Author: George Papaioannou

They say a crisis is too good a thing to waste.  Crises create opportunities to learn.  Crises are like natural experiments, that is, real-life situations we cannot replicate for the sake of research because of the high cost or because we cannot design with high degree of authenticity.  The coronavirus pandemic is a devastating calamity but one that also comes with some valuable teaching moments.

Government matters.  Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher became the heroes of conservative politics and thought by declaring that “government is the problem not the solution.”  The experience of the last forty years teaches us the opposite.  When governments retreat infrastructure decays, social problems flare up and crises take a heavier toll, human and economic.  Government has not been invented by people as a parasite of the private sector.  It exists because it has a crucial and unique role to play.  Adam Smith’s profit motive can take us so far in meeting our needs.  At the end of that road it is only the government that can pick up the task of providing for the rest of our needs.

Take the case of hospital beds in the US.  We currently have 2.8 beds per 1,000 persons, much below what is available in other advanced countries.  This may make sense as a cost containment solution at the level of each hospital system.  But it doesn’t from a public policy standpoint in cases of health emergencies.  Think of this.  The US has more beds for its inmate population (about 2.3 million) than it has to take care of its sick people in a case of a pandemic like this one.  Not to mention, of course, the deficit in other medical equipment.

We need to understand that the government and public sectors have distinct priorities and missions.  The bias in favor of private sector solutions and less government has brought us to where we are now and will continue to be the root cause of future failures.

Preparedness matters.  The lack of preparedness and quick response to the coronavirus pandemic in the US is a direct consequence of the mantra “a smaller government is a better government.”  We now find the hard way that fighting a tiny virus requires a really big government.  Assigning a secondary role to government to address local and national problems translates into less monetary, administrative and professional resources and, hence, delayed and inadequate responses.  There is no way we can sugarcoat the current inadequacy of tactical and strategic planning on part of the federal government to face this crisis.  A country that is obsessed with all kinds of statistics and data cannot gain a reliable knowledge of the extent of the pandemic because of our failure to test in big numbers. *  We have failed to measure and count the one thing that right now matters the most for how we plan our economic and medical response to the crisis.

Fiscal responsibility matters.  When the government passed the $1.5 trillion tax law in 2017 amidst a period of economic growth and falling unemployment, wiser voices warned that we were over-straining the debt capacity of the country and leaving very little room to fight the next economic crisis.  As predicted by experts outside the Administration, the last three years annual fiscal deficits have ballooned to $1 trillion and the national debt has climbed by a similar magnitude.  And now the chicken has come home to roost.  The additional $2 trillion (and most likely much more) of debt we have to assume finds our national finances without any slack for more debt.  The money that is truly needed now will bring the indebtedness of the federal government to unprecedented heights for a peace time economy.  Who will pay? (See below.)

Economic inequality matters.  Prior to the coronavirus crisis we were told that we have a thriving economy.  But for whom?  First, let’s state the fact that average GDP growth has not exceeded in any significant order that of the pre-2017 years, let alone the President’s uninformed assurances for growth much higher than 3%.  Instead the tax cuts created additional deficits and debt with the vast bulk of the benefits in after-tax income and stock market gains going to the top 1 to 10%.  Despite a very low unemployment, significant segments of American families are exposed to financial fragility.  Forty percent of Americans do not have more than $400 to spare in an emergency and credit card delinquencies among young Americans are rising.  Average savings in 401K plans are also woefully low for the size and growth record of the American economy. **  What does this terribly skewed distribution of incomes and wealth mean?  It means that this supposedly thriving economy does not have the capacity at the household level to endure a dislocation of jobs and money in times of crises.  As a result, we need much larger stop gap rescue measures, as now, to avert the economic collapse of households.  So here is the shortsightedness of the trickle-down theory.  It prefers to create immense wealth for the few instead of economically empowering all citizens so they can become better masters of their economic fate.  Ironically, the conservatives’ trickle-down theory betrays the spirit of individual independence they espouse by creating what amounts to a modern-day type of economic serfdom by keeping large numbers of Americans in a perpetual state of financial fragility. ***

Who pays matters.  Who do we think will pay for the exploding fiscal deficits and debt?  Our children and their children and grandchildren, of course.  And we know why.  Because over thirty years the effective tax rates on high and very high incomes has declined without producing enough economic growth to sustain or boost tax revenues.  This has left the federal and state governments with fewer fiscal resources to prepare us for emergencies and minimal capacity to absorb economic shocks without resorting to extreme fiscal measures.  If we have any sense of fairness and social solidarity, Congress should soon adopt legislation to impose a tax surcharge on high incomes and later undertake a radical restructuring of the tax code to restore robust funding of the government so it can do its own job, the job the private sector is not designed to deliver.

The ultimate lesson in a crisis is that’s when a nation needs a leader.  A leader who accepts responsibility, displays humility before the enormity of the challenge, shows compassion, knows how to inspire the people, and gives hope based on facts, reason, and the resoluteness of the human spirit.  I wish I had that leader.

* As of March 25, the number of tests in the US stood at 418,810 whereas it stood at 357,896 in South Korea.  South Korea has a population of 51 million people compared to 330 million in the US.  Therefore, on a per person basis, the US is behind by an order of 6.  And, of course, it took longer for us to ramp up testing than it took for So. Korea.  Without extensive testing, we cannot plan our way out.

** The financial fragility or state of American households has been tracked by the Federal Reserve since 2013.

*** If the word “serfdom” bothers anyone, I suggest reading the main editorial of today’s (March 27, 2020) NYT that describes how several European countries are handling the crisis-induced unemployment.  Instead of boosting unemployment benefits, these countries committed to compensate firms for keeping their employees on the rolls.  It is much more dignified, and eventually productive, to keep people employed than laying them off.

This week I was supposed to be in a warm and sunny place visiting and having good time with friends.  But the plans were cancelled and now here I am feeling duty-bound to write one more blog post.  I could take the week off as originally planned but I don’t want to surrender too much to this bug.  It can control my movements but not my pen, oops sorry, my keyboard.

