Interview with:
Sam Vaknin [samvaknin]
PROFESSION
 |
What is your profession? What is your
title printed on your business card?
I haven't sported a visit card for more than a decade
now. Still, had I had one, it would have borne the unweildy epithet:
"commentator, columnist and analyst". |
|
Which languages do you speak, and how have
you learned them?
I was born in Israel and so am fluent in Hebrew. I am
equally proficient in English, though. Having a prepubescent
infatuation with my teacher and living outside my homeland have
helped, I guess. Finally, I get by in Macedonian. My wife hails from
Skopje, you see. |
|
How do you feel about speaking in front of
an audience? What experience have you had in this
arena?
I am a narcissist: I am addicted to attention
(narcissistic supply). I love to speak in public and have been doing
so repeatedly and rather regularly ever since I was 9 years old (as
a speechmaker, lecturer, and teacher). |
|
List any credits, publications,
competitions, etc.
Web and Journalistic Activities
Author of
extensive Web sites in:
– Psychology ("Malignant Self Love")
- An Open Directory Cool Site for 8 years.
– Philosophy
("Philosophical Musings"),
– Economics and Geopolitics
("World in Conflict and Transition").
Owner of the
Narcissistic Abuse Study Lists and the Abusive Relationships
Newsletter (more than 6,000 members).
Owner of the Economies
in Conflict and Transition Study List , the Toxic Relationships
Study List, and the Links and Factoid Study List.
Editor of
mental health disorders and Central and Eastern Europe categories in
various Web directories (Open Directory, Search Europe, Mentalhelp.net).
Editor of the Personality Disorders, Narcissistic
Personality Disorder, the Verbal and Emotional Abuse, and the
Spousal (Domestic) Abuse and Violence topics on Suite 101 and
Bellaonline.
Columnist and commentator in "The New
Presence", United Press International (UPI), InternetContent,
eBookWeb, PopMatters, Global Politician, The Analyst Network,
Conservative Voice, The American Chronicle Media Group, eBookNet.org, and
"Central Europe Review".
Publications and Awards
"Managing Investment Portfolios in States of Uncertainty",
Limon Publishers, Tel-Aviv, 1988
"The Gambling Industry",
Limon Publishers, Tel-Aviv, 1990
"Requesting My Loved One –
Short Stories", Yedioth Aharonot, Tel-Aviv, 1997
"The
Suffering of Being Kafka" (electronic book of Hebrew and English
Short Fiction), Prague, 1998-2004
"The Macedonian Economy at
a Crossroads – On the Way to a Healthier Economy" (dialogues with
Nikola Gruevski), Skopje, 1998
"The Exporters' Pocketbook",
Ministry of Trade, Republic of Macedonia, Skopje, 1999
"Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited", Narcissus
Publications, Prague, 1999-2007 (Read excerpts - click here)
The Narcissism Series (e-books regarding relationships with
abusive narcissists), Prague, 1999-2007
Personality
Disorders Revisited (e-book about personality disorders), Prague,
2007
"After the Rain – How the West Lost the East",
Narcissus Publications in association with Central Europe
Review/CEENMI, Prague and Skopje, 2000
Winner of numerous
awards, among them Israel's Council of Culture and Art Prize for
Maiden Prose (1997), The Rotary Club Award for Social Studies
(1976), and the Bilateral Relations Studies Award of the American
Embassy in Israel (1978).
Hundreds of professional articles
in all fields of finance and economics, and numerous articles
dealing with geopolitical and political economic issues published in
both print and Web periodicals in many countries.
Many
appearances in the electronic media on subjects in philosophy and
the sciences, and concerning economic
matters. |
PERSONALITY
|
What hobbies have you got?
Reading anywhere (books, Internet, newspapers) and on
any topic
Writing (mainly non-fiction, but also fiction and
poetry)
Films (2 a day and oftentimes more)
Eating
gluttonously |
|
Which actor would you like to
be?
|
|
If you were sent to a deserted island,
which book, CD and film would you take with you?
If I were sent to a deserted island (deservedly, no
doubt), my first priority would be my laptop, upon which reside
libraries of images and sounds and texts, enough for a lifetime.
Assuming I am forced to part ways with my portable joy and
pride:
BOOK Any one volume encyclopedia
CD Mozart's
late symphonies (39-42)
FILM Remains of the
Day |
|
A simple pleasure that for you is quite
big or important.
Downloading electronic books from the Internet. This
simple, one-button act is a double-yummy: it quenches my hoarding
instincts and, being essentially free-of-charge, it restores my
sense of cosmic justice. |
|
In which city do you live? What are your
favourite and least favourite things about it?
I wrote this about Skopje, Macedonia:
Frozen at
an early morning hour, the stony hands of the giant, cracked clock
commemorate the horror. The earthquake that struck Skopje in 1963
has shattered not only its Byzantine decor, has demolished not
merely the narrow passageways of its Ottoman past, has transformed
not only its Habsburgian waterfront with its baroque National
Theatre. The disastrous reconstruction, supervised by a Japanese
architect, has robbed it of its soul. It has become a drab and
sprawling socialist metropolis replete with monumentally
vainglorious buildings, now falling into decrepitude and disrepair.
The influx of destitute and simpleton villagers (which more than
quintupled Skopje's population) was crammed by central planners with
good intentions and avaricious nature into low-quality, hi-rise
slums in newly constructed "settlements".
Skopje is a city
of extremes. Its winter is harsh in shades of white and grey. Its
summer is naked and steamy and effulgent. It pulses throughout the
year in smoke-filled, foudroyant bars and dingy coffee-houses.
Polydipsic youths in migratory skeins, eager to be noted by their
peers, young women on the hunt, ageing man keen to be preyed upon,
suburbanites in search of recognition, gold chained mobsters
surrounded by flaxen voluptuousness - the cast of the watering holes
of this potholed eruption of a city.
The trash seems never
to be collected here, the streets are perilously punctured,
policemen often substitute for dysfunctional traffic lights. The
Macedonians drive like the Italians, gesture like the Jews, dream
like the Russians, are obstinate like the Serbs, desirous like the
French and hospitable like the Bedouins. It is a magical concoction,
coated in the subversive patience and the aggressive passivity of
the long oppressed. There is the wisdom of fear itself in the eyes
of the 600,000 inhabitants of this landlocked, mountain-surrounded
habitat. Never certain of their future, still grappling with their
identity, an air of "carpe diem" with the most solemn religiosity of
the devout.
The past lives on and flows into the present
seamlessly. People recount the history of every stone, recite the
antecedents of every man. They grieve together, rejoice in common
and envy en masse. A single organism with many heads, it offers the
comforts of assimilation and solidarity and the horrors of violated
privacy and bigotry. The people of this conurbation may have left
the village - but it never let them go. They are the opsimaths of
urbanism. Their rural roots are everywhere: in the the division of
the city into tight-knit, local-patriotic "settlements". In the
traditional marriages and funerals. In the scarcity of divorces
despite the desperate shortage in accommodation. In the asphyxiating
but oddly reassuring familiarity of faces, places, behaviour and
beliefs, superstitions, dreams and nightmares. Life in a distended
tempo of birth and death and in between.
Skopje has it all -
wide avenues with roaring traffic, the incommodious alleys of the
Old Town, the proper castle ruins (the Kale). It has a Turkish
Bridge, recently renovated out of its quaintness. It has a square
with Art Nouveau building in sepia hues. An incongruent digital
clock atop a regal edifice displayed the minutes to the millennium -
and beyond. It has been violated by American commerce in the form of
three McDonald restaurants which the locals proceeded cheerfully to
transform into snug affairs. Stolid Greek supermarkets do not seem
to disrupt the inveterate tranquility of neighbourhood small grocers
and their coruscant congeries of variegated fruits and vegetables,
spilling to the pavement.
In winter, the light in Skopje is
diaphanous and lambent. In summer, tis strong and all-pervasive.
Like some coquettish woman, the city changes mantles of orange
autumn leaves and the green foliage of summer. Its pure white heart
of snow often is hardened into grey and traitorous sleet. It is a
fickle mistress, now pouring rain, now drizzle, now simmering sun.
The snowy mountain caps watch patiently her vicissitudes. Her
inhabitants drive out to ski on slopes, to bathe in lakes, to climb
to sacred sites. It gives them nothing but congestion and foul
atmosphere and yet they love her dearly. The Macedonian is the
peripatetic patriot - forever shuttling between his residence abroad
and his true and only home. Between him and his land is an
incestuous relationship, a love affair unbroken, a covenant handed
down the generations. Landscapes of infancy imprinted that provoke
an almost Pavolvian reaction of return.
Skopje has known
many molesters. It has been traversed by every major army in
European history and then by some. Occupying a vital crossroad, it
is a layer cake of cultures and ethnicities. To the Macedonians, the
future is always portentous, ringing with the ominousness of the
past. The tension is great and palpable, a pressure cooker close to
bursting. The river Vardar divides increasingly Albanian
neighbourhoods (Butel, Cair, Shuto Orizari) from Macedonian
(non-Muslim) ones. Albanians have also moved from the villages in
the periphery encircling Skopje into hitherto "Macedonian"
neighbourhoods (like Karpos and the Centre). The Romas have their
own ghetto called "Shutka" (in Shuto Orizari), rumoured to be the
biggest such community in Europe. The city has been also "invaded"
(as its Macedonian citizens experience it) by Bosnian Muslims.
Gradually, as friction mounts, segregation increases.
Macedonians move out of apartment blocks and neighbourhoods
populated by Albanians. This inner migration bodes ill for future
integration. There is no inter-marriage to speak of, educational
facilities are ethnically-pure and the conflict in Kosovo with its
attendant "Great Albania" rumblings has only exacerbated a stressed
and anxious history.
It is here, above ground, that the next
earthquake awaits, along the inter-ethnic fault lines. Strained to
the point of snapping by a KFOR-induced culture shock, by the
vituperative animosity between the coalition and opposition parties,
by European-record unemployment and poverty (Albania is the poorest,
by official measures) - the scene is set for an eruption. Peaceful
by long and harsh conditioning, the Macedonians withdraw and nurture
a siege mentality. The city is boisterous, its natives felicitously
facetious, its commerce flourishing. It is transmogrified by Greek
and Bulgarian investors into a Balkan business hub. But under this
shimmering facade, a great furnace of resentment and frustration
spews out the venom of intolerance. One impolitic move, one unkind
remark, one wrong motion - and it will boil over to the detriment of
one and all.
