Let's Reason

Hesiod, the 8^th century Greek poet and mythology writer, tells us that the Gods created four different races of humans until they settled on ours, the fifth.  For those who see the world as a half-empty glass, the Gods stopped perhaps too soon.  They should have tried a few more races.

We are that last race of humans that has survived to this day.  Our close relatives and potential rivals for survival, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, are now just faint echoes in our DNA.  I am not sure whether we have a collective sense of our ultimate biological triumph, but we certainly have come to behave as the entitled species of all creation. 

The need to feel superior goes beyond comparing ourselves to other species; it also affects how parts of humankind view other parts and their ways of life or how new generations of humans look at the accomplishments of past generations.  Our need for superiority, however, fails us in both ways.

First, we fail to recognize the merits of other cultures and different ways of life.  An early example of this comes out of the stories of the first century BCE geographer Strabo, who wrote that he had difficulty understanding the ways of the Celts.   In the age of explorations, it was the Europeans who fell victims of cultural misunderstanding and hubris.  They were unable to appreciate the civilizations of the people they found in the New World.  By dismissing their culture and their social and political customs, they became indifferent to their demise.  The same thing happened when the first colonists arrived in North America.  But soon they were surprised to find that those “primitive” natives were sophisticated enough to outsmart the Europeans in logical thinking and debating skills.  Kandiaronk of the Wendat tribe is a legendary North-East American native who dazzled his European encounters with his brilliance, oratorical skills and keen political sense.

The second way we fail to develop a better self-awareness is to believe that our way of doing things represents a definite progress over older modes of life and, if in doubt, we do away with our skepticism by postulating that our ways came about as the result of an inevitable evolutionary historical process, which is the equivalent of saying “it is what it is.”

But evidence from archeology and anthropology shows that our modern ways are not the only possibilities nor the inexorable result of the march of history.  Instead, humanity has lived in different ways, some of them better than ours, and our reading of human history as a linear trajectory of constant progress is a false reading of history.  In reality, our human path is full of wrong turns which later generations have tried to correct with what we – quite subconsciously and ironically appropriately – call historical turning points.  Thus, many of these landmarks of progress instead of representing genuine innovations, they should be better understood as attempts to set humanity back to the right course.

According to our familiar narrative of historical evolution, things developed along the following path:  emergence of agriculture led to formation of cities which led to the creation of dynastic and centralized power centers with aristocracies and elites which led to using religion to legitimize authority, enforce moral and legal order, and create cohesion; and as a result of all that we had the emergence of social classes and inequality.

But, as said above, this course of human experience is not the only one we see in the historical record.  Across the globe, from the Americas to Europe to the Middle East, India and China, there were societies living in city-like arrangements who managed their administration and food production without resorting to centralized command and organization.  These societies organized themselves through people’s assemblies, were ruled with considerable degree of consensus, and in many cases had and applied an egalitarian ethos.*

Viewed from the perspective of these societies, the development of dynastic and centralized power, secular and religious elites, social classes, inequality, and recurring warfare represent wrong turns that moved humanity away from ways of life that had none or very little of these maladies.

Contrariwise, from our standpoint of the conventional reading of history and under the notion that humanity was never anything better, we interpret our breakthroughs as entirely new innovations in human history.  Thus, to us, the birth of democracy in Greece is an innovation against dynastic power.  The Enlightenment is the rebellion of reason against dogmatic thinking and superstition.   Socialism and progressivism are political movements against extreme inequality and social injustice.   The development of environmental and climate awareness is our intellectual achievement, though coming after centuries of human-inflicted ecological damage.  What we miss is that a lot of what we call progress has been experienced by humans before us.    

The benefit of a fresh understanding of the history of humankind in its entirety is to realize that our modern world is not the only possible one.  That our ancestors were sophisticated enough to organize societies that avoided some of the shortfalls of our own world.  Though not exactly Gardens of Eden, these pre-modern societies show us we are not locked in some sort of a black hole of human condition out of which we can not escape if we choose to.

Thus, the most exciting way to imagine the future may not be what new corners of our present world and life we will discover.  The most exciting and hopeful vision of the future may instead be what different but better worlds our creativity can take us to if we have the wisdom to avoid wrong turns. 

*  The story of Kandiaronk and how pre-modern societies lived come from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity of David Graeber and David Wengrow.

Much has been written to explain the Russian war against Ukraine.  As I have mentioned in this blog, most of the explanations or justifications revolve around the geopolitical antagonism of Russia and the West, and especially the U.S.  Geopolitics enters the picture when the equilibrium of power between rivals is disturbed and creates a fear of being overrun in the calculations of the slipping rival. 

The upset of the equilibrium can be caused by the faster economic or military advancement of one of the rivals or changes in the world order that offer spillover advantages to one of the rivals.  That’s why, geopolitical powers, in general, favor the proliferation of states that opt for a similar social, economic and political order.  That was the case of oligarchic Sparta and democratic Athens that I wrote about in a recent post.

The balance among rivals can be also upset by the relative economic decline of one of the rivals.  Sustained and prolonged deterioration of the economy degrades a state’s domestic prosperity and social tranquility and most importantly the means to keep its military parity with a rival.  Economic failure was one of the suggested causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.  In their book “Balance: The Economics of Great Powers” Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane make a very strong case for the importance of fiscal strength as they look at the decline of several superpowers from ancient Rome to Great Britain.

So, it is interesting to ask whether any of the factors that may disturb the equilibrium of power appears to have played a role in explaining Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  That is, if geopolitics has been used in this debate so much, let’s take a closer look at it.  So what I aim for in this post is to sketch a thought process that raises some worth-noting doubts against the strict geopolitical argument.