Fighting a virus is so frustrating.  It is not big enough to slap it or whack it.  You can’t hose it down or blow it away.  Invisible and tiny infiltrates everything.  We close the door behind us as we come home and we may carry it inside with us.  We look out the window wondering when it will invade our privacy but we can’t see anything.  We wash our hands but it could be on our clothes and shoes.  How do you escape such an intruder and stalker?

I could go on like that listing all the frustrating thoughts that come to mind, but I prefer to write down some loftier (oh, just poetic license) thoughts I made as this virus is taking more and more of a foothold in our daily lives.

We are first and foremost biological creatures.  This is a virus attacking a species.  It affects us, sickens us and kills us biologically.  Time for us to think of ourselves as a species not as individuals or groups, or nations.  It is in such moments we realize we are one and the same species and we need to defend us together, grieve together, recover together.   We humans have done a horrible job exterminating countless species.  This is the moment to reflect what that means when we ourselves feel that existential threat.

We are also social creatures.  To endure and overcome the challenges and risks of our biological journey on earth, we created art, and literature, and culture and religion to find beauty and meaning as an antidote to our fears and the anxiety of our eventual end that we, better than any other species, are able to contemplate.  But none of these we do alone.  We share and enjoy them together.  It is in sociality our species has found an instinct that increases our chances to survive.  But now this social life we value is under attack.  Our natural inclination to socialize puts us at risk and could kill us.  Imagine if the biological balance between us and other forms of life were such that we had to give up our sociability.  We would no longer be able to learn from each other or develop empathy for strangers.  And we would not be capable to trust others to care for our offsprings, to feed us or defend us.  We would not be the same species.

Trust matters.  Nothing is more important in our social life than trust.  It keeps us together, establishing expectations of reciprocity, fairness and solidarity.  Those who betray our trust we consider unworthy of interacting with us.  In serious matters, societies often ostracize those who violate the unwritten rules of trustworthiness.  In cases, like the one we face now, when we have to engage in collective behavior as pluribus not unum, we need to trust those who have the responsibility to lead the common effort and fight.  We expect of them reliable information, transparency and unvarnished truth.  As harmful as this virus is, it gives us the opportunity to judge the trustworthiness of our leaders and inform ourselves in future political decisions.

Science matters.  Thanks to our developed brains, we humans can learn about the laws of nature and develop technologies and responses to natural forces.  That helps us gain some – not total – control over our fate.  We don’t have to wait and see what the course of the virus will be for our survival.  We can counterattack it biologically as well.  Funny, though, that our reliance in science increases when we face a clear and present danger that threatens us now not down the road.  We are wired to have this strong response to present dangers.  It would be even better if we could overcome our relative indifference to future risks, like those lurking due to climate change, and let science guide us.  Being selective in our acceptance of scientific knowledge is not wise.

Character matters.  The virus has the potential to kill us one at a time.  But it will kill less of us if we show solidarity.  A person’s character is tested in crises.  We have to do the right thing not only for us but also for our fellow humans.  We have to sanitize, stay home and keep our distance from others.  We are not used to living like that.  Our contemporary life is full of recreation and entertainment opportunities that take us away from home and mix us with many people, often strangers to us, in all sorts of interactions.  How can we suspend this life style without feeling being out of our skin?  But we need the temperance and perseverance to do it.

We have become a complex species.  Not just a host to billions of biological cells, but also social players as well as cultural and spiritual beings wielding technology and interacting politically to organize the path of our finite lives.  As such we can suffer or perish in many different ways because of our multifaceted nature.  Biologically, socially, technologically, culturally, spiritually.

Or we can marshal all these constituents of our species and survive one more time and try again to become a better species for ourselves and the rest of the natural world.

Every time I hit the “I Agree” tag on a commercial, government or health care web site I have mixed feelings.  One is positive because agreement will give me passage to a flow of information between me and the site owner.  The other is trepidation because I am uncertain how my personal information will be used.  These hits occur by the millions every hour.  With every hit, the volume of data under the control of the various data aggregators mushrooms.

Never before, humanity as a whole has given away a valuable good (in this case private personal information) at such a huge scale in return of benefits we can hardly grasp and without any competitive mechanism that would give us some bargaining power.  Once our data are collected, they are compiled, spliced, diced and analyzed to yield as much information about our identity, habits and relationships.  Then the scary part comes: the manipulation of our emotions and the programming of our next moves.  From my reading on the subject, I have come down to understanding this business as a three-stage process: data collection; information processing; manipulation and programming of human action.

The private data industry is nothing resembling the perfect competition of Economics 101 textbooks.  It is highly oligopolistic and anti-competitive.  It is part of what Shoshana Zuboff (NYT Jan. 26, 2020) calls Surveillance Capitalism.  It is concentrated in the hands of few players, the most formidable being the Big Four: Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.  The private data industry works like a natural monopoly.  That is, the firm that first achieves a critical volume in its business is the one that keeps expanding thwarting competition from others.  As someone put it, “it doesn’t make sense for you and your friend to be on different Facebook-like platforms if the two of you cannot communicate.”  But these giants don’t leave things to chance.  Once a potent start-up rival appears on the horizon, they buy it out.  They devour their competitors as if they are playing Pac Man.

According to Zuboff, the concentration of private data leads to epistemic inequality, that is, an uneven distribution of knowledge.  A few large players know a lot more about everyone and everything than the rest of us.  And because private information about us can be gleaned from the release of data by our relations, we have no idea what the data aggregators know about us.

I have limited footprint in social media but from my occasional online buying I know that each time we buy an item, we are prompted to consider other items that presumably appeal to our taste or that of cohort groups.  By analyzing our information, data aggregators can infer our preferences and influence our choices.  Now, if such firms are really able to coral large numbers of consumers to buy their suggested goods and services, you can plan the production and sales of manufacturers and vendors.  The until a few years ago unpredictable consumption patterns of millions of people now become a little more predictable.  Project this line of data-information processing-manipulation longer and longer and you arrive close to a centrally planned economy.  With hindsight, we can say Lenin misspoke when he said “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”  Instead, he should have said “The capitalists will sell us the data to plan them.”  Had the Soviet Union survived thirty more years, this could have possibly happened.

