depression and irritability.  But if socialization is a source of pleasurable living to grown-ups, it is an indispensable ingredient to the growth of children.  At some basic level, we all understand that.  But there is more to it and it goes beyond the limits the coronavirus imposed on the socialization of children.

First, why is the socialization of young children important?  Because it helps them understand who they are and thus become aware of their identity; come to love people outside their kin; understand what friendship and trust are and how to make friends; learn to build networks of people that matter to them and use cooperation to achieve goals; experience the good and bad effects of in-group bias and aversion to those outside; and take advantage of social learning and teaching.  All these dimensions of socialization constitute the social suite, as physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis calls it in his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of A Good Society.

The upshot of Blueprint is that, genetically wired with some pro-social instincts, humans managed very early to build social systems that helped them survive the challenges of their natural environments.  In turn, successful social patterns favored those living in them to propagate.  Therefore, humans, as biological and social creatures, are products of a shared genetic and social code.  

By the time children are ready to start kindergarten, they bring with them a degree of social maturation that helps build their social suite.  In his book Becoming Human, psychologist and neuroscientist Michael Tomasello shows that 5-year olds have developed a normative sense of do’s and dont’s that is informed by a sense of obligation to others.  By the age of seven, children have started to regulate their behavior not only according to their own sense of what is right or wrong but also according to the standards of society.  And they have enough reasoning skills to make ethical judgments. Thus, children enter their school life with foundations of morality and social awareness.  As they go through elementary and early high school, children develop a sense for loyalty and trust and then for commitment, empathy and affection.

Of the various social venues, children can find themselves, the school and the playground are arguably the most important for their social growth because they are the testing grounds where children try out and hone their social skills.  In the process, they learn how to adapt to the demands of social life.  Unlike children of past generations, today’s children are mostly deprived of the rich social interaction with members of extended families living in proximity and coming together in frequent intervals.  The preponderance of the nuclear family (just the parents and children) has significantly reduced the richness of this human-based transmission of social histories, experiences and lessons.

So, when we take out the social life of schools and playgrounds, what are children left with?  Of course, we know the answer since it has been around for quite some time before the onset of the pandemic:  online games and social media.  Means of virtual socialization which, of course, have intensified in use with the pandemic.  Therefore, the building-up of the components of the social suite has been already affected by forces beyond the pandemic. 

Over their long history, humans have stumbled on discoveries that gave them no clue in advance how they would change human life and nature.  The discovery of the digital technology is such a development.  It raises the question: Can the transmission and acquisition of social skills and experiences through digital means instead of human interaction change any of the components of the social suite that Blueprint claims is at the heart of a good society?  Can you trust that a bot has your back?  And as far as the process of becoming human is concerned, can we leave that task to Artificial Intelligence?

Around 2005, people reported that the average number of their strong friendships had dropped from three to two and 25% in the survey said they had no one they could truly trust.  If this has happened to adults, imagine the deficit of friendship in children. Of all the components of the social suite, friendship is particularly important because it does not rely on kinship or reciprocal altruism.  In online games, players are replaced without much emotional cost and on social media “likes” do not convey the warmth of real bonding with another human being.  Another collateral damage is children developing the habit of verbally abusing bots, like Alexa, that could potentially transfer to abusing fellow humans.

Although bots and robots can be designed to have a positive impact on how humans interact among themselves, the author of Blueprint N. Christakis has argued (The Atlantic, April 2019) that ill-designed interactions through digital and AI technologies can stunt emotional growth and inhibit human connections.

From a different standpoint, we could argue that the social isolation brought upon us by the pandemic has been less traumatic thanks to the presence of social media.  They have allowed us to stay in contact with relatives, friends, and the society at large.  The fact that social media-related firms outperformed in an otherwise negatively impacted stock market is evidence of where people turned when all tangible in-person contacts were shut down. 

Grown-ups though have already developed the social suite prior to the advent of the pandemic and thus they can easily return to normal human interaction.  This cannot be said for the children living through the pandemic.  That’s why schools closed to in-person instruction and contact may prove to be the most important loss for children and by extension for us all to the extent the disrupted social growth of the young hurts the sustenance and quality of our social suite.

If things were what they used to be in years past, my first blog post of the fall would be about places I had travelled in the summer and the frivolous going-ons at the Yabanaki beach in Varkiza, filled with summer nostalgia.  But none of these things happened this summer and as for nostalgia it rarely is the child of mundane experiences.

Instead, the summer laid more devastation in the US as premature re-openings and callus behavior by people spread the virus and death to thousands.  And that was not all.  America’s cities convulsed with protests in response to deadly police shootings of Black Americans.  So, like in some dark music piece, the summer broke out in a crescendo of sickness, deaths, strife for social justice and broken plans.

We tried to salvage some of the pleasures of summertime by taking advantage of what our natural surroundings have to offer, visiting beaches, parks and preserves – some for the first time.  And we did take limited risks in order to socialize with friends with the usual precautions of wearing masks and social distance.  We even tried outdoor dining as a gesture of support for the local businesses.  All things considered and compared to the hardship and losses suffered by so many other people, we count ourselves among those fortunate enough to have escaped thus far the scourge of the pandemic and ready to move on toward better days. 

