Adam's Ideas

Coyotes and Indians

A few days after we moved to New Mexico we saw two coyotes just a few hundred yards from our house, which is in the middle of Santa Fe. Since then we’ve seen single coyotes several times, always near a small arroyo down the street. Neighbors tell us they are common, though they don’t venture far from the arroyo.

Like most locals, I expect, we look kindly on the coyotes. They are a dash of southwestern color and confirm that the Wild West is not entirely gone. We share half-in-jest warnings to watch our dogs. Just knowing there are coyotes in the neighborhood makes one a bit more alert and alive.

Nudged by the local fauna, a month ago I bought a paperback called Coyote America, by Dan Flores, a Santa Fe based historian. It was an eye-opener. Flores traces coyote history, from the distant past—coyotes, along with all canids, originated in the American southwest—to today. Coyotes are thriving, thank you, and have recently expanded their range to include almost all of the United States and Canada. They have learned to get along well with man and show up in cities big and small, feasting on the mice and rats that accompany human settlements.

Modern civilization has accidentally done several things to benefit the coyote, despite a determined extermination campaign that has lasted 100 years and is not quite done even today. First, our desire to make the West safe for sheep and cattle proved almost completely effective in wiping out wolves, the coyotes’ greatest enemy. Wolves see coyotes as competitors and will often hunt and kill them, or keep them away from food. The last wild wolves in the lower 48 were done away with in the 1920s. Without wolves, coyotes expanded their territories and generally had the wilderness to themselves.

Another boon to the coyote happened in the late 19th century, when reformers took aim at the packs of wild dogs that lived in virtually every American city. We sent out dog-catchers, rounded them up, and put them in pounds. Soon dogs were on leashes or behind fences, and our cities were easy pickings for enterprising coyotes.

This is not to say, however, that coyotes have had it easy. For most of the late 19th and 20th century America waged a no-holds-barred war on coyotes. State and federal bounties incentivized constant killing, but as governments got involved, these retail measures gave way to wholesale trapping and poisoning, mostly with strychnine. Full-time professionals backed by government bureaucrats made it their business to wipe coyotes from the face of the earth. The rationale was the threat posed to big game like deer and elk, and the desire to make the West a sportsman’s paradise. (The innocuously named Biological Survey, part of the then-new Forest Service, took the lead early in the 20th century. Ranchers argued that if the government was going to create protected forest areas where predators could hide and multiply, then the government was obliged to keep them under control). When scientific studies were undertaken in the 1920s it turned out coyotes had minimal impact on game animals, but this didn’t stop the killing, which had taken on a life of its own. Ranchers and farmers wanted coyotes gone and dominated politics in most Western states.

The popular image of the coyote was overwhelmingly negative—it was seen as an ugly, cowardly, pest, of no more intrinsic value than a rattlesnake or tarantula. Flores blames Mark Twain for a good part of this bad press. Twain penned an oft-quoted description of coyotes in his 1872 book Roughing It that called them “spiritless and cowardly,” “coarse-haired and pitiful,” and so on. This became conventional wisdom, repeated by other observers who often contrasted the coyote negatively with the supposedly more noble wolf. Coyotes were said to be barely worth the price of the bullets needed to dispatch them.

Why, despite these assaults, coyotes didn’t go the way of wolves and grizzlies and mountain lions—that is, disappear—is a fascinating story. For one thing, coyotes respond to pressure by increasing the size of their litters. For another, they are adaptable, able to live in close proximity to man, eating our chickens and lambs as well as our garbage and rats, finding places to hide and breed in our midst. Coyotes are highly flexible in their intra-species relations, sometimes living and hunting in large packs, but able to operate in pairs or solo as circumstances dictate. Coyote behavior has been shaped by its position as a middle predator, always under threat from wolves and larger competitors. Coyotes long ago learned to be cunning, wary, and opportunistic.

Their continued survival of course infuriated the coyote-killers. After World War II the government geared up for a final solution, using new poisons developed during the war. But luckily for coyotes the tide began to turn. The new science of ecology taught that predators like the coyote were not just pests but played a vital role in keeping the environment in balance. The widespread use of poisons came to be seen as dangerous to other wildlife and to the entire food chain, including man. The sheep industry declined, and there was less pressure from below on government to continue with extermination. And the broader culture began to embrace the American wilderness and abandon the dream of a West wholly fenced in and tamed.

We can even thank Hollywood. Walt Disney in the 1950s put out a series of cartoons, and eventually a full-length feature called “The Coyote’s Lament,” which protested the bad treatment of coyotes. Flores remembers this as a turning point in his own views. Wiley Coyote wormed his way into every living room.

In short, the White Man moved a little way towards seeing the coyote the way the American Indian always has. For many tribes in the West, Coyote was a central figure in myth and story: the creator, the trickster, a bundle of appetites whose schemes often go awry, but also a cunning mediator between gods and men. Flores contrasts the affection and deep connection to Coyote felt by Native Americans with the pathological hatred and misunderstanding of most white settlers. It makes for sad and uncomfortable reading.

After reading Coyote America I dipped into the ethnographer Barry Lopez’s 1977 compilation of Coyote stories, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping With His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America. Lopez tells us that “No other personality is as old, as well known, or as widely distributed among the tribes as Coyote.” Coyote stories, as Lopez warns the reader, are not always simple or fit for children; Coyote is full of lust and does many terrible things. “Coyote stories detailed tribal origins; they emphasized a world view thought to be a correct one; and they dramatized the value of proper behavior. To participate in the stories by listening to them was to renew one’s sense of tribal identity. For youngsters, the stories were a reminder of the right way to do things—so often, of course, not Coyote’s way.”

Native Americans didn’t romanticize the coyote or make him a cuddly Disney character; they built on the coyote’s real traits of wiliness and adaptability to create an elemental character of great power. It goes without saying that the thought of doing away with coyotes never crossed their mind.

Here in the Southwest you are forced to confront the history of Native American interactions with Europeans, first the Spanish and then Anglo-Americans. It is impossible not to see the parallels between how Anglo-Americans have treated both coyotes and Indians. After initial cautious encounters we became convinced that it was impossible to co-exist. “Civilization” and Manifest Destiny were deemed incompatible with untamed predators, whether people or animals. Sometimes in hot fury, sometimes more in sorrow than anger, we pursued an implacable policy of extermination punctuated by half-hearted efforts to give the enemy a remote place of sanctuary. We created myths of inferiority and threat that justified our actions. We used the most extreme methods—biological warfare (tuberculosis-infected buffalo skins given to Indians, infectious mange deliberately spread to wolves and coyotes), habitat destruction, traps, poisons. Only after thoroughly transforming and destroying the natural environment that each depended on for survival, and bringing both to the brink of elimination, did we begin to regret what we had done.

Today coyotes as a species are thriving, even if attitudes remain mixed. (Here in New Mexico, like many Western states, hunting clubs and outfitters regularly hold coyote shoots, offering prizes for the most coyotes, the biggest coyote, etc. You don’t need a license, and it is always open season.) In contrast the damage done to Native Americans, in terms of their living culture, seems sadly to be permanent and irreversible. A particularly offensive strategy used with Native Americans that has no parallel for coyotes was the policy of forced assimilation. Since the beginning of the Republic it was thought the height of tolerance to offer Native Americans the chance to change themselves into modern Europeans; if they succeeded, they might be accepted as citizens. To this end Native Americans were forced onto reservations, and children were taken from their parents, to be turned into good Christians and farmers.

While we still have coyotes, Coyote is barely alive, eking out an existence on reservations and in scholarly studies. I doubt my ability, being old and set in my ways, to see the world in a way that includes Coyote, no matter how many stories I read. I hope I’m wrong. I look forward to future encounters near the arroyo.

On New Year’s Eve my wife and I went to something called the “Cosmic Walk” at our local Unitarian Universalist congregation in Santa Fe. This was the first I had heard of this ceremony, which apparently is fairly common in the UU world and elsewhere. It’s frequently held at the Solstice or at New Year’s. We gathered inside where a large spiral had been laid out with evergreen branches. At the center was a bowl with a flame, and smaller bowls with colored LED bulbs. As our minister read from a prepared script, we took turns walking into the spiral, taking a bulb, turning it on, and as we retraced our steps placing it in small bowls scattered at intervals along the spiral. Each bulb was meant to represent a milestone in cosmic history.

The script (here is an example, not the exact one we heard, but similar: https://deeptimejourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CosmicWalk.pdf.). It starts with the Big Bang and goes through the major developments from then until today: the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets; the coming to be of water, oxygen, and other elements on earth; the beginning of life; the evolution of animals and plants; the origins of mammals, apes, and man; and highlights of human history such as the development of speech, fire, agriculture, religion, and science. It ends today with our awareness of this complex history as revealed in modern science.

The ritual cultivates a twofold sense of wonder: first at the mystery of it all, that there is something rather than nothing and that all this ‘something’ comes from an unknown and possibly unknowable ‘seed’ existing before there was space or time. And second, that somehow all this development and history makes ‘us’ possible. The universe improbably brings forth a being that can be aware of and at least partially know the universe.

I think cultivating wonder is a good thing—philosophy/science begins with wonder, as Socrates and Aristotle told us, and it is spiritually beneficial to be reminded of the small place that we as individuals and as a species play in this large story. In the 150 feet or so of the spiral, human beings are present in only the last inch. So I enjoyed the ritual and its message.

Still, some things about it started me, well, wondering. First, the attempt to use science to invoke wonder and awe is interesting. The ceremony emphasizes the Mystery of the beginning and the further Mystery of the unfolding. A common criticism of science, however, is that it undermines our sense of wonder. Modern science doesn’t see the universe as a reflection of God’s design, or as filled with perfect circular motions, or as influencing us via the movement of the stars and planets. Instead, science tells us the universe is nothing but matter and energy, devoid of purpose or direction, cold and overwhelmingly lifeless.

When Socrates and Aristotle tell us that philosophy, which for them was indistinguishable from science, begins in wonder, it’s not clear whether ‘wonder’ is a good thing. As they describe it, wonder is a kind of perplexity that drives us to think and learn and ultimately replace wonder with knowledge. We begin by wondering at what seem to be the regular motions of the stars and the irregular ones of the planets, but now that we have precisely mapped these motions and sent probes to the planets, revealing they are made of the same stuff we are familiar with here on earth, isn’t it slightly ridiculous to keep wondering? There are plenty of interesting details we still aren’t sure of, but we seem to be in the mopping up stage—hardly cause for wonder.

Parts of the Cosmic Walk narrative seem tailored to teach us that the development of the universe has a direction, namely to create human beings. There is a set of arguments put forth mostly by theologians that the natural laws governing the universe show intelligent design or purpose; if various physical constants were different in only small ways, for instance, the conditions for life would supposedly be impossible. Can it be accidental that the great forces of attraction and repulsion in the universe are so well balanced that it is possible for any kind of stability at all? Is it accidental that exploding suns broadcast heavy elements that turn into planets with the exact chemical properties needed to create life? The “Cosmic Walk” narrative alludes to such arguments.

This is a thesis that, if true, would indeed be wonderful but is, to put it mildly, not one that most physicists or biologists would endorse. The standard scientific view is that the universe changes in accord with laws of nature that are the same everywhere, and that the evolution of galaxies and stars and life is no more designed to create human beings than it is to create bacteria or thunderstorms or supernovae or any other natural phenomenon.