Corporations are, after all, mini planned economies.  One of the first things I learned as an MBA student was the value of planning.  To plan what millions of consumers will purchase is a very inexact science.  But if you have access to information and behavioral buying patterns provided by big data aggregators you can reduce the uncertainty to manageable levels.  This means corporations have a big interest in manipulated and programmed activities which makes them natural allies of the data aggregators.  This means there is a strong lobby willing to resist serious government oversight.  The US Congress, for one, has been quite inactive in relation to this matter.  Data collection and oligopoly on information and knowledge are, however, too important to ignore for the health of an open economic and democratic society.

These thoughts are echoed in the article “Can technology plan economies and destroy democracy?” by Benedetto Cristofani in the Christmas 2019 edition of The Economist.  This article as well as Zuboff’s piece in the NYT and another related article by Yuval Harari (author of Sapiens) in the October 2019 issue of The Atlantic make the same points.  Namely, exploitation of private personal data diminishes individual autonomy.  Individual autonomy is based on diffuse and decentralized information.  When information is concentrated in the hands of a few players, individuals can be herded toward behavior that is not necessarily optimal to them.

Ironically, surveillance capitalism is the perverse result of a democratic system averse to regulation of large business as it slowly slides toward economic and political oligarchy.  As such, surveillance capitalism is the exact opposite outcome of what libertarians, the defenders of individualism, would advocate for but are unwilling to block.  In this new world, the arguments of unfettered market evangelists, like the Austrian Economist Friedrich Hayek and the American economist Milton Friedman, that free markets and democracies are superior to command economies and centralized political systems thanks to the free flow of information and knowledge are severely challenged.  Private data in the hands of Artificial Intelligence could move the “invisible hand” more efficiently than free markets.  But this “invisible hand” would be waved by a centralized cabal not by multitudes of autonomous individuals.

The end result of these possibilities and warnings may exaggerate the capabilities of information technologies and lie years ahead.  But so did a lot of other transformative human inventions at the time they were imagined.  So, it’s not too early to start reflecting and deliberating on what lies ahead.

Are you frustrated that your Republican or Democrat friends – depending on your affiliation – don’t understand you?  There are some surveys I recently saw that made me again think of the current state of our two-mindedness.

So, let’s ask:  What makes the people of a country disagree on important issues?  One reason among my top candidates is that the national narrative no longer works for everybody.  Narratives are useful because, like glue, they keep societies together under one vision informed by common historical experiences and shared values.  But narratives may have a shelf life.

In the American narrative, ambitious individualism and strong work ethic lead to success.  That seemed true in a simpler economy, less based on knowledge and technology, and less dominated by big corporations.  There is no longer a Wild West to conquer or fields and prairies to turn to wheat fields and ranches.  Individualism is now tramped by the methodical advance of corporations organized, systematized and programmed by the McKinseys of the global ecosystem. These days, a big retailer opens in your area and wipes out your life as a proprietor.    A Chinese young man leaves his village and heads to Guangdong’s industrial hub and there goes your assembly line job in Toledo Ohio.  The narrative was careful to promise equal opportunities not equal outcomes.  But this is no longer true.  Opportunities still exist but like other goods are concentrated in fewer hands.  You were told that merit is your ticket to success but meritocracy is challenged every day by the entitlement ethos of those who can afford to give their own a leg up by all means.  So, not every American buys into this narrative.

Another suspect in bringing people apart is partisan politics.  Parties have an interest to promote an “us versus them” mentality.  Tribalism keeps party supporters in the fold.  Parties can still weave ideas from the same national narrative but using different versions.  To the Republican base, the national narrative remains alive if its protagonists are mainly European descendants.   To the Democratic base the narrative remains alive no matter what the ethnic background of the new Americans is.

And then there is a third suspect of the two-mindedness.  It is our instinctive and genetic predispositions that along with our life experiences shape our political preferences.  At the very core, we are not more liberal or more conservative just because we are indoctrinated in partisan ideas and by culture.  We are liberals or conservatives because we already have what it takes to be one or the other.  Cultural experiences may moderate or intensify our original tendencies but do not change them.  We all operate under the same set of instincts but we are not all equally motivated by these instincts.  As a result, our behavior and choices differ.

The genetic story predicts that liberals care more about the human condition of others and value equality in outcomes.  To conservatives, care is left to the individual and fairness in the distribution of rewards has to be proportional to the effort.   Therefore, a narrative of merit justifies the uneven split of spoils.  A liberal is less loyal to the group’s values because individual freedom for experimentation matters.  A conservative, on the other hand, prides loyalty to the group.  Hence, conservatives are keen on nationalism and security.  Liberals respect authority and hierarchy less than conservatives.  Sanctity and the risk of degradation matter less to liberals.  Conservatives are more repulsed by impurity of life styles and (national, religious or tribal) symbols.  Liberals resent top-down rules imposed by governing bodies.  Conservatives are more inclined to accept, even, impose common rules to all.

Jonathan Haidt uses this matrix of moral foundations to explain the divergent views of Republicans and Democrats.   The Pew Research Center periodically publishes surveys on partisan views.  Its recent surveys show that Republicans and Democrats are far apart how seriously they think of climate change and environmental protections.  Is this because Republicans outright discard science?  Isn’t rather plausible that Republicans are more innately averse to experimenting with a new way of life under environmental and climate-driven constraints?  The same large discrepancy also applies to how Republicans and Democrats see guns and the military.  Both have to do with how effectively a person can protect his group (i.e., his tribe) and impose authority.  Democrats are less keen on these security-related issues.  Race and immigration also divide Republicans and Democrats, most likely because sameness of the other matters to conservatives more as a way of promoting social cohesion and loyalty.  Poverty leaves Republicans less concerned because they take it to be the result of lesser effort and merit and, hence, a fair outcome.  Democrats see more the hand of unfair distribution and, thus, they want to fix it through social programs.