Turning first to the military balance, I find its explanatory importance rather weak.  First, Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.  Second, the threat from its immediate European neighbors has been nonexistent.  Europe’s heavy reliance on Russian energy has signified thus far more willingness to cooperate than to antagonize Russia.  In fact, European states have been accused, and not without reason, for underfunding their military budgets.  Third, though a serious military force, NATO has never made any consequential threatening moves against Russia.  Although, Russia loathes America’s military presence in Europe, it is extremely unlikely that the U.S. would start a hot war against Russia without the acquiescence of its European allies, which have proven to be anything but warmongering.  Fourth, Russia went through an extensive modernization of its armed forces and years of armed conflicts in Chechnya and Syria, should have boosted its war readiness.  Finally, the domestic political mood in the U.S. prior to the invasion of Ukraine was definitely against any more foreign military interventions after the exhausting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

What about the economic balance?  Admittedly, the Russian economy has remained relatively undiversified and heavily dependent on the extraction industries of oil, gas and minerals.  And its model of favoring an oligarchic structure saps entrepreneurial dynamism from the economy.  Although far behind in aggregate economic numbers, Russia has, nonetheless, made progress in closing its economic gap with the US and Europe.  Using World Bank data and real GDP per capita (in constant 2017 dollars) I found that the Russian real per capita GDP rose from 29% to 43% of the U.S. real per capita GDP between 2000 and 2019.  (But it has lost ground versus the real per capita GDP of China.) Therefore, in terms of one of the most meaningful measures of economic power, it is Russia that has gained economic ground, not the U.S.

However, something else has happened in the periphery of Russia that has become a perceived threat to Russia.  This is the move of most of its former European territories (like the Baltic states) and allies in the Warsaw Pact (Hungary, Poland and others) toward democratic liberalization.  This would not have mattered if Russia had itself successfully transitioned towards democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  But after ten critical years were wasted by Russia (with help from the West), twenty more years of rule under Putin have turned Russia inward, illiberal, if not outright autocratic, and hostile to political ideas and economic development not controlled by the regime.  In addition, the traditional hostility of the Russian Orthodox Church against western culture has played its own role in this state of affairs.

Russia is not unfamiliar to this pattern of not heeding the demands of the times.  Before the Tsarist regime was swept away in the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia had failed to follow Western Europe in the exploits of the new capitalist order and instead kept its peasant and workers in a state of serfdom.  In the 1980s when the Western economies were reforming their inner workings and putting the foundations of a new global economic order, the Soviet regime failed to heed China’s bold switch to the market economy while retaining its communist system.  

It seems to me Putin is falling into the same trap.  Unwilling to tolerate a more open and democratic society and tethered to business oligarchs he prefers to align himself with like- minded leaders like Syria’s Assad, Kazakhstan’s Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko.  But in the crucial European periphery Russia has seen its old parts and allies to turn toward western-style democracy.  It is useful to note that Belarus and Ukraine along with Russia were the initial constituent members of the Soviet Union.  It is plausible, therefore, to argue that after facing the very real possibility of losing Belarus to a pro-western opposition, Putin decided to rather not face this possibility in Ukraine, even if this meant a devastating war.

My argument, therefore, is that the persistent clinging of the Russian national narrative to the notion of an imperial nationalism and the inability of successive Russian regimes to adjust to a changing world may better explain the war against Ukraine than any serious disturbance of the military or economic parity. 

The economic sanctions imposed by western countries on Russia in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine include the freezing and even the seizure of assets owned by Russian oligarchs in western countries.  Bank accounts, prized real estate properties and luxury yachts are now out of the reach of their owners.  The West considers this class of mega-rich Russians to be an extension of the state apparatus that has enabled the Putin regime to control the economy and influence domestic public opinion.   The sanctions against the Russian oligarchs imply that their riches are ill-gotten and unworthy of protection under the rules of the international free-market system.

That is the West’s position now.  But Western countries and their wealth management industries held different views until quite recently.  In fact, the international financial system, mostly following Western rules and practices, bears responsibility for abetting the creation of an international system of kleptocracy.  Before the Russian oligarchs started to make their mark in the international scene, the West was already living comfortably with tax havens in far away islands, Swiss secret bank accounts, and even within their own jurisdictions, and had no problem with their banks and tax-related advisers that specialize in aiding their own wealthy citizens with tax avoidance, and even evasion.

The extent of the international network of advisers and clients engaging in secretive financial and tax avoidance and evasion schemes was laid in full view thanks to the leaks of the Panama Papers in 2016 and the Pandora papers in 2021.  These papers revealed how offshore entities created by mostly western firms sealed the identity of world leaders, politicians, business people, kleptocrats, fugitives and drug lords as they stashed their money in tax havens around the globe.

I will draw from two articles published in The Atlantic to give a sense of the problem of kleptocracy and how it erodes democratic and free-market institutions.  Franklin Foer in “How Kleptocracy Came to America” (March 2019) shows how the U.S. failed to block the flow of dirty money to its shores.   According to Foer, the American Government, including Congress, got an early warning about the looting of the Russian treasury in the 1990s from Richard Palmer, a CIA operative.  Palmer described how well-connected Russians were siphoning billions of dollars abroad in the chaotic days of the transition to capitalism during the Yeltsin years.  Congress ignored Palmer and Russian money kept coming to American banks with no scrutiny.  And when Russia’s reformist prime minister Yegor Gaidar asked for help to track the money he was rebuffed by the White House.

In a 2018 study, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman and his co-authors estimated that the wealth of Russian oligarchs stashed abroad equaled the wealth of all Russians kept in Russia itself.  According to a 2019 estimate $1 trillion was leaving the developing economies each year either through laundering or tax evasion. 

A lot of this money flows into the choice real estate markets of New York City, Los Angeles, Miami and London.  The boon to the real estate industry is so huge that when the Patriot Act was passed after September 11 for the purpose of stanching the funding of terrorist and drug groups, the real estate industry lobbied successfully to exempt itself from the disclosure rules.  Thus, illicit money could flow into the U.S. anonymously through shell companies.  Foer writes that Global Witness, an NGO fighting dirty money, found that in some U.S. states it was easier to set up a shell company than to get a library card.