As I listened I was reminded of a line of thought in Catholicism that tries to reconcile science and especially evolutionary theory with Christianity. And when I went home and started investigating, it turns out that is in fact the source: according to one account, the Cosmic Walk “was created in the mid 1980s by Sr. Miriam Therese MacGillis of Genesis Farm in New Jersey, who was inspired by the “New Story,” as then told by Thomas Berry.” ¹ I hadn’t head of Berry, but a few searches revealed he was an American Catholic priest who died in 2009, and called himself a ‘cosmologist’ or ‘eco theologian.” Berry, according to Wikipedia, “studied and was influenced by the work of Teilhard de Chardin and was president of the American Teilhard Association (1975–1987).”

Teilhard de Chardin is someone I encountered with enthusiasm in my youth through a book called The Phenomenon of Man, written in the mid-50s. It’s a somewhat crazy combination of Catholicism (de Chardin was a Jesuit priest) and evolutionary theory (he was also a trained anthropologist who spent years doing original work in China and India on ancient man), arguing that the history of the universe tends to greater and greater complexity and consciousness. This culminates at some time, fairly soon, in the Omega Point where the universe as a whole becomes a coherent, self-aware whole. All this is directed by Christ.

De Chardin is not exactly an orthodox Catholic—the Jesuits banned him from teaching, and his books were officially disavowed—so I was surprised to see that he still has tremendous influence. Recent conservative popes including John Paul II and Benedict VI have praised him. Benedict wrote: “Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the “Noosphere” in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its fullness.” The current Pope Francis mentions him positively in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, which focuses on the environment and our relation to the planet. De Chardin is valued, it seems, for his ability to absorb modern science and in particular evolutionary theory, long a bete noir for believers, into Christianity.

The Cosmic Walk is not explicitly Christian or even religious, but the notion of the universe as a cosmos, an ordered whole designed to bring forth human beings, seems central to its message. Does the existence of human beings—or possibly other beings on other planets who are self-conscious and can know the cosmic order—‘prove’ that the universe was intended from the beginning to be hospitable to us? That, as the Cosmic Walk implies, there is a moral arc from a hot cloud of gas, to a sea of chemicals, to solitary single-celled animals, to cooperation between cells, to animals that care for their young and flowering plants that ‘cooperate’ with flying insects, and ultimately to social animals that create culture?

De Chardin’s vision seems very pagan. There is a Divine Force immanent in the world, and in us. Not outside it. Ross Douthat, a perceptive Catholic writer and New York Times columnist, recently wrote about the rise of paganism in America. ² Douthat defines paganism as meaning “that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.” Douthat is critical of today’s paganism because he thinks it doesn’t offer believers much help in the face of disaster, sickness, and the other ills that flesh is heir to. It therefore appeals more to the privileged than the poor and weak. A transcendent God can intervene in the world on behalf of the helpless, and offer an afterlife beyond the reach of this world.

But Douthat respects, even if he does not endorse, the neo-pagan critique of traditional Christianity, that it sunders us from the world. It devalues nature, and especially many aspects of human nature, in favor of denial and asceticism; your essence is not of this world. Classical philosophy, taken up enthusiastically by certain Christian thinkers, reinforced this tendency to denigrate the natural world in favor of a ‘higher’ sphere of unchanging Being. (Nietzsche famously called Christianity “Platonism for the masses.”).

The Cosmic Walk is all about harmony between nature and man, and also about enlisting science in the service of this harmony. The question is, can science be reconciled with paganism? A pagan sensibility is about living closer to nature and respecting, indeed venerating, the world that man is part of. Modern science in contrast is motivated by the desire to somehow stand outside nature, and to subordinate and manipulate it. It was my conclusion, when long ago I studied Bacon and Descartes and the founders of modern science, that their project was in key ways an extension of a Christian worldview, where the natural world was derivative from and inferior to an external power. But instead of God, now Man would be the master. To do this, however, we needed to stop trying to understand the world; we only needed to be able to accurately describe it.

For most of us, today’s science is as opaque and mysterious as the doctrine of the Trinity or Aristotle’s metaphysics. We take its teachings about quantum paradoxes, and what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang, on faith. It tells us about a natural world that is not just stranger than we imagine, but than we can imagine. Ultimately, there is no scientific reason to think that our little brains, designed to help us survive from day to day, are adequate to unravel the mysteries of the universe.

Given this, yes, a certain kind of wonder is appropriate, but less at how well we fit in the universe than at its ultimate impenetrability. Post-Aristotelian science teaches us to be skeptical of claims that we are outside of nature or different in kind from other animals and other beings. To that extent it reconciles us with the world. But it doesn’t promise an intelligible world, or a world where man feels at home.

Understanding and Restoring Freedom: A Multi-Dimensional View

Introduction

Here in America I think we have a very serious problem with the way we talk about and understand ‘freedom.’ Freedom is one our most precious words. It is central to our self-understanding as Americans, and how we see ourselves in the world and in history. We invoke it frequently, but often in such a cramped and thoughtless way that we run the risk of misunderstanding what freedom means, how to gain it, and how to preserve it.

To state the problem in its simplest terms, America has two distinct political and intellectual traditions regarding freedom. The first, which is dominant today and has been dominant at various times in our past, understands freedom as the absence of external coercion. Defending individual rights and property rights, with the bare minimum of coercion needed to protect Americans from crime and foreign enemies, is the touchstone for judging government. Good government gives individuals the maximum of liberty to interact with one another and employ their talents in a market system to acquire wealth and develop the economy. I will call this the libertarian tradition. In America this vision is associated closely with Jefferson and Reagan, and finds its finest expression in the Declaration of Independence and its ringing claim that every human being is endowed with inalienable rights.

The second tradition sees freedom embodied in democracy and in the mechanisms for determining the public interest and the well-being of the nation and its citizens. Freedom is realized when citizens act together as equals to further the common good. Good government is actively engaged in developing the economy, helping the disadvantaged, and preventing the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands. I will call this the democratic tradition. In America this vision is associated closely with Hamilton, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts and finds its finest expression in the Constitution and its preamble calling on “We the People” to take collective action to secure the blessings of liberty and promote the general welfare.

Of course both traditions intertwine in American history, and for most Americans it is a matter of course that individual rights and participatory democracy are two sides of a coin. There is a natural pendulum swing between periods when one tradition or the other is ascendant, and Americans are taught that both must be taken into account: the will of the majority is decisive in selecting leaders and making policy and law, but majority will is limited by the need to respect individual rights to free speech, due process, etc. However, there is an underlying tension between the two traditions that can lead enthusiasts for liberty to see democracy as a threat to property and freedom, and enthusiasts for democracy to see a too zealous regard for rights as an unacceptable limitation on popular will.

A touchstone for how you see these traditions is how you interpret the Boston Tea Party. Did American patriots throw boxes of tea overboard to say “don’t tread on me”— we don’t like taxes and we don’t want government telling us what to do—as the contemporary ‘Tea Party’ would have it? Or was the message that we want to impose our own taxes and, with democracy as the vehicle, take charge of government for the public good? Today the former understanding is dominant, but I believe the latter is more accurate.

Today we face a Janus-like challenge from both directions. The first and most far-reaching comes from libertarians who seek to use the power of wealth to entrench an oligarchy protected by legal and institutional limits on democracy. Distrust of government, complacency about the strength of our institutions, and poor understanding of how government contributes to individual liberty, have allowed enemies of democracy to dominate our public discourse. For today’s would-be oligarchs, property rights take precedence over democratic efforts to regulate and tax. They seek to hem in the popular will by lobbying, throwing money at politicians, voter suppression, gerrymandering, control of the courts, and flooding public discourse with subsidized experts. The contemporary libertarian-dominated Republican Party, although it controls and is responsible for the national government, has no agenda for actually governing and is instead at work actively undermining the capacity of the federal government.

The second threat is more recent and takes the form of a reactionary populism energized by anger over ‘political correctness’ and the assertion of equal rights by minorities, women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community. The personality cult around Donald Trump rests on the white majority’s view that its interests are being thwarted, and its identity demeaned, by an excessive concern for these other groups. An often tone-deaf progressive movement has helped fuel today’s populism by focusing relentlessly on the grievances of excluded groups and America’s sins, without a more inclusive message.

I think we can counter these trends with a three-part liberal agenda.

• Reinvigorating and reforming our democratic institutions to make words like ‘citizenship,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘government’ sources of pride, not the butt of jokes.

• Fighting the partisan divide by putting in place ways, such as a modified draft, to actively mix together citizens from different classes, races, regions and religions.

• Uniting the country behind big ideas for the common good such as universal healthcare.

Government and Freedom

The greatest misunderstanding, in my view, has to do with our view of government. The libertarian tradition focuses most of its attention on government as the number one threat to liberty. Government without question can be one of the prime culprits and great attention and skill are needed to devise political systems that prevent abuse. But a single-minded focus on guarding against government overreach ignores the ways freedom can be threatened from many other directions. Our neighbors, our families, our churches, our employers—all these can be sources of coercion. Good government is often the only means to defend ourselves and create the conditions for a free life. If government is too strong and uncontrolled, it restricts freedom and undermines other key institutions; but if too weak, it allows those institutions and individuals to become threats to freedom in their own right. Every system and institution, whether family or church or market or government or whatever, needs to be checked by other independent systems and institutions.

Freedom is also at risk when we live as slaves to necessity and want. The classical view was that to be free meant first and foremost to have enough wealth and means to have leisure, free time to devote to public affairs or philosophy or private interests. No one could really be free who had to spend all their time focused on survival. Given pre-modern conditions, only an elite few could afford freedom—most people were peasants, one bad harvest away from starvation. Greeks and Romans justified their use of slaves, in part, as the necessary means for a privileged few to be free.

Here too our view of government is crucial. For libertarians, government is the enemy of prosperity, always prone to strangle individual initiative and burden entrepreneurs with taxes and regulations. But a supportive government is essential to modern capitalism, and without government intervention to shift resources from the haves to the have-nots, many Americans would live in poverty, and few could afford the education and training needed to advance.

Freedom is also in jeopardy if the fruits of economic growth are captured by a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Some version of oligarchy, rule by the wealthy and those who control the acquisition and perpetuation of wealth, has been the norm for most of human history. The American Revolution was first and foremost an experiment in creating a “new order” without oligarchs. But, as Thomas Piketty showed convincingly in his surprise bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, free markets and capitalism have not changed the powerful human forces that tend to create a small class that captures a disproportionate amount of society’s wealth. Government must be strong enough and autonomous enough to prevent this, a task that, given the rising levels of wealth inequality in the United States, our government is not doing very well. (The United States ranks 32nd in inequality out of 35 developed states).

Dealing with Coercion

Even hard-core defenders of individual rights are prone to misunderstand the central role of government in ensuring those rights and guarding against other, equally dangerous threats.  What are the other sources of coercion that we need to guard against?  Four stand out:  other people; family; religion; and markets.

Other People. In fact, every other human being can constrain freedom. It was Hobbes who invented modern political thought by asking, what is the most important task of government, and answering: to protect us from our fellow man. Left to ourselves in a state of nature, every neighbor, every person we encounter, is a potential threat. Hobbes is careful to stress that even a small and weak person can attack and kill someone much stronger. This war of all against all can only end if we give up our natural freedom to a powerful state capable of punishing and preventing this violence.

Anyone familiar with movies about asteroid strikes, or the zombie apocalypse, knows what Hobbes is talking about. When civilization collapses, there is a terrible fight for food and shelter and the minimum of security. Previously friendly neighbors turn into snarling enemies. Well short of this extreme, we see the same phenomenon in parts of the world—including parts of the United States—where police and the law are weak or nonexistent.

I had lunch in the early years of the Iraq war with the journalist George Packer, who wrote the book Assassin’s Gate about the American occupation of Iraq. After exchanging vivid stories about the collapse of order in Baghdad, I asked—rhetorically—why no one in the Bush White House seemed to remember the basic teachings of Hobbes. “They’re all business majors there; no one knows anything about politics,” was his scathing response.