The NYT recently published the results of an international experiment regarding how liberals and conservatives think and act.  When asked about poverty, three quarters of American liberals and non-Americans (liberals and conservatives) voiced concern about it whereas only a quarter of American conservatives did so.  Government policies to alleviate poverty were also supported by American liberals and non-Americans by a wide margin contrary to their limited acceptance by American conservatives.  Similarly, American conservatives were much more likely to justify poverty on such factors, like ability, hard work and risk taking, thus, suggesting that rich people deserve what they earn, in line with the American narrative regarding the positive link of wealth to merit.

But here is the surprise.  When the participants were asked to share with others an extra bonus income received randomly, American conservatives were equally likely to split it fairly with others just like the liberals.  When participants were told the extra income was due to greater effort, only a minority of American liberals and conservatives split it with less “productive” participants.  This means American liberals are not unwilling to accept merit as a cause of income inequality.  And conservatives were found to give to charity with the same frequency as liberals, suggesting they are not insensitive to poverty.

This experiment shows that national and party narratives are powerful influences of peoples’ ideology.  American conservatives do believe the traditional American narrative that links success to hard work and ability.  That’s why they are reluctant to support more taxes and social programs to reduce poverty.  However, the power of the naturally selected instincts of reciprocal altruism and fairness do manifest themselves when it comes to acting out.

It seems to me that our common biological origin binds us more than the divergent ideas we have as to how we can make our condition better.

Several months ago, I wrote a post titled “Capitalism As A Cocktail” that argued that the American economic system is a hybrid of a lot of capitalism with some – yet crucial – social programs (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to mention the most popular). We basically rely on the income and wealth generating capacity of our capitalist economy to produce the resources that support the social programs.

The point we often miss is that the structure and performance of our capitalist economy is not free of consequences for the overall health and stability of the American society and the ability of government to manage social welfare programs.  Therefore, we all have an interest in ensuring that the capitalist part of our economic system delivers outcomes that are consistent with having a financially safe, well-educated, healthier and socially content populace.

Unfortunately, this is not what we have now.  Despite an unprecedented, in its duration, growth of the economy, several indicators show that in education, health, and social advancement and contentment we have a bi-polar system in which the lucky few who reap the lion’s share of incomes and wealth have advanced but not the many who have been left financially behind. *

It is not surprising, therefore, that we currently have strong populist movements on the right and the left that clamor for righting the unequal distribution of economic and social gains.  The respective solutions of these movements, more inward and nativist on the right and more socially activist on the left, are challenging the economic orthodoxy of the two major parties and their respective power centers.

Besides the economic populists, a growing number of successful business people and true capitalists, from Bill Gates of Microsoft to Larry Fink of Blackrock, are voicing their concern about the current course of American capitalism.  Therefore, the pressure to move to a more sustainable kind of capitalism is all around us.  To put it differently, American capitalism is facing an identity crisis.  The cocktail has to be mixed again to give it a more popular taste.

So, how did we end up with the present kind of capitalism?  This is how I see its post-war evolution.  The recovery of the civilian economy after the WW II saw the rise of corporatism in the hands of all-powerful managers.  The fast gains of the American economy gave them the wherewithal to accommodate the interests of labor unions.  This social contract kept both the aggregate pie as well as its slices growing for workers, businesspeople and shareholders.  That was the period of managerial American capitalism.

This economic compact came to an end under the pressure of foreign competition, especially from Japan.  By the early 1980s, American corporations had realized that their complacency had left them exposed to aggressive competition from nibbler foreign rivals.   Private investors also realized that shareholders were not getting maximum value on their investment.  Soon, corporate raiders, like Carl Icahn and T. Boon Pickens, ushered in a period of takeovers and leveraged buy-outs that brought firms under the control of more profit-oriented owners.  Now factories would close not because of slow business but because they had to be moved in lower-cost areas, though, still inside the US.  The drivers were greater economic efficiency and value creation.

Corporate takeovers and leveraged buy-outs, along with the corporate restructurings they effected, were accepted as the epitome of “creative destruction” that allows economic resources to be moved to their best use.  Much less attention was paid, though, to their costs for the communities and individuals that were caught on the losing side of restructurings.  The emphasis on generating value gains at the firm level – mostly captured by shareholders – is at the heart of the “shareholders first” capitalism.

The third stage of American capitalism was the outgrowth of globalization and digital technology that made possible the management of global operations.  Now the corporate restructurings could be done on a global scale.  American communities and workers would no longer lose to rivals within the US; they would also lose to China and other low-cost countries.   Thus, the resentment against business dislocation and loss of jobs mutated from the parochial to the nationalist level.  As American workers were losing because of the global rearrangement of the economic system, income and wealth inequality started to become glaring.  The knowledge economy started to bifurcate the economy into sectors of high incomes and sectors of low wages.  Among 21 OECD countries the US has both the highest income inequality and highest compensation of elite professionals.  On top of that, tax rates and tax loopholes became extremely favorable to high income earners.  As always, high concentration of wealth goes hand-in-hand with high concentration of political influence and power.  The result is the “plutocratic capitalism” we have today.

The current American capitalism ascribes to several questionable principle.  The first is the utilitarian principle that what matters is aggregate economic growth; if winners gain more than losers lose it’s fine.  A second related principle is that as long as all income groups gain, disproportionate gains are fine; in other words, individuals are strict wealth maximizers and don’t care about the fairness of the distribution.  The third principle is that financial incentives (including state help though taxes, subsidies, etc.) should be allocated with priority to the job creators, i.e., firm owners and investors.  This is the trickle-down principle.  The fourth principle is that the cost-benefit analysis should be done at the firm level.  That leaves the side costs of “creative destruction” on communities and individuals out of consideration.

The problem is that these are principles without empirical support or validation.  The utilitarian theory has its problems and people are not strict wealth maximizers; fairness does matter.  The trickle-down principle has not worked.  And ignoring the costs of “creative destruction” can harm social cohesion and trust.

