Steve Harris
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Red Lines

2/24/2023

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One of the notable failures of the Obama foreign policy was his famous declaration  (April 2012) that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria against various domestic groups would be a “red line,” triggering US military intervention. The regime’s use of such weapons was documented within a year but no US intervention followed.

I was thinking of this (relatively) recent incident lately as I have been boning up on the history of genocide for my course this term. Indeed, there is a problematic pattern of Western/Christian/European powers decrying behaviors on the part of Arabs/Muslims/other “Orientals” as being uncivilized/morally outrageous and demanding that such activities cease forthwith. The condemning powers then proceed to wrestle with what to do about such evils but rarely actually step up to their (our?) Modern/Western/Christian morals.

This pattern began in the 19C with the British wringing their hands over the “Bulgarian horrors” in the 1870s in which the Ottoman Empire brutally suppressed an effort by Bulgarian Christians to break away. One result was a set of treaty provisions under which certain Christian communities within the Ottoman Empire were placed under the “protection” of various (Christian) European powers (i.e., Britain, France, and Russia). This included the Armenians, one of the largest such groups whose members were scattered across Anatolia (present-day Turkey).

For a variety of reasons, these Armenian communities continued to be oppressed by Ottoman authorities, despite nominal protests from the Christian powers, culminating in a set of massacres in the mid-1890s and again in 1915 (what is generally seen as the “Armenian Genocide”).

We can see a parallel situation in Europe as Nazi Germany dramatically enhanced endemic antisemitism in the 1930s, pressuring Jews (in particular) to leave the Reich.  With limited exceptions, these same modern/Western/Christian powers (e.g., Britain, France, Switzerland, the US) refused to accept Jewish refugees and found all sorts of excuses for not fully engaging with Germany on this issue.

One could say much the same about subsequent 20C genocides (e.g., Bosnia, Rwanda).

In considering this string of events, I have been pondering the role of guilt. That of the perpetrators seems clear enough, as does the hypocrisy of the West. Still, I wonder whether the guilt of the Western powers plays a role in subsequent incidents. After all, as we all know from personal experience, it is much easier to blame the “other” (even with good substantive reason) than to pay close attention to our own role/responsibility/culpability and spend time figuring out how to clean up our own ‘act.’

In particular, could the intransigence of Western powers towards the Turkish denial of its genocide against the Armenians (going on over a century later) stem in part from its (our?) continued preference to focus on a clearly guilty perpetrator and not acknowledge that Western intervention in the Ottoman Empire in the late 19C could have stimulated Turkish resentment and contributed to the genocidal atmosphere which demonstrated the hollowness of the Western powers’ “protection” of Christian minority communities within the Ottoman Empire?

Similarly, the obvious and horrific actions of Nazi Germany often seem like a “black hole” in terms of historical analysis, distorting and diminishing the roles and responsibilities of others in the process. The awfulness of the Holocaust makes it especially easy to downplay the lack of moral action on the part of the Western powers (and easier to forget the various brutalities on the part of European  and American colonial/imperial powers over the centuries).

A raft of questions arises from these concerns, e.g.:
* How much of the founding of Israel was due to Western guilt over the Holocaust?
* Did the history of British (in particular) inaction over Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire affect how the subsequent Turkish actions have been portrayed? (i.e., are the Turks “worse” so that our failures seem less dire?)
* How did the European stumbling over the “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s affect how the Western powers approached the incipient massacres in Rwanda just a year later?
* How much did the Bush43 debacle in Iraq in the early 2000s deter Obama from a similar intervention in Syria a few years later?

There’s also an interesting question as to whether this whole set of questions in unique to liberal democracies. Our Modern priority on liberty and the rights/lives of individuals makes us especially sensitive to apparent oppression and brutality (Turkish/German/Serbian/Rwandan Hutus). At the same time, such countries have some degree of democratic control over whether and how to act internationally, usually colored by their relative wealth and history of international/imperial power. Stated differently, no one is concerned with Danish intervention and popular sentiment (either moral or isolationist) doesn’t have much impact on the foreign policy of authoritarian countries.