The Hobbesian solution, an all-powerful state, probably seems extreme to most of us. It prioritizes security and protection against other human beings over every other good, and lacks what most of us would consider minimal barriers to abuse of state power. But reflection and experience tell us that some kind of authority strong enough to ensure personal security, and security of property and property rights, is essential for liberty. It is misleading to think of this as ‘giving up’ some of our freedom in exchange for security. We give up our ‘right’ to use violence against others (except in self-defense), and in return are provided a secure space within which we can plan for the future, build institutions, improve our property, raise families, and in short live like human beings. We have seen more than enough recent examples in places like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan of what happens when this authority disappears, even when it is grossly imperfect.

In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker makes a convincing case that in most of the world we have seen a tremendous drop in levels of violence, both domestically and between countries. Murder rates in Europe are a fraction of what they were several hundred years ago. So are rates of robbery, rape, and all manner of inter-personal violence. Our norms and expectations have shifted, so that punishments such as burning heretics at the stake or putting people to death for petty crimes, that seemed normal to our ancestors, are now beyond the pale.

Why this tremendous change? Pinker says a critical factor for Europe was the growth of strong centralized states that, while not (initially) democracies, had an interest in advancing the conditions of their populace. These stronger states brought to heel the hundreds and thousands of semi-independent fiefdoms, petty nobles, landlords, and wealthy churchmen who produced in Europe something close to the state of nature. The first police forces were created in London only 200 years ago. Before that no permanent institution was tasked with preventing crime or capturing criminals. Ad hoc posses, often organized by local landowners or nobles, might go after criminals, often acting as judge, jury, and executioner.

Does this growth in law enforcement and state power mean we are less free? For the vast majority, clearly not. They have moved from being constant victims of crime, random violence, arbitrary punishments, and abuse by their social superiors, to being citizens with expectations of a peaceful life and protection from threats and violence. Those who feel most aggrieved are the rich and powerful, who under weak states were free to do as they pleased. Now they see strong central government as a burden. Just as America’s first wave of robber baron capitalists was devoted to laissez faire liberalism, many of today’s billionaires advocate some form of libertarianism, not because of any devotion to individual freedom, but because government redistributes some of their winnings and (sometimes) stands in the way of their schemes.

At first glance a large group of Americans seems eager to weaken the protection provided by government and take on the job of security for themselves, in effect returning to pre-modern conditions. Being “pro-gun” is often shorthand for being suspicious of the state and happy to trade off less security for an expansive right of self-protection. On closer inspection, however, most 2nd Amendment enthusiasts are not really looking for a weaker government—in fact, they usually extol the military and police, the armed face of Leviathan. They would like those institutions to have more money and more authority. What they don’t like is that the state isn’t doing enough to put down minorities and immigrants and other perceived threats.

Family. Families nurture and protect, and extensions of family—clans and tribes—are how most people provided security and gathered resources to stay alive before the development of the state. Families remain central components of all human society. Clans and tribes have waned in the modern West in favor of the nuclear family, but still matter in much of the rest of the world.

Families, however, are not sources of individual freedom. For most of human history they have sharply constrained individual choices—about marriage, work, dress, faith, friendships and much else. Romeo and Juliet brings vividly to life how family and tradition can conspire to destroy human happiness. Patriarchal families, clans and tribes have subordinated and, often, abused women. Families are not democratic, and are the conveyers and enforcers of traditional norms. In most societies sons and daughters have been expected to subordinate their own ambitions to family interests. Tribes seek ferociously to channel power and wealth to fellow tribesmen, without regard for competence or any broader public good. Shielded from outside scrutiny, it is all too easy to hide exploitation and abuse of children and spouses, and reject children who are gay or ‘abnormal.’

When family goes bad, what recourse is available? Other institutions can intervene; a priest or minister, a benevolent neighbor. But in many societies tradition gives the heads of families tremendous leeway. Exposing and preventing abuse within the family is hard. Think about women living in a society that practices genital mutilation, or the burning of widows, traditions enforced by a woman’s own mother and close relatives. Impartial laws, backed by police and investigative resources and enforced by a strong state, are a necessary option when people face intimidation or violence from a spouse, or a parent.

The ‘state’ as an institution can be understood as the method of governance devised to replace the family/clan/tribe as the source of authority. Francis Fukuyama gives a clear account in his recent multi-volume analysis of the Origins of Political Order—the state comes into being when merit and achievement (and sheer force) replace blood ties as the criterion for leadership, and when membership in a political community derives from living in a given territory rather than kinship. The symbol of this shift is the Chinese exam system, first developed over 2000 years ago, where administrators are chosen from those who master classic texts and key elements of culture rather than bloodlines.

In America and most modern states, government interferes in the family in myriad ways. It requires that parents educate and vaccinate their children. It prohibits polygamy and child marriage. Children can be put in foster care for neglect or criminal behavior by parents. Nepotism is frowned upon and restricted by law. These interventions are justified in the name of individual rights, which trump family considerations for adult citizens. Without this government activism to weaken and counterbalance families it is hard to imagine that most individuals would be free in meaningful ways.

Religion. Religious teachings and leaders—prophets, ministers, saints—can be a critical check on corrupt and tyrannical governments. Religion is the source of law, rules that bind earthly governors as much as the governed under a god or gods from whose lofty heights the difference between kings and commoners means little. Law is not the same thing as freedom, but it is a necessary condition if we want to constrain leaders and neighbors.

The force of divine law speaks through Old Testament prophets who warn the princes of Israel against abuse and corruption. Christianity in Europe gave rise to Catholic and then Protestant churches that were in principle independent of particular rulers and could, on occasion, call them to account. Fear of divine punishment might restrain kings and princes, or lead them to see a common spark of God in their subjects or potential enemies. Religion can be a check on arbitrary power.

The power wielded by religious figures, however, can easily be abused. Recently we heard excruciating details of how the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania fostered and protected sexual predators. The truth was revealed by an investigation from the attorney general of Pennsylvania, acting to penetrate the veil of secrecy and intimidation that had kept thousands of victims from speaking up.

Where would we be if our government, instead of investigating the Catholic Church, was joined with it, was its champion? Who would reveal the truth then? This has been the norm throughout history, with religion and secular power working together to reinforce one another. Only the separation of church and state, achieved first in the United States, has succeeded in keeping these two sources of authority apart and ensuring that state power is not used to put down rival faiths and enforce compliance to the particular beliefs and moral codes of one religion or sect. Religion cannot be used to justify racial discrimination or child sacrifice. No one can be forced to submit to religious restrictions against their will. The essential condition is for the legitimacy of the state to rest on a secular foundation—in the case of the United States, one based on reason and universal principles. Where this separation has not taken hold, as in much of the Muslim world, freedom is severely limited.

Around the world we see attempts in countries with secular traditions to re-combine church and state: Hinduism in Modi’s India, Orthodoxy in Putin’s Russia, Catholicism in Orban’s Hungary, Islam in Erdogan’s Turkey. Aspiring dictators see religious fervor as a way to oust rivals and rally supporters; leaders of the major religion are happy to see state power deployed to put down their religious rivals.  Often this is accompanied by vicious campaigns against homosexuals and others who don’t meet ‘traditional standards.’ While not yet at the same level, determined forces in the US want to redefine America as a Protestant Christian nation rather than a religiously neutral one. Almost half of Americans now say that their identity as a Christian is more important than their identity as an American. Any movement in the direction of re-defining America’s basic principles as inseparable from Christianity is a terrible threat to freedom—and also to Christianity.

This is not to deny that Jerusalem was a source of the vision of individual human dignity and freedom that has animated the United States since its founding. Christianity was arguably a necessary condition for liberal democracy. Necessary—but far from sufficient. The key thinkers and doers who set the stage for the American Revolution and made it happen did not, in my view, act as Christians or for the sake of Christianity. They understood, correctly, that what they were attempting was made possible only by a free exercise of reason unconstrained by dogma, and was contrary to longstanding Christian traditions and the role of Christian churches and leaders in politics.

Markets. In no area it seems to me is there greater misunderstanding of freedom than our discussion of markets. Acolytes of free markets are the most outspoken critics of government for interfering with market forces and, supposedly, reducing wealth and efficiency. Corporations and entrepreneurs often argue that their freedom is diminished by taxes and regulations and unions. Contemporary market fundamentalists dream of returning to the era exemplified by the 1905 Lochner decision by the Supreme Court, which struck down a state law that limited working hours on the grounds that it violated the ‘freedom’ of employers and workers to engage in contracts. Since then our views have evolved to allow government to intervene to protect employees and the public from corporate exploitation.

Markets, however, depend on government in myriad ways: to create a medium of exchange; to enforce contracts; to define and protect property rights; to prevent and punish thievery and fraud, and much more. Most of this is not controversial. More disputable are other ways government arguably makes modern capitalism possible and keeps it from being destructive: preventing monopoly, regulating working conditions, keeping our air and water clean, insuring banks, preventing overly-risky financial practices, etc.

Laissez-faire advocates like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have tried to argue that much of this can be done by individuals acting freely in accord with market forces. Government is needed, barely, for the first set of goods, not the second. Government efforts to regulate capitalism are counterproductive at best, a slippery slope to communism at worst.

But actual American experience doesn’t bear this out. We can start with slavery, perhaps the ultimate expression of laissez-faire thinking. Attempts to end slavery were resisted ferociously by slave owners on the grounds that they violated their freedom to dispose of their property as they saw fit. Other periods in America when we have been most in love with laissez-faire policies—the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20s, the Greenspan Era—have led to terrible crashes and corrosive economic inequality. The period of our greatest sustained prosperity, a time when the rising economic waters really did lift all boats, was in the 1950s and 1960s when unions were strong, taxes were high, and government programs (the GI Bill, the interstate highway system) took hold to grow the economy and cushion Americans from capitalism’s excesses. Starting in the Progressive Era, government began to see it had a responsibility to restrain the private sector for the benefit of all, and over time developed tools to analyze and direct our market system.

Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth,” however, have continued to fight fiercely to undermine the legitimacy of public, democratic intervention in the economy. During the 1950s and 60s they wrung their hands about the threat to freedom from socialism and big government, exploiting Cold War fears of international communism to equate all government intervention with Marxism. Few listened until the stagflation of the 1970s, brought on by a foolish unfunded war and OPEC’s manipulation of oil prices, gave them an opening. Wealthy individuals and foundations—the Koch Brothers, the Scaifes and Adelsons and many more—have funded countless think tanks, institutes, university departments, conferences and publications dedicated to free market and libertarian ideas. Their message was embodied in Reagan and his transformative Presidency, whose message was that government itself was the problem. Largely as a result, today many Americans instinctively think that the ‘private sector’ is more virtuous and efficient than anything that involves government. The market is equated with freedom, government with coercion.

But nothing is more inimical to individual freedom than unrestrained markets. Left to itself, capitalism generates huge concentrations of private wealth—an oligarchical system that rests on severe restrictions of individual rights. Marx was wrong about many things, but on this one big thing he was correct: capitalism left to itself will concentrate wealth—and power—in a few hands. Something competing corporations can agree on is limiting the rights of workers and consumers by weakening collective bargaining, labor laws, individual bankruptcy options, environmental protections, class-action lawsuits, and other political and legal protections in hiring and the workplace.