Dame Rebecca West was here, in Skopje (Skoplje,
as she spelt it) about 60 years ago. She wrote:
"This
(Macedonian) woman (in the Orthodox church) had suffered more than
most other human beings, she and her forebears. A competent observer
of this countryside has said that every single person born in it
before the Great War (and quite a number who were born after it) has
faced the prospect of violent death at least once in his or her
life. She had been born during the calamitous end of Turkish
maladministration, with its cycles of insurrection and massacre and
its social chaos. If her own village had not been murdered, she had,
certainly, heard of many that had and had never had any guarantee
that hers would not some day share the same fate... and there was
always extreme poverty. She had had far less of anything, of
personal possessions, of security, of care in childbirth than any
Western woman can imagine. But she had two possessions that any
Western woman might envy. She had strength, the terrible stony
strength of Macedonia; she was begotten and born of stocks who could
mock all bullets save those which went through the heart, who could
outlive the winters when they were driven into the mountains, who
could survive malaria and plague, who could reach old age on a diet
of bread and paprika. And cupped in her destitution as in the hollow
of a boulder there are the last drops of the Byzantine
tradition." |
|
What do you imagine yourself doing for
your retirement?
I am a narcissist. The narcissist ages without mercy
and without grace. His withered body and his overwrought mind betray
him all at once. He stares with incredulity and rage at cruel
mirrors. He refuses to accept his growing fallibility. He rebels
against his decrepitude and mediocrity. Accustomed to being
awe-inspiring and the recipient of adulation - the narcissist cannot
countenance his social isolation and the pathetic figure that he
cuts.
The narcissist suffers from mental progeria. Subject
to childhood abuse, he ages prematurely and finds himself in a time
warp, constantly in the throes of a midlife crisis.
As a
child prodigy, a sex symbol, a stud, a public intellectual, an
actor, an idol - the narcissist was at the centre of attention, the
eye of his personal twister, a black hole which sucked people's
energy and resources dry and spat out with indifference their
mutilated carcasses. No longer. With old age comes disillusionment.
Old charms wear thin.
Having been exposed for what he is - a
deceitful, treacherous, malignant egotist - the narcissist's old
tricks now fail him. People are on their guard, their gullibility
reduced. The narcissist - being the rigid, precariously balanced
structure that he is - can't change. He reverts to old forms,
re-adopts hoary habits, succumbs to erstwhile temptations. He is
made a mockery by his accentuated denial of reality, by his obdurate
refusal to grow up, an eternal, malformed child in the sagging body
of a decaying man.
It is the fable of the grasshopper and
the ant revisited.
The narcissist - the grasshopper - having
relied on supercilious stratagems throughout his life - is
singularly ill-adapted to life's rigors and tribulations. He feels
entitled - but fails to elicit Narcissistic Supply. Wrinkled time
makes child prodigies lose their magic, lovers exhaust their
potency, philanderers waste their allure, and geniuses miss their
touch. The longer the narcissist lives - the more average he
becomes. The wider the gulf between his pretensions and his
accomplishments - the more he is the object of derision and
contempt.
Yet, few narcissists save for rainy days. Few
bother to study a trade, or get a degree, pursue a career, maintain
a business, keep their jobs, or raise functioning families, nurture
their friendships, or broaden their horizons. Narcissists are
perennially ill-prepared. Those who succeed in their vocation, end
up bitterly alone having squandered the love of spouse, off-spring,
and mates. The more gregarious and family-orientated - often flunk
at work, leap from one job to another, relocate erratically, forever
itinerant and peripatetic.
The contrast between his youth
and prime and his dilapidated present constitutes a permanent
narcissistic injury. The narcissist retreats deeper into himself to
find solace. He withdraws into the penumbral universe of his
grandiose fantasies. There - almost psychotic - he salves his wounds
and comforts himself with trophies of his past.
A rare
minority of narcissists accept their fate with fatalism or good
humour. These precious few are healed mysteriously by the deepest
offense to their megalomania - old age. They lose their narcissism
and confront the outer world with the poise and composure that they
lacked when they were captives of their own, distorted, narrative.
Such changed narcissists develop new, more realistic,
expectations and hopes - commensurate with their talents, skills,
accomplishments and education. Ironically, it is invariably too
late. They are avoided and ignored, rendered transparent by their
checkered past. They are passed over for promotion, never invited to
professional or social gatherings, cold-shouldered by the media.
They are snubbed and disregarded. They are never the recipients of
perks, benefits, or awards. They are blamed when not blameworthy and
rarely praised when deserving. They are being constantly and
consistently punished for who they were. It is poetic justice in
more than one way. They are being treated narcissistically by their
erstwhile victims. They finally are tasting their own medicine, the
bitter harvest of their wrath and arrogance. |
|
If you were to return reincarnated, which
real-life person would you like to be?
I always wanted to make a difference, to be remembered
as someone whose life left the world a changed place (not
necessarily a better one).
To paraphrase what Henry James'
once said of Louisa May Alcott, my experience of genius is small but
my admiration for it is, nevertheless, great. When I visited the
"Figarohaus" in Vienna - where Mozart lived and worked for two
crucial years - I experienced a great fatigue, the sort that comes
with acceptance. In the presence of real genius, I slumped into a
chair and listened for one listless hour to its fruits: symphonies,
the divine Requiem, arias, a cornucopia.
After 48 years, all
I have to show for my manic pursuits is Internet ubiquity and
parroted, shallow, ersatz-"scholarship". I am a fake.
I
always wanted to be a genius. Partly as a sure-fire way to secure
constant Narcissistic Supply, partly as a safeguard against my own
mortality. As it became progressively more evident how far I am from
it and how ensconced in mediocrity - I, being a narcissist, resorted
to short cuts. Ever since my fifth year I pretended to be thoroughly
acquainted with issues I had no clue about. This streak of
con-artistry reached a crescendo in my puberty, when I convinced a
whole township (and later, my country, by co-opting the media) that
I was a new Einstein. While unable to solve even the most basic
mathematical equations, I was regarded by many - including world
class physicists - as somewhat of an epiphanous miracle. To sustain
this false pretence, I plagiarized liberally. Only 15 years later
did an Israeli physicist discover the (Australian) source of my
major plagiarized "studies" in advanced physics. Following this
encounter with the abyss - the mortal fear of being mortifyingly
exposed - I stopped plagiarizing at the age of 23 and has never done
so since.
I then tried to experience genius vicariously, by
making friends with acknowledged ones and by supporting up and
coming intellectuals. I became this bathetic sponsor of the arts and
sciences that forever name drops and attributes to himself undue
influence over the creative processes and outcomes of others. I
created by proxy. The (sad, I guess) irony is that, all this time, I
really did have a talent (for writing). But talent was not enough -
being short of genius. It is the divine that I sought, not the
average. And so, I kept denying my real self in pursuit of an
invented one.
As the years progressed, the charms of
associating with genius waned and faded. The gap between what I
wanted to become and what I have has made me bitter and
cantankerous, a repulsive, alien oddity, avoided by all but the most
persistent friends and acolytes. I resent being doomed to the
quotidian. I rebel against being given to aspirations which have so
little in common with my abilities. It is not that I recognize my
limitations - I don't. I still wish to believe that had I only
applied myself, had I only persevered, had I only found interest - I
would have been nothing less of a Mozart or an Einstein or a Freud.
It is a lie I tell myself in times of quiet despair when I realize
my age and compare it to the utter lack of my accomplishments.
I keep persuading myself that many a great man reached the
apex of their creativity at the age of 40, or 50, or 60. That one
never knows what of one's work shall be deemed by history to have
been genius. I think of Kafka, of Nietzsche, of Benjamin - the
heroes of every undiscovered prodigy. But it sounds hollow. Deep
inside I know the one ingredient that I miss and that they all
shared: an interest in other humans, a first hand experience of
being one and the fervent wish to communicate - rather than merely
to impress. |
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What will your epitaph be?
Assuming anyone would care enough to carve this on my
tombstone: "Here lies someone whose self-loathing was axceeded only
by the loathing he induced in
others." |
IDEAS
|
Should consensual offenses such as drug
use or prostitution be legalized?
The state has a monopoly on behaviour usually deemed
criminal. It murders, kidnaps, and locks up people. Sovereignty has
come to be identified with the unbridled - and exclusive - exercise
of violence. The emergence of modern international law has narrowed
the field of permissible conduct. A sovereign can no longer commit
genocide or ethnic cleansing with impunity, for instance.
Many acts - such as the waging of aggressive war, the
mistreatment of minorities, the suppression of the freedom of
association - hitherto sovereign privilege, have thankfully been
criminalized. Many politicians, hitherto immune to international
prosecution, are no longer so. Consider Yugoslavia's Milosevic and
Chile's Pinochet.
But, the irony is that a similar trend of
criminalization - within national legal systems - allows governments
to oppress their citizenry to an extent previously unknown. Hitherto
civil torts, permissible acts, and common behaviour patterns are
routinely criminalized by legislators and regulators. Precious few
are decriminalized.
Consider, for instance, the
criminalization in the Economic Espionage Act (1996) of the
misappropriation of trade secrets and the criminalization of the
violation of copyrights in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(2000) – both in the USA. These used to be civil torts. They still
are in many countries. Drug use, common behaviour in England only 50
years ago – is now criminal. The list goes on.
Criminal laws
pertaining to property have malignantly proliferated and pervaded
every economic and private interaction. The result is a bewildering
multitude of laws, regulations statutes, and acts.
The
average Babylonian could have memorizes and assimilated the
Hammurabic code 37 centuries ago - it was short, simple, and
intuitively just.
English criminal law - partly applicable
in many of its former colonies, such as India, Pakistan, Canada, and
Australia - is a mishmash of overlapping and contradictory statutes
- some of these hundreds of years old - and court decisions,
collectively known as "case law".
Despite the publishing of
a Model Penal Code in 1962 by the American Law Institute, the
criminal provisions of various states within the USA often conflict.
The typical American can't hope to get acquainted with even a
negligible fraction of his country's fiendishly complex and
hopelessly brobdignagian criminal code. Such inevitable ignorance
breeds criminal behaviour - sometimes inadvertently - and transforms
many upright citizens into delinquents.