Moving toward a more inclusive and socially responsible American capitalism requires that we seriously rethink its current principles and purpose and we return it to the service of society.

*  A good account of how America has fallen behind in various indicators of economic and social progress can be found in Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas.

During our history on earth, our endowment with brains that have grown in sophistication over time has been a boon and a bane.  Our brains have produced ever more effective technologies and conceived captivating myths, ideas and beliefs.  All have fallen prey to our urge to prevail over our natural environment and fellow humans.  For all our more advanced development relative to other species, we humans seem to arguably be the least tolerant to nature and our own species.

Just read Yuval Harari’s Sapiens to grasp the scope of devastation exacted on the fauna and flora of this planet by our ancestors – a devastation continued to this day by us.  And our history books are no less replete with wars, massacres and barbarities people have committed upon other people.  In my posts, I often refer to and decry the harm that religious zealotry and intolerance has inflicted on many people over the centuries.  But to focus only on religion as a root of aggression is a narrow reading of history or a poor understanding of the full scope of the sources of intolerance.  For example, religious people point out that secular movements have also produced great human suffering.  They point, in particular, to human decimation committed by the Jacobins following the French Revolution, imperialism and colonialism, Nazism and various communist regimes.

What is common behind religious and secular human catastrophes is the presence of some Big Idea and the determination of its devotees to evangelize and impose it on all people.  Is it possible that all these ideas – religious and secular – become disastrous because they fail to rely on reason? Not really.  Jacobins embraced reason, they even built temples to celebrate reason.  The genetic theories and policies of Nazis were based on reasoned science, though, in reality, it was pseudoscience.  Because reliance on reason and science as antidotes to superstitious religiousness has again emerged as the safe path to a better humanity, it is wise to stare at both with some skepticism before we commit new mistakes in their name.

Two books I recently came across call us to think more open-mindedly about the human nature and the causes of our troubles.  The first is Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray, a retired professor of Oxford and the second is Believers: Faith in Human Nature by Melvin Konner, a professor of anthropology and medicine at Emory University.

The gist of Gray’s book is that any idea or belief (religious or secular) that envisions an unique and universal “end of history” where all humanity finds spiritual salvation, peace or harmony (whichever state you prefer) puts itself at risk of becoming oppressive and very likely on the path of aggression in order to bring all of us into compliance with its tenets.  For Gray, the various types of atheism he identifies are not different from religious beliefs if they also adopt the view that there is an end of history common and good for all humanity.

Christianity preaches that human history will end with the day of judgment when the pious will be separated from the sinful.  Because to Christians saving one’s soul is a universal good, proselytizing and converting the heathen does God’s will.  Millions of people have suffered for resisting this end-of-the-world vision.  Islam with its own salvation story also has to account for its own spread behind the sword.  Nazism believed that the end of history was a eugenically cleansed humanity that is represented only by the Arian race.  The concentration camps bear witness to the pursuit of this belief.  Russian Bolsheviks and China’s Maoists believed that communism would bring social harmony to the human race.  Millions died before the pursuit of this idea was abandoned.  Believers in reason and science also have their own blissful destination for humanity by placing too much faith in the capacity of humans to be rational and thus able to replace the comfort of religiousness with the certainty of reason and science.  In pursuing that goal, atheists can become as illiberal as the religious people they oppose.

Gray’s premise is that the evolution of nature moves without purpose other than its preservation.  Each person seeks and finds his or her own meaning by various spiritual, intellectual or materialist means.  To proclaim that one purpose, one end of history is good for all of humanity is antithetical to how nature works.  To him “live and let live” is what can keep us from oppressing each other.

Melvin Konner, an atheist himself, relies on evolutionary analysis to show that religiousness is not incompatible with human nature.  Although there is no God gene that predisposes many people to spirituality and religiousness, a combination of genetic and cultural factors makes religiousness a very human condition.  Therefore, the polemics of new-age atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, directed against religion, Christianity in particular, miss the point.

This is how Konner summarizes his arguments based on scientific evidence.  Religious inclinations and capacities are built into the brain, though, without uniform intensity across all people.  These inclinations start to develop in childhood and indoctrination does not explain religious development.  Faith development is not the same as moral development.  Religion evolved by natural selection.  This means that those genetically inclined toward spiritual or religious experiences were helped to manage fear, grief, and existential loneliness, and through bonding with others in acts of altruism, common defense and cooperation developed a stronger advantage for survival.

Because of this genetic connection and the power of culture, religion’s functions cannot be replaced by science, arts, or secular ways of life.  Religious believers which in Thomas Jefferson’s famous dictum “do not pick our pockets or break our legs” are entitled to enjoy freedom and tolerance just like atheists and non-believers are.

With arguments and evidence, Gray and Konner admonish us to recognize that though one species, each one of us seeks the enjoyment of life by taking different paths.  Forcing humanity toward a single final spiritual, religious, or material destination can only cause us friction, suffering and unhappiness.

I saw something several days ago that brought back to my mind what George Will, the conservative commentator, had said in a college commencement exercise many years ago.  What he said was something like that: “There are people who have values and then there are people who have virtue.”  He proceeded to say that one can argue Adolf Hitler had values (he valued the idea of the (supposed but false) superiority of the Arian race) but George Washington had both values and virtue (he fought for the independence of his people).

And so it is about freedom.  We praise it as one of the greatest values; but do we use it with virtue?  Freedom is like a floodgate.  It engenders so many other things.  With freedom we can be moral agents, that is, capable to demonstrate our morality by choosing between good and evil.  With freedom we can have self-determination by choosing to be what we wish to be.  And with freedom we can choose big and important things (whom to love or vote for) or small and pedestrian things (where to shop) that make life a personal experience.

But freedom has its challenges.  How we treat our freedom and that of others is one of them.  We often spend more energy trying to limit the freedoms of others than ensuring our freedom becomes an instrument of goodness.  My two previous posts treated this issue.  John Locke and the Enlightenment helped make the idea of individual freedom a fundamental value of the West and as such it made its way into the political declarations of the French and American Revolutions.  How ironic, though, that Western civilization, which so much prizes the ideal of freedom, has been responsible for the oppression and coercion of countless people around the globe.