The noose around foreign money tightened a bit after the 2007 financial crisis but it still left gaping holes.  For example, When the Obama Administration asked Congress permission to share U.S. bank information on foreigners’ holdings with other countries it was turned down.  And when in 2014 the OECD countries agreed to enforce the same practice, the U.S. refused to sign on.  Ironically, U.S. refusal to share information with other countries does not stop it from demanding others to share financial information with U.S. authorities. 

In a more recent article, “The United States Has a Dirty Money Problem” (The Atlantic Jan/Feb 2022), Anne Applebaum offers more insights into the workings of the international kleptocracy and the role of tax havens.  For example, just two tax havens, Jersey Island and Cayman Islands, hold assets that account for almost 10% of the global GDP.

Anne Applebaum notes that there are several reasons why countries do not close down the kleptocratic system.  First, many of the practices used by foreign kleptocrats have been used by wealthy citizens and industries in the West.  Banks, real estate, and the supporting professional trades in western countries are loath to losing lucrative sources of revenue.  Second, kleptocracy utilizes sophisticated practices and tools that only a few law enforcement civil servants can master.  Even when they do, they are intimidated by the opposing interests. 

Another reason is that investigating journalists and the news media lack the resources to take on corruption cases.  And activists who stand up to domestic corruption, like the Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, are persecuted and silenced by the authorities. 

Finally, the international kleptocracy has developed the expertise and connections to mount full war against reforms.  So much so that the Western industries and politicians that stand to benefit often come to their defense.  Anne Applebaum warns that the international kleptocracy tries hard to corrupt democratic institutions, politicians, government bureaucracies and the independence of the press. 

The truth of the matter is that the West could have stymied the growth of the powerful Russian oligarchs if it had not enabled the culture of permissiveness toward plutocrats, including its own, that gave rise to the international world of kleptocracy.    

When we enable powerful interests to accumulate wealth through illicit tactics, we allow them to boost their political influence and to partake in the market system with advantages denied to ordinary citizens.  The West ought to shut down the whole world of kleptocracy, not just its Russian branch.

The war of Russia against Ukraine is not just another armed conflict driven by factors that concern only the combatant states.  Instead, it is also a war motivated by the geopolitical rivalry between two powerful camps, that of Russia on one side and the West (America and Europe) on the other, with Ukraine caught in the middle.  Geopolitics, as a reality of international politics, is nothing new and it is often used by powerful states to interfere in the domestic affairs of weaker states, sometimes going as far as to subjugate suspected or unwilling states.   

Debates cast within the geopolitical paradigm regrettably leave out of proper consideration the wishes and rights of the states caught in between.  This is really the dark consequence of geopolitics for states that try to place themselves on the world stage on account of their own political preferences.  A state aligning itself with one or another political or economic system heightens the fear of the left-out power that its rival is gaining ground against it.  This is the essence of the Thucydides Trap that eventually caused the Peloponnesian War between the Athenian alliance on one side and the Spartan coalition on the other.

The Peloponnesian War was one of the earliest geopolitical wars fought between democratic Athens and its allies and oligarchic Sparta and its own allies.  Its history, written by Thucydides, remains one of the most astute studies of great power rivalry, human folly and suffering, and the dire consequences borne by the warring parties.  So, I will try to distill some of the important lessons of this history by resorting to the much-praised work of Yale historian Donald Kagan, the PELOPONNESIAN WAR.  We may find useful parallels between that war and our present state. 

First, geopolitical wars are cast as conflicts of competing political systems.  Pericles, the Athenian commander, left no doubt of this in his Funeral Oration that the war was between a free-thinking and culture-loving democracy and a socially-rigid oligarchic state.  Hence, it was important that democratic Athens prevailed over oligarchic Sparta. 

Thucydides is not fooled, however, by the pronouncement of high-minded ideals.  He argues that at the root of the war we would find economic greed and personal ambition.  Furthermore, he builds a case of failed diplomacy and inability on both sides to demonstrate good faith and read the intentions of their opponent as contributing factors to the war’s duration for 31 destructive years.  Very insightfully, Thucydides tells us that the parties resorted to reason only to craft arguments against accepting compromise on anything that had value to them. 

The lessons of the Peloponnesian War become very poignant when it comes to the function and behavior of democracies when geopolitical interests are defended.  Athenian arrogance and over-confidence in the superiority of its political system turned Athens into a tyrannical hegemon over its allied city-states.  And when it needed to bring some allies back into the fold, Athens did not spare them of brutality.  Melos, Scione and Megara are examples of the inhumanity even a democracy can inflict on its disloyal allies. 

Thucydides also reminds us that democracies are susceptible to the rise of demagogues and populists, like the Athenian politicians Cleon and Alcibiades.  These are the politicians that put democracies at risk, even cause their demise.  Alcibiades, in particular, is a tragic figure because despite being a disciple of Socrates, he emulated neither his teacher’s loyalty to his city (he fled to the Persian court) nor his skepticism when he arrogantly advised the disastrous Athenian expedition against Sicily from which Athens never recovered. 

In geopolitical contests there is usually a third party ready to win after the combatants exhaust each other.  In the case of the Peloponnesian War, it was the Persian King that came to the aid of Sparta by funding the building of its naval force which finally crippled Athenian superiority in the sea.  Today, it is China that expects to benefit from the rivalry of Russia and the West.

What happened once the war was over and Sparta prevailed holds additional insights as to what awaits geopolitical opponents.  The male populations of the main combatants, Athens, Sparta and Corinth, were decimated.  Most of the Peloponnese was turned into an impoverished country.  Trade across the Greek world and beyond declined as societies turned inward and were left with fewer resources.  The classical ideals of Greeks we associate with controlled emotion and serene beauty in arts gave way under the weight of emotional upheaval and the questioning of the old values the war had unleashed.  It’s the same way with us, as we speculate what our own world will look like in the aftermath of the double crises we experience due to the pandemic and the Ukrainian war.