But this fall is different not just because we are getting out of an unusually deadly and anything but let-loose summer, but also because Americans will soon have to decide the direction they wish for their country.  And, if I may be excused for some hyperbole, it is still true that as America goes so does the world in many respects. 

The pandemic and our individual and collective response to it as well as the social unrest following the deaths of Black Americans in the hands of police should have taught us something about personal choice, personal responsibility and law and order.  That personal choice not informed by an ethical code and social conscience is an empty privilege; that personal responsibility without social sustenance is abandonment; and that law and order not grounded on justice lose legitimacy. 

It is, therefore, unfortunate that the much-needed political debate about the serious problems America faces, centered around racial, social and economic justice, is falling victim to a much more urgent call.  The call to preserve the rules and values of American democracy as opposed to pursuing a narrowly defined nationalism of an America that denies its diversity. 

Long before the pandemic happened upon us, critical conditions had been set in motion that would lead us to the dead-end politics of populism and its dubious leaders.  Populism arises when people feel frustrated and thus become more receptive to the alluring messages of cynical demagogues who succeed in corrupting people’s faith in democracy and pluralism.  We ‘ll always have corrupt and devious politicians, but when their personal follies and exaggerated self-importance are not checked by the people, then we should worry.  Graver yet, it is to dismiss the populist sentiment of the people and especially the conditions that drive them to that state.

A lot has been written about what has driven America to this point.  But two books stand out in their ability to encapsulate the main arguments.  In Deaths of Despair Anne Case and Angus Deaton (a Nobel laureate) use the stark power of numbers to describe how job displacement, social alienation and an ineffective health care system has driven hundreds of thousands of middle-age men in Fly-Over America to opioid dependence and suicide.  

In Winners Take All Anand Diridharadas lays out his case against the global constellation of elites that abuse capitalism to corrupt free markets, amass power and wealth and frame the narrative to ensure that “change” never undermines the underpinnings of their dominance.

A common thread that connects all the economic, social and race-related failings is the diminished presence of a social conscience.  The neglect and even dismissal of the social good as a legitimate goal.  And it’s not because no one writes or talks in its defense but rather because the majority of us have become immune to its influence dazzled by the glitter of the system, so rewarding if you are on the lucky side of the tracks but so punishing if you are not.

In different ways, this is going to be a fall of discontent for many.  But we can get out of this dismal state if we are willing to re-examine the relationship of the individual to the society and of the individual self-interest to the social good. 

I bet no one had predicted what a year this 2020 would turn out to be when we were celebrating in those New Year Eve parties   A global pandemic, sickness and death, lockdowns and unemployment, social isolation, public demonstrations for the deaths of black people in the hands of police, elation the pandemic was on its way out, opening up business and society.  And then breaking the rules, resurgence of cases, retreat on opening up.

So we march into the summer months of July and August carrying all this baggage of emotions, memories, experiences, losses and grief that will mark our lives forever, if not exactly afraid at least concerned about what awaits us on the other side of the season when fall returns.  Here are some thoughts I take with me into the summer.

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The return to normalcy could have been a lot smoother and less risky and reversible if we all had displayed temperance and wisdom.  If we had eased our lives into the joys we had missed instead of binging in them.  If our elected officials had the wisdom to go slow and mandate the precautions needed to keep the virus away.  Instead we treated Nature with hubris and we lost.  With new cases surging at alarming rates, the reopening of the economy is now threatened and America finds itself unwelcomed to parts of the world that unlike us continue to reopen while they keep cases down.  Failing to realize we are all in together, states, like Florida and Texas, now condemn us in the Northeast to international distancing as a result of their antipathy to social distancing.

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Statues of men who had made their mark from the Revolutionary times to the Civil War and even the Twentieth century used to gaze out from their solid pedestals, unperturbed by the pestilence and turmoil suffered by us mortals.   No more.  The Black Lives Matter demonstrations have again put on the table of public consciousness the thorny question: “Who deserves the public immortality of a statue?”  Tempered voices advice we keep the statues of men, who, despite committing the crimes of their day, fought for something good, like building a country even if that meant a country for whites only; but do away with the statues of Confederate men who fought to keep other humans enslaved.  Not so, we are told by those who come from those enslaved men and women.  No good these founding men did for this country can erase their original sin.  The cold reality is that history and the symbols that remind us of it are written and chosen by the victors.  But the day comes when the victors are challenged by their conscience from within and by the aggrieved from outside.  This is the moment we are in right now.  Not only Black Americans but White Americans as well feel the moment of catharsis has come or is very near.  The least White America can do is listen to its fellow Black as well as Native Americans and be sensitive to their sense as to how our common history must be remembered and memorialized.

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When hit by the vicissitudes and risks of something as insidious as this pandemic, it is time to ask “How can I live my life to survive the emotional and mental tear and wear?”  That’s when my mind goes to what the Stoics and the Epicureans had to say about a life well lived.  Both advised that after the initial shock we feel as we react to unpleasant change, fear and loss we should quickly restore our composure and take control of our lives by resorting to reason and contemplation.  Stoics would further advise us to focus on the now and here.  To enjoy what we have and not get trapped in the fear of what we might lose tomorrow.  The Epicureans would add that safeguarding happiness is a virtue.  And by that they did not mean happiness built on the unrestrained pursuit of pleasures.  They rather meant happiness pursued with prudence; happiness that comes from learning to adapt as circumstances change and from discovering new opportunities to find pleasure.  A Stoic endures hardship without surrendering his will to feel whole; while an Epicurean does not let hardship take away her faith in life and a better tomorrow.