Unfortunately a growing body of legal scholarship, funded by wealthy market fundamentalists, has emerged to defend the rights of corporations on First Amendment grounds, ‘weaponizing’ the right to free speech as a way to limit other rights. This radical new doctrine is well-represented on the Supreme Court, especially with the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh. Justice Kagan’s dissent, in a recent case that overturned the right of public sector unions to require workers to contribute union dues, is eloquent: “Speech is everywhere—a part of every human activity (employment, health care, securities trading, you name it)… For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices. The First Amendment was meant for better things.” ¹

The blunt truth is that many of the rich see democracy as a threat—it was Aristotle who warned that under democracy the people would try to take the property of the rich—and therefore have fought tenaciously to secure the right to use money freely to buy political influence. As explained persuasively and at length by historian Nancy MacLean in Democracy in Chains, the libertarian right under the guidance of the Koch network has used its money to reshape the rules of politics to make sure that their wealth can offset votes. The United States today is already a semi-oligarchy, where wealthy individuals and corporations easily fund candidates, create fake ‘grassroots’ movements, control major media, and lobby elected officials. These efforts are usually sold as ways to enhance individual freedom for everyone, but are in fact designed to enhance the freedom of the haves at the expense of the have-nots.

Freedom and Want

The debate over free markets leads to a second aspect of freedom. The first was freedom from coercion, the second is freedom from want. People who live in poverty and chronic economic uncertainty struggle to be free, even if they have formal political and legal rights. All their time and energy is taken up by ensuring survival for themselves and their family. Their neediness makes them vulnerable to coercion by employers or landowners. This was the normal condition for the vast majority before the modern era.

It is no coincidence that the success of democratic government has coincided with the historically unparalleled growth of wealth from modern technology and industrial capitalism. Today the United States and other advanced economies are rich enough to free most citizens from grinding poverty and provide them with education and literacy. Most have enough wealth and economic security to use their freedom meaningfully in leisure activities, intellectual pursuits, private passions, and public life. We have largely overcome the pre-modern divide between the impoverished and enslaved many, and the wealthy few. The strength of America’s civil society, the multiplicity of associations that are the way most citizens participate in public affairs, noted by Tocqueville and others, rests on both the country’s wealth and its equitable distribution.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, however, Americans have received a crash course in the problem of economic inequality. Inequality has been growing sharply since the late 1970s; income and wealth for the top 10%, and especially the top 1% and 0.01%, has been going up remorselessly. Almost all the gains in national wealth over the past 40 years have gone to a small class, while for the bottom income has been largely stagnant.  To the apparent surprise of some, cutting marginal tax rates sharply in the Reagan (and again in the Bush II) administrations ended up making the rich richer while producing disappointing economic growth, much lower than in the 1950s-60s.

As a result many Americans who thought of themselves as solidly middle-class and living the American Dream have become economically and socially insecure; they no longer expect their children to do better than they did. They are angry at the contrast between the wealth and status of the few, and the declining prospects of the many. Condescending lectures from both liberals (go to college!) and conservatives (work more!) ring hollow when college is more and more expensive, unskilled jobs pay less, and in many families both partners are running flat out and not getting ahead.

The meaning of ‘poverty’ is slippery in a country as wealthy as the US. Even those at the bottom typically have enough to eat and a roof over their heads, not to mention cellphones and flat-screen TVs. But a significant number of Americans still live only a stone’s throw from poverty, bankruptcy, and homelessness. Their lives are dominated by the fear of foreclosure or eviction, losing a low-paying job, being denied government benefits, going to jail for minor fines they are unable to pay, bankruptcy for medical expenses they can’t afford, and an endless array of other challenges. These challenges are of course greater for African-Americans and other minorities. A recent Atlantic article showed that nearly half of Americans would have difficulty raising $400 in cash for an emergency. ² Continue reading “Understanding and Restoring Freedom”

Immigration and Hospitality:  Thoughts on Camp of the Saints, Exit West, and Kant

Many years ago, in the mid-1970s, I read a novel called Camp of the Saints by a French writer, Jean Raspail. Camp was about the death of the West via an apocalyptic mass migration from South Asia and other parts of the darkest Third World to the shores of Mediterranean France. While unabashedly racist in its portrayal of the arrivals, the real target was weak-kneed Western leftists and multiculturalists (though the word had not yet been invented), who were shown as too soft and wishy-washy to fight back until it was too late.

At the time I was rather down on soft-headed leftists myself, so I basically liked the story but thought the mass-migration scenario was pretty farfetched. Today, of course, it sounds more prophetic. It shouldn’t be any surprise that Camp is a cult favorite of Steve Bannon and anti-immigrant nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic.

The reason I’ve recalled this old book is that I just finished a new novel, Exit West, by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Mahid. Mahid has written a number of good books that revolve around the crisis of modern fundamentalism in Pakistan and elsewhere. Exit West is a kind of reimagining of Camp of the Saints that privileges the immigrant view. In a sprawling unnamed South Asian city, Islamic radicals gradually take over and ordinary lives are crushed between random violence and religious repression. A young couple, Nadia and Saeed, just embarking on an affair, are pushed together for survival. As things fall apart, mysterious gateways begin to appear around the city that allow people to escape, and Nadia and Saeed jump from South Asia to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Mykonos, then to London, and finally to the Marin hills outside San Francisco. They join a huge movement of peoples from all over the world who show up uninvited in the wealthier, established countries of Europe and North America, often emerging from their portals literally inside rich people’s bedrooms.

What Mahid tries to do is imagine a positive outcome from this crisis. It would be easy to go in Raspail’s direction and see this uncontrolled flood leading to civilizational collapse, and equally easy to write a thriller showing how the threatened societies marshal their armies and militias to destroy the invaders. It is harder to picture a new world emerging, a new modus vivendi between the global haves and have-nots. In Exit West, the British stand down from an all-out attack on immigrant enclaves—we aren’t taken inside British decisionmaking, so Saeed and Nadia can only conclude that it would have been too appalling for British citizens to stomach. In America, the new immigrants live in the hills and slowly integrate into the cities; we never get much of an explanation as to why a nationalist backlash doesn’t materialize.

In a short epilogue several decades later, Saeed and Nadia, now long separated, meet again in their unnamed South Asian city, where life has returned to normal. “Half a century later Nadia returned for the first time to the city of her birth, where the fires she had witnessed in her youth had burned themselves out long ago, the lives of cities being far more persistent and more gently cyclical than those of people, and the city she found herself in was not a heaven but it was not a hell, and it was familiar but also unfamiliar, and as she wandered about slowly, exploring, she was informed of the proximity of Saeed, and after standing motionless for a considerable moment she communicated with him, and they agreed to meet.” Their journey has opened them up. Nadia, never religious, has discovered a new sexuality, and Saeed has stayed within Islam but with a broader understanding of its many faces and of the world more generally. Human beings are resilient, seems to be the message, and given opportunity and time will restore a kind of equilibrium.

Mahid’s soothing picture might seem utopian, except that to a large extent I think it corresponds to reality. In the US and Canada and Australia and Western Europe over the last 20-30 years, huge numbers of poor immigrants from very alien cultures have moved in. This has not seemed quite so odd in North America, where there is a long history of this sort of thing, but in Western Europe it has been new and more disruptive. Despite plenty of friction, until very recently the sky had not fallen.

Terrorism shifted the debate, however. ISIS-inspired attacks that turned immigrants into a perceived 5th column, and the huge wave of immigrants in 2015 from Syria and Afghanistan and Libya and sub-Saharan Africa fleeing war and oppression, produced a crisis in Europe. European politics continues to be warped to the right by immigration fears, even though the number of migrants has now returned to pre-2015 levels. East European states like Hungary and Poland seem to have tipped irretrievably towards authoritarianism. Italy is teetering. Angela Merkel may lose her position; if Germany goes to the dark side, the West is indeed in trouble.

America, despite a huge drop in illegal immigration over the past 10 years, has gone into its own largely self-inflicted tailspin. Trump and other right-wing opportunists have pumped up immigration fears as their main vehicle to take power. With little direct impact here from Syria and other terrorist trouble spots, Trump has falsely but successfully held up Central Americans fleeing gang violence and broken states as sources of crime and instability.

Given these trends, maybe it is useful to hear Mahid’s call not to lose heart. Who would have thought 50 years ago (the US relaxed its immigration policy in 1965) that Europe or even the US would absorb so many, so quickly, with so little violence or blowback? The big and many not-so-big cities of Europe, North America, and Australia have been transformed into far more diverse, vibrant, and interesting places. Immigration has added so much to the economies, the arts, the cultures, the social fabric that it is difficult to imagine the alternative. Who seriously wants a New York or London or Toronto made up mostly of white Anglo-Saxons? In the 1980s we feared a rising Japan; today, who owns the future—immigrant-averse Japan, or immigrant-welcoming (until recently) America?

Who, 50 years ago, would have predicted other astonishing successes to the benefit of the world’s poor: that China would become a fast-growing middle-income state, that India would feed itself and generate a dynamic tech sector, that South Korea would become rich and democratic?  The great danger of that time, an aggressive Soviet Union fostering left-wing radicals around the world, is a distant memory.

Now that blowback is upon us, it isn’t clear if our current preoccupation with immigrants is a phase we will outgrow or the harbinger of worse to come. Mahid suggests the former. The immigrants as he portrays them are mostly decent, normal people escaping terrible situations. Some bad apples are present—he mentions attempts by Islamic militants to carry out attacks designed to provoke a violent response—but they are not the norm. The receiving peoples are also decent, sometimes confused and fearful but able to see the common humanity in the new arrivals. When they come face to face and must decide whether to share or attack, they share. Eventually, if the world’s haves are generous and patient, the chaos and violence driving people to flee their homelands will abate, allowing for a more stable relationship.

May it be so. But hope is not a strategy, and we will need to navigate some choppy waters to get to Mahid’s equilibrium. Too many places in the world have become unlivable, and unfortunately the reactionary politics that immigration is provoking in rich countries are likely to make things worse. Less positive engagement with the outside world, less foreign aid, less trade, less global cooperation—this is a recipe for a downward spiral.   Twenty-five years ago a more confident America negotiated NAFTA as part of a successful strategy to stem out-of-control immigration from Mexico by helping Mexico become more wealthy and democratic. It worked; today net immigration from Mexico is zero. Nothing similar is imagined now for Honduras or Guatemala.

The incentives for politicians in many rich countries to demagogue immigration are very strong.  Fear—that a flood of newcomers will take away our jobs, harass our women, shoot us down in the street, or just make us feel like aliens in our own land—has been a potent force that is driving today’s populism.   It is far easier to scapegoat vulnerable outsiders than address the real causes of discontent such as growing inequality.

While the threat has been exaggerated, does that mean it doesn’t exist? Is there a size and type of immigration that is genuinely dangerous? There is, of course. Open borders with no restrictions would be unsustainable. Wages would plummet. Social services would collapse. Integration of immigrants into a stable, functioning liberal society would become impossible. Friction between natives and newcomers would escalate, and a harsh nativist backlash could easily lead to a police state or civil war. It would not help anyone, including the world’s poor, if developed countries were destabilized and impoverished.

So we need limits on immigration. But all of us lucky enough to have been born in a country that other people would like to move to should reflect on what we owe to those—the vast majority—not so lucky. To some, those mired in the most extreme poverty or facing imminent danger, we owe immediate help including the boon of immigration. But we can bring in only a fraction of all those in less dire circumstances. At a minimum, it seems to me, we need a long-term policy that offers hope to all, a policy that commits America and its allies to moving the world towards economic development, and decent and effective government.

This used to be the consensus about US foreign policy in the post-war era. In our own slightly myopic but generous way we seemed to say: We would love to let all of you in so you can become Americans, but since we can’t, we will help you become more American. Many of our allies joined in this endeavor. Liberals and conservatives emphasized different tools, with liberals leaning toward direct aid and multilateral institutions like the World Bank, conservatives toward free trade and private foreign investment, but both agreed that helping other parts of the world become richer and freer was in America’s interest and also an obligation that came with our great power and wealth.