After enjoying the fruits of their victory for some years, the Spartans found themselves unable to sustain their supremacy over allies and foes.  In less than forty years after the war, Sparta was decisively defeated by its old ally Thebes and never was heard again as a powerful state. 

On the other hand, Athens restored its democratic system and in short time it recovered its alliances and prospered as an independent democracy for most of the 4^th century.  Is this evidence of the greater enduring power of democracies?  Maybe.  But we cannot take it for granted.  This is how Kagan throws caution into this question: “Athens’ loss . . . was taken as proof of the inadequacy of its political system; . . . Ordinary human mistakes and misfortunes were judged to be the peculiar consequences of democracy.”  China is always ready to judge the democratic West the same way.  If arrogance was what drove Athens into defeat in the hands of an oligarchy, our indolence in cultivating the democratic ethos and inability to achieve social and economic fairness could as well cause us to have a similar fate as we face challenges from alternative political systems.

The geopolitical paradigm gives powerful countries an excuse to rationalize their aggression in order to exercise hegemony over other states.  We know enough from history to resist this temptation.  It is time that we the people across the globe tell our governments to rather turn their interests into our real and present dangers: a fast-deteriorating climate and a threatened ecosystem, as well as the fighting of disease and poverty.

The hints if not the drums of war had started to fill the air even before my last blogpost.  We are now in the middle of this war of Russia against Ukraine and, along with many others, I am trying to make sense of it.  Of course, we know who the aggressor and the victim are, respectively.  Wars happen for some reasons.  Wars can be also avoided.  Also, sadly, wars sometimes cannot be avoided given some historical context.  I start to think that Ukraine is a victim of history; its own and of others.    

For one thing, Ukraine is victim of the allure of imperial hegemony in its part of the world.  It is interesting to note that the two world wars of the twentieth century were catalysts for the dissolution of two empires, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of independent nation states, and the unwinding of the colonial possessions of Britain and France. 

And yet against this trend, one entity went the opposite way.  That was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union in short.  Composed first of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, the Soviet Union grew to include a total of 15 republics, including the reincorporation of the Baltic states.  The Soviet Union collapsed around 1990, when one after the other its constituent parts declared their independence.  This however did not dim the nostalgia of its core nation, Russia, for its old imperial past.  No wonder Putin has lamented the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20^th century.  Ukraine for better or worse was part of this empire and now it is falling victim to the imperial doctrine of her neighbor. 

Ukraine is also a victim of overreaching by victors.  To understand this, we need to go back to the Paris Peace Conference after the end of WW I.  It was there where the victorious allies imposed the most exacting war reparations against Germany.  Neither the moderate position of Woodrow Wilson nor the reasoned arguments of John Maynard Keynes (one of the British representatives at the conference) were enough to placate the obstinate and revenge-thirsty French and the calculations of George Lloyd of Britain.  The humiliation of Germany along with the dire economic conditions that culminated in runaway inflation would eventually kill democracy, bring Hitler to power and lead to the unprecedent human carnage of the WW II.

Why is the Paris Peace Conference relevant to the Ukrainian crisis?  Because just like the heavy terms of the Paris Peace Conference fueled sentiments of national humiliation and revanchism among Germans and thus helped to drive them to Nazism, the same argument has been made in relation to the way a triumphant West treated Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Despite the many voices of reason and moderation among Democrats and Republicans, Presidents Bush (the father) and Clinton pushed for NATO expansion into states that had been parts of the Soviet empire.  Through-out the presidency of Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin there was a wide-spread sense that Russia was not treated with the respect its past history and its status as a nuclear superpower deserved.  By the time Vladimir Putin took the reins of Russia, liberal democracy had made little genuine progress and communism, though, gone had been replaced by a perverted capitalist economy, dominated by oligarchs.   

Very pertinent to this point are the comments of George F. Keenan, the preeminent Russia expert among American diplomats, quoted in Thomas Friedman’s NYT column this week.  Looking back, Keenan criticized the West because instead of promoting the rooting of democracy and the end of Cold War antagonism with Russia, the U.S. and NATO grasped the opportunity to strengthen their geopolitical position.  Keynes had made a similar point to express his frustration at the outcome of the Paris meetings.  The progressive and liberal ideals, the US, Britain, and France were defending and promoting at home, Keynes argued, could not at the end be reconciled with their desire for imperial dominance abroad.

Finally, Ukraine is victim of what I will call “monkey see monkey do.”  Putin has lifted a page out of the book the U.S. used to justify the war in Iraq, to falsely accuse Ukraine of harboring Nazis, scheming against the security of Russia, and conducting ethnic cleansing against its Russian-speaking population.  If one superpower can get away with pretenses to make war, we can understand why another superpower feels it’s also its right to use similar methods.

Finally, Ukraine is victim to our false and overoptimistic extrapolation of history.  We are supposed to live at the end of history (as Fukuyama put it), in a world that goes its merry way blending capitalism with some democracy here and some despotism there, but all working for our material enjoyment.  Unlike China, the post-Cold War era has not brought comparable prosperity to Russia.  So, its imperial national identity still remains a source of fulfillment.  This sentiment may matter only in Putin’s head but he after all is all that matters which way Russia goes.

We can resort to history to help us understand and explain but not necessarily to forgive or cast away responsibility.   Regardless of the circumstances that brought him to power, history has not forgiven Hitler for the human hecatombs he caused.  Similarly, history will not be kind to Putin for his choice of war regardless of the historical context he wishes to invoke as cover. 

War is a tragedy that scars both victors and vanquished.  In war, humans display their worst behavior.  War is also our greatest failure as a species.  Unique among species, humans organize themselves in a grand scale to attack others of our own species.  We have invented philosophy and religion, poetry and arts, knowledge and technology and yet we are still unable to check our most visceral emotions that lead us to mass aggression and conflict. 