Even if there is moral clarity and a determination to intervene, there are real and significant limitations on the ability of even the most powerful countries to effect change in distant lands. Taking a moral stance without the power and will to follow up may (as perhaps was the case in the Armenian situation) aggravate the situation. Anguish and hand-wringing may be all that is practically possible. Then, there’s a whole set of economic and social trade-offs to consider. And, perhaps, there is some basis for caution in (self-righteous?) moral prescription on the part of Western powers whose own record is more than a little problematic. Overall, this is indeed, as Samantha Power said in her book (2002): “A Problem From Hell.”

So, even if I think Obama’s unfulfilled “red line” was a mistake with real consequences (e.g., Afghanistan, Ukraine), I can sympathize with the desire to do something…anything. But, at least when global politics is concerned, it may be better to decry, but not threaten; and any active intervention needs to be really well-planned and executed, because saber-rattling or failed intervention can easily have awful and long-lasting consequences.

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What is a Constitution?

2/17/2023

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As I have noted previously, the ailments of the American body politic have some deep cultural roots, stemming from a strain of isolationism/exceptionalism/entitlement which can’t stand the strains of globalization, accelerated change, and from the excesses of capitalist/individualistic mythology evidenced in inequality and environmental catastrophe. (Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln,….)

I’ve made a set of suggestions as to changing the US Constitution as one means of dealing with some of the structural problems with our system of government, but they don’t deal with these more fundamental concerns.

In an important sense, they can’t.

Amid all the talk about the end of Roe, court-packing, filibusters, and impeachments which have dominated our Constitutional discourse over the past several years, precious little attention has been paid to amending our constitution (i.e., intentionally lower-case).

The documentary version of a Constitution (capitalized) (which virtually every country has in the 21C) is a reflection of the power structure of its society. Of course, there’s always some distance between what a society says it is all about (e.g., democracy, equality, rule of law, true religion, etc.) and the actual way things work. Sometimes, that’s a good thing; sometimes, it presents problems: aspirations are striven towards or, in falling short, cause disappointment. In theory, the two should work into alignment over time.

A (lower-case) constitution, on the other hand, while it, too, follows from that underlying power structure, is a logical predicate to the formal document. It may be simpler to refer to the former as a societal constitution and the latter as a governmental Constitution.

In the case of many “failed states,” the societal constitution never coalesced or it has since unraveled. In the case of heretofore solidly democratic states which seem under siege, such as the US, the societal constitution seems to be fraying. And, naturally, there is only a limited amount of cohesive power in the written document if the ground underneath it is starting to shift and crack. Still, as the current debates in Israel demonstrate, without the (relative) clarity and stability of a written document, there is a chink in the armor of democracy which can be exploited by temporary majorities.

Sociologists and political scientists talk about two views of what a Constitution is (a “contractual” model and a “consensual” model), but I think they are actually talking about two different things. Some have gotten taken in by the relative stability of democratic societies in the later 20C and gotten overattached to a legalistic/formalistic vision in which the society is its Constitution. Putting the cart before the horse, they think concepts like law apply prior to the consensus/cohesion of society; but you can’t have a sense of social norms to be enforced by the institutional expression of society (i.e. a “government” or the “state”) without having a more-or-less understanding that there is a “We the People” whose agreement/consensus/inertia is the basis of the norms which eventually become laws.

In contrast to places where guns are still prevalent (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Syria, Myanmar) or places whose authoritarian superstructure prevents the flow of ideas and the possibility of uncertain outcomes (e.g., China, Russia, Egypt, Cuba, Iran), most places (including the US) merely have to contend with sclerosis, inertia, and garden-variety corruption. Those societies (us!)  have the possibility of expressing themselves through a set of norms (and eventually laws); both a societal consensus and a written Constitution.

