Let's Reason

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.

Depending how you count decades, our century is already or will be 20 years old.  So, like others, I asked the question “How have we done these first 20 years?”  You may ask “what’s different about the first 20 years of a century?”  Well, they usually tend to be bad and set the tone for the rest of the century.  There is a Greek saying that you can tell how the day will turn out by how it starts in the morning.

So, I looked at the first 20 years of the last three centuries: from the 19^th to the 21^st.  I admit that, at least for the 19^th century, my retrospective is very much Euro-centric.  But not without a good reason, since European nations have demonstrated unusual belligerence for most of the modern world history.  Despite all the tragedies and the mayhem, we have experienced, from September 11 of 2001 to the current crisis of the US-Iran conflict, I am glad to report that the beginning of this century compares very well to the beginnings of the past two centuries.  It may be an isolated case or it may signal that as a species we have made significant progress in preventing international disputes and antagonisms from erupting into general all-out wars.

Let’s start with the first 20 years of the 19^th century.  They were dominated by the Napoleonic wars that spread from Great Britain to Russia and finally ended with the decisive defeat of Napoleon in Waterloo in 1815.  The ostensible reason for the wars was the desire of the French to spread the liberal ideals of the French Revolution to the rest of Europe that was ruled by Emperors and Princes.  The end result, though, was a backlash that reasserted the dominance of the monarchical model.

The wars were not, however, without some significant consequences.  For one, they brought the end of the 1000-year Holy Roman Empire after the defeat of the Austrian Emperor in Austerlitz in 1805.  Great Britain emerged as the dominant naval power of Europe and this eventually became the springboard of its colonial expansion toward a global empire in which “the sun never sets.”  The embers of liberalism set off by the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars did not entirely die out.  Soon after, they stoked national wars of independence, first in Greece and later in other countries, and inspired civil uprisings demanding social reform and justice.

The first 20 years of the 20^th century proved to be even more catastrophic in human losses and geopolitical consequences.  World War I was, of course, the defining world event of these years.  This time the conflict was truly global engulfing 32 countries.  Besides the usual suspects, Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia, the war drew in the Ottoman Empire, the United States and Japan.  The spark for the war was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist, but the reasons lied in imperial and colonial antagonisms and the prospects of territorial gains from the anticipated collapse of the weakened Ottoman Empire.

WWI proved to be extremely deadly by all standards.  They estimate that 20 million troops and civilians were killed while another 20 million were wounded.  The geopolitical consequences were equally paramount.  The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 ushered in the establishment of the communist system in the lands of the Russian Empire that became the Soviet Union.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, and the Ottoman Empire were dissolved.  As a result, a whole host of nation-states emerged across Europe and the Middle East.  The United States found the opportunity to establish itself as a global power with a say in European affairs.  The extremely punitive terms against Germany set the flow of events that eventually gave rise to Nazism and Hitler.  It is not a hyperbole to say that WWII was born out of the ashes of WWI.

Unlike the first 20 years of those two centuries nothing equally catastrophic has yet happened in the 21^st century.  With few exceptions, the conflicts and wars have been mostly confined to the Arab and Muslim world and have featured three sets of adversaries.  First, we have fundamental Islam and Arab nationalists going after the Western world to avenge past and recent offenses against Arab sovereignty.  Second, we have progressive Arab masses revolting against authoritarian regimes following the Arab Spring in Tunisia in 2010.  And lastly, we have the Shia Muslims going after the Sunni Muslims.  In the midst of these conflicts, we have had two wars launched by the US.  One in Afghanistan, necessitated by the 9/11 terrorist attack by Al- Qaeda and the second in Iraq, now almost universally condemned as a war of choice.   Conflicts with religious undertones are not unique to the Middle East area.  The Rohingya Muslims have been ruthlessly persecuted by Buddhists in Myanmar and Uighur Muslims have seen their human rights been violated by the Chinese government.