We are also incapable to master sufficient reason to look at our past and try to avoid the pitfalls that bring us to armed conflict.  Filled with stirring emotions, bereft of reason, and abandoned by the Gods to our demons we walk into our demise.    

In my last post I gave a critical assessment of conservatism.  My main point was that in its effort to preserve established traditions and authority, conservatism may become an impediment to social progress and it is ill-prepared to adjust to developments that challenge its preference for the known and tried.  I now turn to liberalism and its own complications.

If conservatism believes in the wisdom of established traditions and order, liberalism believes in the individual and trusts that individual freedom and self-actualization will also secure the good of the whole.  The linchpin in the relationship between the individual and the whole (especially the state) is consent.  That’s why liberalism is associated with democratic governance.  Consent is what makes the individual to cede part of his freedom to the law and order of the state.  Very aptly, Jean Jacques Rousseau said that when individuals make their own laws, to obey them means to obey themselves.

To leave, however, humans to their own designs may have harmful consequences for them, individually or as a whole.  Assuming that individuals are rational and knowledgeable beings allows us to expect they are capable to weigh the consequences of their choices to themselves and the whole and choose wisely.  That was the liberalism that came out of the Enlightenment; it was built on human rationality and knowledge and a social contract that recognized the right of consent to the governed. 

But even in the era of Enlightenment, not everybody believed that reason and knowledge could be trusted.  This skeptical version of liberalism found expression in the American Constitution, which adopted the system of indirect representation.  Differing perceptions regarding the capacity of the individual to engage in civic political participation have resulted in political systems that grant different degrees of political empowerment.  Curtailing political rights on the basis of property, race or gender were expressions of that early skepticism in the exercise of liberty.   Thus, liberalism can ironically be the privilege of the few.

Over time, liberalism has evolved to recognize more individual freedoms.  The modern liberal tradition (originating with John Locke) initially aimed at liberating the individual from religious authority and prejudice, from tyrannical government, and economic serfdom.  The French Revolution expanded liberalism to include protection of civil and human rights.  Over the years, the breadth of human rights has itself expanded to mean full political participation and equality regardless of race, gender, social or economic status as well as freedom of sexual and gender orientation.  How far these freedoms go is always subject to cultural variations and the tension between individual-centric and socio-centric attitudes.

The many shades of liberalism can be also seen in the organization of the economy.  In the liberal economic tradition from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the paradigm of economic freedom is that of autonomous individuals, who acting out of self-interest manage to solve the economic problem of production and distribution and they do so with as little government interference as possible.  This type of economic liberalism, also called economic libertarianism, considers opportunities and, especially outcomes, the result of individual abilities, work ethic, and prudent decisions. 

By the end of the 19^th century, libertarianism was challenged by the strand of new liberalism, which, in the U.S., ushered in the Progressive Era.  What came of that strand were the New Deal in the U.S. and, under the influence of socialist ideas, the welfare-state economy and democratic socialism in Europe.  The premise of new liberalism was its distrust in the fairness of opportunities and outcomes and the possible harm of self-centered liberalism on the common good.  That more socio-centric liberalism saw economic outcomes associated with poverty, sickness, illiteracy, and social decay as detrimental to the capacity (even the right) of the individual to act as a free agent – think of Roosevelt’s freedom from want.  Therefore, it is the duty of the government to set the individual free from certain debilitating conditions regardless of individual abilities or fortunes.    

Because liberalism can apply to different areas of human activity and thought, it can split a person’s stance toward it.  A person can believe in state regulation of the economy and also have liberal social and moral values.  Or consider the American Constitution with its distrust of the individual to directly make political choices (the case of Electors) while it grants individuals full agency in economic choices.  

The pitfalls of liberalism can be found in its extreme forms of certainty for moral and epistemological superiority and the positive role of top-down governance.  The current criticism of liberalism in America focuses on attempts by liberals in the academy, the media and the arts to impose their understanding of correct social and political thought and speech in general.  Although the freedom of thought and beliefs has also suffered in the hands of illiberal American movements (a topic for another post) it is now the liberals that stand accused of practicing some form of a cancel culture on their opponents.  

The tension between individual-centric and socio-centric liberalism is another difficult challenge to liberalism.  Favoring individual freedom too much is vulnerable to unchecked and irresponsible excesses that can harm the whole.  Too much preoccupation with the collective interest can lead to excessive top-down governance that goes beyond the consent of citizens. 

Finally, global problems arising due to threats from climate change and pandemics or the disruptive effects of new technologies, are as serious a challenge to liberalism (how much freedom to cede) as they are to conservatism (how much loss in tradition and authority to tolerate).

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, liberalism has been a positive force for human progress and its prerequisite of consent allows it to reflect the values, concerns and aspirations of the governed.  It does that by moving the needle either toward the freedom of the individual or toward the interests of the whole.  The balance is not always perfect but it is better than the alternative.

I tend to believe the problem with ideologies is that they are products of the social, political and economic conditions of their times.  As such they reflect the intellectual understanding of these conditions.  As conditions change, ideologies risk losing the resonance they originally had or even worse their relevance.  I am afraid this is the case of conservatism, and especially classical conservatism.   

I came to this topic after reading what traditional conservative thinkers have to say about the chasm that has opened between the conservatism exemplified by the populist base of the Republican Party and classical conservatism.  (Of course, there is also a critical appraisal of the new liberalism as exemplified by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.)

As a matter of historical interest, the term conservatism was first used by the French diplomat Francois-Auguste Rene vicomte de Chateaubriand in 1815 when the Bourbon monarchy was restored back to the French throne.  However, the intellectual father of conservatism is Edmund Burke, the 18^th century British-Irish statesman and intellectual.  Burke’s conservatism was premised on the ideas of David Hume and Adam Smith that sentiments, not reason, are the leading factors that explain human behavior.