This consensus has now disappeared. The Republican Party has been captured by leaders who view relations with the outside world as transactional, short-term, and guided by an America First mentality. Instead of seeing our prosperity and power as implying some moral responsibility to share these good things with others, they see others as perpetually taking advantage of us and trying to cut us down. The long history of Western colonialism and predation and military intervention—processes to which the United States has been no stranger—might make us willing to concede that the problems “out there” are partly our doing. This view is mocked as weak and naïve.  People in other countries, emphatically including our oldest and closest allies, are seen as competitors if not outright threats. We owe them nothing.

Immanuel Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace,” written at the end of the 18th century, and reflecting the same enlightenment principles that had just brought the United States into being, was one of the earliest and greatest attempts to outline how peace could be achieved in a world of sovereign nation-states. Kant says that one of the three Definitive Articles for peace between nations is that “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality” (the other two: all states must have republican governments, and all states must join a federation that renounces war). What does this mean? According to Kant, “hospitality” means “the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another…they have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other.”

Today, much more than when Kant wrote, we are one world. We cannot disperse and must learn to tolerate. If Americans are true to our principles, it is impossible to believe that national borders should be undergirded by hard lines of race and culture. This is the zero-sum vision of Camp of the Saints—it’s us or them. The truth is that at bottom borders are arbitrary, and which side of these artificial lines you end up on is largely a question of luck. It is this view that I believe informs Exit West, and Kant, and America in its better moments. We have an obligation to be hospitable. To acknowledge this is the beginning of moral clarity.

 

Two Nationalisms

Many voices, worried about the toxic populism that has engulfed America, are appealing to our tradition of ‘civic nationalism’ as an antidote. Recently I heard former CIA Director Michael Hayden invoke it against whatever it is Trump stands for.

Civic nationalism means a patriotism and identity that rests on principles and core values that are universal and apply to everyone, embodied in a constitution and laws that are binding equally for all within a given territory. For Americans, these are the principles and values set forth in the Declaration and Constitution and Bill of Rights and Lincoln’s great speeches, refined and modified by key Supreme Court decisions, and exemplified by the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Their ultimate justification is a claim that they are true: based on inalienable rights that can be discerned by reason and translated into institutions and laws that earn our intellectual assent. If you accept and adhere to these you are an American. It is a nationalism that can be learned and acquired; this makes it perfect for assimilating immigrants and enabling social mobility.

Civic nationalism is usually contrasted with ethnic or ‘blood and soil’ nationalism, meaning a patriotism and identity that rests on shared characteristics such as ethnicity, language, culture, and religion. In America this often means a view that ‘real’ Americans are white, of European ancestry (preferably northwestern European), Christian (preferably Protestant), native English speakers, and so on. Being American is something you are born with, rather than something you acquire by affirming a set of principles. For ethnic nationalists, even principles such as “all men are created equal” are seen as something discovered by Protestant Europeans and not accessible to people from distant cultures. The source of patriotism is emotional and historical, not rational.

Blood and soil nationalism has led to terrible things. In 19th and 20th century Europe it fueled anti-Semitism, ethnic cleansing, fascism, colonialism, two world wars, and the Holocaust. In both Europe and the United States today nationalists are suspicious of immigrants, especially non-white immigrants from non-European countries. As blood and soil nationalists are well aware, the percentage of ‘real’ Americans is dropping as immigration and demography and cultural shifts make the US less white, less European, less Protestant.

Advocates of the civic version sometimes try to draw a hard line between the two types of nationalism. In America, however, the lines are blurred. Almost everyone has immigrant ancestors and knows something of his or her arrival story. The immigrant narrative is a central part of American identity, and many of us know that our ancestors came and struggled to learn English, to be accepted, to adopt local customs—in short, to become Americans. More importantly, for most Americans belief in founding principles is at least as much rooted in faith and tradition as reasoned understanding. Americans stand for freedom of speech, or the pursuit of happiness, more or less the same way an Englishman stands for the Queen. It’s what you were brought up with.

Furthermore, civic nationalism is not always an unalloyed good, and blood-and-soil nationalism bad. The Soviet Union is an example of a state that tried aggressively to suppress ethnic nationalism and replace it with a civic faith. The results were horrific, because in the Old World, keeping down longstanding national identities embodied in communities with centuries of shared traditions, languages, and religions could only be done with almost unimaginable coercion. Ultimately it was the passionate resistance of suppressed ethnic nationalisms—including Russian nationalism—that destroyed the USSR, just as earlier versions led to the breakup of the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires.

In the US too zealotry in defense of perceived core principles can be destructive. Second-amendment fundamentalists have mobilized to further the spread of guns with scant regard for the consequences. Neoliberals have fought with great success to reinterpret American principles as prioritizing property rights and corporate rights.

It seems to me one way of defining the task of modern statecraft is to harmonize these two sources of identity. While the United States is perhaps the original of modern ‘civic nationalism,’ (a classical version might be Imperial Rome, which extended citizenship and a considerable degree of cultural tolerance to non-Romans) other states such as France have their own versions or have adopted variations of models originally developed elsewhere. The UN and other international institutions have helped legitimize a set of individual rights and principles of good government. All over the globe a rational, rights-based patriotism that often has considerable popular support is in tension with a blood and soil narrative focused on language, ethnicity, history and attachment to a particular culture. (Some would argue that there is a third alternative in the modern theocracies of Iran or Saudi Arabia and ISIS. Religion is usually a component of ethnic nationalism, but making it the central source of national identity is a way of combining the strength of tradition with the strength of a set of bed-rock principles—but derived not from reason but from revelation. This view is present in America too, despite our separation of church and state, when people go too far in identifying our political principles with Christianity).

The biggest danger can come from a fusion of civic with blood and soil nationalism. We then see all the emotion and energy that comes from our natural attachment to place and tradition, combined with intellectual conviction and self-righteousness. This is what produced the Civil War in the US, where two distinct American experiences, with and without slavery, generated incompatible interpretations of founding principles.

Do we see something similar today? I would argue that for a long time very distinct American experiences have been in tension and led to distinct nationalisms. An urban, more educated, more pluralistic experience rooted in both external and internal migration (of rural white and black Americans) has been growing, while a rural, small-town experience (now relocated largely to the suburbs) and rooted in the ‘rugged individualism’ of Westward expansion has been in decline. This tension has often been fruitful as generation after generation of Americans has migrated to cities and gone to college and mingled a more traditional set of values with newer norms. But the fear of losing their social and economic privileges has often caused an explosive reaction among white, rural Americans, as with the rise of the KKK in the 1920s, or McCarthyism in the 1950s, or George Wallace in the 1960s. Today it has exploded again with the rise of the Tea Party and populism.

The divide between the two is not that one is ‘civic’ and the other is ‘ethnic.’ Both versions contain principled appeals to founding principles and emotional appeals to tradition and culture. Both versions claim to represent the ‘real’ America. The urban/immigrant variant puts more emphasis on tolerance, pluralism, and a view of the United States as an imperfect work-in-progress, a country that is different in degree but not in kind from the rest of the world. The more conservative rural variant emphasizes America as a unique “city on a hill” that requires adherence to a set of strict founding principles that cannot be separated from their European and Christian origins. Immigrants or minorities or educated elites who deviate from the standard model are viewed with suspicion.

One of the dividing points between the two is a different understanding of the individual and his or her relation to the larger community and the government. The conservative version emphasizes individual rights and downplays duties to community or state; its American hero is the frontiersman, taming the West with a horse and a six-gun. In comparative polling, Americans (followed by England and other former British colonies) are always the most individualistic, as seen in answers to questions about whether success is due to hard work or good luck, or whether welfare hurts individual initiative. This is why the US continues to tie itself in knots when it comes to constructing a modern welfare state: our efforts to prioritize property rights and individual choice have led, for instance, to our insanely complicated and too-expensive medical system.

This uncompromising individualism can make the American model attractive in other countries—where people often chafe under powerful social norms—but also deeply disliked. Most other peoples place more value than Americans on family, village, and state. It is an almost universal criticism of America in Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America that the American ‘way of life’ undermines familial and communal ties. It is viewed as glorifying a me-first struggle for wealth and power.

This has become more true in recent times. Individual rights and opportunity have always been a central part of the American identity, but the thrust of modern American conservatism, the neoliberal version dominated by Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, has been to double down on these strands of our history while denigrating alternatives. Fear of anything that requires a strong central government (except, inconsistently, the military) has become the dominant nationalist narrative. This has created an odd world where conservatives, who would seem naturally to stand for strong traditions and emotional ties between citizens, have become tightly bound to radical theories of free markets and individual choice that are destructive of all traditions and non-rational commitments. But however inconsistent, a nationalism with a civic side emphasizing individualism and limited government, and an ethnic side that rests on white, European, Protestant traditions has become a potent political force.

The liberal alternative, true to its more pluralistic dna, has not found an equally coherent way to define its own version of nationalism. Its civic side draws on deep American principles in emphasizing equality and democracy over individualism, but its emotional appeal has tended to dissolve in identity politics—an orientation now mirrored with equal if not greater vehemence by white nationalists. Liberal nationalists are put off by what they see as the defiant, flag-waving, chest-thumping, military-focused assertion of national superiority that passes for patriotism among conservative nationalists. This sometimes leads to a carping narrative that only sees American shortcomings. The conservative emotional appeal is strong but narrow, and as many have pointed out, based on a shrinking part of the electorate. Liberal nationalism is more inclusive but weaker and sometimes divides more than it unifies.

To create a stronger nationalism, liberals must be clearer on how equality and democracy are endangered by too much individualism. America is most true to itself when we help all our citizens get ahead, not when a distorted meritocracy produces a few winners while the rest struggle. And it must dial back on the perception that lifting up non-white minorities comes at the expense of the majority. Conservatives must understand that neoliberal individualism destroys traditional values, and flirting with white nationalism amounts to mirroring the worst aspects of the identity politics that most conservatives loathe.

Intellectual and emotional attachment must both be present for any viable American nationalism. America starts with a powerful set of principles, but it also has a magnificent land, stories of sacrifice, heroes and villains, great works of music and literature, amazing scientific and technological achievements—in short, all the ingredients to engender a healthy pride and bonds of kinship and trust, without falling back on race or religion. For the most part we interpret our successes as the realization of these principles, and our failures as falling short. In this way founding ideas explain the good things we have done and infuse all our history, and also spur us to do better. This is a powerful combination that I think can continue to serve us well, as long as we avoid the reactionary temptation to interpret our story as perfect, or the revolutionary temptation to interpret it as constant failure.

How I Think About Racism

Growing up and living in America over the past 60 plus years I have toggled repeatedly between optimism that we are leaving our racist past behind, and pessimism that we will never be rid of it. Every time it seems we have put it in the rear view mirror, it roars up and sideswipes us. We have gone in one head-snapping moment from our first black President to a President who is not only himself a despicable racist but encourages and raises up racism in others. All too many of my fellow citizens are either eager to follow, or don’t care enough to reject, this kind of leadership.

Pessimism on this point is ascendant now across the land. One cause is the growing realization that prejudice is often held unconsciously or semi-consciously, and manifests itself in patterns of discrimination in policing and education and housing and on and on. People who are convinced they have no racial bias often act as though they do, especially when they are anxious or stressed. There seems no way out. What are we to do with all this?

Clearly for much of our history a majority of Americans grew up in a society steeped in racism. White Americans—and not just in the South—were explicitly taught, or absorbed by example, endless lessons about the inherent inferiority of African-Americans (and Native Americans, and Chinese, and more). They might not have been taught that it was permissible to treat African-Americans badly, but it would have been strongly implied. Family, friends, community leaders, and local press reinforced this point of view.