These conflicts and wars have cost thousands of human lives but nothing at the scale of the wars of the 20^th century.  Most importantly, these conflicts have not become the excuse for major powers to go after each other as in past centuries.  The US, Russia and China have found a way to avoid direct conflict and limit themselves to diplomatic skirmishes or low-grade military face offs.  There are several reasons for the unwillingness to escalate local frictions to major conflagrations.  First, there are international institutions, like the UN, the WTO and others that mediate international conflicts and disputes before they get out of control.  Second, an extensive nexus of economic and business relationships across the globe has raised the cost of war to all, especially for those countries with the most to lose, like the developed West and the prosperity-dependent China.  Third, nations realize that in a peaceful world control over land and other tangible resources is less critical for creating and sustaining prosperity than intangible resources based on knowledge and soft power.  In sum, the world has moved more toward adopting win-win solutions than antagonistic win-lose (or zero-sum) strategies.

On the negative side, we see that religious beliefs still tend to divide instead of uniting people within and across nations.  If I had to guess, I would err on the side of optimism in light of major forces at work in business and technology, the climate, and human education and advancement that point more toward international cooperation than conflict.

The bully-in-chief that resides in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C., has tweeted to the world that any hostile response by Iran will be met by 52 strikes, some of them directed to sites that are “very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture.”  With that tweet, Trump and by extension our country he presides over were put at the same level of barbaric disposition toward monuments of cultural heritage as the one shared and carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

So, what is next that could be expendable in international conflicts?  The Acropolis? The Coliseum in Rome? The Taj Mahal (the real one, not the fake one built by Trump)?  Despite all that may separate us, nations have come to respect certain common principles and cultural achievements.  Thus, a 1954 international agreement (also signed by the US) places cultural monuments outside the acceptable list of targets.

But this President, who continues to govern with the same scorched-earth instincts and practices he applied to his personal and business life, has no respect for the institutions that define American democracy or for international norms and agreements.  The already severely depleted political and cultural capital of the US has suffered another irreparable blow by this latest tweet.

It is time that all decent Americans, including those who voted for Trump, stood up and declared to the world this President does not speak for America when he so hideously offends what the world has declared to be part of our shared heritage.

Best wishes for

Holidays full of Cheer

and

A Healthy and Prosperous 2020

 

Many people around the world do very special things that deserve our thanks and appreciation.  My list this year will include, though, some out of the ordinary cases.  The idea came to me some time ago, when I took notice of how my life in small and trivial as well as big and important ways has been or is affected by some people.  In each case, it is what they have chosen to do that if it were absent it would have left me missing or not experiencing something that added a thing of value to life.  I am sure each one of you have such people in your lives.  So, I want to share that special list.

First, my thanks go to the newspaper delivery person that makes sure I have a paper to read as early as 7 o’clock or even earlier.  I have enjoyed drinking my cup of coffee while catching up with the news of the world for as far back as I remember.  But for me to enjoy this, the delivery person wakes up in the wee hours of the day and then, sunshine, rain or snow, delivers the newspapers.  And this is not the only job he or she has.  After completing their rounds, they usually have a second job to go to.

Next, my thanks go to those who operate diners.  If you live in my part of the woods, suburban Long Island, and it is later than 9 pm, and you need to have dinner, good luck.  And it’s not just dinner.  You want a late-night coffee or snack?  Same thing.  Long Island used to be called a bedroom community in relation to New York City.  People worked in the city and came to Long Island to eat and sleep.  So restaurant close relatively early. Greek-Americans have made many contributions to America.  But the almost 24-hour diner with the “everything you can eat or drink” menu is a true gift of convenience.  To run a diner is a tough business.  Work starts around 4 in the morning and continues until 2 or 4 am the next day.  That’s why diners are run by relatives who take turns.  Whenever I am in a diner, I remind myself I am the beneficiary of a very harsh schedule.