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In my amateurish practice of Stoicism, I tried to convince myself that each day of my new limited life I went through was another battle won.  That enduring this prolonged period of isolation was a meaningful experience that tested my will and ability to fight an enemy, and I should not be defeated.   And in my amateurish way of practicing Epicureanism, I started to find pleasure in things I had long ignored.  I started to take pleasure in the flower beds and the landscaping of homes I went by in our daily walks around the neighborhood.  I started to pay attention to the architectural styles of homes.  I would bring back memories of walks in European cities.  Here is an Art Nouveau building and here is an Art Deco or Neo-Classical building.  I saw none of these styles in my neighborhood.  Just Center Colonials, and a few Dutch Colonials and what they call here Ranger Ranches and the other styles you see in an American suburb.  For millions of people, a neighborhood had become the world.

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Funny how we rediscover our social selves under trying conditions.  In our walks, we nodded and said Hi to people we didn’t know and they nodded back.  We saw people sitting in lawn-chairs in front of their houses waving and showing gladness when they would see us again.  We saw people visiting friends sitting in prudent distance from each other in front yards like in times past.   The pandemic had pushed us apart and yet we were pulled closer by a new found need to bond, even so lightly, with others.  I hope people will still wave at us and say “Hi” after the pandemic is gone.  What an irony, if this never happens again and we look back to the pandemic days with nostalgia for the “His” and the looks from strangers, all full of understanding for the common condition we had to share those days of the lockdowns.

So let’s choose the joys of the 4^th of July celebrations with prudence so that we enjoy with exuberance the Labor Day feasts come September.

Let’s face it.  Timing the return to a normal life after the onset of the pandemic was not meant to be an easy or a well-informed decision.  A number of countries, especially in Europe and East Asia, waited until new case and death rates went reliably down before they relaxed the lockdown restrictions.  In some cases, they had to reimpose them at the local level.

In the US, the out-of-sync federal system from the President down to the states proved to be the cause of an uneven and haphazard approach to the pandemic from its start to the time it came to fashion a return to normalcy.  Whether aiming to restore some semblance of social life or, more urgently, to reboot the economy, states started to relax the precautions by following the usual pattern.  Republican governors hewed to the President’s persistent reopening call while Democratic governors opted to march at their own more cautious pace.

What lies behind the two different approaches are different calculations and sentiments regarding the right balance between saving livelihoods and saving lives.  Now, after several weeks of reopening attempts, the results are streaming in and the news isn’t pretty.  States that hastened to reopen their economies are recording accelerating rates of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.  This adverse reality does not seem though to change the minds of the rushing governors and the segments of the population that stand behind them.

Sometimes the argument in favor of saving livelihoods takes on a libertarian ideological cover under which, however, there lies a more or less nonchalant stance toward human loss.  It goes like this: “We can’t shut down the economy just because some people are expected to die.  After all, people die every day for one or another reason.  The vulnerable ones can always choose to sequester themselves to avoid infection.”

I recognize the importance of saving livelihoods but we also need to appreciate the nature and scope of this calamity.  First, dying of complications from Covid-19 is not the same as dying from just any other disease.  Many have died because they caught it from the very people they had to care for.  Almost none of them would have otherwise died.  Others died because they caught it from an infectious relative, friend or co-worker who might never have suspected to be a carrier of the virus.  Absent the coronavirus, these people would still be alive.  To those who lost someone to Covid-19 it feels like a tragedy.  They have suffered a grave loss that could have been avoided.  That heart-sinking feeling of “what if” can last forever.  To the survivors of the Covid-19 victims, the conundrum of saving livelihoods versus lives has a whole different meaning; it’s very personal and devastating.

Next, let’s think of what it means for a state authority to say it’s okay to apply less caution than before.  For example, the prime minister of UK, Boris Johnson, just recently said that social distancing can be reduced to one meter (three feet) down from two meters.  What does that mean from an epidemiological standpoint?  Can an official declare by fiat we are now safer under the closer distance?  Will all of a sadden the virus obey the new guideline?  It would have been more honest if Boris Johnson had also informed his fellow citizens how the shorter distance changes the infection risk.

And what about the position that advocates to let the people decide what to do by making their own calculations of the risks they take?  This is the libertarian view that leaves things up to the individual not the state.  It appeals to those who believe that individuals acting as autonomous units eventually produce a better solution than state mandates.  It sounds liberating until you dig under the surface and discover how naively counterproductive it is.

Mandating individual behavior in relation to coping with the coronavirus is similar to regulating various activities and markets.  So let’s think along this regulation paradigm.   Why do we have regulation?  Not because we believe that individuals in general are dishonest and behave badly but because we believe, based on experience, that some individuals will behave badly.  So what?  Well, if people do not have the information or the expertise to guess who will behave honestly and who won’t, or the cost of doing the screening is prohibitively high, then a lot of individuals will shun away from an activity or market and bring their collapse.