It is important that for much of this time racism was instated from both the bottom and the top. It was something you absorbed from your peers, but was also deliberately fostered by rich and powerful leaders for their own benefit and to keep poor whites and poorer blacks from making common cause. Educated authorities drove home these lessons with warped interpretations of the Bible or pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy.

It is not a sufficient excuse for acting badly to blame it on a bad upbringing, but it is a factor that needs to be considered. If someone is a murderer or a thief, we often, and properly, put some blame on factors outside the individual’s control. We look to childhood abuse or neglect, or extreme poverty, or an undiagnosed mental or learning disorder, as mitigating circumstances.

What we don’t typically say is, “well, they were brought up in a community where their parents taught them that murder and thievery were OK.” For the most part such parents and such communities do not exist. But if someone has racist views, it is often the case that their parents—and the broader community well beyond their parents—DID teach them that racism was OK. And via racism people easily learn to tolerate and even advocate murder and theft directed at people they see as inferior.

It is difficult for most people not to learn lessons that come from family and peers, are reinforced by people in authority, and are in their own self-interest. It takes a particularly strong person to resist. We can look back today on previous generations of Americans and understand regretfully that many of them shared in the taken-for-granted prejudices of their time and place. (There are people who because of their learning and sophistication should have known better: see Jefferson, Thomas.)

Today though, if you have racist views you have them in the face of most of what you will be taught in school and hear from figures in authority. For several decades the ‘official’ view, from (most) government figures, newspapers and major media, religious and business leaders, has favored racial equality. You cannot easily plead ignorance and the rest of us cannot and should not easily excuse you.

It is nevertheless true that there remain many families and sub-cultures that think otherwise and teach their young the same lessons as their grandparents and great-grandparents. The grooves of prejudice are deep and close to the surface. How do we judge those unfortunate enough to be raised this way? How do we judge ourselves?

I said earlier that racism in our history was both bottom up and top down. I think today the continued surfacing of discrimination and prejudice is mostly top down. Even as the dominant narrative has changed sharply towards racial equality, it has been easy for ambitious politicians from Wallace to Nixon to Trump to exploit racial bias to gain power. Today the leading voices in the Republican Party base their appeal on thinly-disguised shout-outs to white male fears of losing dominance. Stopping by any means necessary the long term shift towards more power for minorities and women is their central message. Much of their criticism of ‘elites’ and ‘Washington’ translates into anger at new cultural and political norms mandating greater equality.

Faced with this repeated bubbling up of racism, one response is to go on the offensive, exposing and confronting every instance, big and small. We (white people) are encouraged to uncover our own unconscious biases and be ready to jump on every tasteless joke or unthinking stereotype.

Introspection is always valuable, and sometimes thoughtless relatives or friends need correction. But in my view we need to be understanding of, perhaps even sometimes overlook, the garden-variety racism that is floating around in many Americans. It can’t be argued away with confrontations and criticism. Shaming and pillorying every minor manifestation (such as relentlessly exposing ‘micro-aggressions’ on college campuses) is counter-productive and deepens our cultural divide. Instead it needs to be delegitimized by aggressively and persistently calling out leaders in politics, in religion, in business, in law enforcement who are deliberately fostering these messages. Those people and their self-interest have to be relentlessly exposed. They have to be defeated in elections, ousted from their pulpits, voted off their corporate boards. Racial bias in policing and the courts is especially toxic and must be countered. Racial appeals have to be seen to not work. Once those leaders are discredited, racism will not vanish, but it will lose its force.

Trump is extraordinarily damaging because it is top cover from people in positions of authority that gives permission to ordinary people to act badly. It is crucial to counter and expose his racism and defeat him and his supporters at the polls. And their racism and prejudice must be seen to be a key reason for this defeat.

Just as urgently, we must do something about the conditions that make it easy to activate racial prejudice. Families and communities that are in decline—losing jobs, losing hope for the future—are ripe for appeals to race. Raising them up is the best way to blunt prejudice and keep it beneath the surface.

Education that is honest about our American past, and the ways that past shapes us now, is the best long-term corrective. Certainly my baby-boomer generation was raised on many lies and half-truths: that slavery ‘wasn’t that bad;’ that the Civil War was really about ‘state’s rights;’ that once we ended legal segregation we would quickly see full equality. Steps such as the removal of Civil War statues are vital to spark re-thinking and to send a message about what is acceptable in the public sphere. If we do this, future generations will be less susceptible to racist appeals.

My concluding thought is that racism and other types of prejudice don’t come only from our peculiar American history. It is, I think, a permanent part of the human condition that we are susceptible to being suspicious of people who differ racially or ethnically. There is plenty of racial and ethnic prejudice in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Everywhere it is a potential that can be activated by stress, fear, and greed, and is urged on by ambitious men who see it as a vehicle to gain power and wealth.

This is not an excuse: every bad or immoral act arguably is rooted in some ‘natural’ drive; we expect decent human beings to resist and control these drives. What it means, I would hold, is that we should not hope to ‘eliminate’ racism or think that it is some unique failing of Americans or white Europeans. What we can do is weaken it by making it a losing strategy for acquiring power.

Permanent Disruption

I recently read an article by Walter Russell Meade in Foreign Affairs, “The Big Shift: How American Democracy Fails its Way to Success.” I usually like reading Meade, who is good at putting today’s problems in perspective. In this case he compares our politically impoverished, feels-like-we’re-puppets-of-our-corporate-masters present to the period after the Civil War, when the US was birthing massive new industries and government seemed unable to keep up. Meade thinks the information sector is playing this role today. His optimistic point is that in the first half of the 20th century government did catch up. The US generated laws and institutions to regulate big business, while deploying some of our new national wealth to help the old and the poor. We can do that again, Meade promises. Harvard polymath Stephen Pinker on a grander scale offers the same promise in his new book, Enlightenment Now, which argues that if we trust in the scientific method and build on the progress of the past several centuries, all our problems can be overcome.

This is a useful view, and has some truth to it. But when I read Meade and Pinker I get a sinking feeling. Their framework is reassuring, telling us we are in a temporary ‘period of transition’ and eventually we’ll get our feet under us and restore some kind of normalcy. Only that isn’t what seems to happen, and will probably never happen. Is there anyone who believes we are moving from a stable time when peasants worked the land under the thumb of rich autocrats to a new equally stable time characterized by…what? Factory workers marching off in the morning with their lunch pails and coming home at night on the trolley? Office workers driving in from the suburbs and returning to a nice martini? Twenty-somethings in remote workstations logging into their latest gig jobs?

No. The disruption from our capitalist system and constant scientific and technological advances is never-ending. Meade glosses over the slight 20th century hiccups of communism and fascism, both of them attempts to exploit the chronic insecurity and anxiety caused in normal human beings by this endless churn. Communism promised a new order, overseen by all-wise technocrats, that would permanently alter the distribution of economic and social rewards to the benefit of all. And part of the attraction was that it would be a one-off: once the world was cleansed (violently and irrevocably) of the old order, the new order would last forever. Fascism was to do the same: cleanse the world of the inferior races and put the world under the boot of its rightful rulers, and you have the 1000 year Reich. They failed, so good for us, but it was a near thing, and the underlying sources of fear and anxiety—the loss of control and predictability over our daily lives, the risk of losing everything from random economic or scientific changes, the upending of social and cultural norms—have not gone away.

I am generally sympathetic to the progressive response, which is to use an active government to smooth out the inevitable ups and downs of the modern world with a variety of programs to guarantee basics like healthcare, housing, education, and a respectable income. The United States can and should do a much better job in all these areas. I think this would help buffer us from the excesses of populism. Let’s go all the way and implement some form of Basic Minimum Income. But I am not Panglossian about this. European states that offer a lot more public support than the US are also being buffeted. This is because the sources of anxiety are as much cultural as economic. The threats posed by immigration and demography and technology cannot be fully overcome by more social programs. And there is no realistic prospect of a resting place; no one can promise that once we deal with the Dreamers, or take down all the Civil War statues, or get over it and offer universal healthcare, that disruptive change will be over. No, we all realize with more or less clarity that climate change is coming, that the robots are coming, that a multicultural (and much older) society is coming, that gene-splicing is coming, that sneaky new ways for corporations and politicians to manipulate us are coming , and on and on. And as these waves of disruption threaten to break over us, we become more anxious and more susceptible to the siren songs of thugs and bullies and clever power-mongers.

Meade and Pinker would tell us, and are right to tell us, that these challenges pale in comparison with what our ancestors faced every day. Thanks to economic and political advances we don’t generally have to worry about starving to death if it’s a bad winter, or dying from minor infections, or being raped and pillaged by invading Mongols. But most people are not reassured by being told they should stop complaining about today’s problems because it used to be worse. Their sense of well-being comes from their expectations for now, and their experience with other people more or less like themselves.

Our responses fall along a spectrum from full-blown reaction, digging in our heels to Make America Great Again; to embracing the Brave New World. The former leads to Trumpism and the rule of thugs and bullies, the latter to an equally obnoxious but so far unnamed syndrome that we might call Zuckerbergism: don’t fight the manipulation and exploitation of your identity by the gods of Silicon Valley. Just relax. Make more friends on Facebook.

As is often the case, the extremes meet and reinforce one another. The Cambridge Analytica fiasco has shown that using the most sophisticated technology tools in the service of reactionary politics is well-advanced.

Today we have a political divide that is incoherent from the perspective of managing the inevitable arrival of the new. There is a liberal/progressive movement that wants to do more to support families economically and limit the power of corporations and special interests, but also favors aggressive efforts to expand rights for minorities and women and immigrants. There is a conservative/reactionary movement that wants to slow or roll back the expansion of individual rights and the flow of immigrants, but favors leaving individuals at the mercy of the market and encouraging the continued rise in inequality and corporate rights.

Populism can be seen as an attempt to combine liberal economics with a conservative social agenda. As practiced by Trump and his supporters, however, it has been wholly captured on the economic front by Paul Ryan’s neoliberal orthodoxy, leaving its appeal to rest entirely on its resistance to cultural change. In other words, it is standard-issue modern conservatism, but with an ugly edge that often crosses the line into outright racism and xenophobia.

How should we think about this? If the progressive economic agenda is a good thing from the standpoint of managing economic change and enabling citizens to cope with the radical uncertainty of modern life, is there also a case to be made for a slower, more deliberate approach to cultural change? This is a difficult nut to crack, because any such call easily plays into the hands of people who want no change at all. On some issues, such as the status of African-Americans, I would argue there is no room for anything but maximum pressure. Racism has such a deep hold in America that it requires uncompromising straight talk and radical measures, like the new National Lynching Memorial in Montgomery.

Other issues, however, are less straightforward. Immigration is an area where I think the reluctance of political leaders to manage the flow of immigrants (the result of overlapping pressure from business and progressive activists) has led to an unnecessary crisis. There is no excuse for demonizing immigrants as people, but it is not incompatible with liberal values to agree that every society has some limits on the numbers and types of people it can accept without excessive strain. Anger over immigration is the number one driver of today’s dangerous populism in both the US and Europe—responsible politicians should have done more to prevent this from happening. More limits 20 years ago would have headed off today’s enthusiasm for a Wall.

Support for rural and small town America is another area where we have not done enough as a nation. Economic dislocation has combined with disdain from urban elites to create a burning sense of anger and frustration. Does everyone have to drink soy lattes and live in a downtown loft? There are signs that ambitious youth and new companies are leaving over-priced coastal cities and striking out for the heartland. Let’s encourage this.