And talking of restaurants, I want to thank the owners of “Harry”, a family restaurant in Varkiza (you know… the home of Yabanaki beach) where my family spends time in the summer.  “Harry” (also the owner’s name) is part of a disappearing type of restaurants; the ones where you can find homemade style meals.  It’s a lot easier and faster to prepare steaks, gyro and souvlaki.  At “Harry”’s, though, you can eat traditional meals.  I am thankful to the “Harry” family for keeping alive the Greek culinary tradition.  Harry’s father who is 80 or so years old is the salesman of the restaurant.  To order, you go inside where all the meals of the day are displayed in trays along a counter.   The old man, Mr. Vassilis, calls out the names of the meals reserving the most colorful words for the “dishes of the day”.  Here is the very fresh mackerel baked in fresh tomatoes and garlic, and there is the delicious pasticcio.  As you point to each tray, Mr. Vassilis takes notes in his little notebook.  Then you go out – no body eats inside in Greece during the summer – you choose your table and the food and drinks are promptly served.  Mr. Vassilis knows his regular customers well.  When he sees us for the first time of our summer stay, he welcomes us back.  Last summer, I had started to worry that “Harry” may close for lack of business.  I was disabused of my fear when one night, not even 9 o’clock, we showed up at “Harry”’s only to see Mr. Vassilis and his family leaving.  To my question “why so early?”, the answer was “We are out of food. Everything went.”  I was disappointed I had missed a dinner at “Harry”’s but happy as well that “Harry” is not going anywhere any time soon.

The next three people may surprise you for making it in my list.  They are Brett Stephens, David Brooks and Peggy Noonan.  I thank them because they give me a thoughtful conservative perspective on what’s happening in our country.  So, they check my liberal predilections that could push me off the guard rails.  Peggy Noonan writes for the Wall Street Journal but her pieces are more centrist than the majority of the WSJ readers would like.  Brett Stephens and David Brooks write for the New York Times and they are more to the center-right than the NYT readers would prefer.  All three, therefore, do not write for the choir.  I bet they get a lot of unfriendly mail.  What they do, though, takes courage.

Two years ago, and on the way to Stockholm, we had to stop in Paris due to a medical emergency.  A Romanian young lady, a French-African man and a French young lady were the doctors who took care of the problem.  They, and their supervising doctors, spared no test and exam (including an MRI) in their effort to find a diagnosis.  After seven hours of meticulous medical attention and having found nothing serious, they let us go.  Neither on the way in or the way out of the hospital we were stopped by any clerk to check our medical insurance cards or ask us to fill out payment responsibility forms.  All they knew was that they had a medical case to solve.  The French National Health System provides this type of service every day to everyone who needs care.  The system is not broken financially or in regards to health outcomes.  Actually, in several critical health indicators France is ahead of the US.  Contrast that to your visit to an American hospital or doctor’s office.  The first or second inquiry has to do with who pays for the services to be rendered.  Think of that.  The secular French act like the Samaritan woman of the New Testament.  I think we do need to think seriously about humanizing our medical care system.

After completing medical school, doctors have to decide in which health area they want to specialize.  Most select lucrative fields.  After all, who can blame them in light of the huge debts they have accumulated.  But there are doctors who choose to go into health areas that afflict very few individuals, thus accepting a more precarious future.  One of these doctors works at Winthrop/NYU Langone Medical Center.  Back in the 1980’s he saw the devastating consequences of an extremely rare syndrome and he chose to dedicate his professional life to the victims of this syndrome.  Thanks to his endless and passionate work he inspired doctors around the world to take notice and join their efforts to improving the lives of a small number of kids.  Today, children born with this syndrome grow to have better lives, with fewer medical problems, and a better chance to live “normal” lives.

It is sometimes worth reflecting on what the career choices of others mean for us and what we could be missing in their absence.  Then we can start to recognize how interdependent we are.  And how lucky.

With the holidays approaching, I have been eagerly looking for anything that might allay my political anxiety and dyspepsia.  So, I was thrilled when I read Mr. Philip Terzian’s OP-ED piece “Trump’s Rhetoric Has Precedent” in the NYT this Wednesday.

For three years now, I, along with millions of fellow Americans, have been living under the spell of the existential threat the Trump presidency supposedly means for all of us weak-in-the knees and soft in the brain liberals.  But now, here comes Mr. Terzian and puts all our fears to rest.  I look back at all my thoughts and utterings the past three plus years and I wonder how I could be so wrong.

Here it is how Mr. Terzian delivers his magical therapy.

Mr. Trump’s tweets “are very nearly as entertaining as their memorable content.”  Wow! I left all that joy slip by!