Another challenge is this.  Freedom as a value can collide with freedom as a virtue when the right of freedom obtains a fetish power to the extent an individual considers the right to be superior to the responsibilities it entails.  This seems to be more of an affliction of western societies than Asian societies which value social harmony and goals, even at the expense of individual freedom.  Americans are perhaps the most representative of Westerners in their ardent advocacy of the right of individual freedom.  But how well do we use this right?

What triggered these thoughts about freedom was a scene on TV several weeks ago.  It was when advocates of gun rights demonstrated in Richmond, Virginia.  A reporter asked a few of them what brought them to the rally and their feverish reply was “to protect our right to carry guns.”  I juxtaposed that reply to the reality of gun ownership and its consequences in the US.  Americans own about 393 million guns or 46% of all the guns owned by civilians in the world.  Gun violence and gun-related suicides are major causes of death in this country.  Every year dozens of people from students to church-goers and mall-shoppers are gunned down in acts of mass shootings.  International statistics draw a clear association between number of guns and gun-related deaths.  Yet, gun enthusiasts, with help from NRA, are unrelenting in their defense of unregulated gun ownership no matter how much misery it causes the society.  Is this virtuous defense of freedom?

On a different level, Americans are abandoning smaller cars in favor of pick-up trucks and SUVs whether they truly need them or not.  Car manufacturers in the US are closing down lines for sedans to concentrate on the higher-margin SUVs.  How does that contribute to clean air, to road maintenance, and the climate?  If we consume in order to “keep up with the Joneses” instead of our real needs, how virtuous is this use of freedom?

And then, a piece of news that really shocked me.  The Watkins College of Arts in Nashville had to merge with another local college, Belmont University.  But Belmont happens to be a Christian institution that requires all its faculty and staff to be Christian.  So Belmont’s provost announced that the non-Christian faculty of Watkins College could not continue working at Belmont, though, later Watkins’ president said that some faculty would be considered for employment.  The artistic expression of the transferring Watkins’ students would also might have to be modified to make it appropriate for Belmont audiences.  Again, it is in the name of freedom, here religious freedom, that an institution practices a form of discrimination.  First, of all, how Christian is this?  And secondly, is it a virtuous application of freedom?

Down the list of abused freedoms, we have the freedoms of corporations.  They clamor for freedom to operate without regulations.  Fine.  We know regulations add to the cost of doing business and that cost is passed on to the whole society.  But are corporations virtuous users of business freedom?  I used to tell my business students that if they wished to keep regulation and its burden down, they should behave as ethical managers.  Those executives that abuse corporate freedoms spoil it for all businesses as society finds it necessary to regulate business behavior.  Their non-virtuous use of freedom is a cost to all of us just like the Richmond guys’ enthusiasm for free guns.

And because this is a seminal week in the political history of the US, I have to talk about freedom in the acts of politicians.  The Republican senators found themselves in a rare moment of history.  Many of them could have acted as free individuals, true to their privately expressed admission of wrong doing on part of the president, and free of the fear of risking their political future.  The excuse that Democratic senators might not have behaved any different is like telling a cop that you should not get a speeding ticker because everybody else drove as fast as you.  In serving in a court you should take care of both, procedural justice (fairness in the rules of the game) and distributive justice (fairness in the verdict).  All but two Republicans decided to sacrifice procedural justice (not calling witnesses) so that they would not face a much harder decision in distributing justice.

Many more examples could be cited.  The point is that to claim and defend the right of individual freedom, as we so loudly do in the West, is only half of the solution if it is wasted.  And the danger is that there always are out there those who proclaim to know how to make freedoms virtuous but there is no guarantee the way they understand virtue is the same as each one of us does.

A frequently used adage says that one’s freedom ends where somebody else’s freedom starts.  And by freedom we usually mean one’s human and individual rights.  The problem is that each one and, by extension, each group of us wants to draw the line deeper into somebody else’s territory of rights.   This drawing of the lines becomes extremely difficult in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religion country like America.  The tension and friction that comes with any attempt to broaden or redraw the rights of people is not, though, confined to this country.  We see it around the world.  As different groups try to escape miserable and dangerous places, or poverty, or political disenfranchisement, or social injustice they are met with resistance.

As the last post showed, the expansion of human and individual rights to oppressed segments of the population in America has been a series of some steps forward and some steps backward.  The march to this day has been one of both progress and tremendous political friction.  After the emancipation of slaves, women won the right to vote, and then over the past thirty years one’s choice of sexual/gender orientation has become much less subject to an unequal enjoyment of rights.  But at each juncture the pursuit of such rights has brought dangerous political polarization.  We are in the midst of such polarization right now.  According to a survey, today’s Americans are more unhappy if a relative marries a person from the opposite party than a person of different race or religion!

One reason for the polarization we periodically see is because each of the two dominant parties in America stakes opposite positions with regard to this or that right.  Thus, it was the newly founded Republican Party that fought to end slavery and restore the political rights of black people.  The Democratic Party opposed that and after regaining power in the South it succeeded in reversing the political and civil liberties of blacks.  Even the women’s suffrage movement found more support within the Republican than the Democratic Party.  But then, at the start of the 20^th century, a strange thing happened and the Republican Party started to adopt the racial biases of Southern Democrats while the Democratic Party gradually started to move toward a less racially and gender biased stance.  By 1964 when Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act and a year later the Voting Rights Act, it was the Democrats working on the project of “A more perfect union” and the Republicans trying to block it.

Since the 1960’s the two parties have evolved to attract under their respective umbrellas different constituents.  The Democrats have adopted policies that appeal to an electorate that is more racially and ethnically diversified, more liberal in connection to sexual/gender rights, less religious, and more likely to be better educated and to live in more globally integrated cities.  On the other hand, Republicans have embraced an electorate that is overwhelmingly white, more Christian and traditional in its values, and more representative of working-class people.