While racism and xenophobia are front and center in motivating populist reactionaries, anger over women’s rights is close behind. Male resentment at the rising assertiveness of women is a major driver behind the alt-right, not to mention Hillary’s loss. At the risk of angry hate-mail, I think this is a problem we need to take seriously. Young men, especially the less-educated, are having a hard time finding their way in modern society and are angry when they see women getting ahead. Many women understandably think this is a non-problem. We don’t want to reinforce patriarchy. But disgruntled, alienated young men are easy recruits into the worst kind of political movements. We need public service and apprenticeship programs aimed at finding meaningful work for men who are falling through the cracks.

There is, in short, lots of room for new political movements that don’t oppose change per se, but focus on ways to soften the impact and spread the benefits widely. Dealing better with economic change is crucial. But we also need to recognize and address sympathetically new challenges to identity, meaning, and status.

Why I Am Skeptical of Skepticism

Today’s emphasis on the weakness of human reason, our cognitive limits and unconscious biases, has become destructive. It’s the go-to story for anyone who wants to explain away things that other people are doing that they don’t like, or justify their own prejudice. The battering rams of ‘criticism’ have done their work well. Fifty years ago it was a mark of educated liberal sophistication if you pointed out that the media were pawns of corporate masters or reflected the class interests of Ivy League editors; today Fox News and every man in the street believe some version of the same thing.

The Big Idea of classical Western philosophy was ‘nature’, an objective reality independent of human beings but knowable by human beings and governed not by capricious deities but by impersonal and regular patterns or laws. We are part of it but also able to stand outside and observe it, analyze it, comprehend it. This idea clashes with most religions and a view of the world controlled by multiple gods or one god. It weakened under Christianity and almost disappeared, but survived and eventually was renewed more or less successfully in the acts of synthesis of medieval scholasticism. But it was a forced balancing act and eventually broke down with modern science and Enlightenment thinkers exploring nature as an independent reality while—initially—paying lip service to religion.

Science and objective inquiry, however, eventually turned on themselves. Many modern philosophers who looked at human beings as natural phenomena concluded we had huge built-in limitations. Hume and Kant defined unbridgeable limits to reason—we could describe Nature mathematically, but never really ‘know’ it. Darwin and his successors told us we were packages of drives and chemicals designed to survive and with brains optimized for reproductive success, not objective knowledge. Nietzsche questioned the premise of philosophy, that human life was improved by the use of reason. Freud and countless others tried to probe our hidden depths, finding we had all sorts of unconscious biases, goals, prejudices, and instincts that often overwhelmed our little frontal cortexes. Wave upon wave of sophisticated Marxists and neo-Marxists taught us to be suspicious of accepted political, social, and personal positions as nothing but justifications for power and privilege. Thomas Kuhn explained that even the natural sciences are warped by ambition and resistance to new truth. Today growing branches of social psychology and behavioral economics have popularized what is now almost a given for many, that no matter how ‘rational’ we think we are, we are caught in a spiderweb of biases and cognitive limitations.

This is a pretty well-trodden story by now.  What has become clear is that  this rejection of the possibility of agreeing on an objective reality has now penetrated so deeply that it has become an unquestioned article of faith that corrodes the possibility of common discourse. We see this in our current politics. We are having bitter fights now about science and the role of experts in politics and policy. Populists and conservatives are lining up against scientific findings like global warming, the need for childhood vaccinations, and other similar exercises in truth denial. The Trump budget drastically cuts government funding for scientific research, and Trump himself regularly asserts things that are manifestly untrue, while equally regularly claiming that all his critics are liars. The Republican tax bill that passed in December assumes future economic growth from tax cuts that is contradicted by experience, economic theory, macroeconomic models, the vast majority of economists, and many businessmen and investors.

More generally, an influential sect of conservatives opposes the role of “experts” and professionals in government and public life generally.  Steve Bannon’s famous pronouncement some months ago about rolling back the “administrative state” articulates this view. Regulations promulgated by “unelected bureaucrats” are a major target (never mind that most of these have been mandated by Congress), but the disagreement goes deeper. Many of the conservative thinkers who have banded together behind Trump demonize Woodrow Wilson as the arch-enemy who symbolizes what has gone wrong with America. Wilson was an academic and a political scientist—first President of the American Political Science Association—who thought good decisions should be informed by professional experts drawing on the latest scientific research.

In the Bannon perspective argument and discourse are exclusively about the will to power: undermining other people’s views and advancing the interests of your own tribe. There is no point in fighting bias, prejudice, instinct or whatever—this is who we really are. This is the nihilistic position that now seems to animate American (and Russian) internet trolls who have weaponized these critiques: it’s fun to weaken all norms and social bonds and ‘play’ at being irrational haters.

The American founders by and large supported what they saw as new, scientific discoveries in politics, as Hamilton tells us in Federalist #9: “The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients.” This new science did not assume that human beings were always reasonable in understanding and working for the common good. Quite the opposite: it was built on the assumption that men are not angels and usually act for their own narrow and selfish ends. Scientific institutions and laws, however, can take this into account and convert normal self-interested behavior into decent government.

The difference between then and now, in a nutshell, is that we are less and less sure that people are rational in even the narrow sense. Our democracy doesn’t assume that voters are high-minded and disinterested; but it arguably does assume that voters have a good idea of what they want and can map political candidates and policy proposals onto their wants and choose accordingly. Certainly this is possible for a literate, informed, educated citizenry. This allows for the formation of coherent political parties and political platforms.

But the election of Donald Trump is only one arrow in the quiver of skepticism about voter rationality. Much research on both the macro level (voting patterns, public opinion surveys) and the micro level (how individual choices can shift or change due to cues and circumstances that have nothing objectively to do with a political choice) suggests that we do not know our own minds. We do not have stable preferences, do not connect preferences to policy options, do not vote or choose in accord with any recognizable ideology or set of principles. We are ridiculously easy to manipulate and confuse. We pick our tribes or parties first, and make our goals and principles fit.

In the eyes of many advocates of these theories, the problem these findings point to is not that we don’t know our own minds, but that we don’t really have minds to know. In this the findings of political science and social psychology seem to agree with much of modern philosophy. The ‘self’ is an illusion, an unstable fiction of coherence that is belied by actual human behavior. Much of what we like to think our ‘selves’ think, believe, and do is done to us by unconscious drives and internal mental modules and genetic makeup. Or it is shaped by idiosyncratic external factors—upbringing, language, culture, geography, what we ate for dinner, a random TV show.

You don’t have to be a philosophy major to accept these conclusions. They are baked into most of our education in the humanities and social sciences, and increasingly into popular discourse.  An appropriate response to this framework would seem to be humility: “don’t believe everything you think.” Even if we reject the more radical implications, we should have a healthy skepticism of our own opinions. But inevitably it is most often used to cast doubt on what other people think, people we disagree with or dislike.

Accepting that there are limits to individual reasonableness doesn’t have to do this—it can reinforce the need for dialogue if people agree that each of us by ourselves has limits and blinkers, but collectively we can approach closer to what is true and good for all. The argument for democracy as the best, or at least a defensible, form of government largely rests on judgments about the role of uncertainty and unpredictability in human affairs. If the world is terribly complicated and full of complex interactions, and human beings are inherently limited, no human being can fully unravel the lines of causality, or predict the outcomes of what we do and don’t do. This means in some basic sense that we are all equal. Each of us is just as flawed and partial as anyone else. There is good reason to think that joint judgments that get the benefit of many individuals contributing their experience and views, and that guarantee the decision will be made with an eye to the well-being of the many, will be better and fairer than the judgments of a few.

This was Aristotle’s argument for democracy. We are better together. We don’t have full access to the truth but we can discern more and check one another’s excesses and mistakes if we agree on processes and institutions to manage conflict, and accept that the results of these deliberations are legitimate.

It is not clear that most Americans accept this anymore. It may be that democracy “cannot bear very much reality.” Today we have an unprecedented class of commentators, analysts, and explainers operating ceaselessly 24/7. Deploying the multiple access tools of social media, close examination of every law, every election, every public figure, every tweet, reveals too many warts. Each voice wants to gain our attention and our dollars by stoking our fears. Our naïve faith is overwhelmed. The reaction is often, I don’t trust any of you. Or, I trust the ones who reinforce what I want to believe.

Popular culture reinforces our pessimism. Americans today are not optimistic about their future, and the airwaves (an anachronistic image, but you get the idea) are full of dark and dystopian tales. Today’s Batman is not your father’s superhero. From the Matrix to Westworld, reality is something to be manipulated and reshaped, usually by nefarious governments or corporations. Orwell’s 1984 is back on the best-seller lists.

Today, defenders of democracy must go deeper than reiterating the arguments made in 1789. We were founded at a high point of optimism about the ability of reason to craft laws and institutions to steer us in a positive direction—a belief that normal people with all their frailties can, if well-organized, make good decisions. Americans now tend to believe that their most important institutions conspire to deceive and manipulate them, while many of their fellow citizens cannot be trusted because they are deceived and manipulated, whether by fake news or the deep state or wealthy oligarchs or Silicon Valley techies or all of the above.

I have no easy solution, but I can say that nowadays I try to be skeptical of skepticism. The United States has, by any historical or comparative measure, had a damn good run these last 250 years. We need some major housecleaning, however, to have another 250. We seem to have collectively decided that making serious changes to our institutions is just too hard. We can’t get rid of the stupid Electoral College, we can’t restrict money in politics, we can’t do something about our crazy Senate and its bias (the worst in the developed world) in favor of the rural few at the expense of the urban many, we can’t lift up African-Americans, we can’t fix gerrymandering. And much, much more. Let’s do some of these things, and we won’t need to make so many excuses for our bad behavior by blaming hidden drives and unconscious biases.

 

Awhile ago I posted a piece about addictive behaviors. (http://www.adamideas.org/?s=Addictive).  These are drives and instincts that are rooted in human biology and evolution that modern technology and business can easily exploit, things like our cravings for sugar or sex.  I think our fascination with guns also falls in this category.

GUNS

Among the many reasons people give for wanting access to all kinds of guns is that shooting is just a lot of fun. I think that’s obviously true, but why exactly is that? Let’s think of shooting as an extension of throwing. From an evolutionary point of view, humans evolved about 2 million years ago to be terrific throwers, much better than our ape cousins or any other animal on the planet. This involved changes to our shoulders and other physiological shifts allowing us to coordinate leg, torso and arm motions. Better throwing made us better hunters and better fighters, increasing our intake of protein, altering the course of evolution and setting us on the path towards bigger brains and modern Homo sapiens.

In short, throwing is a Big Deal. Being able to project a rock or stick or spear accurately and at high velocity over a long distance was an extremely valuable skill. Human beings were praised for it, taught it, had more children because of it, and the talent and the liking for it was bred into us. Oh, and there appears to be a significant gender gap here, with males not only being able to do it better because they are bigger and stronger, but because there is a neurological component that makes it easier for men to coordinate the complex coordination of leg, torso, and shoulder. In any case, whether via nature or nurture, throwing well became a central part of being a successful man. It made you a good hunter and useful warrior. It got you recognition, status, better mate selection.

The key thing here is that throwing, and throwing well, became something to enjoy for its own sake. It was closely connected to survival and evolutionary advantage, but like many activities (e.g. sex) it became enjoyable for its own sake. It was incorporated into games and sports. It was what boys did when they didn’t have anything else to do—skip rocks, throw snowballs, flip knives into trees.

Over time we added new ways to throw. Spears. Darts. Slings. Bows and arrows. And eventually guns. Guns don’t require the same physical skills as throwing but satisfy the basic urge to project something and hit a target quickly, accurately, at a distance.

