Author: George Papaioannou

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.

With the new cases of corona virus declining in many countries, authorities are grappling with the question of how far they should go in relaxing their lockdown requirements.  In answering this question, the unpleasant quandary is this: “Do we relax the restrictions and face deaths that could be otherwise avoided or do we keep the restrictions and suffer additional economic damage?”  Actually, the quandary can be refined to this question: “What amount of economic loss can a society accept in order to save an X number of human lives?”

There are at least two writings on this topic that I am aware of.  One was an article in the New York Times of May 12.  The other appeared a day earlier on the online news outlet Wired. *  In the Wired essay we learn that the research to put a value on human life started in the consulting firm RAND in the early 1950s and then it became a topic of academic research all the way to our days.  Initially, the US Defense Department had an interest to find how much it should spend on airplane equipment that could save pilot lives but would potentially doom the airplane.  Later President Carter, and in short order Congress, mandated that new regulations should estimate the cost of saving lives.

Thomas Schelling (a 2005 Nobel Prize winner in economics) introduced the metric of Value of Statistical Life (VSL) by asking “How much money people are willing to accept to risk their own life.”  A working estimate of VSL stands at between $9m and $11m in today’s dollars.  Armed with this estimate, a president, prime minister or state governor can multiply the additional number of deaths expected from some opening up program by the VSL and compare the product to the expected incremental gain in GDP.  If the economic gain doesn’t match the value of lost lives then you recalculate.  All this sounds cynical and even inhumane, but it reflects the calculus behind public pronouncements of the kind “The people cannot keep seeing their livelihoods disappear.”

In the NYT article, we read that estimates of VSL differ across countries and even within countries, as for example in the US.  Republican administrations apply lower VSL estimates whereas Democratic administrations apply higher estimates.  This way, Republicans can limit the scope and severity of new regulations while Democrats aim for the opposite.   The World Health Organization also has its way of deciding how much to spend on new health projects. The WHO estimates its VSL as GDP per capita multiplied by 3.  If this product exceeds the cost of a health initiative that adds one year of quality life, the health project is approved.

Of course, this economic approach has its critics.  A monetary estimate of VSL ignores the cost of enduring disruptions in everyday living and the cost of grieving.  Uncertainty in mortality rates also makes the total cost of human lives unreliable.

OK.  So much about the economic methods and the tendency economists have to use their “dismal science” to solve all kinds of problems. What do we know about human behavior in similar situations?

Kin selection from the theory of evolution explains that a mother would sacrifice her life to save her child and thus give her genes a chance to survive in future generations.  So, let’s conduct a crude thought experiment.  Let’s assume that relaxing lockdown restrictions would potentially kill only old people who are passed the procreation age.  Would we accept opening up the economy to avoid an economic meltdown?  We see that it’s not only economics that can pose cruel dilemmas.  Actually, human behavior can lead to different decisions, depending whether your moral focus is on the means or the ends.

We have insights on this conundrum from the famous trolley experiments of Joshua Green of Harvard and his colleagues.  A trolley has lost its breaks and will kill five people if it keeps moving on its tracks.  You can pull a lever to send the trolley down different tracks but this will kill one person who is crossing those tracks.  Will you pull the lever?  In repeated experiments 60 to 70% of people said “Yes”, they would pull the lever.  Then, they were asked whether they would push a person onto the tracks to halt the trolley and save five people.  Now, only 30% said “Yes”.  Green concluded that when you divert the trolley you have no intention to kill the passer-by.  The passer-by just happens to be there; death is a side effect of the attempt to save five others.  But pushing someone to his death is an act of intention.  Therefore, intentionality makes the difference.

Furthermore, these experiments found that 30% of the respondents always acted as deontologists, consistently refusing to pull the lever or push the person while 30% acted as utilitarians, consistently willing to pull the lever or push the person.  The deontologists found the means (killing one to save five) morally abhorrent; whereas the utilitarians found the end (saving five at the expense of one) morally acceptable.  Such patterns of human behavior help us understand the present split between those eager to relax the restrictions in order to boost the economy and those unwilling to sacrifice more lives to that end.

But there are complications.  Green argues that looking at the immediate ends (or consequences) to justify the means may fail us if we ignore the long-term consequences.  In the case of the pandemic, for example, upon further reasoning, we may come to the conclusion that the means (relaxing restrictions) may not work to produce the desirable ends (economic gains).  In this case, we risk sacrificing our moral principles for much less moral vindication than what we expect to find in the sought-after ends.

The other more insidious complication is the usual infringement of Us versus Them into our moral judgments.  What if those who will be most exposed to potential infection are members of Them (for example, poor, immigrants and minority workers or residents of the Them states)?  Or the vulnerable people may be those in distant locations toward whom we feel less kinship.  Based on what we know about human behavior, we may be more inclined to pull the lever or push the person in those instances.