In a new book, “The Age of Entitlement: America since the Sixties,” the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell aptly recognizes this parting of ways when he writes that Republicans adhere to a view of America more in line with the pre-1964 era whereas the Democrats adhere to a post-1964 view of expanded rights.  As a result, one half of today’s Democrats are liberal but three fourths of Republicans are conservative.  Therefore, I would say that the emergence of a politician, like Donald Trump, with a pre-1964 vision of America is not an anomaly within the GOP.

Like Caldwell, Yoni Applebaum (How America Ends, The Atlantic, Dec. 2019) attributes the party polarization to the fear of previously dominant groups that their control is eroding.  But whereas, Caldwell would place the blame on the legislative priorities of Democrats, Applebaum attributes that to demographic forces, of which none other is more powerful than the constant inflow of immigrants in a country whose white population is on a declining trajectory due to below-replacement birth rates.  It is fair to say that both, attention to the rights and advancement of the identity groups favoring the Democrats plus the prospect of diminished control in the medium-term have pushed the more traditional, value-wise, working-class white Americans to the GOP.

For many decades after the Reconstruction, Democratic politicians in the South were loath to abandoning their pro-racial stance for fear they would lose elections.  Because of that, civil rights suffered and not only in the South.  I am afraid Republicans find themselves in a similar conundrum today.  The voting blocks that cling to the Republican Party espouse political, cultural and religious views that are not necessarily open to the interests of people of color, or women’s reproductive rights, or the rights of the GLBTQ community and immigrants.  As a result, any overture of the Republican Party towards those latter groups would put the loyalty of their traditional base at jeopardy.

This has two unfortunate consequences.  One is that the road toward a more perfect union, that is, more equal rights, is less likely to become a bipartisan agenda.  The second is that political survival has rendered the GOP more depedent on institutions and tactics that appear less and less democratic.  These are the Electoral College, the disproportionate representation of small states in the Senate, partisan gerrymandering, and vote suppression.  But this is not a sustainable course for the GOP in the long run and more critically it is not good for democracy.

But blame also falls on the Democrats.  The attention they place on groups that deserve protection of their rights is often perceived that comes at the expense of working-class Americans.  Championing for human and individual rights should not necessarily drive Democrats away from the less fortunate whites of Middle America.  Instead the cause of rights would be better served if Democrats convinced Middle America that in the long spectrum of rights, the rights to education, decent jobs, access to quality health care and freedom from opioids and other social ills stand side-by-side with the right to be free of racial, ethnic, religious, cultural and gender/sexual bias.   A more balanced attention by both parties to the interests of the diverse segments of Americans would go a long way in ameliorating the current polarization.

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice,…” These aspirational words from the Preamble to the Constitution have been invoked by many, though no better than by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C., in 1963.  As we celebrate his memory this week, I was fortunate to have just finished reading a book that gives a salient historical account of how treacherous and difficult the road to a better union has been for Americans and what it teaches us as we look forward.

Those words in the Preamble were not a rhetorical flourish.  In fact, they were an acknowledgement that basic rights, like the right of slaves to freedom and citizenship and, of course, the political rights of women had been left out.   Furthermore, language regarding a national definition of citizenship, the rights such citizenship confers and who is responsible to protect these rights was also absent or unclear in the constitution.  It took three monumental amendments, the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th, for these essential steps toward a more perfect union to gain constitutional status.

The importance of these amendments was such that Eric Foner (a professor emeritus of Columbia University and Pulitzer Prize winner) suggests they constituted a second founding of the American Republic.  Hence, the title of his book The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.  But as the book explains, elation and optimism very soon gave way to frustration and disappointment.  Although slavery was effectively abolished, the rights of citizens, and most particularly those of color, granted in the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, were in later years undone across the Southern states.

The first of the three amendments, the 13^th (ratified in 1865), formally abolished slavery in the United States, contrary to the widespread impression that this had been accomplished by the Emancipation Proclamation.  The 14^th Amendment (ratified in 1868) introduced birthright citizenship, brought citizenship under the protection of the US government, not that of the individual states, defined life, liberty, and property as the rights of all citizens, introduced due process of law, and granted equal protection of the laws to any person, not just citizens.  Finally, the 15^th Amendment (ratified in 1870) declared that the voting right of citizens “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”  It would take another fifty years for sex to be added to these three accounts.

Passage of the three amendments was possible only due to the extraordinary powers of Reconstruction that, in addition to the vote of former slaves, shifted political dominance in Southern states from the pro-white supremacy Democratic Party (sounds strange, right?) to the Republicans who had championed the anti-slavery campaign.  But the rights written in the amendments were seriously weakened once the Reconstruction project came to an end after the Democrats returned to state power in the latter part of the 19^th century.  That was the period the pro-white supremacy system of Jim Crow was established through out the South.  Segregation, discrimination, and violence against blacks became routine in the Post-Reconstruction South.

The most serious offense against the letter and spirit of the amendments was the gradual denial of the vote to black people.  Poll taxes, literacy tests, and convictions for an expanding array of petty crimes would become reasons to deny one’s right to vote.  Ever creative in designing discriminatory laws, the Southern authorities would avoid the use of racial terms but introduce voting right criteria that were certain to disproportionately afflict and, hence, exclude black people from voting.  (Similar methods were used to suppress the vote of the Catholic Irish and other minorities even in the north.)

Regrettably, as Foner remarks, the state discriminations that went against the intended purpose of the three amendments, found validation in a series of Supreme Court decisions.  In crucial cases, the jurists argued that the amendments were not purported to tip the balance of power toward the federal government and away from the states.  Thus, the states were left effectively free to decide what constituted or not bias and discrimination in actions taken by public and private parties.  As Foner writes, in its pro-state opinions, “The Courts did not simply reflect popular sentiment – they helped to create it.” As one reads the outrageous and hateful comments launched against the fitness of people of color, and also against women, to partake of civil, political, and social rights, one wonders how low indeed the human mind and soul can sink.  Apologists of white supremacy claimed that giving rights to people of color was tantamount to punishing white people by removing their special status, a spin still heard in some white circles today.