We still highly value a good thrower. We pay pitchers and quarterbacks a heck of a lot of money. Most of our popular sports involve some type of accurate throwing to hit a target—baseball, football, basketball, tennis, lacrosse.  Soccer does it with kicking but the core objective—projecting a ball quickly and accurately—is the same. What video game doesn’t make shooting or throwing of some kind a central feature?

And so too with guns. Someone who is good with a gun is praised for having a valuable skill. Like a good accurate throw, a good accurate shot just feels…fun. Satisfying. People admire it, identify with it. And while throwing a baseball or spear is hard and difficult for many people to do well, shooting is a lot easier and can potentially be taken up by more people.

So there is a very strong biological, evolution-based desire for the gun industry to build on. Yes, there are other drivers too, for safety or power or as a symbol of freedom or whatever. But all these ride, it seems to me, on the underlying satisfaction and enjoyment people get from throwing. And it’s easy for a firearms company to make a gun more ‘fun’ by emphasizing that it’s faster (assault rifles have much higher muzzle velocity than handguns), or shoots more quickly, or is more accurate, or projects something bigger and heavier—any of the basic components of satisfying throwing.

Does this make shooting a potentially ‘addictive’ behavior? There certainly does seem to be an irrational attachment to shooting and guns by their most fervent defenders, a good sign that we are dealing with an instinctive drive that can turn addictive.

Of course this doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t regulate guns. People have plenty of other outlets for their throwing needs, and we could easily accommodate the use of guns of different kinds at licensed ranges. If we recognize and deal with the connection to throwing, we have a better chance of crafting arguments and policies that all of us can live with.

How to Think About Guns

(I wrote this initially after the mass shooting at Sutherland Springs, Texas in November, but it applies just as much after yesterday’s Parkland school shooting in Florida, AND THE MAY 24 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SHOOTING IN UVALDE, TEXAS).

After the latest mass killing in America, in Texas, at a tiny church in the middle of nowhere, in a town that loves its guns and still loves them–another demonstration to us all, as though another demonstration was needed, that we human beings are made of some kind of special steel that is impervious to evidence and logic and heartache—after this bloodbath we were inundated, again, with calls to treat the perpetrator’s mental condition, or fix the loopholes that kept him from being listed as a child-abuser and on a no-buy list for guns. From the Attorney General of Texas, no less, we heard once again the astonishing truism that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’

I say truth because it is, of course, undeniable. Human beings are the problem. On this we can all agree. If we can fix the human problem, it would be safe for us to have guns. If we can keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, we will be safer. If we can keep guns out of the hands of all the people who lose their tempers, who get road rage, who envy their neighbor’s shiny new car or hate the way they keep their yard; all the people who drink too much at parties, or use opioids or meth or coke; the ones who take anti-depressants and lithium, and the ones who throw them away; all the people who get jealous at their girlfriends and boyfriends, who want to dominate a spouse or a date; all the people consumed by lust, who think ‘no’ means ‘yes’; all those obsessed by power and needing praise and validation; every young man on the streets with too much testosterone; everyone who’s careless and forgets to put dangerous things away or lock them up; everyone who’s lost their job, had a bad boss, got passed over, seen their dreams go up in smoke; all the daredevils, the risk-takers, the ones who think they’re invulnerable; all the rich people who feel entitled and can’t imagine anything bad happening to them, and the poor who don’t expect anything but the bad; all the stupid people, the confused, the baffled, the frustrated; all the power-hungry ideologues and the people in thrall to their conspiracy theories and lies; everyone who’s been traumatized and has PTSD; all the ones left behind, lying in the dust, and those who put them there.

Yes, if we can keep guns out of the hands of these dangerous folks, we’ll be safe.

Raise your hand if you’re a candidate for sainthood. Look to the left, look to the right, look in the mirror. Not too many hands up.

I’m a good person, you’re thinking. I would never hurt anyone except in self-defense, never use my gun dangerously. I haven’t done drugs, committed any crimes, threatened anyone.

Good for you. But…never? NEVER?? No one knows themselves that well.

We aren’t able to predict who is going to be the next killer. What do people always say, afterwards: “He seemed like such a nice guy.” “I would never have imagined he would do anything like that.” Here’s the thing—people change. People snap. Stuff happens to them, or in them, that no one else can see. There are no signs, or only ones that can be interpreted correctly after the fact. Look at the Las Vegas killer. No one saw him coming. No criminal record. We still don’t know ‘why’ he did it. All we know, in retrospect, is that he spent a lot of his time and money collecting guns and training with them.

I’m not just talking about mass killings. Those are awful but relatively rare. We have zero ability to find those people ahead of time and put them on some no-buy list. And these are usually determined people who are not deterred by easy-to-get-around restrictions. No, I’m talking about all the day-to-day, mundane stuff. The botched robbery. The wife-battering husband. The street-level gang-banger. The depressed teenager. All the killings that add up to over 11,000 homicides by gun in 2014. To a US homicide rate 7 times higher than the average for other developed countries, and a gun homicide rate over 25 times higher. To over 20,000 suicides every year, from guns.

We have a shitload of guns floating around in the hands of virtually everyone. In the hands of all of us with all of our frailties, all of our selfishness and anger and stupidity. Technology has made these weapons cheaper and cheaper, and more and more lethal. To make it worse, we live in a consumer driven society where amoral companies compete to develop and sell us the coolest, most effective, do-the-most-damage-in-the-least-amount-of-time toys. Other amoral companies compete to glorify gun violence in movies, TV, music, and video games. All this is insane and suicidal. Any society would suffer if it imitated this. But it’s only part of the story.

Let’s be serious for once. We have a problem that won’t be solved by restricting bump stocks or assault rifles or gun-show loopholes with all those ‘common-sense’ laws we hear about. Gun advocates laugh, rightly, at most of these well-meaning but inadequate ideas. They wouldn’t do much. The problem requires solutions commensurate with reality. We have a lot of people who exalt guns and the gun life, who get their meaning and identity largely from guns, who place guns at the center of their world. Fewer and fewer Americans own guns or use them, but those who do are more and more committed. They buy more guns. They care about guns more than anything else in life. This needs to be turned around. And that will take real action and strong laws. It will require a shift like the shifts we’ve seen about smoking and drunk driving, a rejection of a set of attitudes and behaviors that characterize a lot of Americans right now.

Yes, gun enthusiasts, I do mean you. We need to de-legitimize having guns for ‘fun’, collecting guns, seeing guns as signs of manhood and authority, and viewing guns as central to being an American. Protecting your family in your home, yes. Going hunting in the fall, yes. The current pornographic obsession with guns that we see at gun shows, in Hollywood, in the NRA, no.

These cultural shifts can’t be legislated, but laws and public action and statements matter. The de-legitimization needs to start at the top with some bright lines. Registration. Tough restrictions. Buy-backs. Destruction of illegal weapons. Lawsuits against gun manufacturers. Condemnation of cultural products that glorify guns and the gun life. Rolling back open carry laws and prohibiting guns outside the home except in carefully defined circumstances. Courage in the face of inevitable pushback and anger, knowing that the majority of Americans—even conservatives and gun owners—already back many of these measures.

The starting point should be taking back the Second Amendment. One of the gun movements great successes was a deliberate campaign to re-define the historic understanding that connected gun ownership rights to a broad public purpose, maintaining a militia for community self-defense. The Heller Case as articulated by the late Justice Scalia is a travesty of bad scholarship and sophistry. (I suggest you read it and judge for yourself). It needs to be aggressively challenged and questioned. It is not ‘normal,’ and not consistent with most legal scholarship or most Americans understanding of the English language and the meaning of the Constitution. It is now used by gun extremists to justify any type of weapon, to anyone, anywhere. On this issue Americans should never give in, never, never, never. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. It aims at securing us a decent life.

Part of this fight is to knock down the idea that guns in private hands are our protection against bad government. Gun enthusiasts often seem to see themselves as protagonists in the next re-make of “Red Dawn”, taking to the hills with their Bushmasters to fight some shadowy state power. But if modern government does go bad, no number of pop guns will stop the 82nd Airborne or the 1st Armor Division. More to the point, the architects of the Constitution looked to strong states to help check national power, not groups of armed insurrectionists. The inability of the national government to deal with various local rebellions was a major reason to create a stronger structure under the Constitution. The 2nd Amendment is designed to protect state authority by checking the national government from taking away the weapons needed for state militias. (And also to make sure that in slave states, white citizens always had the means to keep slaves under control).

The 2nd Amendment is the only one of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights that has an explanatory preamble. The others simply define the rights being protected. That tells us this ‘right’ is something different and needs to be carefully circumscribed.

To the extent 2nd Amendment purists are motivated by genuine arguments, they rest on a deeply flawed understanding of freedom. When advocates are confronted with the undeniable consequences of their stance—the 30,000 gun deaths (and many more injuries) each year, the mass shootings, the degradation of our public space, the huge financial burden (and cost in lives) for police and private security, the humiliating damage to America’s soft power—they tend to shrug. This is the ‘price of freedom,’ as Bill O’Reilly said after the murders in Las Vegas.

The freedom arguments used here focus, as is all too common for modern conservatives, almost exclusively on possible abuses of government power. To be free is to be free of the state. But there is no freedom in practice without states. The drafters of the Bill of Rights were steeped in the arguments of natural rights theorists—Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu. Human beings living with no agreed authority over them, in some version of the ‘state of nature,’ can be argued to have a natural right to defend themselves and preserve their lives (and property, to the extent it is needed for life). But as Hobbes pointed out, this is a life “of all against all”—nasty, brutish, violent, and short. We have plenty of examples of this sort of life today, in Somalia, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in El Salvador. These are not places with any shortage of guns.

The primordial threats come from our fellow man. It is to ease these that we have government, to protect first of all Life, along with Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. This is the natural right tradition that our Founders lived and breathed. Government cannot take away the right of individual self-defense but it can and must check the rights of individuals to use force or the threat of force to have their way in the world. Human beings are not angels. Self-defense cannot become an excuse for every manner of pre-emption or implied violence. Having and displaying modern firepower and allowing it to be widely available sends a message to your fellow citizens that any and every interaction has the potential to become deadly; that doing or saying anything offensive, even accidentally, may result in lethal violence. It signals that I as an individual, someone you may not know and have no way of knowing, am prepared and willing to take things into my own hands rather than rely on police or courts or designated authorities.

The implied threat from owning modern weapons inhibits free speech and democratic debate. This is especially the case for weapons that a reasonable person would interpret as beyond what is needed for personal defense, e.g. any type of assault rifle, or armor-piercing or extra-lethal rounds, or large clips. The same for carrying any type of gun in public.

“An armed society is a polite society” is another way of saying it is an intimidated society. Arms used to be the monopoly of the ruling elites, who used naked force to keep the lower classes submissive but among themselves relied on codes of honor backed by the threat of duels or vendettas to settle disputes. An elaborate etiquette and courtly language accompanied these norms to avoid giving offense and triggering violence. This is incompatible with a healthy democracy where we need open and unconstrained debate.

Gun enthusiasts who want to make the world safe for guns by identifying potentially dangerous people and not letting them buy guns are heading down a perilous road.  All of us are potentially dangerous.  And in a society saturated with guns, there is no way to keep even a mildly determined person from getting a weapon.  These arguments are not serious.  They are pretexts.

The true believers and 2nd Amendment purists are a minority but a very vocal and determined one, backed by abundant funding from firearms companies. They are in my view committed to a false vision of human nature and human community that violates our fundamental rights to life and liberty, and undermines democracy and individual freedom. This must be checked by the use of political power. People committed to a different agenda have to be elected and then supported in the face of intense blowback. And we must change the debate, going beyond feckless calls for ‘common-sense’ compromises and taking a clear stand against the association of guns with freedom, manliness, fun and the Constitution.