In the land of the
free - the USA - close to 2 million adults are behind bars and
another 4.5 million are on probation, most of them on drug charges.
The costs of criminalization - both financial and social - are mind
boggling. According to "The Economist", America's prison system cost
it $54 billion a year - disregarding the price tag of law
enforcement, the judiciary, lost product, and rehabilitation.
What constitutes a crime? A clear and consistent definition
has yet to transpire.
There are five types of criminal
behaviour: crimes against oneself, or "victimless crimes" (such as
suicide, abortion, and the consumption of drugs), crimes against
others (such as murder or mugging), crimes among consenting adults
(such as incest, and in certain countries, homosexuality and
euthanasia), crimes against collectives (such as treason, genocide,
or ethnic cleansing), and crimes against the international community
and world order (such as executing prisoners of war). The last two
categories often overlap.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
provides this definition of a crime: "The intentional commission of
an act usually deemed socially harmful or dangerous and specifically
defined, prohibited, and punishable under the criminal law."
But who decides what is socially harmful? What about acts
committed unintentionally (known as "strict liability offences" in
the parlance)? How can we establish intention - "mens rea", or the
"guilty mind" - beyond a reasonable doubt?
A much tighter
definition would be: "The commission of an act punishable under the
criminal law." A crime is what the law - state law, kinship law,
religious law, or any other widely accepted law - says is a crime.
Legal systems and texts often conflict.
Murderous blood
feuds are legitimate according to the 15th century "Qanoon", still
applicable in large parts of Albania. Killing one's infant daughters
and old relatives is socially condoned - though illegal - in India,
China, Alaska, and parts of Africa. Genocide may have been legally
sanctioned in Germany and Rwanda - but is strictly forbidden under
international law.
Laws being the outcomes of compromises
and power plays, there is only a tenuous connection between justice
and morality. Some "crimes" are categorical imperatives. Helping the
Jews in Nazi Germany was a criminal act - yet a highly moral one.
The ethical nature of some crimes depends on circumstances,
timing, and cultural context. Murder is a vile deed - but
assassinating Saddam Hussein may be morally commendable. Killing an
embryo is a crime in some countries - but not so killing a fetus. A
"status offence" is not a criminal act if committed by an adult.
Mutilating the body of a live baby is heinous - but this is the
essence of Jewish circumcision. In some societies, criminal guilt is
collective. All Americans are held blameworthy by the Arab street
for the choices and actions of their leaders. All Jews are
accomplices in the "crimes" of the "Zionists".
In all
societies, crime is a growth industry. Millions of professionals -
judges, police officers, criminologists, psychologists, journalists,
publishers, prosecutors, lawyers, social workers, probation
officers, wardens, sociologists, non-governmental-organizations,
weapons manufacturers, laboratory technicians, graphologists, and
private detectives - derive their livelihood, parasitically, from
crime. They often perpetuate models of punishment and retribution
that lead to recidivism rather than to to the reintegration of
criminals in society and their rehabilitation.
Organized in
vocal interest groups and lobbies, they harp on the insecurities and
phobias of the alienated urbanites. They consume ever growing
budgets and rejoice with every new behaviour criminalized by
exasperated lawmakers. In the majority of countries, the justice
system is a dismal failure and law enforcement agencies are part of
the problem, not its solution.
The sad truth is that many
types of crime are considered by people to be normative and common
behaviours and, thus, go unreported. Victim surveys and self-report
studies conducted by criminologists reveal that most crimes go
unreported. The protracted fad of criminalization has rendered
criminal many perfectly acceptable and recurring behaviours and
acts. Homosexuality, abortion, gambling, prostitution, pornography,
and suicide have all been criminal offences at one time or another.
But the quintessential example of over-criminalization is
drug abuse.
There is scant medical evidence that soft drugs
such as cannabis or MDMA ("Ecstasy") - and even cocaine - have an
irreversible effect on brain chemistry or functioning. Last month an
almighty row erupted in Britain when Jon Cole, an addiction
researcher at Liverpool University, claimed, to quote "The
Economist" quoting the "Psychologist", that:
"Experimental
evidence suggesting a link between Ecstasy use and problems such as
nerve damage and brain impairment is flawed ... using this
ill-substantiated cause-and-effect to tell the 'chemical generation'
that they are brain damaged when they are not creates public health
problems of its own."
Moreover, it is commonly accepted that
alcohol abuse and nicotine abuse can be at least as harmful as the
abuse of marijuana, for instance. Yet, though somewhat curbed,
alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking are legal. In contrast,
users of cocaine - only a century ago recommended by doctors as
tranquilizer - face life in jail in many countries, death in others.
Almost everywhere pot smokers are confronted with prison terms.
The "war on drugs" - one of the most expensive and
protracted in history - has failed abysmally. Drugs are more
abundant and cheaper than ever. The social costs have been
staggering: the emergence of violent crime where none existed
before, the destabilization of drug-producing countries, the
collusion of drug traffickers with terrorists, and the death of
millions - law enforcement agents, criminals, and users.
Few
doubt that legalizing most drugs would have a beneficial effect.
Crime empires would crumble overnight, users would be assured of the
quality of the products they consume, and the addicted few would not
be incarcerated or stigmatized - but rather treated and
rehabilitated.
That soft, largely harmless, drugs continue
to be illicit is the outcome of compounded political and economic
pressures by lobby and interest groups of manufacturers of legal
drugs, law enforcement agencies, the judicial system, and the
aforementioned long list of those who benefit from the status quo.
Only a popular movement can lead to the decriminalization of
the more innocuous drugs. But such a crusade should be part of a
larger campaign to reverse the overall tide of criminalization. Many
"crimes" should revert to their erstwhile status as civil torts.
Others should be wiped off the statute books altogether. Hundreds of
thousands should be pardoned and allowed to reintegrate in society,
unencumbered by a past of transgressions against an inane and
inflationary penal code.
This, admittedly, will reduce the
leverage the state has today against its citizens and its ability to
intrude on their lives, preferences, privacy, and leisure.
Bureaucrats and politicians may find this abhorrent. Freedom loving
people should rejoice.
APPENDIX - Should Drugs be Legalized?
The decriminalization of drugs is a tangled issue involving many
separate moral/ethical and practical strands which can, probably, be
summarized thus:
(a) Whose body is it anyway? Where do I
start and the government begins? What gives the state the right to
intervene in decisions pertaining only to my self and contravene
them?
PRACTICAL:
The government exercises similar
"rights" in other cases (abortion, military conscription, sex)
(b) Is the government the optimal moral agent, the best or
the right arbiter, as far as drug abuse is concerned?
PRACTICAL:
For instance, governments collaborate
with the illicit drug trade when it fits their realpolitik purposes.
(c) Is substance abuse a personal or a social choice? Can
one limit the implications, repercussions and outcomes of one's
choices in general and of the choice to abuse drugs, in particular?
If the drug abuser in effect makes decisions for others, too - does
it justify the intervention of the state? Is the state the agent of
society, is it the only agent of society and is it the right agent
of society in the case of drug abuse?
(d) What is the
difference (in rigorous philosophical principle) between legal and
illegal substances? Is it something in the nature of the substances?
In the usage and what follows? In the structure of society? Is it a
moral fashion?
PRACTICAL:
Does scientific research
support or refute common myths and ethos regarding drugs and their
abuse?
Is scientific research influenced by the current
anti-drugs crusade and hype? Are certain facts suppressed and
certain subjects left unexplored?
(e) Should drugs be
decriminalized for certain purposes (e.g., marijuana and glaucoma)?
If so, where should the line be drawn and by whom?
PRACTICAL:
Recreational drugs sometimes alleviate
depression. Should this use be permitted?
Note: The Rule of
Law vs. Obedience to the Law
We often misconstrue the
concept of the "rule of Law" and take it to mean automatic
"obedience to laws". But the two are antithetical.
Laws have
to earn observance and obeisance. To do so, they have to meet a
series of rigorous criteria: they have to be unambiguous, fair,
just, pragmatic, and equitable; they have to be applied uniformly
and universally to one and all, regardless of sex, age, class,
sexual preference, race, ethnicity, skin color, or opinion; they
must not entrench the interests of one group or structure over
others; they must not be leveraged to yield benefits to some at the
expense of others; and, finally, they must accord with universal
moral and ethical tenets.
Most dictatorships and tyrannies
are "legal", in the strict sense of the word. The spirit of the Law
and how it is implemented in reality are far more important that its
letter. There are moral and, under international law, legal
obligations to oppose and resist certain laws and to frustrate their
execution. |
|
Are there too many holidays in the work
calendar?
Indeed, there are! This is part and parcel what I call:
the demise of the work ethic.
Airplanes, missiles, and space
shuttles crash due to lack of maintenance, absent-mindedness, and
pure ignorance. Software support personnel, aided and abetted by
Customer Relationship Management application suites, are curt (when
reachable) and unhelpful. Despite expensive, state of the art supply
chain management systems, retailers, suppliers, and manufacturers
habitually run out of stocks of finished and semi-finished products
and raw materials. People from all walks of life and at all levels
of the corporate ladder skirt their responsibilities and neglect
their duties.
Whatever happened to the work ethic? Where is
the pride in the immaculate quality of one's labor and produce?
Both dead in the water. A series of earth-shattering social,
economic, and technological trends converged to render their jobs
loathsome to many - a tedious nuisance best avoided.
1. Job
security is a thing of the past. Itinerancy in various McJobs
reduces the incentive to invest time, effort, and resources into a
position that may not be yours next week. Brutal layoffs and
downsizing traumatized the workforce and produced in the typical
workplace a culture of obsequiousness, blind obeisance, the
suppression of independent thought and speech, and avoidance of
initiative and innovation. Many offices and shop floors now resemble
prisons.
2. Outsourcing and offshoring of back office (and,
more recently, customer relations and research and development)
functions sharply and adversely effected the quality of services
from helpdesks to airline ticketing and from insurance claims
processing to remote maintenance. Cultural mismatches between the
(typically Western) client base and the offshore service department
(usually in a developing country where labor is cheap and plenty)
only exacerbated the breakdown of trust between customer and
provider or supplier.
