Let's Reason

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.

The tenth year of the Trojan war had taken a terrible turn against the Greeks or Achaeans as Homer calls them.  Achilles, the ferocious warrior, is sitting it out after a spat over a war trophy woman with the chief commander Agamemnon.  The Trojans led by their noble and brave leader Hector, son of King Priam, are closing in toward the Greeks’ camp, poised to throw them to the sea.  At that moment of desperation for the Greeks, Achilles’s dear friend Patroclus, clad in Achilles’s armor, steps into the fray.  Unfortunately, the comeback of the Greeks is short-lived as Patroclus falls under Hector’s spear.

Achilles mourns his friend’s demise and to avenge his grave loss decides to return to the battle.  He eventually kills Hector, and then in an infamous gesture of inhumane treatment of a fallen enemy, Achilles drags Hector’s body in front of the walls of Troy before retrieving it to his camp.   Up to that point, the epic of Iliad is a story of brutal fighting, horrible deaths and deceitful acts by the gods as they take turns and cavalierly intervene in favor of the Greeks or the Trojans.  But at the closing chapters of the Iliad, Homer’s epic turns into a story of human drama.  It becomes a teaching lesson about the capacity of humans to feel contrition for their acts and empathy for their foes.

In the darkness of the night, and helped by Hermes, Priam slips through the Greek camp and reaches Achilles’s tent.  There the white-hair old King implores Achilles to release Hector’s corpse so that he bury his son as is proper for any man.  Priam reminds Achilles of what his father would deserve if he, Achilles, had fallen in battle.  At that moment, the proud, arrogant, and vengeful Achilles breaks down and starts crying as visions of his father pass through his mind.  He realizes the banality of his act and overcoming his lust for revenge and his sorrow for having lost Patroclus recaptures his sense of humanity.  Above all, he connects with the grief of the old man.  He grants Priam his request and Hector finally receives the honorable funeral he deserves.

Three thousand years later, in another war, an American Navy SEAL officer leans over the scraggly teenage body of a wounded ISIS fighter, pulls a knife and stabs the sedated captive in the neck.  Although that is not the cause of death, a military tribunal finds the SEAL officer guilty for posing in a photograph holding the dead captive up by the hair.  The officer is sentenced to confinement, demotion and possible expulsion.  But by that time, this officer has become a hero to conservative crowds and media.  The President orders that the officer be restored to his rank and maintain his Navy SEAL status.   The rallying cry of the officer’s supporters is that to be merciful to the enemy is political correctness gone too far; to conform to military rules is weakness, a fool’s errand, when the enemy is a member of a band of ruthless fighters of a stateless and terrorist entity.  On the other side, military commanders and civic organizations protest that voiding military disciplinary action undermines the rules that should apply in the conduct of war and treatment of combatants.

What lessons about human conduct, rage and magnanimity can we learn from these two acts of war?  How can we as outsiders pass judgment on such events?

We first realize that several thousand years of human history have not changed human nature much when it comes to war.  No matter whether a war is just or not, it has a way of dehumanizing the individual.  Warriors engage in battle with the same rage and ferocity as ever against their opponents.  They often cannot resist to subject their foes to what Achilles and officer Gallagher committed against their fallen enemies.  But by dehumanizing the enemy in the process we dehumanize ourselves because we eventually discover we have violated the other person’s – no matter how much vilified in our eyes – dignity and the right to mercy.   Those same rights we wish our enemies grant us.

In the times before and for many centuries after the Trojan war, a warrior had only his personal sense of morality, magnanimity and compassion to guide him how he fought and treated the enemy.  But often, as with Achilles, none of these personal restraints mattered.  Achilles’s reckoning of his disrespect and brutality comes only when Priam pleas to him as a devastated father.  I have no way to tell whether officer Gallagher had a similar personal reckoning.

There is, though, something that has changed since the days of the Trojan war.  We finally realized that someone has to step in between the warrior’s rage and lust for revenge and the defeated enemy.  Someone has to prevent the individual from descending down to the dark chambers of one’s soul where lurks the urge to deprive the enemy of his humanity.  Someone has to save the warrior from losing his own dignity and thus being dehumanized himself.  Thus, from the establishment of the Red Cross (Crescent) in the middle nineteenth century to the Geneva Convention and the International Criminal Court nations have come together to check and harness the aggressive instincts of human nature and punish the violators of the accepted norms.