According to Burke, humans, driven by passion and emotions, are unable to put reason to good and effective use when it comes to building social and political systems.  Therefore, the safest course of action is to rely on traditions and existing institutions, such as the family, community, organized religion, and the political order.  Practiced traditions and institutions in place reflect the wisdom of past generations and should be changed only gradually and cautiously.  This skepticism toward reason, or epistemological modesty (as David Brooks of the New York Times calls it) is behind the conservative resistance to state-led or top-down dictated reforms.  That is, any kind of social engineering is fated to fail since we do not understand human nature and, thus we cannot draw any predictable connection between planned reforms and ultimate results.

Classical conservatism does not consider society as a mere collection of individuals but rather as an organic whole whose common good is attained through the selfless contributions of all its members.  Because classical conservatism considers human nature to be fallible and fickle, individual discipline is assured by observing the norms of the social, religious, and political authorities.  Classical conservatism requires individuals to rely on and live by moral, social and political tradition and accept inequality and social ills as part of an imperfect world and imperfect institutions created as a matter of how nature works.  This explains the much wider acceptance of inequities among conservatives to this day.

So, what could go wrong in societies organized under conservative principles?  Here is what David Brooks has to say on this question.  In real life, conservative epistemological modesty can turn into anti-intellectualism and a contempt for learning and expertise; love of community can turn into xenophobia, parochialism and anti-pluralism; and social change can be regarded as evidence of moral decline.  Brett Stephens, the NYT columnist, fears that American conservatism has degenerated to mere anti-liberalism without any viable political message of its own.

There are, however, more fundamental drawbacks that prevent conservatism to stay relevant in an evolving world.  Edmund Burke himself believed that economic interests should be subordinated to the conservative social ethic and capitalism should be subordinated to the medieval social tradition.  His beliefs were justified.  Capitalism survives on constant innovation and creative destruction.  It requires societies to adapt demographically, institutionally and technologically in order to thrive.  Hence, the gradualist and tentative adaptation conservatism prescribes is unsustainable.  Furthermore, capitalism puts the individual’s interests, not society’s, at the center of decision making and optimization.  It is the individual’s utility or economic gain that must be maximized.  The spillover effects on the whole (community or country) are beyond the immediate concern of the decision rules of capitalist agents (individuals or firms).  

There is also tension between conservatism and the needs of modern world.  How can conservatism address the need to fight the dangers from climate change or life-threatening pandemics?  The response to such global threats requires we upend some traditions or rely on top-down planning and action.  Moreover, this approach demands collective action on a scale that only organized governments and science can mount.   Conservatism distrusts all these. 

Conservative ideals also have come to clash with conservative policies.  Conservatism requires that it supports policies that preserve the social fabric, which depends on the well-being of individuals, families, and their communities.  Heeding Burke’s concerns, conservatism ought to be first in the effort to offset the deleterious effects of capitalism on the stability of traditions and institutions.  Instead, modern-day conservatism is the primary defender of unfettered capitalism.  The fear of government inspired and led initiatives and solutions, renders conservatism incapable of fighting the corrosive effects of economic interests on the things it values the most: stability of traditions and social infrastructure. 

Finally, conservatism can stand in the way of social and political progress.  The traditions it finds defensible may be the result of ill-conceived ideas about equality of races, genders and people in general.  Or they may be the result of ill-gotten power concentrated in the hands of the few.  Such were the traditions and powers the French Revolution rallied against.  The pursuit of equality through radical than incremental means was the purpose of the American Civil War.  Conservative gradualism and respect for the old can often solidify the unacceptable than work toward social progress.

To remain relevant, conservatism has to accept that the established order of the day is not necessarily the best humanity can achieve.  And to guard against the deterioration of the human condition it has to refocus again on the common good of the society as we move on to future challenges.

This week is Davos week.  In normal times, presidents, prime ministers, politicians, big business shots, and “thought” leaders would gather at Davos, Switzerland in the annual meeting sponsored by the World Economic Forum.  Around the conference venues scores of mostly young people would demonstrate against this modern-day “Holly Alliance” that tries to shape the global order.  Due to covid-19, however, the in-person gathering has been postponed for the summer.  Still an online collection of papers and speeches are available in case you are interested.

The WEF was set up by a Swiss, Klaus Schwab, some 50 years ago.  The purpose was to bring together important figures to ponder about big world problems and propose solutions.  Over time, it became the Alpine substitute of sunny golf course hobnobbing.  As David Gelles of New York Times put it “Davos is a weeklong schmooze fest where billionaires and autocrats mingle; companies make climate pledges; and economists discuss inequality.” And of course, once the last good-byes are over, all goes back to square one.  The following year the same, more or less, participants come back, with renewed determination to meet the last year’s promises.   

Anand Diridharadas (author of Winners Take All) has a more damning opinion about Davos and similar congregations of the rich and powerful.  He writes if we expect the same people that have brought us all that ails the world to remedy our problems, then we are fooling ourselves.

On paper, the aims of the WEF sound lofty.  In 2020, following the adoption of Stakeholder capitalism by the Business Roundtable, the WEF went all out for it in its annual meeting.  Stakeholder capitalism has been a dear topic to WEF founder K. Schwab.  A bit defensively, he has clarified that his intention is not to change the economic system but rather to turn it to responsible capitalism.  He should not worry.  Given the characters he invites to his big party not only the economic system is not in danger of being changed; responsible capitalism is hardly in the distant horizon.  As the New York Times has reported, the same big companies that make idealistic proclamations for social progress and climate sustainability are those making hefty contributions to the campaigns of politicians that fight both.

Twenty-twenty was not a good year for WEF.  Covid had turned into a pandemic and countries started to come down on their people with lockdowns and mandates.  There was also talk of fast-tracked vaccines to be administered on a global scale.  Unwittingly, WEF’s theme for 2020 was The Great Reset.  This did not go well with the nascent movement of vaccine conspiracists.  The Great Reset aimed at resetting the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models, and the management of global commons.  To conspiracists, this sounded like a Big Brother takeover of peoples’ lives.  The fact that Bill Gates, one of the high priests at Davos, is also the champion of global health projects, including vaccines and vaccination programs, didn’t go well either with conspiracists. 