This is exactly the situation we face with the coronavirus.  When we walk into a venue, we have no idea who carries the virus.  Since carriers can be asymptomatic, how many of us are willing to step into a situation where distinguishing between low and high-risk individuals is impossible?  Very few, unless we are recklessly indifferent to sickness and death.  We can encourage and increase participation, by mandating that certain precautions, like wearing a mask and/or keeping the required distance, are required of all, regardless of their sense as to what risk they pose to others.  This is equivalent, for example, to the rules that require all firms to disclose the same types of information when they wish to sell new shares or bonds to the public in order to protect buyers from fraud.  Therefore, a mandate to comply with certain precautions contributes to having a lot of vital activities and markets up and running instead of letting them wither or completely shut down under the failure to signal a reliable measure of protection.

But then, we hear the worn-out argument “What about my constitutional right (meaning ‘to do as I please short of committing a crime’)?  My answer is: “And what about the right (it doesn’t need to be constitutional) of a vulnerable person to shop for food or work or worship without risking his or her life?”

The truth of the matter is that by accepting mandates for certain behavior and rules we can restore a lot of social and business activities and enjoy many of the life’s pleasures.  But we have to show discipline and social responsibility.  And, also let’s stop invoking individual rights, no matter how deadly they may be, because we cling to the naïve assumption of the all-rational and responsible individual.  The states that stuck to this fantasy are now those that reap the grim reality of the virus.

In one of his speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr. said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  On June 15, 2020, this arc bent a little bit more when the Supreme Court of the United States in a 6 to 4 decision ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected LGBTQ persons from employment discrimination.

Although the individuals involved in the three cases before the Court were not employed by religious organizations, the decision was met with strong opposition and dire warnings about its consequences in various religious quarters.  The religious arguments against the decision are centered around the right of religious freedom.  Over the years, religious freedom has emerged as the major argument for the right of religious establishments (churches and affiliated organizations), individuals and non-religious entities to apply religious moral standards in various activities, including employment practices.

It must be said that the right of religious freedom is enshrined in the First Amendment, and as such it is a powerful, justifiable and legitimate right to be defended.   It is the scope of this right that is in dispute, especially when it collides with someone else’s rights.  The argument of religious freedom has been increasingly used to deny services (like decorating a wedding cake) or employment to people of a particular lifestyle, in this case, their sexual orientation or gender identity.  Given, however, the different moral values and standards held by different religions, what happens when they choose to apply them in dealing with others?  Permission to apply diverse moral beliefs on instances that affect people’s lives outside their practice of religious duties would imply that laws work differently across different legal entities within a country.

In an early case, Reynolds v. United States, 1878, the Supreme Court recognized the difficulty of placing religious belief over the Constitution and stated: “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto herself.  Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.”

What is of interest, however, outside the realm of law, is to ask: What informs the position of religious establishments and religious-minded individuals to invoke the right of religious freedom to deny a person employment or services because someone’s lifestyle is deemed to fall short of a particular moral standard?  A related question is:  Can religious beliefs be trusted to the point that it gives them the authority to define the rights of others?  As provocative this question may sound to religious people, it is a question deserving probing and answering.

If moral beliefs were immutable truths, one could say that a clear demarcation of right from wrong would exist and could possibly be the basis for discrimination in the allocation of rewards and punishments by religious authorities.  History, however, suggests that moral values and beliefs are anything but immutable.  They evolve with knowledge, social environments, political power, and natural conditions.

Although Christianity proclaimed all persons to be equal before God, it nonetheless went along with slavery in the secular world.  In the American South church people even gave godly reasons on behalf of slavery.  Likewise, women were placed behind men with respect to various rights not only in the secular but also the religious world.  The view that the earth rotates around the sun was once a belief enough to send you to the stake.  Likewise, if one held religious beliefs that ever so slightly deviated from official church dogma.  For a period, the Church thought people, especially women, were bewitched by Satan and sentenced them to death.  The theory of evolution and the cosmological evidence that our universe has existed as such for only a finite period were denounced as immoral beliefs, before they were accepted with considerable delay and consternation.   Other religions have made similar revisions of their moral beliefs.

In these and other cases, religion usually claims it is God’s word that has set on this and that side what is right and what is wrong.  Luckily, religious views about God’s will have evolved toward a more tolerant stance.  Robert Wright calls this the evolution of God in his book with the same title.  Of course, what is evolving is not God; it is our sense of what is moral and ethical that is evolving.  Even better for humanity, and despite occasional periods of stepping backwards, we seem to move to beliefs that allow more justice for ever more people.  I suppose this is behind Martin Luther King’s metaphor of the arc of moral history.

Given the history of evolution of moral standards, it seems to me the right thing religions ought to do is apply special skepticism about the absolute moral “truths” they hold lest the future bending of the arc proves these “truths” to have unjustly punished people under the standards of the day.  The Eastern Fathers of the Christian Church, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, had the wisdom to develop an apophatic conceptualization of God, by arguing that humans cannot conceive the essence of God.  If so, why would then Christians, or anyone for that matter, claim with full certainty knowledge of God’s will and word?