Equally important, national armies have adopted their own military rules of conduct to control behavior that dehumanizes combatants on both sides of the lines of conflict.  International treaties and military codes of conduct are our only defenses against allowing the suffering of wars to extend into the annihilation of the human spirit.

I think it is in the context of the need for rules that protect against dehumanization of those we send to war that we ought to reflect and judge the events surrounding officer Gallagher’s action, the President’s reversal of the military tribunal’s decision, and the outcry against it.

Because this is a short week – preparing, traveling, celebrating Thanksgiving takes most of it – I thought I should take a break from the blog.  But an idea kept creeping up in my brain that was too tempting to let go.

Thanksgiving is a story about the early experience of a bunch of people who had left their ancestral homes and sought a better future to somebody else’s land.  All human migrations are played out the same way.  Almost always, some people move into a place already inhabited by others.  Sometimes, the newcomers and the indigenous people find a way to live peacefully together.  Most often, the newcomers use aggression to takeover and subjugate the natives.  Many years later, the descendants of those newcomers declare the land their own since time immemorial.   They become the new natives that feel they have to defend “their” land from new newcomers.

Since the time information started to travel ahead and faster than people, the “natives” everywhere have some idea who the would-be newcomers are and where they come from.  Thus, the natives make judgments about the character and cultural makeup of the newcomers.  The Europeans know a lot about the Syrians, Iraqi, Afghani, and African refugees who cross the Mediterranean.  They know their religion, their culture, the kind of countries they come from.  So, if, for example, they happen to be Christian, they may be more welcoming of them than if they are Muslim.  And so on.

On this side of the Atlantic, we also know where the refugees and migrants come from and who they are.  Since the founding of America, we have judged that we prefer to let in more of the immigrants that come from Europe.  Further north and west in Europe, even better.  Not so good if you come from south of our border or the Middle East or Africa.

Now let’s think of those native Americans who saw the Mayflower sail into Plymouth, Mass.  They knew nothing of the people that disembarked.  Nothing about their culture or the countries they had come from.  All they saw was that these newcomers looked like them, walked like them, and communicated with some medium that sounded like a language.  In short, the natives saw the Pilgrims as fellow Homo Sapiens – not that those natives or anyone else knew at the time which human species we are.

What if the natives knew the Pilgrims had sailed from war-torn Europe?  What if the natives knew the newcomers came from a continent that was in the middle of all-out religious wars; a continent whose people were willing to kill in the name of God?  What if the natives knew the newcomers carried deadlier weapons and diseases?  Would the native Americans be as welcoming as they were?  Would they have helped the Pilgrims survive their first winter, had they known the aggressive nature of the newcomers?

So, I wonder whether America as we know it might have been the result of ignorance?

Consider the following order of things.  Any year your income exceeds $2 million, you pay 90% in taxes on the excess income.  Each year, the President and the Majority Leaders of Congress honor the top ten contributors to tax revenue.  They even give them a plaque.  Something similar to the annual honors for top achievers in arts and humanities.  If you are Bill Gates or Warren Buffet you are proud to show your guests all the plaques you have accumulated over many years of income creation and contributions to taxes.

You think this is a crazy fantasy.  It’s not.  It happened in the 1950s minus the ceremony and the plaques.  The marginal tax rate for personal income over $200,000 (or $2 million in today’s dollars) was 91%.  And capitalism in America thrived.  But over the years, we started to read out of a different book, according to which high tax rates for even very rich people became an anathema.  How did we arrive to the new notion about capitalism and taxes?  Was it because high taxes slow (a) the work ethic? Or (b) the rate of corporate investment? Or (c) the rate of innovations?  In short, did we discover that high taxes could bring the collapse of capitalism?

The truth of the matter is that we didn’t discover any such tax effects.  Take the argument of diminishing work supply and effort if incomes are limited (say, by taxes).  Major sport leagues in the US have total salary caps; no such limits exist in European sports.  Can anyone credibly argue that American athletes compete less vigorously?  Switzerland had a tax holiday and there was no change in work intensity or supply.  In the US, changes in welfare benefits have been associated with insignificant changes in work habits.   Alaska pays $5,000 per household a year out of its oil fund.  No slackers there either.   As this year’s Nobel Prize winners in economics, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, write: “Financial incentives are nowhere near as powerful as they are usually assumed to be.”  Why do people still work and excel in spite of lower financial rewards?  Because of personal pride, status in their communities, dignity, and desire to demonstrate social solidarity and cooperative spirit.