This is, I believe, our present predicament.  Do we sacrifice additional human lives to avoid further devastation of livelihoods and the economy or do we look more carefully at the longer-run consequences lest we discover material and moral consequences that do not justify the immediate ends?  How we proceed will depend on whether the deontologists or the utilitarians gain the upper hand.

* I want to thank a friend who brought the Wired essay to my attention.

It is too bad that we often find about the exploits and contributions of fellow men and women after their death.  And we usually do this when we read their obituaries.  But many go unread, unless they refer to a celebrity or otherwise famous person.  Mel Baggs’s obituary in the New York Times last week could very well have been one of these unread obituaries.  Her name rang no bells for me.  But, as I fleetingly scanned the title, I caught the last five words: “. . . the Essence of Being Human.”  So, I read the full title: “Mel Baggs, 39; Explored Autism and the Essence of Being Human.”  Now I had to read the whole story.

Mel Baggs was a non-verbal autistic person who expressed herself by blogging and in videos.  Her message was that “people who think and communicate in nontraditional ways are fully human, and that humanness is a spectrum, not something that can be reduced to a normal/abnormal dichotomy.”  Reading those words “humanness is a spectrum” set a whole range of thought processes in my head.

We are used to employing the term spectrum to refer to the range of symptoms identified with a syndrome or disability; hence, the autism spectrum.  Mell Baggs, though, used the word to capture the whole range of conditions, normal-abnormal, typical-atypical, rare-frequent, that we observe in human beings.  Mel Baggs wanted to remind us that all kinds of conditions that are found in humans are legitimate constituents of the human spectrum.  Her purpose was to help us understand the breadth of our humanness.  She wanted to bring more people from the forgotten or misunderstood fringes of our species into the visible part of the human spectrum, the part inhabited by the so-called “normal” people.

The idea that we are all on the human spectrum and thus deserve respect and compassion is unfortunately an idea that has been challenged, even discarded, through out human history with devastating and barbaric consequences.  We have used religion, race, gender and ethnicity to push people to the outer bounds of the human spectrum, even to throw them overboard altogether.

Take the case of slavery.  It has been justified in the past on the invidious ground that enslaved people deserved this fate because they are less human or not even human at all.  “An inferior man … and no fanaticism can raise him to the level of the Caucasian race.” That’s how a Southern senator opined about black Americans in the years after the Civil War.  And “inferior man” in this case meant inferior human.  And Caucasian race was, for all purposes, the whole human spectrum as far as that Senator was concerned.

Women too would not occupy any significant position on the human spectrum for thousands of years.  “A husband has a right of property in the service of his wife, … and the “right of a husband to his wife” and of “a father to his child” comprise the “three great fundamental natural rights of human society.”  That’s how a member of Congress saw women on the human spectrum.  We still have societies and states that view women no differently than that late nineteenth century Congressman.

Next, take the case of the Nazi final solution project against Jews, Roma, Slavs and people with disabilities.  To justify the barbarity of those holocausts the Nazi public propaganda machine would cast doubt on the full humanness of its victims.  Underman, sub-man, subhuman were the terms the Nazis used to describe the above people as well communists and anyone else Nazi paranoia deemed unworthy to meet its narrow band of the human spectrum.

In the early twentieth century, a mix of overzealous science and racist bias combined to justify the practice of Eugenics.  The goal was to weed out the “unfit” and populate the human spectrum with those endowed with desired traits.  Again, a case of purification and cleansing of the human spectrum that could be effected through selective breeding.  Related to eugenics is the modern-day push to use medicine and genetics to sculpt babies into the kind of humans favored by their parents.  Obviously, such parents believe that certain places on the human spectrum are up for sale.

And finally, the soft, but most present and pervasive, cases of redefining and downsizing the human spectrum are those that put a distance between those with mental, emotional and physical disabilities and the rest.  A distance that can be manifested in limited socialization, gratuitous ignorance about their existence, lesser human rights and care.  They perceive the world differently, they express themselves differently, they feel about things differently, they move their bodies differently, that’s how these people are different from the rest.  These conditions keep them from fully partaking in the world of those in the “normal” range of the human spectrum.  But more devastating to these individuals is to feel unwelcome and to sense the distance others keep from them.

The biggest irony in any of these selective redefinitions of the human spectrum is that they are the product of a diminished sense of the other’s predicament, or sense of empathy, or sense for sociality, which are the building blocks for becoming human in the first place.  In his acclaimed book “Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny,” Michael Tomasello shows how humans build on biologically endowed capacities to develop bonding, first with their parents and later with others, by understanding the other person’s feelings and intentions.  And how this initially limited bonding gradually grows to more extensive and sophisticated relationships based on joint commitments, empathy, fairness, cooperation and regard for social norms.  The culmination of this process is the attainment of a uniquely human sense, the sense of “We.”

Mell Baggs dedicated her life to convince us to extend our sense of “We” to all born human irrespective of one’s particular condition.