So what should this document comprise?

1) A statement of purpose/goals/aspirations (e.g. Preamble)
2) The delineation of the roles and status of individuals and groups (e.g. rights/responsibilities)
3) The structure of institutions empowered to act on behalf of the people  (or other basis of the societal power structure) in order to achieve the first-noted principles and purposes
4) A means of updating/revising the document.

Some while back, Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale, wrote a piece which argued that the “real” constitution of the US was the Declaration of Independence of 1776, since that was the first and fullest expression of what we were doing together as a coherent society. From this perspective, he argued, the Constitution of 1787 was merely an engineering implementation guide for a government to get us to the aims Jefferson had espoused 11 years earlier. There’s a lot to this framing, but from a historical perspective, the practice of constitutionalism has moved on and we can load both aspects now into a single document.

All this is fine as a snapshot in time, but a Constitution (and certainly a constitution) is more than this: it’s a process as well as a product.  In an age of democratic constitution-making the participation of the people in the process of designing and debating their expression of aspirations and mechanisms not only validates and legitimizes the result, but, in an important sense,  itself also constitutes the society (and its political expression: the state).

In the US, we haven’t had such a process since the Reconstruction amendments (XIII, XIV & XV) in the aftermath of the Civil War (if even then), it is no wonder that we have become estranged from the document and, even more importantly, from the societal cohesion that comes with it. The last time there was a serious, widespread debate on a constitutional issue in this country was the ERA in the 1970s.

It's no wonder, therefore, that we have become estranged from our constitution and our Constitution. Instead, it has turned into scripture, to be pored over and parsed like a Talmudic study group or the medieval Scholastics of the Catholic Church. We devote the brilliance and energy of some of our sharpest thinkers to the (relatively) sterile process of determining the precise number of angels who can dance on the head of James Madison’s pin. We contort the language written almost 250 years ago to apply to modern society, technology, and international relations. We’re not thinking about what would work for us…now.

Moreover, we’re not engaging our society in trying to figure this out. We’re so wrapped up in the threat of the Trumpian “Proud Boys” and the foes of women’s right to choose that we seem afraid to take control of our constitutional future.

In the end, a constitution is the expression of a society as to what it wants to become and how it wants to get there. But, it’s not a passive process. We can’t wait for Moses to come down from the mountain top with two tablets. We have to wrest our future from the hands of our increasingly ancient past and, in the process, reconstruct who “We the People” is in the 21C
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Generations

2/10/2023

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Generations

In January, I saw in the news that Lucile Randon, then the oldest known person in the world (and the fourth oldest known person ever), had passed away. She was a few days short of her 119th birthday. Yes, that’s right: 119!

She was born in February, 1904 which made her the last person alive who had been born before my grandmother, Edythe (Rosen) Barnett. So, for me, besides a general interest in demographics and longevity (may you all live long and prosper!), Mlle. Randon’s passing marked a generational change: the era of my grandparents was finally over. Now, my parents have been gone for five and thirteen years, respectively, but there are some of their friends still around and, I expect, others of that generation will continue for another twenty years or so. And, of course, people of my generation have been dying for a long time. The first person of my cohort that I knew died when we were in high school. On current numbers, however, someone from my era is likely to make it to the 2070s; so we’ll be around for a while.

On the other end, I did meet one set of my great-grandparents, Moses and Pearl Rosen (Edythe’s parents), who were married for almost 70 years and died in their early 90s in the early 1960s. Not having any kids directly, I can’t “pass the torch” genetically, but my Great-Niece Emily Berg (who just had her first birthday) has, actuarily-speaking, a pretty good shot at living into the 22d century.

Together, then, I can directly connect within my family to 230 (+/-) years of history. It’s something to think about! 230 years takes us from Newton to Einstein, from Bach to Glass, from Leonardo to Manet, and from Washington to Trump.