And what about boosting corporate investments by giving tax relief to corporate profits?  We have seen that the tax relief corporations got from the 2017 tax law was primarily used to buy back stocks than to make new investments.  A NYT (Nov. 17, 2019) article featured the story of FedEx, which despite going from a tax bill of $1.5 billion in 2017 to $0 in 2018 (a $1.5 billion tax windfall) made no appreciable addition to its investments.  The same elusive evidence about a dependence on lighter taxation holds for the rate of innovation.  These examples do not totally invalidate the effect of taxes on economic activity and outcomes, but neither do they support the hysterical claims that taxing very high incomes and wealth is a fatal blow to capitalism.

Over the two hundred years of history with capitalism, people have succeeded in leaving behind lives of subsistence and building more equitable and prosperous societies.  For most of that time, economic gains and social progress moved on parallel tracks.  That co-movement has, after all, been the main reason behind the endurance and political legitimacy and acceptance of capitalism.

Over the last thirty years, though, we have witnessed a serious loosening of the bonds between capitalism and society, especially in this country.  The drive for individual success, epitomized by the accumulation of wealth, has made us much less attentive to the imperative of social progress and cohesiveness.  Wealth accumulation is now treated almost like a sport.   Every year we are told how rich people are ranked in wealth.  There is less interest in how the average Joe ranks in overall human wellbeing.

Thus, we have arrived at a state where the rising aggregate national income and wealth are distributed with unprecedented abundance to the few and great stinginess to the many.  How else can we explain that the average tax rate for the 400 richest households dropped from 70% in the 1950s to 23% in 2018 whereas it rose from 16% to 26% for the bottom 10%; that the US minimum wage is 34% of the typical wage (the lowest in the OECD group) versus, for example, 62% in France; that the 1% of richest Americans earned 20% of the national income in 2014 compared to 11% in 1980; and that an estimated $1 trillion per year has been transferred from the bottom 80% to the top 1% since 1979, a result of the redistribution of wages and salaries away from the many and toward the few?

Such tectonic shifts in the distribution of incomes and wealth call into question the economic and moral underpinnings of wealth creation and distribution.  One culprit is, of course, the declining progressivity of the tax code complemented by the preferential taxation of certain incomes (like capital gains and carried income) and forms of wealth (estates, in particular).  The other culprit is that wages have not kept pace with the gains of productivity, resulting in a shrinking share of wages in the national income in favor of profits.  And a third culprit is the breakdown of meritocracy in education.  In a new book, The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits, A Yale Law professor, describes how the admissions process of top colleges has been corrupted to make room for the children of the upper classes and the connected at the expense of equally qualified but underprivileged students.  Thus, Markovits argues we have the emergence of an oligarchic elite that can perpetuate its inter-generational advantage.  The fact that social mobility in the US is now below that of European nations adds credence to his argument.

The sense of inequity in economic rewards and opportunities along with the deterioration of several critical indicators of human development are reflected in the recent political choices of American voters.  And the feeling of inequity explains why a majority of Americans support a wealth tax and even raising the marginal income tax rate to 70%.  The erosion of faith in the fairness of the capitalist system among younger Americans ought to be a warning.

Wealth creation is not the problem.  How wealth is created and is distributed is the real problem.  Its ultimate purpose ought to be the betterment of society not the extravagant aggrandizement of the individual.  Instilling social responsibility in the creation and distribution of wealth is the challenge we must meet.  Perpetuating policies that seek to create wealth at the expense of fairness and then shield it from fairly sharing in society’s needs is, in my opinion, what can ultimately undermine the moral foundations of capitalism and jeopardize its viability.

We all know what happened to the frog that failed to notice that the temperature of the water was rising until it was too late.  People in democratic states may face the same fate unless they take time from their everyday lives and pay attention to what is going on in the political systems of their countries.