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch stated: “But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.”  In other words, Justice Gorsuch (a conservative person himself) recognized that in prohibiting discrimination on the base of sex, the drafters of the Civil Rights Act ought to be understood as extending this right to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

Imagine if those Christians opposing the rule of the Court were able to find the wisdom and tolerance to also understand that Christ’s grace, that same grace that was extended to the Samaritan woman and the reviled tax collector was also meant to be extended to people regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.

It is in that sense I chose the title to imply that religious freedom exercised with a magnanimous  view of the original religious message, especially when its messenger preached mercy and love, should never limit another person’s rights because of choices society no longer accepts as a moral or civil lapse.

It was Friday, April 21, 1967.  I had gotten up very early to go over the material of a difficult college exam later that day when my father came in and told me that there was a coupe d’ etat in process and a strict curfew in place.  That’s how the seven-year military dictatorship started that day in Greece.  Rolling the tanks out of the barracks and laying siege to critical government buildings in a country’s capital and other key cities was the preferred method of establishing dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s around the world.

In almost every case the assumption of extraordinary emergency powers by a strongman and the army was not in response to threats from abroad but rather from an alleged enemy from within.  The standard rationale was to establish “law and order” and protect the people from dark domestic enemies.  There was always a significant portion of the population that felt relieved and willing to substitute authoritarian rule for civil liberties and constitutional protections in the name of a vague fear of civic unrest and insecurity.  To others violent suspension of the constitutional order was their way to impose their will.

That was the technology of producing dictatorships and illiberal political orders back then.  Since then the technology has been refined.  The origination point has been moved from the army barracks to the judiciary system.  Hungary’s Orban and Poland’s Law and Justice party have been successful in appropriating their countries’ justice systems in order to intimidate and neutralize their political opponents, including the press.  Putin is doing it in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey.  These countries are nominal democracies with duly elected officials.  But they are not true democracies.  Control of the judiciary system easily translates into control of the law enforcement apparatus.  When the government arbitrarily prosecutes and compliant courts convict who needs the armed forces?

Apart from articulating wishes with an authoritarian flavor, unusual for an American president, few thought early on that the Trump presidency threatened the essence of American democracy.  Not anymore.  There is a growing concern that liberal democracy in America is at risk.  Why the recent reckoning?  Because all the major pillars of a liberal democracy have come under assault or are found wanting.  This should have both conservatives and liberals worry.

Independent administration of justice.  Citizens must feel free of coercion or intimidation from the judiciary arm of the government.  From the start of his term, President Trump made it known he wanted an Attorney General who would protect his interests.  Finally, in early 2019, he got one who comes close to fitting this job description.  Consistent with his view that the constitution gives the president nearly unchecked powers, Attorney General Barr has fostered than restrained President Trump’s predilection for absolute power.   Barr has given favorable spins of damning reports (e.g., the Mueller Report) and has launched investigations of those who have caused problems for the President.  Equally worrisome is Barr’s publicly declared disdain and demonization of secularism and his siding with religious interests in legal matters that refer to the constitutional separation of church and state.  Instead of practicing neutrality, Barr’s Justice Department is seen as aligned with the President’s political agenda.  Unsurprisingly, Barr has been accused of weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department.

An independent and intimidation-free press.  Since before the elections of 2016, Donald Trump declared news to be fake and the press an enemy of the people.   Whether this claim is believed or not by the public, it undermines the credibility of news reporting and encourages the public to seek news in unvetted and unreliable corners of the internet.  It betrays President Trump’s ulterior end to brand the press irrelevant and thus be left unchecked to shape the political reality for Americans.  In a world of “alternative facts” any government tactics and actions become legitimate.

A professional corps of public servants.  From the CIA and FBI to inspectors general and diplomats, President Trump sees nothing but a cabal that runs the state apparatus bent on destroying him and governing over Americans from the deep layers of bureaucracy.  Thus, he has fired FBI directors, inspectors general, and diplomats.  The message is clear and chilling: collaborate or you are out.

Freedom of expression and assembly.  Arguably the most important constitutional right of citizens that allows them to express their disapproval of actions or policies of the government and its subdivisions.  Thomas Jefferson held civic demonstrations and even disobedience so important as to have said: I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.  No such tolerance, let alone appreciation, fills the political philosophy of the current administration.  Calling for the intervention of the army and attacking peacefully demonstrating citizens so that the President would walk through was as disgraceful as it was antithetical to the essence of what it means to lead a democracy.  And the picture of a military chief in fatigues walking next to the President was a caricature of Latin American strongmen showcasing the support of the army.  Thankfully, reaffirming the military’s loyalty to civilian rule, former chiefs of the armed forces were quick to renounce the President’s call to turn the military against Americans.  And the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Milley finally found his voice and apologized for his infamous walk.  I hope it has not escaped the American people the fact that our laws give the right to some hotheads to burst into a State Capitol building in full semi-automatic gear while demonstrating citizens are harassed and attacked!

Free and fair elections.  The impartiality and reliability of American elections are undermined by a patchwork of state rules, practices and mechanics.  From partisan gerrymandering to vote suppression and faulty voting mecanics, the American election system is unbecoming of a country that calls itself the greatest democracy on earth.  One can see why a system like this is vulnerable to abuse and discrediting and how it can be manipulated by an unscrupulous leader to deny the people the government of their choice.