3. The populace in developed countries
are addicted to leisure time. Most people regard their jobs as a
necessary evil, best avoided whenever possible. Hence phenomena like
the permanent temp - employees who prefer a succession of temporary
assignments to holding a proper job. The media and the arts
contribute to this perception of work as a drag - or a potentially
dangerous addiction (when they portray raging and abusive
workaholics).
4. The other side of this dismal coin is
workaholism - the addiction to work. Far from valuing it, these
addicts resent their dependence. The job performance of the typical
workaholic leaves a lot to be desired. Workaholics are fatigued,
suffer from ancillary addictions, and short attention spans. They
frequently abuse substances, are narcissistic and destructively
competitive (being driven, they are incapable of team work).
5. The depersonalization of manufacturing - the
intermediated divorce between the artisan/worker and his client -
contributed a lot to the indifference and alienation of the common
industrial worker, the veritable "anonymous cog in the machine".
Not only was the link between worker and product broken -
but the bond between artisan and client was severed as well. Few
employees know their customers or patrons first hand. It is hard to
empathize with and care about a statistic, a buyer whom you have
never met and never likely to encounter. It is easy in such
circumstances to feel immune to the consequences of one's negligence
and apathy at work. It is impossible to be proud of what you do and
to be committed to your work - if you never set eyes on either the
final product or the customer! Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece,
"Modern Times" captured this estrangement brilliantly.
6.
Many former employees of mega-corporations abandon the rat race and
establish their own businesses - small and home enterprises.
Undercapitalized, understaffed, and outperformed by the competition,
these fledging and amateurish outfits usually spew out shoddy
products and lamentable services - only to expire within the first
year of business.
7. Despite decades of advanced notice,
globalization caught most firms the world over by utter surprise.
Ill-prepared and fearful of the onslaught of foreign competition,
companies big and small grapple with logistical nightmares, supply
chain calamities, culture shocks and conflicts, and rapacious
competitors. Mere survival (and opportunistic managerial plunder)
replaced client satisfaction as the prime value.
8. The
decline of the professional guilds on the one hand and the trade
unions on the other hand greatly reduced worker self-discipline,
pride, and peer-regulated quality control. Quality is monitored by
third parties or compromised by being subjected to Procrustean
financial constraints and concerns.
The investigation of
malpractice and its punishment are now at the hand of vast and
ill-informed bureaucracies, either corporate or governmental. Once
malpractice is exposed and admitted to, the availability of
malpractice insurance renders most sanctions unnecessary or
toothless. Corporations prefer to bury mishaps and malfeasance
rather than cope with and rectify them.
9. The quality of
one's work, and of services and products one consumed, used to be
guaranteed. One's personal idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and
problems were left at home. Work was sacred and one's sense of
self-worth depended on the satisfaction of one's clients. You simply
didn't let your personal life affect the standards of your output.
This strict and useful separation vanished with the rise of
the malignant-narcissistic variant of individualism. It led to the
emergence of idiosyncratic and fragmented standards of quality. No
one knows what to expect, when, and from whom. Transacting business
has become a form of psychological warfare. The customer has to rely
on the goodwill of suppliers, manufacturers, and service providers -
and often finds himself at their whim and mercy. "The client is
always right" has gone the way of the dodo. "It's my (the supplier's
or provider's) way or the highway" rules supreme.
This
uncertainty is further exacerbated by the pandemic eruption of
mental health disorders - 15% of the population are severely
pathologized according to the latest studies. Antisocial behaviors -
from outright crime to pernicious passive-aggressive sabotage - once
rare in the workplace, are now abundant.
The ethos of
teamwork, tempered collectivism, and collaboration for the greater
good is now derided or decried. Conflict on all levels has replaced
negotiated compromise and has become the prevailing narrative.
Litigiousness, vigilante justice, use of force, and "getting away
with it" are now extolled. Yet, conflicts lead to the misallocation
of economic resources. They are non-productive and not conducive to
sustaining good relations between producer or provider and consumer.
10. Moral relativism is the mirror image of rampant
individualism. Social cohesion and discipline diminished, ideologies
and religions crumbled, and anomic states substituted for societal
order. The implicit contracts between manufacturer or service
provider and customer and between employee and employer were
shredded and replaced with ad-hoc negotiated operational checklists.
Social decoherence is further enhanced by the anonymization and
depersonalization of the modern chain of production (see point 5
above).
Nowadays, people facilely and callously abrogate
their responsibilities towards their families, communities, and
nations. The mushrooming rate of divorce, the decline in personal
thrift, the skyrocketing number of personal bankruptcies, and the
ubiquity of venality and corruption both corporate and political are
examples of such dissipation. No one seems to care about anything.
Why should the client or employer expect a different treatment?
11. The disintegration of the educational systems of the
West made it difficult for employers to find qualified and motivated
personnel. Courtesy, competence, ambition, personal responsibility,
the ability to see the bigger picture (synoptic view), interpersonal
aptitude, analytic and synthetic skills, not to mention numeracy,
literacy, access to technology, and the sense of belonging which
they foster - are all products of proper schooling.
12.
Irrational beliefs, pseudo-sciences, and the occult rushed in to
profitably fill the vacuum left by the crumbling education systems.
These wasteful preoccupations encourage in their followers an
overpowering sense of fatalistic determinism and hinder their
ability to exercise judgment and initiative. The discourse of
commerce and finance relies on unmitigated rationality and is, in
essence, contractual. Irrationality is detrimental to the successful
and happy exchange of goods and services.
23. Employers
place no premium on work ethic. Workers don't get paid more or
differently if they are more conscientious, or more efficient, or
more friendly. In an interlinked, globalized world, customers are
fungible. There are so many billions of potential clients that
customer loyalty has been rendered irrelevant. Marketing,
showmanship, and narcissistic bluster are far better appreciated by
workplaces because they serve to attract clientele to be bilked and
then discarded or ignored. |
|
Do you think the catastrophism about
climate change has been exaggerated?
Yes, I do. It borders on mass hysteria or shared
psychosis.
The concept of "nature" is a romantic invention.
It was spun by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th
century as a confabulated utopian contrast to the dystopia of
urbanization and materialism. The traces of this dewy-eyed
conception of the "savage" and his unmolested, unadulterated
surroundings can be found in the more malignant forms of
fundamentalist environmentalism.
At the other extreme are
religious literalists who regard Man as the crown of creation with
complete dominion over nature and the right to exploit its resources
unreservedly. Similar, veiled, sentiments can be found among
scientists. The Anthropic Principle, for instance, promoted by many
outstanding physicists, claims that the nature of the Universe is
preordained to accommodate sentient beings - namely, us humans.
Industrialists, politicians and economists have only
recently begun paying lip service to sustainable development and to
the environmental costs of their policies. Thus, in a way, they
bridge the abyss - at least verbally - between these two
diametrically opposed forms of fundamentalism. Similarly, the
denizens of the West continue to indulge in rampant consumption, but
now it is suffused with environmental guilt rather than driven by
unadulterated hedonism.
Still, essential dissimilarities
between the schools notwithstanding, the dualism of Man vs. Nature
is universally acknowledged.
Modern physics - notably the
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - has abandoned the
classic split between (typically human) observer and (usually
inanimate) observed. Environmentalists, in contrast, have embraced
this discarded worldview wholeheartedly. To them, Man is the active
agent operating upon a distinct reactive or passive substrate -
i.e., Nature. But, though intuitively compelling, it is a false
dichotomy.
Man is, by definition, a part of Nature. His
tools are natural. He interacts with the other elements of Nature
and modifies it - but so do all other species. Arguably, bacteria
and insects exert on Nature far more influence with farther reaching
consequences than Man has ever done.
Still, the "Law of the
Minimum" - that there is a limit to human population growth and that
this barrier is related to the biotic and abiotic variables of the
environment - is undisputed. Whatever debate there is veers between
two strands of this Malthusian Weltanschauung: the utilitarian
(a.k.a. anthropocentric, shallow, or technocentric) and the ethical
(alternatively termed biocentric, deep, or ecocentric).
First, the Utilitarians.
Economists, for instance,
tend to discuss the costs and benefits of environmental policies.
Activists, on the other hand, demand that Mankind consider the
"rights" of other beings and of nature as a whole in determining a
least harmful course of action.
Utilitarians regard nature
as a set of exhaustible and scarce resources and deal with their
optimal allocation from a human point of view. Yet, they usually
fail to incorporate intangibles such as the beauty of a sunset or
the liberating sensation of open spaces.
"Green" accounting
- adjusting the national accounts to reflect environmental data - is
still in its unpromising infancy. It is complicated by the fact that
ecosystems do not respect man-made borders and by the stubborn
refusal of many ecological variables to succumb to numbers. To
complicate things further, different nations weigh environmental
problems disparately.
Despite recent attempts, such as the
Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) produced by the World
Economic Forum (WEF), no one knows how to define and quantify
elusive concepts such as "sustainable development". Even the costs
of replacing or repairing depleted resources and natural assets are
difficult to determine.
Efforts to capture "quality of life"
considerations in the straitjacket of the formalism of distributive
justice - known as human-welfare ecology or emancipatory
environmentalism - backfired. These led to derisory attempts to
reverse the inexorable processes of urbanization and
industrialization by introducing localized, small-scale production.
Social ecologists proffer the same prescriptions but with an
anarchistic twist. The hierarchical view of nature - with Man at the
pinnacle - is a reflection of social relations, they suggest.
Dismantle the latter - and you get rid of the former.
The
Ethicists appear to be as confounded and ludicrous as their "feet on
the ground" opponents.
Biocentrists view nature as possessed
of an intrinsic value, regardless of its actual or potential
utility. They fail to specify, however, how this, even if true,
gives rise to rights and commensurate obligations. Nor was their
case aided by their association with the apocalyptic or survivalist
school of environmentalism which has developed proto-fascist
tendencies and is gradually being scientifically debunked.
The proponents of deep ecology radicalize the ideas of
social ecology ad absurdum and postulate a transcendentalist
spiritual connection with the inanimate (whatever that may be). In
consequence, they refuse to intervene to counter or contain natural
processes, including diseases and famine.
The politicization
of environmental concerns runs the gamut from political activism to
eco-terrorism. The environmental movement - whether in academe, in
the media, in non-governmental organizations, or in legislature - is
now comprised of a web of bureaucratic interest groups.