Americans thought they were insulated from such worries.  After all, our government under Republican and Democratic administrations was the champion of liberal democracy around the world.  But while, we were busy admonishing others about the rules of democratic governance, our own democracy had started to erode.  Freedom House, an agency partly funded by the US government, has been taken the pulse of democracy around the world for a long time.  In its 2019 report, it reported that the quality of democracy in the US has been on the decline over the last 8 years.  Across the globe, the Freedom House finds that the quality of democracy has slipped over the past 13 years.  The Economic Intelligence Unit, an agency based in the UK, ranked the US 25^th in quality of democracy out of 167 countries in 2018.  All three Scandinavian countries were in the top five places.  It was in 2016 the US slipped in the rankings from Full Democracy to Flawed Democracy.  According to EIU, of the 167 countries it ranks, 75 countries fall in the Full Democracy or Flawed Democracy category and another 39 countries are ranked as Hybrid Democracies.

Notwithstanding the usual criticisms all rankings draw, there is no doubt the sense that liberal democracy is slipping here and abroad has become more palpable in recent years. I believe there are three factors that appear to contribute the most to the decline of liberal democracy.  One is the feeling that “the system (i.e., democracy) is not working for me.”  In America, this sentiment is strongly correlated in intensity and time-wise with the growth of the lobby industry, starting in the 1970s.  A 2015 study found that large corporations and their associations spend $34 for every dollar spent by labor unions and public-interest groups.  The Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United has certainly expanded the influence of big money.  Moreover, the need of members of Congress to raise campaign funds keeps them farther and longer away from their constituents and their everyday concerns.

The second factor is the diminished opportunities for social and economic advancement.  For example, nine out of ten Americans born in 1940 made more money at age 30 than their parents made at the same age.  The ratio is now down to five out of ten for those born in the early 1980s.  Diminishing intergenerational mobility as well as the eye-popping income and wealth inequality feed into other populist sentiments driven by  economic trends.  Thus, societies that have experienced positive growth in the Human Development Index are more likely to be for global trade than societies that have stagnated in human development.   (And the evidence shows that while the HDI is rising in China, it is falling or stagnating in many parts of America.)

Finally, the third factor is the growing disregard for other people’s views and even their rights.  This tendency is usually fed by religious fanaticism, fear of diminished political control, and nativism (i.e., nationalism).

The sense among broad swaths of the population of a country that they are left out of the political decision-making process leads to political apathy and withdrawal.  The feeling of not sharing in the spoils of growth leads to populism.  And the disregard of other people’s rights and freedoms most often coupled with a feeling of victimhood or persecution leads such groups to seek protection by all means, even at the expense of constitutional rights.  All three sentiments can, and oftentimes are, exploited by parties or strongmen and demagogues, thus, contributing to the erosion of the rule of law and civil rights.  And this is exactly what we have seen happening around the world.

What should be a sobering warning to western democracies, and certainly to America which has traditionally vied for global influence, is the rising credibility of political systems that present themselves as alternatives to liberal democracy.  Consider, for example, the results of a recent survey conducted by the Global Network for Advanced Management among business students from 30 countries.  A majority of these students from developed (not including the US) and developing countries expressed the opinion that developing countries and emerging markets are looking more to China than to the US for guidance on how to organize the economy and society.  And the World Values Survey (a global organization of social scientists) found that in mature democracies the statement “It is essential to live in a democracy” was supported by 30 percent of millennials (those born after 1980) compared to 70 percent of respondents born around 1930.  This signifies the receding belief among younger people about democracy as a successful political system.

What escapes many of us is that over the millennia of recorded human history, democracy, and liberal democracy in particular, has been around for a relatively short period of time.  This is so because democracy is a fragile and demanding political system.  It is built on social trust and individual courage.  It takes both of these for those who lose a political contest to trust that they will not be treated badly in the hands of the winners.  Democracy endures when the constituents share common overarching values and ideas, the preservation of which offsets any potential loss from being in the opposition.

I am not alone in saying that this sharing in common values and ideas has been terribly fractured in America.  As two Yale Law professors, Amy Chua and Joe Rubenfeld, put it in an article in The Atlantic, “Americans on both the left and the right now view their political opponents not as fellow Americans with differing views, but as enemies to be vanquished.”

So, how do we step back from this point before it’s too late?  I would rather leave the task of answering this question to each one of us.