Of course, at a personal level, my connection to Moses and Pearl on the one hand and Emily on the other doesn’t likely amount to a strand of great historical significance. Nobody in my family (even laterally) has risen to recognition in Wikipedia or whatever other measure of noteworthiness you might choose. Perhaps Emily will do something that merits widespread attention and I (and Moses and Pearl) will be appropriate footnotes in the first chapter of her biography; but, more likely, not. We’re more likely to be nothing more than links in the great genealogy tree compiled by the Mormons.

We’re ordinary in this way. The delight of a new birth, the celebration of birthdays, the marking of passing—all of which loom large in our day-to-day lives are, from this wider perspective, not much to get too excited about. They happen to everybody and this set of experiences (which I call my life) is not remarkable to anybody else. I think it’s helpful to see that this is true of everybody. We all face the same set (in our own versions) of life events/developments. Every family comes to a point where all grandparents are lost, then parents are lost, then we are lost, etc. etc. I (and at most three cousins) have the only conscious memories of Moses and Pearl; and, to be sure, they are already pretty faint. That’s all the living memory that is left of them. In due course, there won’t be any living connection to them and they will slip into the maw of the massive compendium of records of those who lived in the 19/20C; known only by a few scattered references in bureaucratic compilations.

They will take their place among those who were slightly visible in the past. And, visible at all only because of the trappings of modernity. Those born  a century or millennium earlier are almost all entirely vanished among the 100 billion humans of the totality of life on earth.

There is a part of me that struggles against this tsunami of anonymity. What can I do, I think sometimes, to leave a mark on history?  I think of those who gave some great sum to some institution to secure a building in their name or some other “permanent” memorial and I have to laugh (see Shelley’s Ozymandias.) I’m not likely to discover and name a comet that will cause my name to reappear every hundred years or so (Edmund Halley was, otherwise still quite an interesting character). I take some comfort (rationalization?) in my work as a teacher: a few published articles and some impact (of which they may be conscious or not) on the minds of students and their lives; but I don’t have any illusions of my prominence in the historical record. Even if I had kids, and progeny for multiple generations, then, as with Moses and Pearl, there would come a time150-180 years after my birth, when I, too, would fade from living memory and rely on my place in the census and other records.

As it is, I expect that will happen by the end of the century. While technology will preserve an increasing pool of traces of my existence, it’s not clear (even assuming that there is no digital degradation) that anyone will find them in the yottabyte (i.e., a quadrillion quadrillion bytes) ocean of data likely by then.

At this scale (of time and data), it’s not so clear how different humans are from ants or other creatures. But, we don’t live at such scales and only spend an inkling even contemplating them. As much as I am a big fan of long-term thinking, we can’t have any good idea what the world will be like five generations from now (any more than folks born in the early 19C had of how we live now). How could Moses and Pearl have any conception of the life that Emily will have? All we can do is nudge the ball forward as best we can and in whatever direction we can best guess makes the most sense.

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Laissez-Faire

2/3/2023

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Laissez faire

One of the many signs of a rudderless “conservative” political wing is the abandonment of  long-held tenets regarding the nature and role of government. Indeed, there is a robust line of thought back to the 18C (17C?) which includes Paine, Jefferson, Burke, and of course, Locke, who argued that government should be limited in scope and purpose lest it unnecessarily intrude on the lives and liberties of the people. Indeed, the very rejection of absolutist monarchies and the erection of states subject to controls/rule of law/separation of powers was to ensure that those states could not unduly trample on individual liberties. While this is pretty well established across our political culture, there has been some divergence since the middle of the 19C, with some (now associated with the “left”) advocating a larger role for government in actively promoting/enabling those individual liberties.; thus, the common (if awkward) label “liberals”. On the other hand, in modern American political parlance, at least since the early 20C, the Republican Party has stood in this tradition and associated itself with the free conduct of business and personal living. The recent trend among GOP’ers to attack private businesses for espousing certain political positions thus raises a raft of interesting questions.