There are several lessons we can draw from the record of resistance against the liberating provisions of the three amendments.  Passing laws, even constitutional amendments, is not sufficient to provide remedy for long-standing racial prejudices.  The Post-Reconstruction history of the Supreme Court shows that our trust in the courts to protect basic rights can be betrayed.  Opinions handed down at that time caused long-term harm to the equal enjoyment of rights.  They were reversed to some extend almost a century later by court decisions, like Brown vs Board of Education (that ended segregation) and Congressional legislation, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  But even this latter Act was later weakened by the 2012 Supreme Court decision that ended the proactive enforcement role of the federal government in regards to protecting the voting right.

Citizen rights, especially the voting right, are, even today, unevenly protected across states.  Thus, the accolade of having a great democracy is not equally deserved by all states.  Finally, it is only through awareness of that history that today’s grievances and sensibilities of the black communities in issues, like profiling, incarceration, red-lining in housing, etc., can be understood in contemporary America.

In Foner’s words “A century and a half after the end of slavery, the project of equal citizenship remains unfinished.”

There is a common-sense agreement that speech should be free unless it can cause physical harm.  Thus, for example, I am not allowed to shout out “fire” in a crowded theater because the ensuing pandemonium could cause serious harm, even death, to some of the people in the crowd.  However, in recent years, the right to free speech has been challenged on the ground it can pose an emotional harm to some people in the audience.

More importantly, these challenges to free speech have been raised on university campuses, including those of some liberal schools, like Berkeley and Yale.  The persons denied the right to speech have varied from the notorious far right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to mainstream commentators, like George Will, the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the former US Attorney General Eric Holder.  Others, like Erika Christakis, a childhood and education expert formerly at Yale, have been forced to resign.  In all these instances, and many others, the objections have primarily come from students, who claimed what these people had said or had to say caused or would cause them emotional discomfort and anxiety.

The Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has documented 379 disinvitation campaigns in colleges since 2000, of which about half were successful.  While until 2009 objections to speakers were raised in equal frequency by left and right groups, more of them have come from the left in later years, especially after 2013.  In 2017, 58% of surveyed liberal and conservative students expressed the opinion that they should not be exposed to “intolerable” and “offensive” ideas on campus.  One third of surveyed students also opined that violent means to cancel “offensive” speech were acceptable.  Opposition is not limited to objectionable speakers but extends to parts of the classroom curriculum.  Based on these survey results we can presume that had Socrates, a perennial challenger of Athenian morals, stood trial in front of these easily “offended” students, he would have met the same fate as he did in the hands of his detractors in 399 BCE.

The fact that such selective opposition to free speech became pronounced on American campuses after 2013 suggests that it is a phenomenon connected to the generation that was born in 1996 and later, and, hence, it reached college age in 2013.  This, so-called iGen (i for internet) generation was the first to grow entirely in the culture of digital communication technology (smart phones) and social media.

If so, the question is then, what is different about this generation that has led to such oversensitivity to opposed ideas.  In their book “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation for Failure” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt identify three myths (as they call them) that drive iGeners to intolerance.  One myth is the parents’ belief that young people are fragile and need protection from “offensive” ideas.  The second myth is that trusting one’s feelings is a good thing.  And the third myth is the idea of tribalism that convinces young people the world is one of Us versus Them.

The fragility idea is a myth because natural selection has conditioned species, including us, to adjust to the challenges of our environment in order to survive.  A new style of parenting, though, the one called “helicopter” parenting, has now turned parents to overprotective guardians of their children.  This style of parenting is more prominent in well-to-do middle and upper-class families.  It is usually driven by parental concern about the professional positioning of children, and nothing looms bigger in this connection than admission to a reputable college (see recent scandals in this regard).  As a result, parents meticulously choreograph their children’s daily activities to maximize the chances for a good education and valuable networking.  Thus, children are left with much less play time, especially the kind of play that exposes kids to interaction and conflict with playmates.  It is in play that kids are challenged by rivals, learn from failures, and engage in conflict resolution.

Trusting one’s feelings and emotions can also be dangerous.  Emotions can instinctively arise but that doesn’t make them accurate representations of reality.  We need reason to check whether our feelings and emotions align with facts.  Encouraging kids to trust their emotions diminishes the need for critical thinking.  Thus, the balance between emotions and reason is distorted.

Finally succumbing to the tribalistic dichotomy “us versus them” deprives youngsters (and for that matter all of us) of the willingness to give any sort of consideration, and much less legitimacy, to the viewpoints of others.  The result is: “If they belong to “them” we should not like anything they have to say.” Here, however, we need to acknowledge that tribalism among students has coincided with tribalism within the American society at large.  The unusually high vocal and violent presence of white supremacists (see Charlottesville) and anti-Semitic groups has contributed to the increased intolerance against such groups observed among progressive students.

Regrettably and also perilously for the future of open discourse, universities have rushed to the parents’ side to create “safe” spaces for students.  Whereas protecting students from sexual, racial or other forms of harassment manifested in physical form is a necessary and proper policy, there are universities that have tried to protect students from exposure to ideas and theories they subjectively find disturbing to their emotional or mental wellness.  Even worse, academic administrations and faculty are increasingly demanding the retraction of writings they find offensive to this or that idea instead of using the traditional method of rebuttal.  All this, however, amounts to abdication of the mission of universities to champion a liberal education and discourse, where liberal is to be understood as the freedom to present and debate ideas and theories regardless how objectionable – even repugnant – to some these may be.

It is not difficult to project what this attitude of safetyism implies if it were to prevail.  Any idea or theory can potentially become vulnerable by being declared “unsafe” to this or that group and thus ostracized from the public square.  Should we prohibit holocaust deniers from speaking, or atheist critiquing religion, or white supremacists degrading other races, or creationists attacking the theory of evolution?  Unless we can defend our ideas and theories with reason and evidence, no speech barrier will make us a better society.