I am afraid that in good faith many Americans believe what is happening is the unfolding of a ripple in the trajectory of American history that eventually always steers itself back to the course of liberal democracy.  But history need not repeat itself and its trajectory may not return toward the desired direction.  Just imagine what this president could do if his Secretary of Defense, his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former military leaders had come out in support of his call for military intervention to “dominate our cities.”

After almost three months of social lockdown, we thought we would soon be free to breathe again.  And then a white knee pressed hard on a black neck and when the black chest could no longer breathe, Americans, black and white, realized they could not breathe either.  That’s how it was that American society came one more time face to face with its ugly legacy of racism and all other forms of social divisions between Us and Them.

I have just finished reading Robert Sapolsky’s authoritative volume Behave with a whole chapter dedicated to how humans navigate their intuitive tendency to see the world through an Us versus Them perspective.  I knew then I would have to write a post about this topic.  Little I knew that I would have to do this under such gut-wrenching and tumultuous circumstances.

Nature seeds our brains with instincts and biases that steer us toward kinship, altruism, cooperativeness and fairness.  Alas, though, the same nature, aided by cultural inculcation, also renders us more willing to exercise these virtuous behaviors toward in-group than out-group fellow humans.  Be exposed to something positive about a member of what is Them to us and our brain, as if in shock, pauses to process this association, as if it is an anomaly.  This happens because we have come to associate positive attributes, like generosity, trustworthiness and cooperativeness with our Us members.  We recognize more merit and greater morality in Us than in Them.  And we are more empathetic for our Us members than Them.

In contrast to the warm feelings we reserve for Us, we see those in Them as threatening, angry and untrustworthy.  We perceive them as menacing and disgusting.  We look at those we perceive as Them not as distinct individuals but as a monolithic mass fully vested with undifferentiated stereotypical attributes.  Arbitrary differences between Us and Them are registered as essential differences in values and beliefs.  Thus, a person who fancies hoodies becomes a potential threat if encountered by a white person in the dark of the night.

Feeling superior in human attributes versus Them-s is part of the problem.  It gets a lot uglier when we in Us choose to put a greater distance from Them-s not by improving ourselves but rather by putting down and hurting those in Them.  In that pursuit, building greater solidarity within the Us group is not done for self-improvement but in order to better fight the Them group.

This is the grim reality of the Us versus Them conflict that Sapolsky draws from numerous psychological, neurological and neuroimaging studies.   But we are not necessarily doomed to live in perpetual friction.  There are manageable ways to bridge the gap and bring Us and Them together.  It turns out that no one belongs to one Us or Them only.  We actually belong to multiple Us and Them.  We have shared commonalities.  When they find one such commonality, Us and Them come together, even if fleetingly.  A famous case is the Christmas Truce between British and German soldiers during the First World War.  They realized they were all from Christian nations accustomed to celebrating the same holiday.  That overrode their being parts of different enemy camps.

Other ways to ameliorate the chasm between Us and Them is to strive to look at the world from the other side’s perspective, to gain a better understanding of one another, and to judge people as individuals and not as members of a stereotyped body of people.  It also helps if we tamp down the sense of superiority and our craving for hierarchical dominance over the other group.  Bringing Us and Them together has a better chance of success if done in equal terms and under shared goals.  All these hopeful possibilities can be accomplished with closer contact and acquaintance with the other side.

So, how well is America doing in practicing individual and societal rehabilitation in order to erase the lines of division.  Lines whose number appears to have grown.  We are told that intellectual elites are out of step with the average person; urban Americans are culturally distant from rural Americans; and Democrats and Republicans are far apart on small and large issues.  Even wearing a mask has become a political statement.  But nowhere else America is more divided than when it comes to race and poor versus rich.  In many cases, race and poverty intersect and interact to produce common inequitable outcomes in educational attainment, social mobility, health soundness, level of wealth, and environmentally clean habitats.

The usual approach to reducing these inequities is to appeal for remedial policies.  But, as we see, progress is slow.  There is a reason why this is so.  The leading forces that could champion such policies are not experiencing the every-day problems of the underprivileged Americans.  The reason for this is that America lives in a sort of social segregation and distancing that makes difficult for the Us-es to understand the Them-s.  In other words, we are not giving ourselves the chances to successfully practice what Robert Sapolsky recommends if we have a chance to bring Us-es and Them-s closer together.

The Us-es of privileged America retreat in high-cost suburbs or behind gated communities.  They send their children to expensive private schools or public schools full of the children of Us-es.  And then they use various means to secure admission to top colleges.  Less affluent Americans separate their children from public schools by sending them to charter or parochial schools.  There are rich school districts and poor school districts with unequal educational resources and outcomes.  In their formative years, America’s schoolchildren learn that they live in split worlds.  Even worse, there are willing public officials and professionals that contribute to our segregation.  Politicians legislate strict zoning laws to keep lower income Americans out of precious suburbs or exclusive urban neighborhoods.  Realty firms use dirty tricks to keep minorities out of residential areas inhabited by white and rich people.