Over the past few decades, those on the “left,” have pressured businesses (especially large corporations) to become more Environmentally-aware, Socially-responsible, and more transparent and open in their Governance, i.e., “ESG.” I’m not to get into the question of whether this is a wise or morally-beneficial approach (nor whether it has been unaccompanied by some degree of hypocrisy), but the ESG movement has gained some traction, especially among companies with a high public profile. This has manifested in companies being far more aggressive than what was expected of them 50 years ago in terms of espousing diversity/inclusion and prevention/condemnation of discrimination. We can see this in individual corporate policies, duly posted on web sites, statements of CEOs, and even boycotts of offending companies and states with antipathetic policies.

That such public positions have garnered vocal opposition is not surprising. There is a significant minority (at least) in this country who actively reject such “progressive” stances. Nonetheless,
it seems strange for public officials who proclaim their devotion to private sector freedom to seek to regulate and punish companies for exercising their own freedom to choose who to do business with. There is, to put it mildly, some tension between a pro-liberty position and one in which governmental power is harnessed to limit liberty in the name of certain moral views. It calls into question whether these self-proclaimed inheritors of Burke et al. are really part of the conservative (i.e. classical “liberal”) tradition? After all, what exactly is the governmental problem with a private citizen/corporation announcing that it will, e.g., accommodate transgender persons as employees? Why should elected officials (especially of the De Santis/Hawley/Cruz tendency) decry such expressions of liberty?

It’s the flip side of those on the left who have sought to use legal tools to impose their morality on the private sector generally. To read the progressive critiques of recent supreme court cases concerning religious freedom not to do business with or to “speak” on behalf of those with whom the business might have moral’/religious objection (e.g. developing a web site for a gay couple’s wedding) some liberty is OK, but other flavors are not. Ditto for complaints about Madison Square Garden using facial recognition software to screen its patrons. (Let me reiterate that I am not talking about the pros and cons of such policies per se, but rather whether they should be the subject of governmental pressure/constraint.)

Another curious angle is raised by Elon Musk’s efforts to determine who publishes on Twitter. We will leave to the side his business acumen in this regard. However, Musk/Twitter is a publisher, not too different from Murdoch and Fox, Col. McCormick and the Chicago Tribune (in an earlier age), or Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post. It’s pretty amusing (and a bit bewildering) to see folks accusing Musk of trampling their “First Amendment” rights. Last time I looked, the 1A regulates what government does; it doesn’t regulate the private sector. Its purpose was to ensure publishers have the freedom to publish what they wanted; not to force them (Musk, Bezos et al.) to publish (or not) something they didn’t want to. Stated differently, I (and other private individuals) have rights vis-à-vis the government, but not vis-à-vis publishers. So, if Musk wants to bar me from Twitter (crocodile tears here), he can and I’ll have to use Mastodon or some other social media platform (or start my own (like Trump’s “Truth Social” channel).  It’s hard to hear progressives endorse Musk’s 1A rights only insofar as he keeps Trump out of the twittersphere; just as those on the right want to investigate Bezos or other tech moguls who allegedly skew their platforms to the left.

All of this leads me to conclude that traditional liberal stream of thought is pretty much finis. (Of course there is a pretty good argument that (given the rather skewed religious, gender, and racial configurations of power in Western cultures in the 17-20Cs) this line of argument was always more about power than liberty anyway.) In the classic framing of the history of political philosophy, the argument was nominally about the power of the state versus the rights of the individual, but perhaps was really about the preservation/promotion of power and recruiting the state as the enforcer of certain moral positions and mentalities. These days, this argument shows up in more convoluted ways, but neither left nor right has a monopoly on intellectual contortion.

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    Condemned to Repeat It --
    Musings on history, society, and the world.

    I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

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