Like
all bureaucracies, environmental organizations are out to perpetuate
themselves, fight heresy and accumulate political clout and the
money and perks that come with it. They are no longer a
disinterested and objective party. They have a stake in apocalypse.
That makes them automatically suspect.
Bjorn Lomborg, author
of "The Skeptical Environmentalist", was at the receiving end of
such self-serving sanctimony. A statistician, he demonstrated that
the doom and gloom tendered by environmental campaigners, scholars
and militants are, at best, dubious and, at worst, the outcomes of
deliberate manipulation.
The situation is actually improving
on many fronts, showed Lomborg: known reserves of fossil fuels and
most metals are rising, agricultural production per head is surging,
the number of the famished is declining, biodiversity loss is
slowing as do pollution and tropical deforestation. In the long run,
even in pockets of environmental degradation, in the poor and
developing countries, rising incomes and the attendant drop in birth
rates will likely ameliorate the situation in the long run.
Yet, both camps, the optimists and the pessimists, rely on
partial, irrelevant, or, worse, manipulated data. The multiple
authors of "People and Ecosystems", published by the World Resources
Institute, the World Bank and the United Nations conclude: "Our
knowledge of ecosystems has increased dramatically, but it simply
has not kept pace with our ability to alter them."
Quoted by
The Economist, Daniel Esty of Yale, the leader of an environmental
project sponsored by World Economic Forum, exclaimed:
"Why
hasn't anyone done careful environmental measurement before?
Businessmen always say, ‘what matters gets measured'. Social
scientists started quantitative measurement 30 years ago, and even
political science turned to hard numbers 15 years ago. Yet look at
environmental policy, and the data are lousy."
Nor is this
dearth of reliable and unequivocal information likely to end soon.
Even the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, supported by numerous
development agencies and environmental groups, is seriously
under-financed. The conspiracy-minded attribute this curious void to
the self-serving designs of the apocalyptic school of
environmentalism. Ignorance and fear, they point out, are among the
fanatic's most useful allies. They also make for good
copy. |
|
Do you boycott brands if you learn they
employ children in third-world countries or harm the
environment?
Everyone knows the intimate relationship between good
intentions and the road to hell.
From the comfort of their
plush offices and five to six figure salaries, self-appointed NGO's
often denounce child labor as their employees rush from one five
star hotel to another, $3000 subnotebooks and PDA's in hand. The
hairsplitting distinction made by the ILO between "child work" and
"child labor" conveniently targets impoverished countries while
letting its budget contributors - the developed ones - off-the-hook.
Reports regarding child labor surface periodically. Children
crawling in mines, faces ashen, body deformed. The agile fingers of
famished infants weaving soccer balls for their more privileged
counterparts in the USA. Tiny figures huddled in sweatshops, toiling
in unspeakable conditions. It is all heart-rending and it gave rise
to a veritable not-so-cottage industry of activists, commentators,
legal eagles, scholars, and opportunistically sympathetic
politicians.
Ask the denizens of Thailand, sub-Saharan
Africa, Brazil, or Morocco and they will tell you how they regard
this altruistic hyperactivity - with suspicion and resentment.
Underneath the compelling arguments lurks an agenda of trade
protectionism, they wholeheartedly believe. Stringent - and
expensive - labor and environmental provisions in international
treaties may well be a ploy to fend off imports based on cheap labor
and the competition they wreak on well-ensconced domestic industries
and their political stooges.
This is especially galling
since the sanctimonious West has amassed its wealth on the broken
backs of slaves and kids. The 1900 census in the USA found that 18
percent of all children - almost two million in all - were gainfully
employed. The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional laws banning
child labor as late as 1916. This decision was overturned only in
1941.
The GAO published a report last week in which it
criticized the Labor Department for paying insufficient attention to
working conditions in manufacturing and mining in the USA, where
many children are still employed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics
pegs the number of working children between the ages of 15-17 in the
USA at 3.7 million. One in 16 of these worked in factories and
construction. More than 600 teens died of work-related accidents in
the last ten years.
Child labor - let alone child
prostitution, child soldiers, and child slavery - are phenomena best
avoided. But they cannot and should not be tackled in isolation. Nor
should underage labor be subjected to blanket castigation. Working
in the gold mines or fisheries of the Philippines is hardly
comparable to waiting on tables in a Nigerian or, for that matter,
American restaurant.
There are gradations and hues of child
labor. That children should not be exposed to hazardous conditions,
long working hours, used as means of payment, physically punished,
or serve as sex slaves is commonly agreed. That they should not help
their parents plant and harvest may be more debatable.
As
Miriam Wasserman observes in "Eliminating Child Labor", published in
the Federal Bank of Boston's "Regional Review", second quarter of
2000, it depends on "family income, education policy, production
technologies, and cultural norms." About a quarter of children
under-14 throughout the world are regular workers. This statistic
masks vast disparities between regions like Africa (42 percent) and
Latin America (17 percent).
In many impoverished locales,
child labor is all that stands between the family unit and
all-pervasive, life threatening, destitution. Child labor declines
markedly as income per capita grows. To deprive these bread-earners
of the opportunity to lift themselves and their families
incrementally above malnutrition, disease, and famine - is an apex
of immoral hypocrisy.
Quoted by "The Economist", a
representative of the much decried Ecuador Banana Growers
Association and Ecuador's Labor Minister, summed up the dilemma
neatly: "Just because they are under age doesn't mean we should
reject them, they have a right to survive. You can't just say they
can't work, you have to provide alternatives."
Regrettably,
the debate is so laden with emotions and self-serving arguments that
the facts are often overlooked.
The outcry against soccer
balls stitched by children in Pakistan led to the relocation of
workshops ran by Nike and Reebok. Thousands lost their jobs,
including countless women and 7000 of their progeny. The average
family income - anyhow meager - fell by 20 percent. Economists
Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardorif, and Robert Stern observe wryly:
"While Baden Sports can quite credibly claim that their
soccer balls are not sewn by children, the relocation of their
production facility undoubtedly did nothing for their former child
workers and their families."
Such examples abound.
Manufacturers - fearing legal reprisals and "reputation risks"
(naming-and-shaming by overzealous NGO's) - engage in preemptive
sacking. German garment workshops fired 50,000 children in
Bangladesh in 1993 in anticipation of the American never-legislated
Child Labor Deterrence Act.
Quoted by Wasserstein, former
Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, notes:
"Stopping child
labor without doing anything else could leave children worse off. If
they are working out of necessity, as most are, stopping them could
force them into prostitution or other employment with greater
personal dangers. The most important thing is that they be in school
and receive the education to help them leave poverty."
Contrary to hype, three quarters of all children work in
agriculture and with their families. Less than 1 percent work in
mining and another 2 percent in construction. Most of the rest work
in retail outlets and services, including "personal services" - a
euphemism for prostitution. UNICEF and the ILO are in the throes of
establishing school networks for child laborers and providing their
parents with alternative employment.
But this is a drop in
the sea of neglect. Poor countries rarely proffer education on a
regular basis to more than two thirds of their eligible school-age
children. This is especially true in rural areas where child labor
is a widespread blight. Education - especially for women - is
considered an unaffordable luxury by many hard-pressed parents. In
many cultures, work is still considered to be indispensable in
shaping the child's morality and strength of character and in
teaching him or her a trade.
"The Economist" elaborates:
"In Africa children are generally treated as mini-adults;
from an early age every child will have tasks to perform in the
home, such as sweeping or fetching water. It is also common to see
children working in shops or on the streets. Poor families will
often send a child to a richer relation as a housemaid or houseboy,
in the hope that he will get an education."
A solution
recently gaining steam is to provide families in poor countries with
access to loans secured by the future earnings of their educated
offspring. The idea - first proposed by Jean-Marie Baland of the
University of Namur and James A. Robinson of the University of
California at Berkeley - has now permeated the mainstream.
Even the World Bank has contributed a few studies, notably,
in June, "Child Labor: The Role of Income Variability and Access to
Credit Across Countries" authored by Rajeev Dehejia of the NBER and
Roberta Gatti of the Bank's Development Research Group.
Abusive child labor is abhorrent and should be banned and
eradicated. All other forms should be phased out gradually.
Developing countries already produce millions of unemployable
graduates a year - 100,000 in Morocco alone. Unemployment is rife
and reaches, in certain countries - such as Macedonia - more than
one third of the workforce. Children at work may be harshly treated
by their supervisors but at least they are kept off the far more
menacing streets. Some kids even end up with a skill and are
rendered employable. |
|
Do you defend animal experimentation for
the development of medicine that can save human lives?
This question is a sub-species of the broader issue of
animal rights.
According to MSNBC, in a May 2005 Senate
hearing, John Lewis, the FBI's deputy assistant director for
counterterrorism, asserted that "environmental and animal rights
extremists who have turned to arson and explosives are the nation's
top domestic terrorism threat ... Groups such as the Animal
Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front and the Britain-based
SHAC, or Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, are 'way out in front' in
terms of damage and number of crimes ...". Lewis averred that " ...
(t)here is nothing else going on in this country over the last
several years that is racking up the high number of violent crimes
and terrorist actions".
MSNBC notes that "(t)he Animal
Liberation Front says on its Web site that its small, autonomous
groups of people take 'direct action' against animal abuse by
rescuing animals and causing financial loss to animal exploiters,
usually through damage and destruction of property."
"Animal
rights" is a catchphrase akin to "human rights". It involves,
however, a few pitfalls. First, animals exist only as a concept.
Otherwise, they are cuddly cats, curly dogs, cute monkeys. A rat and
a puppy are both animals but our emotional reaction to them is so
different that we cannot really lump them together. Moreover: what
rights are we talking about? The right to life? The right to be free
of pain? The right to food? Except the right to free speech – all
other rights could be applied to animals.
Law professor
Steven Wise, argues in his book, "Drawing the Line: Science and the
Case for Animal Rights", for the extension to animals of legal
rights accorded to infants. Many animal species exhibit awareness,
cognizance and communication skills typical of human toddlers and of
humans with arrested development. Yet, the latter enjoy rights
denied the former.