As the bus pulled farther away from its stop, the houses would become fewer and fewer until they were left behind; the olive groves where I would ride my bike would look less familiar; the coast line would no longer be the one with the beaches where I would spend time swimming and playing with friends.  That’s when I would recall the moment I jumped out of the buss when it arrived at the village, the welcoming of my uncles, aunts and cousins, and the anticipation of the pleasures of a whole summer ahead of me.  All that would come to an end two months later.  I would try to relive those first moments of arrival but it was hard to really “live” them.  I could not replay my summer vacation.  That was then my personal struggle with time.

We all struggle with time.  We want time to stay still, or the duration of something we enjoy to remain endless.  Other times we wish something lasts as little as possible.  So, given our human fascination and struggle with time, I read with great interest Carlo Rovelli’s short book The Order of Time.  Rovelli is an Italian physicist, specializing in quantum gravity.  But don’t assume he is a story teller of cold scientific facts.  His book is informative and poetic, close to science but never far from our human essence.

In this book, we learn that time as a physical variable is anything but stable, single, or always present.  Time passes faster if you live at the top rather than the ground floor of the Empire State building.  Time passes more slowly if you keep moving than staying still.  The rambunctious kids that run around in the ground floor age more slowly than the old folks who spend hours watching TV in the top floor.  The present, the now, is also not the same for all of us.  When my cousin in Greece hears my voice on the phone, I have already moved into the future because my voice does not reach my cousin instantaneously.  There is a multitude of “presents” in our universe.  In the world of quantum physics, that is, the world of the very, very tiny things we call particles, time, as a variable, is absent.  Processes can be played forth and back without upsetting the laws and equations of quantum mechanics.  In this infinitesimally small world, the very foundation of our universe, there is no past, present or future.

By the end of that part of the book, we realize that time is not what we think it is.  That line we divide into past, present and future along which we believe our lives unfold.  But after Rovelli has destroyed our everyday notions of time, he starts to reconstruct time as we humans experience it.  Our ability to perceive the world in its smallest scale, the quantum scale, has not been selected by nature as a trait necessary for our survival.  That’s why we do not sense all these peculiarities about time.  What is necessary for us to survive and thrive is just enough (actually a coarse) perception of the world as a three-dimensional space plus a fourth dimension we experience as a single time, ordered from past to future.

Our human sense of time, as far as the outside world is concerned, starts with our incomplete perception of the world as a physical system that moves from low entropy to higher entropy.  Entropy measures how well- arranged things are.  The leaves on the tree are ordered in some arrangement.  Then the fall wind blows them to the ground where they lie in a less ordered arrangement.  Later the wind scatters them into greater disorder.  The leaves on the tree had lower entropy than the leaves scattered around the yard.  Thus, in our human eyes, the world moves from low (greater order) entropy to higher (greater disorder) entropy.  Entropy cannot move backwards, that is, entropy does not go from high to low.*  Entropy, that is, the order of the world as we perceive it, is the closest thing we have in relation to nature that can sustain our sense of a past, present and future.

If it is so difficult to find time in the physical world, how does it emerge in our human lives?  Rovelli argues that time emerges in our brains as memory (a sense there is a past) and anticipation (a sense there is a future).  The clock is in our brain.  It helps us organize our lives along a line from past to future and give us a sense of personal identity and makes us conscious of our interactions with the external world.

Here Rovelli starts to sound like the French philosopher Henri Bergson (An Introduction to Metaphysics) for whom consciousness means memory.  Our memory is the repository of the past so that the past lives in the present.  But the present is elusive like the flow of a river.   “We cannot step into the same river twice,” is how the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus (6^th century BCE) put it.  We sense time as duration not as a string of still moments.  Bergson writes “Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity.”  Therefore, the becoming not the being is true reality.

Once we start to accept that becoming (the change) not the being (the stillness) is what the world is all about and what we intuitively sense, then we can start coming to better terms with time.  We recognize that our sense of time, despite the load of past unpleasant or sad moments it carries, is what makes us live fuller lives with consciousness of who we are.  That, to quote Rovelli, makes time a source of anguish but in the end a tremendous gift.

Those years I spent my summers in the village, I knew nothing about Rovelli or Bergson.  I knew nothing about time in the external or our internal world.  All I wanted, as the bus pulled away, was to take one more glimpse of what I was leaving behind, anything that would keep me tied to the summer moments.  The moments that were now becoming melancholy memories relieved only by the anticipation that another summer would arrive again next year.  This is what time is all about.

* Entropy moves in one direction from low to high because of the second law of thermodynamics which states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time.