The Us-es and Them-s may work in the same places, may cheer the same teams in stadiums, and sometimes may pray in the same places of worship.  But we still are like ships passing by in the darkness of the night knowing and feeling so little about each other.  When we live separate lives with little personal interaction let’s not be surprised that prejudices grow and stereotypes make us blind to individual attributes and worthiness.

If America has a hope to become a less divided and more cohesive society, we must create the political and social institutions to bring the Us-es and Them-s together.  And each one of us has to build bridges that will take us to the other side.  The black stand-up comedian Wanda Sykes put it succinctly when in one of her shows she asked her white audience: “In this twenty-first century, tell me whether you have a black friend?  Yup.  That’s the reality test.  If we replace black by any other Them category, have we tried to get close to any one of Them?

* Behave: The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky (professor of biology and neurology, Stanford University, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant).

** Should we capitalize the initial letter of the words black and white when referring to people?  I referred to the Columbia Journalism Review, according to which both upper- and lower-case initial letters are used by different users.  I went for the lower case.

For about seventy years after World War II, America promoted and pursued a global order that was based on political liberalism and free trade.  Despite its flaws, costly military interventions and the support of illiberal regimes, this policy succeeded in establishing a globalized economy that gained even greater momentum after the entrance of the countries of the former Soviet Block and especially China into the world of capitalism.

The US commitment to internationalization was made at a time America was effectively an unchallenged economic and military power.  It was also fueled by a supreme confidence in the capacity of America to maintain its competitive advantages as a capitalist country.  Furthermore, there was a consensus across the political spectrum that America was willing to absorb economic costs in order to pursue global strategies that were deemed to be in the national interest.  Such costs were those related to securing the defense of Europe and Japan while these countries grew their economies and became serious competitors of America.  One could say, therefore, this strategy was a win-win proposition.

The same strategic thinking was behind America’s decision to accept China as an economic partner and give her a seat at the World Trade Organization.  The hope was that as China opened up its markets and economy and integrated itself into the global market system political liberalization would follow.

Now, we are discovering that while the strategy seemed to be sound, at least from an American standpoint, it was poorly executed and assumed too much.  The catalysts that helped America come to this realization have been two cataclysmic events: the Great Recession of 2008 and the Pandemic of 2020.

The 2008 crisis focused the minds of middle- and lower-income Americans on the fragility of their finances, the insecurity of their jobs, and how much was lost to foreign competition and offshoring.  It had a lot to do with the growth of the populist fervor that eventually brought Donald Trump to the White House.  For its part, the Pandemic showed that at a time of a severe health crisis, America’s procurement of critical medicines and health equipment depended on supply chains it no longer controlled.

So, what went wrong with the international economic order America had pursued until recently?  I believe the single most critical mistake was to ignore the inevitable loss and denigration of domestic jobs and the need to adopt policies to soften the blow.  Just as in the American domestic market the pursuit of unfettered capitalism ignored the costs of creative destruction (i.e., creating new jobs that destroy old jobs), the same way American global capitalism ignored the destruction of American jobs through offshoring and foreign competition.  Similar complaints have funneled public unrest in other Western countries.

The cost of globalization to America could have been less under any of the following conditions.  One would have been the presence of a robust labor union system that could have put checks on economic policies that threatened the livelihoods of working-class Americans.  The second condition would have been an enlightened corporate policy that would practice a more equitable sharing of the economic gains of globalization.  And the third condition would have been a public policy that would have aimed at the reengineering of the skill sets and education of the labor force to fortify it against the inevitable dislocations caused by globalization.

If none of these conditions came to pass it is, I believe, because of corporate interests and money and their political allies.  Growing aggregate wealth, the bulk of which went to a tiny fraction of Americans, became a more acceptable criterion of economic growth than its fair distribution.  All the while, raising taxes to fund public policies to mitigate the costs of job losses became an anathema.  In sum, the execution of the American global order eventually morphed from a win-win proposition to a win (for the few) – lose (for the many) reality.

The second flaw in the execution of the American global order, especially after the ascendancy of China, was the assumption that international economic partners can be trusted.  Trust is of essence in any trade arrangement.  I specialize in the production of good A and you in the production of good B.  Whenever, I need good B, I know I can procure it from you and vice-versa.  The Pandemic of 2020 exposed the risks of the trust assumption.  Western nations, including the US, felt vulnerable as they came to rely on foreign, mostly Chinese, firms to secure what they needed to fight the pandemic.  Trust had already become an issue, as for example, in the case of 5G technology and its applications to sensitive telecommunication systems.  The central question is whether nations can trust the international division of production if they are concerned that some countries may act nationalistically to maximize their leverage.

Against these negative realities, the current American approach is exemplified in President Trump’s rhetoric for an “America First” and the lack of willingness to seriously engage in multilateral talks in order to right the course of the economic global order.

But because America is willing to live with less internationalization, it doesn’t mean the rest of the world will follow us.  China, in particular, is pursuing a methodical multiprong strategy to secure a leading role in the global economic ecosystem.  The “Made in China 2025” aims at placing China at the top of technology and research by 2025.  The “Belt and Road Initiative” is establishing a nexus of countries across the globe where China has an economic presence and which can be used to secure supply lines for the growing Chinese economy.  It is doubtful that the leading economies in Europe, Russia, India and Brazil will resist the temptation of doing business within this new emerging model.