According to Wise, there are four
categories of practical autonomy - a legal standard for granting
"personhood" and the rights it entails. Practical autonomy involves
the ability to be desirous, to intend to fulfill and pursue one's
desires, a sense of self-awareness, and self-sufficiency. Most
animals, says Wise, qualify. This may be going too far. It is easier
to justify the moral rights of animals than their legal rights.
But when we say "animals", what we really mean is non-human
organisms. This is such a wide definition that it easily pertains to
extraterrestrial aliens. Will we witness an Alien Rights movement
soon? Unlikely. Thus, we are forced to narrow our field of enquiry
to non-human organisms reminiscent of humans, the ones that provoke
in us empathy.
Even this is way too fuzzy. Many people love
snakes, for instance, and deeply empathize with them. Could we
accept the assertion (avidly propounded by these people) that snakes
ought to have rights – or should we consider only organisms with
extremities and the ability to feel pain?
Historically,
philosophers like Kant (and Descartes, Malebranche, and Aquinas)
rejected the idea of animal rights. They regarded animals as the
organic equivalents of machines, driven by coarse instincts, unable
to experience pain (though their behavior sometimes deceives us into
erroneously believing that they do).
Thus, any ethical
obligation that we have towards animals is a derivative of our
primary obligation towards our fellow humans (the only ones
possessed of moral significance). These are called the theories of
indirect moral obligations. Thus, it is wrong to torture animals
only because it desensitizes us to human suffering and makes us more
prone to using violence on humans. Malebranche augmented this line
of thinking by "proving" that animals cannot suffer pain because
they are not descended from Adam. Pain and suffering, as we all
know, are the exclusive outcomes of Adam's sins.
Kant and
Malebranche may have been wrong. Animals may be able to suffer and
agonize. But how can we tell whether another Being is truly
suffering pain or not? Through empathy. We postulate that - since
that Being resembles us – it must have the same experiences and,
therefore, it deserves our pity.
Yet, the principle of
resemblance has many drawbacks.
One, it leads to moral
relativism.
Consider this maxim from the Jewish Talmud: "Do
not do unto thy friend that which you hate". An analysis of this
sentence renders it less altruistic than it appears. We are
encouraged to refrain from doing only those things that WE find
hateful. This is the quiddity of moral relativism.
The
saying implies that it is the individual who is the source of moral
authority. Each and every one of us is allowed to spin his own moral
system, independent of others. The Talmudic dictum establishes a
privileged moral club (very similar to later day social
contractarianism) comprised of oneself and one's friend(s). One is
encouraged not to visit evil upon one's friends, all others
seemingly excluded. Even the broadest interpretation of the word
"friend" could only read: "someone like you" and substantially
excludes strangers.
Two, similarity is a structural, not an
essential, trait.
Empathy as a differentiating principle is
structural: if X looks like me and behaves like me – then he is
privileged. Moreover, similarity is not necessarily identity.
Monkeys, dogs and dolphins are very much like us, both structurally
and behaviorally. Even according to Wise, it is quantity (the degree
of observed resemblance), not quality (identity, essence), that is
used in determining whether an animal is worthy of holding rights,
whether is it a morally significant person. The degree of figurative
and functional likenesses decide whether one deserves to live,
pain-free and happy.
The quantitative test includes the
ability to communicate (manipulate vocal-verbal-written symbols
within structured symbol systems). Yet, we ignore the fact that
using the same symbols does not guarantee that we attach to them the
same cognitive interpretations and the same emotional resonance
('private languages"). The same words, or symbols, often have
different meanings.
Meaning is dependent upon historical,
cultural, and personal contexts. There is no telling whether two
people mean the same things when they say "red", or "sad", or "I",
or "love". That another organism looks like us, behaves like us and
communicates like us is no guarantee that it is - in its essence -
like us. This is the subject of the famous Turing Test: there is no
effective way to distinguish a machine from a human when we rely
exclusively on symbol manipulation.
Consider pain once more.
To say that something does not experience pain cannot be
rigorously defended. Pain is a subjective experience. There is no
way to prove or to disprove that someone is or is not in pain. Here,
we can rely only on the subject's reports. Moreover, even if we were
to have an analgometer (pain gauge), there would have been no way to
show that the phenomenon that activates the meter is one and the
same for all subjects, SUBJECTIVELY, i.e., that it is experienced in
the same way by all the subjects examined.
Even more basic
questions regarding pain are impossible to answer: What is the
connection between the piercing needle and the pain REPORTED and
between these two and electrochemical patterns of activity in the
brain? A correlation between these three phenomena can be
established – but not their identity or the existence of a causative
process. We cannot prove that the waves in the subject's brain when
he reports pain – ARE that pain. Nor can we show that they CAUSED
the pain, or that the pain caused them.
It is also not clear
whether our moral percepts are conditioned on the objective
existence of pain, on the reported existence of pain, on the
purported existence of pain (whether experienced or not, whether
reported or not), or on some independent laws.
If it were
painless, would it be moral to torture someone? Is the very act of
sticking needles into someone immoral – or is it immoral because of
the pain it causes, or supposed to inflict? Are all three components
(needle sticking, a sensation of pain, brain activity) morally
equivalent? If so, is it as immoral to merely generate the same
patterns of brain activity, without inducing any sensation of pain
and without sticking needles in the subject?
If these three
phenomena are not morally equivalent – why aren't they? They are,
after all, different facets of the very same pain – shouldn't we
condemn all of them equally? Or should one aspect of pain (the
subject's report of pain) be accorded a privileged treatment and
status?
Yet, the subject's report is the weakest proof of
pain! It cannot be verified. And if we cling to this
descriptive-behavioural-phenomenological definition of pain than
animals qualify as well. They also exhibit all the behaviours
normally ascribed to humans in pain and they report feeling pain
(though they do tend to use a more limited and non-verbal
vocabulary).
Pain is, therefore, a value judgment and the
reaction to it is culturally dependent. In some cases, pain is
perceived as positive and is sought. In the Aztec cultures, being
chosen to be sacrificed to the Gods was a high honour. How would we
judge animal rights in such historical and cultural contexts? Are
there any "universal" values or does it all really depend on
interpretation?
If we, humans, cannot separate the objective
from the subjective and the cultural – what gives us the right or
ability to decide for other organisms? We have no way of knowing
whether pigs suffer pain. We cannot decide right and wrong, good and
evil for those with whom we can communicate, let alone for organisms
with which we fail to do even this.
Is it GENERALLY immoral
to kill, to torture, to pain? The answer seems obvious and it
automatically applies to animals. Is it generally immoral to
destroy? Yes, it is and this answer pertains to the inanimate as
well. There are exceptions: it is permissible to kill and to inflict
pain in order to prevent a (quantitatively or qualitatively) greater
evil, to protect life, and when no reasonable and feasible
alternative is available.
The chain of food in nature is
morally neutral and so are death and disease. Any act which is
intended to sustain life of a higher order (and a higher order in
life) – is morally positive or, at least neutral. Nature decreed so.
Animals do it to other animals – though, admittedly, they optimize
their consumption and avoid waste and unnecessary pain. Waste and
pain are morally wrong. This is not a question of hierarchy of more
or less important Beings (an outcome of the fallacy of
anthropomorphizing Nature).
The distinction between what is
(essentially) US – and what just looks and behaves like us (but is
NOT us) is false, superfluous and superficial. Sociobiology is
already blurring these lines. Quantum Mechanics has taught us that
we can say nothing about what the world really IS. If things look
the same and behave the same, we better assume that they are the
same.
The attempt to claim that moral responsibility is
reserved to the human species is self defeating. If it is so, then
we definitely have a moral obligation towards the weaker and meeker.
If it isn't, what right do we have to decide who shall live and who
shall die (in pain)?
The increasingly shaky "fact" that
species do not interbreed "proves" that species are distinct, say
some. But who can deny that we share most of our genetic material
with the fly and the mouse? We are not as dissimilar as we wish we
were. And ever-escalating cruelty towards other species will not
establish our genetic supremacy - merely our moral
inferiority. |
|
Are you pro-choice or
pro-life?
I wish it were so clearcut!
The issue of
abortion is emotionally loaded and this often makes for poor, not
thoroughly thought out arguments. The questions: "Is abortion
immoral" and "Is abortion a murder" are often confused. The
pregnancy (and the resulting fetus) are discussed in terms normally
reserved to natural catastrophes (force majeure). At times, the
embryo is compared to cancer, a thief, or an invader: after all,
they are both growths, clusters of cells. The difference, of course,
is that no one contracts cancer willingly (except, to some extent,
smokers -–but, then they gamble, not contract).
When a woman
engages in voluntary sex, does not use contraceptives and gets
pregnant – one can say that she signed a contract with her fetus. A
contract entails the demonstrated existence of a reasonably (and
reasonable) free will. If the fulfillment of the obligations in a
contract between individuals could be life-threatening – it is fair
and safe to assume that no rational free will was involved. No
reasonable person would sign or enter such a contract with another
person (though most people would sign such contracts with society).
Judith Jarvis Thomson argued convincingly ("A Defence of
Abortion") that pregnancies that are the result of forced sex (rape
being a special case) or which are life threatening should or could,
morally, be terminated. Using the transactional language: the
contract was not entered to willingly or reasonably and, therefore,
is null and void. Any actions which are intended to terminate it and
to annul its consequences should be legally and morally permissible.
The same goes for a contract which was entered into against
the express will of one of the parties and despite all the
reasonable measures that the unwilling party adopted to prevent it.
If a mother uses contraceptives in a manner intended to prevent
pregnancy, it is as good as saying: " I do not want to sign this
contract, I am doing my reasonable best not to sign it, if it is
signed – it is contrary to my express will". There is little legal
(or moral) doubt that such a contract should be voided.
Much
more serious problems arise when we study the other party to these
implicit agreements: the embryo. To start with, it lacks
consciousness (in the sense that is needed for signing an
enforceable and valid contract). Can a contract be valid even if one
of the "signatories" lacks this sine qua non trait? In the absence
of consciousness, there is little point in talking about free will
(or rights which depend on sentience). So, is the contract not a
contract at all? Does it not reflect the intentions of the parties?