Setting aside the fear and paranoia about The Great Reset, there is mainstream criticism of the WEF and its operations both from the right and the left.  Michael Rectenwald, Chief Academic Officer of the conservative group American Scholars, wrote a scathing piece in Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  He decries WEF’s stakeholder capitalism as disguised corporate socialism or communist capitalism.  He claims the WEF-endorsed index of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) principles is a tool to squeeze out nonconforming firms that score low.  To him the true goal of The Great Reset is to allow few big corporations to monopolize economic activity around the world.  He writes that whereas China moved to combine communism with capitalism, the West is moving (under the influence of WEF) toward a combination of democracy with economic socialism.

On the left, Ivan Wecke writes in the online forum Open Democracy that WEF sponsors a version of stakeholder capitalism in which governments are reduced to one of the multiple stakeholders to be managed and catered to by big corporations.  In other words, big business is willing to adopt stakeholder capitalism because it will place it at the driver’s seat.  To Wecke, the signing of a strategic agreement between the UN and WEF in 2019 is proof of how the closed club of WEF bosses intends to replace the world body in cross-national negotiations.  Wecke says: look at how Big Pharma succeeded to kill the WHO initiative to suspend the intellectual rights on vaccines that could speed up production for the benefit of poor countries.

Excoriated by fringe and mainstream critics, WEF chose for its 2022 meetings the theme The Year to Rebuilt Trust.  How can you build trust though when those writing the music score are unelected corporate bosses and the average Joe and Jane are not invited to the party.  There is a sprinkling of community and social entrepreneurship leaders invited but only to be charitably congratulated for the work they do to mitigate part of the social and environmental damage done by the corporate chieftains.  We keep failing to recognize that as we lengthen the distance between those at the top of decision making and those at the bottom, we help create swamps of distrust and fantastical scenarios.  Gatherings like that in Davos add insult to injury when they tell the rest of us “Here, see.  We care about the world and because we know your problems and concerns, we ‘ll find win-win solutions for everybody.”  It doesn’t work like that.

If the Davos gatherings serve anything is as a testing ground of ideas about governance models and the place of big business in them.  There seem to be three distinct models emerging.  One is Putin’s system in which big business (the oligarchs) pledge obedience to an autocratic head of state in exchange for political cover.  The second is the Chinese model, in which big business serves the Communist’s Party agenda.  And the third model is the Western one.  Here power is still more diffused between politicians, elites, business, and ordinary folks.  Big business buys influence through campaign contributions and funding “think” tanks.  To appease the people, big business engages in some popular causes that eventually are shaped by legislation under the influence of campaign money.  And so the world turns. 

Expect next year the Davos theme to be one that aims to reassure us that they are on the right track and, oh yes, they do feel our pain. 

Most often, crises do not come out of the blue.  Their causes may go back a long, long time.  Today, the US is in a political crisis concerning the identity and functioning of its political system.  Is the US a genuine democracy? Do political minorities have too much power? Is the right to vote secured and unabridged?  These questions pop up daily with frequency not seen before in our life-times.

Naturally, when such questions arise people look at the foundational law of the country, that is, the Constitution, and its Framers.  There is no denying that despite its endurance through time, judged by the moral and political standards of our times, the American Constitution was a flawed foundational document.  

The gravest of its flaws was that it sacrificed the abolition of slavery to the interests of founding the new Republic.  And consistent with the times, it denied women the voting right.  It took a bloody civil war and a long popular movement to cast these flaws away.  There are though other provisions which are still with us and very much at the center of our political crisis.  No direct vote to elect the President; equal State representation in the Senate regardless of population size; and granting the States the right to set voting laws and the selection of Electors in a manner of their choosing.

Collectively, these latter constitutional provisions compromise the principal feature of democratic governance: that in a democracy it is the majority that rules.  Of course, the drafters of the Constitution were aware of this principle.  So, why didn’t they incorporate it in the Constitution?  Mostly because they had to stich a country out of thirteen states with divergent interests.  But also because they were engaging in an innovative nation-building effort with no contemporary examples to guide them, and thus they were destined to commit errors.  To their credit, however, they tried hard to come up with a durable political system.  Actually, their effort in that regard stands in stark contrast to our own inability to address the current political crisis which threatens to jeopardize the future of the country as a democracy. 

A lot has been written about the motives, frames of mind, and the imperatives on the ground that went into the writing of the Constitution.  One book that tries to illuminate what informed the design of the Constitution is First Principles by Thomas Ricks.  It reviews the intellectual background of the major protagonists of the American Revolution and explains how that shaped their ideas that gave us the Declaration of Independence and more importantly the Constitution.  We do know that most of the Founding Fathers were intellectual products of the Enlightenment with its reliance on Reason as the guiding force of human behavior.  Less known is their study of and fascination with Greek and Roman history, and especially, with political figures of honor and courage and the political workings of Greek city-states and the Roman Republic.

In their romanticized and idealized understanding of classical antiquity, the first thing that impressed the Founding Fathers was virtue and commitment to the public good.  “There must be a positive Passion for the public good, and the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republic Government, nor any real Liberty.” is what John Adams wrote to a friend.

The second great concern of the Framers was the rise of an autocratic leader.  Cincinnatus, who withdrew to his farm after saving Rome in 458 BCE, was the role model of a patriotic disinterested public figure whereas Caesar was the dreaded role model of a would-be autocrat.  Cato and Cicero, two Romans who sacrificed their lives to save Roman Republicanism, were exactly the type of citizens Adams had envisioned in the above quote.