Therefore, after seventy years of a global order led by America, we are now at a point this order is withering as America turns inward and has to compete with a new order modeled by China.  American indifference to constructive global engagement has the risk of ending up with a new global order to which America will feel like an outsider.

The title is more intriguing than it is informative.  So let me explain.  I don’t mean we can be immune to death.  What I mean is we have the capacity to become immune to the idea of death, and by that I don’t mean the idea that we all eventually die.  I rather mean that we learn to live with the idea that something will kill us.  Therefore, at some point and until we discover a vaccine or treatment, we will find it acceptable to live with deaths from coronavirus.  Some of the reasons for that eventual acceptance are grounded in historical experience, others in cynicism, and others in cold calculations.  And the most powerful reason yet is our own nature.

In my last post, I dealt with moral judgment when a decision must be made between means and ends when human lives are involved.  In this pandemic, the decision to lift restrictions is primarily in the hands of public officials.  Nevertheless, the ultimate resolution of this matter will be determined by individual choices.  Although currently people are still mostly hesitant to break out of the restrictions, we should not be surprised to see that as the spreading subsides and the economic and social consequences become more painful to bear more people will opt to take risks in order to restore their livelihoods and social lives.  And we have the record to show that for better or worse we have accepted to live dangerously and to accept deadly conditions.

Over the last two hundred years we have developed technologies that introduced new risks of death.  Electricity, industrial machinery, chemicals, fossil fuels, cars, airplanes, and the ultimate risk, nuclear plant accidents and nuclear weapons.  We have lost many lives to these discoveries; but we have also gained solutions to diseases, starvation, and other maladies.  I suppose we have found the cost-benefit trade-off to be to our advantage.  And what about the multitudes of people who insist to live in tornado alleys, hurricane-stricken areas, and lands exposed to annual monsoons, cyclones, tsunamis, and earthquakes.  The deaths come predictably every year and yet people stay put.  It’s difficult to understand the reasons.  It may be loyalty to one’s homeland or lack of means to change habitat or just dogged defiance.

Then there are deaths we have accepted because of a cynical indifference to those paying the price.  In the early years, we remained idle as gay, and not only, people died of AIDS.  Today, we do nothing or much less than it is warranted to eliminate the scourge of opioids, gun-caused suicides and the mass murders of schoolchildren, churchgoers and even concert attendants.  Governments also refuse to impose or they ease regulations concerning water and air quality or work safety rules although these actions have predictable risks for diseases and fatalities.

And then we have cold calculations that pit self-interest against public safety.  President Trump was unwilling to acknowledge the potential severity of the coronavirus threat for fear that it would spook the stock market.  President Bolsonaro of Brazil was similarly dismissive of the pandemic until it was too late.  Now both men are blamed for infections and deaths that could have been avoided.  Cold calculations can also be attributed to businesses that are eager to reopen without adequate protective and safety practices in place.  They may perceive infections and deaths to be part of the cost of doing business.  Others, politicians included, point out in a very matter-of-fact manner how, after all, the pandemic is primarily dangerous to older people and, hence, that should not stop us from opening up for everybody else.

(A special case, I believe, is the display of a mix of moral dissonance and hypocrisy found in the eagerness of mostly conservative states to relax restrictions despite warnings of a flare up of infections and additional deaths.  Aren’t these the states that have strict anti-abortions views and rules for the purpose of protecting unborn children?  What about protecting the lives of real, already born, people?)

For one or another reason, therefore, we have learned to live with technologies, natural phenomena, policies, and ways of doing business that have the capacity to kill us.  In spite of all the existential anxiety we feel for our ultimate end we do not seem to shrink from putting our lives at risk.   And then there is one risk we cannot resist to take because it comes straight out of our nature as social animals.  Our social ecosystem cannot survive if we stay in isolation from one another.  This is the most important natural environment to humans.  And it has the irresistible power of pulling us into its orbit.  Living in isolation with loved ones, or even with very close friends, it’s not enough.  We like to work with others, have fun with others, celebrate with others, grieve with others.  And to afford these social interactions we are willing to risk our welbeing.

So this is the human record and background within which the current debates as to how fast and how far we should remove the lockdown restrictions are taking place.  A cool mind and passionate heart would like to slow things down but, I am afraid, their power of suasion would wane over time.  What I fear, however, even more is the opportunistic voices which, taking advantage of our record of risk taking and acceptance of death as well as our prosocial instincts, will become the sirens to coax and lure people back to “normal” life, thus, legitimizing Covid-19 deaths as one more of those cases we have come to take for granted.

And there are political implications in this tug of war.  Conservative commentators and, of course, our equivocating President already clamor for relaxing the lockdown rules.  Interesting, how all of sudden, their “bleeding hearts” lament the plight of the working-class people who can neither work from home nor can they rely on savings to stay home.  But the political position of liberals is equally fraught with conveying the wrong message, that is, a message of over-caution and timidity.  Humans are accustomed to taking control of their lives and their environment.  To that end, they are willing to take risks and pay the ultimate price.

It will take a lot of collective wisdom to find the right and humane balance between courage and rashness and between compassion and selfishness as we try to restore our lives.