The answer is in the negative. The contract between a mother
and her fetus is derived from the larger Social Contract. Society –
through its apparatuses – stands for the embryo the same way that it
represents minors, the mentally retarded, and the insane. Society
steps in – and has the recognized right and moral obligation to do
so – whenever the powers of the parties to a contract (implicit or
explicit) are not balanced. It protects small citizens from big
monopolies, the physically weak from the thug, the tiny opposition
from the mighty administration, the barely surviving radio station
from the claws of the devouring state mechanism. It also has the
right and obligation to intervene, intercede and represent the
unconscious: this is why euthanasia is absolutely forbidden without
the consent of the dying person. There is not much difference
between the embryo and the comatose.
A typical contract
states the rights of the parties. It assumes the existence of
parties which are "moral personhoods" or "morally significant
persons" – in other words, persons who are holders of rights and can
demand from us to respect these rights. Contracts explicitly
elaborate some of these rights and leaves others unmentioned because
of the presumed existence of the Social Contract. The typical
contract assumes that there is a social contract which applies to
the parties to the contract and which is universally known and,
therefore, implicitly incorporated in every contract. Thus, an
explicit contract can deal with the property rights of a certain
person, while neglecting to mention that person's rights to life, to
free speech, to the enjoyment the fruits of his lawful property and,
in general to a happy life.
There is little debate that the
Mother is a morally significant person and that she is a
rights-holder. All born humans are and, more so, all adults above a
certain age. But what about the unborn fetus?
One approach
is that the embryo has no rights until certain conditions are met
and only upon their fulfillment is he transformed into a morally
significant person ("moral agent"). Opinions differ as to what are
the conditions. Rationality, or a morally meaningful and valued life
are some of the oft cited criteria. The fallaciousness of this
argument is easy to demonstrate: children are irrational – is this a
licence to commit infanticide?
A second approach says that a
person has the right to life because it desires it.
But then
what about chronic depressives who wish to die – do we have the
right to terminate their miserable lives? The good part of life
(and, therefore, the differential and meaningful test) is in the
experience itself – not in the desire to experience.
Another
variant says that a person has the right to life because once his
life is terminated – his experiences cease. So, how should we judge
the right to life of someone who constantly endures bad experiences
(and, as a result, harbors a death wish)? Should he better be
"terminated"?
Having reviewed the above arguments and
counter-arguments, Don Marquis goes on (in "Why Abortion is
Immoral", 1989) to offer a sharper and more comprehensive criterion:
terminating a life is morally wrong because a person has a future
filled with value and meaning, similar to ours.
But the
whole debate is unnecessary. There is no conflict between the rights
of the mother and those of her fetus because there is never a
conflict between parties to an agreement. By signing an agreement,
the mother gave up some of her rights and limited the others. This
is normal practice in contracts: they represent compromises, the
optimization (and not the maximization) of the parties' rights and
wishes. The rights of the fetus are an inseparable part of the
contract which the mother signed voluntarily and reasonably. They
are derived from the mother's behaviour. Getting willingly pregnant
(or assuming the risk of getting pregnant by not using
contraceptives reasonably) – is the behaviour which validates and
ratifies a contract between her and the fetus. Many contracts are by
behaviour, rather than by a signed piece of paper. Numerous
contracts are verbal or behavioural. These contracts, though
implicit, are as binding as any of their written, more explicit,
brethren. Legally (and morally) the situation is crystal clear: the
mother signed some of her rights away in this contract. Even if she
regrets it – she cannot claim her rights back by annulling the
contract unilaterally. No contract can be annulled this way – the
consent of both parties is required. Many times we realize that we
have entered a bad contract, but there is nothing much that we can
do about it. These are the rules of the game.
Thus the two
remaining questions: (a) can this specific contract (pregnancy) be
annulled and, if so (b) in which circumstances – can be easily
settled using modern contract law. Yes, a contract can be annulled
and voided if signed under duress, involuntarily, by incompetent
persons (e.g., the insane), or if one of the parties made a
reasonable and full scale attempt to prevent its signature, thus
expressing its clear will not to sign the contract. It is also
terminated or voided if it would be unreasonable to expect one of
the parties to see it through. Rape, contraception failure, life
threatening situations are all such cases.
This could be
argued against by saying that, in the case of economic hardship, f
or instance, the damage to the mother's future is certain. True, her
value- filled, meaningful future is granted – but so is the
detrimental effect that the fetus will have on it, once born. This
certainty cannot be balanced by the UNCERTAIN value-filled future
life of the embryo. Always, preferring an uncertain good to a
certain evil is morally wrong. But surely this is a quantitative
matter – not a qualitative one. Certain, limited aspects of the rest
of the mother's life will be adversely effected (and can be
ameliorated by society's helping hand and intervention) if she does
have the baby. The decision not to have it is both qualitatively and
qualitatively different. It is to deprive the unborn of all the
aspects of all his future life – in which he might well have
experienced happiness, values, and meaning.
The questions
whether the fetus is a Being or a growth of cells, conscious in any
manner, or utterly unconscious, able to value his life and to want
them – are all but irrelevant. He has the potential to lead a happy,
meaningful, value-filled life, similar to ours, very much as a one
minute old baby does. The contract between him and his mother is a
service provision contract. She provides him with goods and services
that he requires in order to materialize his potential. It sounds
very much like many other human contracts. And this contract
continue well after pregnancy has ended and birth given.
Consider education: children do not appreciate its
importance or value its potential – still, it is enforced upon them
because we, who are capable of those feats, want them to have the
tools that they will need in order to develop their potential. In
this and many other respects, the human pregnancy continues well
into the fourth year of life (physiologically it continues in to the
second year of life - see "Born Alien"). Should the location of the
pregnancy (in uterus, in vivo) determine its future? If a mother has
the right to abort at will, why should the mother be denied her
right to terminate the " pregnancy" AFTER the fetus emerges and the
pregnancy continues OUTSIDE her womb? Even after birth, the woman's
body is the main source of food to the baby and, in any case, she
has to endure physical hardship to raise the child. Why not extend
the woman's ownership of her body and right to it further in time
and space to the post-natal period?
Contracts to provide
goods and services (always at a personal cost to the provider) are
the commonest of contracts. We open a business. We sell a software
application, we publish a book – we engage in helping others to
materialize their potential. We should always do so willingly and
reasonably – otherwise the contracts that we sign will be null and
void. But to deny anyone his capacity to materialize his potential
and the goods and services that he needs to do so – after a valid
contract was entered into - is immoral. To refuse to provide a
service or to condition it provision (Mother: " I will provide the
goods and services that I agreed to provide to this fetus under this
contract only if and when I benefit from such provision") is a
violation of the contract and should be penalized. Admittedly, at
times we have a right to choose to do the immoral (because it has
not been codified as illegal) – but that does not turn it into
moral.
Still, not every immoral act involving the
termination of life can be classified as murder. Phenomenology is
deceiving: the acts look the same (cessation of life functions, the
prevention of a future). But murder is the intentional termination
of the life of a human who possesses, at the moment of death, a
consciousness (and, in most cases, a free will, especially the will
not to die). Abortion is the intentional termination of a life which
has the potential to develop into a person with consciousness and
free will. Philosophically, no identity can be established between
potential and actuality. The destruction of paints and cloth is not
tantamount (not to say identical) to the destruction of a painting
by Van Gogh, made up of these very elements. Paints and cloth are
converted to a painting through the intermediacy and agency of the
Painter. A cluster of cells a human makes only through the agency of
Nature. Surely, the destruction of the painting materials
constitutes an offence against the Painter. In the same way, the
destruction of the fetus constitutes an offence against Nature. But
there is no denying that in both cases, no finished product was
eliminated. Naturally, this becomes less and less so (the severity
of the terminating act increases) as the process of creation
advances.
Classifying an abortion as murder poses numerous
and insurmountable philosophical problems.
No one disputes
the now common view that the main crime committed in aborting a
pregnancy – is a crime against potentialities. If so, what is the
philosophical difference between aborting a fetus and destroying a
sperm and an egg? These two contain all the information (=all the
potential) and their destruction is philosophically no less grave
than the destruction of a fetus. The destruction of an egg and a
sperm is even more serious philosophically: the creation of a fetus
limits the set of all potentials embedded in the genetic material to
the one fetus created. The egg and sperm can be compared to the
famous wave function (state vector) in quantum mechanics – the
represent millions of potential final states (=millions of potential
embryos and lives). The fetus is the collapse of the wave function:
it represents a much more limited set of potentials. If killing an
embryo is murder because of the elimination of potentials – how
should we consider the intentional elimination of many more
potentials through masturbation and contraception?
The
argument that it is difficult to say which sperm cell will
impregnate the egg is not serious. Biologically, it does not matter
– they all carry the same genetic content. Moreover, would this
counter-argument still hold if, in future, we were be able to
identify the chosen one and eliminate only it? In many religions
(Catholicism) contraception is murder. In Judaism, masturbation is
"the corruption of the seed" and such a serious offence that it is
punishable by the strongest religious penalty: eternal
ex-communication ("Karet").
If abortion is indeed murder how
should we resolve the following moral dilemmas and questions (some
of them patently absurd):
Is a natural abortion the
equivalent of manslaughter (through negligence)?
Do habits
like smoking, drug addiction, vegetarianism – infringe upon the
right to life of the embryo? Do they constitute a violation of the
contract?
Reductio ad absurdum: if, in the far future,
research will unequivocally prove that listening to a certain kind
of music or entertaining certain thoughts seriously hampers the
embryonic development – should we apply censorship to the Mother?
Should force majeure clauses be introduced to the
Mother-Embryo pregnancy contract? Will they give the mother the
right to cancel the contract? Will the embryo have a right to
terminate the contract? Should the asymmetry persist: the Mother
will have no right to terminate – but the embryo will, or vice
versa?
Being a rights holder, can the embryo (=the State)
litigate against his Mother or Third Parties (the doctor that
aborted him, someone who hit his mother and brought about a natural
abortion) even after he died?
Should anyone who knows about
an abortion be considered an accomplice to murder?
If
abortion is murder – why punish it so mildly? Why is there a debate
regarding this question? "Thou shalt not kill" is a natural law, it
appears in virtually every legal system. It is easily and
immediately identifiable. The fact that abortion does not "enjoy"
the same legal and moral treatment says a lot.