However, as soon as the arduous and challenging task of drafting the Constitution started, reliance on personal virtue gave way to the practicality of checks and balances.  One vexing issue was how to balance the interests of the national government with those of the States.  Madison believed that the interests of the States were less divided by size and more by other factors, like their stance toward slavery.  How prescient he was!  Today, large and small states coalesce under the Blue and Red banners, respectively.  

Nonetheless, other delegates to the Constitutional Convention had a different model in mind as they argued for equal representation in the Senate.  Their model was the Amphictyonic League, a loose Confederation of Greek city-states, which granted equal representation to all member cities.  Of course, one cannot help but suspect that those delegates were using that ancient system to mask their desire to protect the particular economic stakes of their States, especially the preservation of slavery in the South.  In the end, the argument for a stronger central government, espoused by Madison and Hamilton, gave way to more robust State rights.

We know that many of the Founding Fathers were distrustful of direct election of officials.  On that, they had no other contemporary democratic government to draw from.  The excesses of the French Revolution and Aristotle’s view that democracies can turn to tyrannies of the mob would not help them either in this connection.  The generally low education of their contemporary fellow Americans also contributed to the elitist bias that better-informed notables had to mediate the people’s choices.  The result of these apprehensions was a system of rules that have often frustrated the will of the majority.

In the end, the Constitution was a balancing act in the face of competing interests and above all a product of its time.  As such it served more as a treaty between States than a national charter.  Instead of fully enshrining power with the people, its many safeguards against abuse have often proved to be counterproductive.  Whether they knew it or not, the Framers of the Constitution had created a constitutional order that in the end relied more on personal virtue than institutional structure.  In 2020, it all came down to the honor of a limited number of citizens to uphold the constitutional order.

There is no guarantee though this will always save us.  We should rather heed Hamilton’s admonition that “Reliance on patriotism has been the source of many of our errors.”  Although good citizenship will always be the keystone of good governance, American democracy will survive only if the votes of the people count without disenfranchisement or partisan interference.

As the end of 2021 approaches, I decided to reflect on the bigger picture that lies in the background of this year’s blogposts.  The issues in these posts are, of course, written within their contemporary context, but they are the products of long historical processes and transformations.  I have often referenced the distant past to show how the present is different.  This help us understand that many institutions and practices of modern life were not always the norm for the human race.   

One way to grasp the bigger picture is to look at trends.  Trends connect points of the past to the present and help us to project into the future.  They help us discern whether we have made progress or not and where we are headed if we continue in the same way.   A huge advantage we humans have is a strong collective memory of our life on earth thanks to our ability to pass knowledge and information from one generation to the next.  This way we can study our history and discover the mega-trends and the tipping points that moved us from one historical phase to the next.  That can be very instructive, besides being fascinating.  That’s why we appreciate books like Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,” Yuval Harari’s “Sapiens,” and the most recent “The Dawn of Everything” of David Graeber and David Wengrow.

For trends to take hold there need to be some underlying developments that change the flow of history as they push us toward a new direction.  As we enter a new path, we are compelled to design and adopt new ways to optimize our chances for survival and success.  The new ways may not necessarily be good for everybody.  Sometimes, they may not be good for anyone.  I am not sure we can judge the paths humanity has taken from a moral standpoint.  But we can see what they have spawned and whether we can do better the next time we face a new path.  So, here is my list of some of the powerful developments that took us into new paths.

The loss of egalitarian culture.  It came with the emergence of agriculture and the founding of cities.  It created hierarchies of power and the classification of people into rulers and ruled, upper-class and lower-class.  It also brought the division of labor that further segregated people by social and economic status.  Work was turned from a collaborative effort to a commodity item to be leased in the marketplace or even obtained through slavery.  We still see this in the authority and power employers exercise over workers.  And to claim a better place in the division of labor we strive for exclusive credentials, thus, creating a privileged meritocratic class.

Our elevation to God’s favorite creature.  This belief completes the loss of the egalitarian culture.  Not only we have various hierarchies within human societies; we also rationalize humans as the rulers of the planet.  To buttress this privilege, we come to believe we are unique in being endowed with minds and emotions.  Our survival and well-being take precedence over all other species. 

The move from basic needs to wants of choice.  This has been called the malady of infinite wants.  The constant multiplication of wants we feel we have to meet puts pressure on natural resources, taxes our environment and turns other species into expendable resources.  Satisfying as many wants as we can is another way to raise our profile and separate us from others, that is, it is another by-product of the loss of egalitarian culture.  To produce what it takes to satisfy an ever-growing number of needs and wants makes it imperative that we produce at neck-breaking speeds and quantities, thus, leading us to the tyranny of efficiency.

The loosening of family and social ties.  Over many centuries we have moved away from the institution of extended family to the nuclear family comprised of parents and children.  In past traditional family environments, we had a network of relatives living in close proximity to support us in times of economic, health or other kinds of crises.  Children would learn traditions and social and moral norms from a broader circle of people.  The need for labor mobility, the development of impersonal markets and the rise of individualism unfettered by family constraints ushered in the break-up of extended families.  Today’s digital technology brings people together online but it also facilitates distant communication.  The more we can come together technologically the more we can distance ourselves physically.  Our most immediate social ties used to be with people in our locale.  Now they are with people scattered around the globe. 

The greatest force behind all paths we have taken is, of course, our biological endowment with large and sophisticated brains.  Our brains also happen to be curious and innovative in order to overcome obstacles and challenges thrown at us by nature and our own self-interests.  Our brains seem though to always get overexcited about the new possibilities and frontiers they open for us and to ignore or miscalculate the potential dangers.  When the hunter/gatherers invented agriculture, they had, in all likelihood, no idea what a new world order they were entering.  The same way, as we are now at the cusp of mastering Artificial Intelligence, we may be ready to enter its world with the same ignorance or miscalculation. 

The question is whether we have any capacity to shape our future based on what we know about the past or we are fated to stumble from one path to another and then struggle to make things right and find a new meaning.  The good thing is the same curious and innovative brains that push us into new paths are also good in finding new meanings out of new realities.