“Even his nicknames – “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and “Sleepy Joe” Biden  – while occasionally puerile and cruel, deftly capture something essential in their subjects.”  How could I miss Mr. Trump’s talent as an adept wordsmith that contributes to the richness of our political vocabulary?

“He is not our first divorced president (Ronald Reagan),” (which, therefore, makes Donald Trump so typical of his humble subjects – since close to one in two marriages ends in a divorce) Nor [is he] the first to have been harried by allegations of a sex scandal (Thomas Jefferson among others).”  Poor Tom.  Even writing the Declaration of Independence does not set you apart from consummate philanderers.

“We might wish, at times, that Mr. Trump were a little less juvenile, or insensitive or hypersensitive; but we might also wish that every president achieves perfection.”  Oh, how stupid of me to miss that Mr. Trump is so close to perfection, if he could just find the right balance of sensitivity.  Near perfection before my eyes!  This holiday season will be my happiest!

“Even the tweets are more likely to be remembered as mastery of new technology.”  I can already see grammar school classes using Mr. Trump’s tweets to teach social media effectiveness and also build character thanks to their content.

“It’s useful to consider Mr. Trump’s opprobrium – as racist, proto-fascist and aspiring dictator – in light of the history of partisan rhetoric.  It’s essentially forgotten now, but the standard enlightened view of Mr. Reagan in the Oval Office was as an “amiable dunce…”  Again.  What’s wrong with me?  Did I miss that being racist and proto-fascist are now better attributions for present-day Republicans than being a little slow up there?

Finally, Mr Terzian puts to rest the gravest source of our worries.  “While unique in his way, Mr. Trump is not a president like no other, nor a threat to democracy or the constitutional order.  He has roots in the American civic tradition….”  Well, Mr. Terzian, here you are off the mark.  Mr. Trump is not a threat to democracy because his roots are in his self-interest and exaltation.  And because he is not an ideologue and does not have the discipline, steadiness and political vision to usher in a different political order.  He is a gifted demagogue without a strategic plan.

His apparent autocratic management style comes from his running personal businesses with no checks and balances from boards of directors or shareholders.  He has failed to transition his management style to one compatible with a system of shared governance just like many corporate chieftains who find it very challenging to manage academic institutions.  I have seen some of them in my academic career.  His problem is that either by genetic predisposition or cultural upbringing or his advanced age, he is disinclined to learn new ways.

If President Trump is a threat, albeit an indirect one, to democracy, it is because he has proven that a good fraction of American voters are willing to entrust their future with politicians, regardless of the tone of their political language or their character, who stand ready to engaged in tribal wars with no-holds-barred tactics.  More refined, competent and ideologically committed politicians, like Mike Pompeo and Bill Barr, pose, in my opinion, a much more direct threat to the American liberal democracy than Donald Trump.

Whether or not comments like these make Democrats or “Never-Trump” Republicans feel any better, what about the hard core of the President’s supporters?  Do they have reasons to close the third year of the Trump presidency in a mood of euphoria and vindication?  I am not so sure.  I feel Mr. Terzian owes them a soothing column as well.

I can see a Trump supporter who, after the “sugar high” of a rally, starts having some really nagging questions.  “Why is the Wall taking so long?  Where is the money from Mexico?”  “Why does this arrogant North Korean guy still have his nukes?  Don’t tell me he outplayed my man and he can now dance around as a legit nuclear power?”  “Where are all those manufacturing jobs promised to us?”  When I took a sneaky look at that liberal fake-news paper at the barber’s I read that even the revised NAFTA will not restore the old Rust Belt glory.  “And how about that huge tax cut? I can hardly feel it.  The fake news says most of it went to the fat cats.  Can it be true? I won’t tell my cousin Maggie.  It will break her heart.”

“And then there is that Lavrov guy in the Oval Office.  Every time he goes there it means trouble for my guy.  If you, just a secretary, get the right to plop your ass in my President’s den the least you can do is not to contradict him about discussing elections.  When that scoundrel Larry crossed me in the pub, I didn’t talk to him for weeks.  I ‘m confused.  Can anybody please explain again what ‘Make America Great Again’ means.”

Well folks, that’s the best I can do to lighten up the mood.  I leave the rest to you.