Appendix -
Arguments from the Right to Life
I. The Right to Life
It is a fundamental principle of most moral theories that
all human beings have a right to life. The existence of a right
implies obligations or duties of third parties towards the
right-holder. One has a right AGAINST other people. The fact that
one possesses a certain right - prescribes to others certain
obligatory behaviours and proscribes certain acts or omissions. This
Janus-like nature of rights and duties as two sides of the same
ethical coin - creates great confusion. People often and easily
confuse rights and their attendant duties or obligations with the
morally decent, or even with the morally permissible. What one MUST
do as a result of another's right - should never be confused with
one SHOULD or OUGHT to do morally (in the absence of a right).
The right to life has eight distinct strains:
IA.
The right to be brought to life
IB. The right to be born
IC. The right to have one's life maintained
ID. The
right not to be killed
IE. The right to have one's life
saved
IF. The right to save one's life (erroneously limited
to the right to self-defence)
IG. The Right to terminate
one's life
IH. The right to have one's life terminated
IA. The Right to be Brought to Life
Only living
people have rights. There is a debate whether an egg is a living
person - but there can be no doubt that it exists. Its rights -
whatever they are - derive from the fact that it exists and that it
has the potential to develop life. The right to be brought to life
(the right to become or to be) pertains to a yet non-alive entity
and, therefore, is null and void. Had this right existed, it would
have implied an obligation or duty to give life to the unborn and
the not yet conceived. No such duty or obligation exist.
IB.
The Right to be Born
The right to be born crystallizes at
the moment of voluntary and intentional fertilization. If a woman
knowingly engages in sexual intercourse for the explicit and express
purpose of having a child - then the resulting fertilized egg has a
right to mature and be born. Furthermore, the born child has all the
rights a child has against his parents: food, shelter, emotional
nourishment, education, and so on.
It is debatable whether
such rights of the fetus and, later, of the child, exist if the
fertilization was either involuntary (rape) or unintentional
("accidental" pregnancies). It would seem that the fetus has a right
to be kept alive outside the mother's womb, if possible. But it is
not clear whether it has a right to go on using the mother's body,
or resources, or to burden her in any way in order to sustain its
own life (see IC below).
IC. The Right to have One's Life
Maintained
Does one have the right to maintain one's life
and prolong them at other people's expense? Does one have the right
to use other people's bodies, their property, their time, their
resources and to deprive them of pleasure, comfort, material
possessions, income, or any other thing?
The answer is yes
and no.
No one has a right to sustain his or her life,
maintain, or prolong them at another INDIVIDUAL's expense (no matter
how minimal and insignificant the sacrifice required is). Still, if
a contract has been signed - implicitly or explicitly - between the
parties, then such a right may crystallize in the contract and
create corresponding duties and obligations, moral, as well as
legal.
Example:
No fetus has a right to sustain its
life, maintain, or prolong them at his mother's expense (no matter
how minimal and insignificant the sacrifice required of her is).
Still, if she signed a contract with the fetus - by knowingly and
willingly and intentionally conceiving it - such a right has
crystallized and has created corresponding duties and obligations of
the mother towards her fetus.
On the other hand, everyone
has a right to sustain his or her life, maintain, or prolong them at
SOCIETY's expense (no matter how major and significant the resources
required are). Still, if a contract has been signed - implicitly or
explicitly - between the parties, then the abrogation of such a
right may crystallize in the contract and create corresponding
duties and obligations, moral, as well as legal.
Example:
Everyone has a right to sustain his or her life, maintain,
or prolong them at society's expense. Public hospitals, state
pension schemes, and police forces may be required to fulfill
society's obligations - but fulfill them it must, no matter how
major and significant the resources are. Still, if a person
volunteered to join the army and a contract has been signed between
the parties, then this right has been thus abrogated and the
individual assumed certain duties and obligations, including the
duty or obligation to give up his or her life to society.
ID. The Right not to be Killed
Every person has the
right not to be killed unjustly. What constitutes "just killing" is
a matter for an ethical calculus in the framework of a social
contract.
But does A's right not to be killed include the
right against third parties that they refrain from enforcing the
rights of other people against A? Does A's right not to be killed
preclude the righting of wrongs committed by A against others - even
if the righting of such wrongs means the killing of A?
Not
so. There is a moral obligation to right wrongs (to restore the
rights of other people). If A maintains or prolongs his life ONLY by
violating the rights of others and these other people object to it -
then A must be killed if that is the only way to right the wrong and
re-assert their rights.
IE. The Right to have One's Life
Saved
There is no such right as there is no corresponding
moral obligation or duty to save a life. This "right" is a
demonstration of the aforementioned muddle between the morally
commendable, desirable and decent ("ought", "should") and the
morally obligatory, the result of other people's rights ("must").
In some countries, the obligation to save life is legally
codified. But while the law of the land may create a LEGAL right and
corresponding LEGAL obligations - it does not always or necessarily
create a moral or an ethical right and corresponding moral duties
and obligations.
IF. The Right to Save One's Own Life
The right to self-defence is a subset of the more general
and all-pervasive right to save one's own life. One has the right to
take certain actions or avoid taking certain actions in order to
save his or her own life.
It is generally accepted that one
has the right to kill a pursuer who knowingly and intentionally
intends to take one's life. It is debatable, though, whether one has
the right to kill an innocent person who unknowingly and
unintentionally threatens to take one's life.
IG. The Right
to Terminate One's Life
See "The Murder of Oneself".
IH. The Right to Have One's Life Terminated
The
right to euthanasia, to have one's life terminated at will, is
restricted by numerous social, ethical, and legal rules, principles,
and considerations. In a nutshell - in many countries in the West
one is thought to has a right to have one's life terminated with the
help of third parties if one is going to die shortly anyway and if
one is going to be tormented and humiliated by great and
debilitating agony for the rest of one's remaining life if not
helped to die. Of course, for one's wish to be helped to die to be
accommodated, one has to be in sound mind and to will one's death
knowingly, intentionally, and forcefully.
II. Issues in the
Calculus of Rights
IIA. The Hierarchy of Rights
All
human cultures have hierarchies of rights. These hierarchies reflect
cultural mores and lores and there cannot, therefore, be a
universal, or eternal hierarchy.
In Western moral systems,
the Right to Life supersedes all other rights (including the right
to one's body, to comfort, to the avoidance of pain, to property,
etc.).
Yet, this hierarchical arrangement does not help us
to resolve cases in which there is a clash of EQUAL rights (for
instance, the conflicting rights to life of two people). One way to
decide among equally potent claims is randomly (by flipping a coin,
or casting dice). Alternatively, we could add and subtract rights in
a somewhat macabre arithmetic. If a mother's life is endangered by
the continued existence of a fetus and assuming both of them have a
right to life we can decide to kill the fetus by adding to the
mother's right to life her right to her own body and thus
outweighing the fetus' right to life.
IIB. The Difference
between Killing and Letting Die
There is an assumed
difference between killing (taking life) and letting die (not saving
a life). This is supported by IE above. While there is a right not
to be killed - there is no right to have one's own life saved. Thus,
while there is an obligation not to kill - there is no obligation to
save a life.
IIC. Killing the Innocent
Often the
continued existence of an innocent person (IP) threatens to take the
life of a victim (V). By "innocent" we mean "not guilty" - not
responsible for killing V, not intending to kill V, and not knowing
that V will be killed due to IP's actions or continued existence.
It is simple to decide to kill IP to save V if IP is going
to die anyway shortly, and the remaining life of V, if saved, will
be much longer than the remaining life of IP, if not killed. All
other variants require a calculus of hierarchically weighted rights.
(See "Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life" by Baruch A. Brody).
One form of calculus is the utilitarian theory. It calls for
the maximization of utility (life, happiness, pleasure). In other
words, the life, happiness, or pleasure of the many outweigh the
life, happiness, or pleasure of the few. It is morally permissible
to kill IP if the lives of two or more people will be saved as a
result and there is no other way to save their lives. Despite strong
philosophical objections to some of the premises of utilitarian
theory - I agree with its practical prescriptions.
In this
context - the dilemma of killing the innocent - one can also call
upon the right to self defence. Does V have a right to kill IP
regardless of any moral calculus of rights? Probably not. One is
rarely justified in taking another's life to save one's own. But
such behaviour cannot be condemned. Here we have the flip side of
the confusion - understandable and perhaps inevitable behaviour
(self defence) is mistaken for a MORAL RIGHT. That most V's would
kill IP and that we would all sympathize with V and understand its
behaviour does not mean that V had a RIGHT to kill IP. V may have
had a right to kill IP - but this right is not automatic, nor is it
all-encompassing. |
|
What is your opinion of the rise in
popularity of plastic surgery and implants?
Narcissism, pure and simple.
We are surrounded
by malignant narcissists. How come this disorder has hitherto been
largely ignored? How come there is such a dearth of research and
literature regarding this crucial family of pathologies? Even mental
health practitioners are woefully unaware of it and unprepared to
assist its victims.
The sad answer is that narcissism meshes
well with our culture [see: http://samvak.tripod.com/lasch.html].
It
is kind of a "background cosmic radiation", permeating every social
and cultural interaction. It is hard to distinguish pathological
narcissists from self-assertive, self-confident, self-promoting,
eccentric, or highly individualistic persons. Hard sell, greed,
envy, self-centredness, exploitativeness, diminished empathy - are
all socially condoned features of Western civilization.
Our
society is atomized, the outcome of individualism gone awry. It
encourages narcissistic leadership and role models: http://samvak.tripod.com/15.html
Its
sub-structures - institutionalized religion, political parties,
civic organizations, the media, corporations - are all suffused with
narcissism and pervaded by its pernicious outcomes: http://samvak.tripod.com/14.html
The very
ethos of materialism and capitalism upholds certain narcissistic
traits, such as reduced empathy, exploitation, a sense of
entitlement, or grandiose fantasies
("vision"). |
|
Should homosexual couples have the same
right to adopt as heterosexual couples?
This question is a politically correct version of the
real concern: is homosexuality natural or (as the American
Psychaitric Association insisted until the late 1980s) a mental
health disorder?
Recent studies in animal sexuality serve to
dispel two common myths: that sex is exclusively about reproduction
and that homosexuality is an unnatural sexual preference. It now
appears that sex is also about recreation as it frequently occurs
out of the mating season. And same-sex copulation and bonding are
common in hundreds of species, from bonobo apes to gulls.
Moreover, homosexual couples in the Animal Kingdom are prone
to behaviors commonly - and erroneously - attributed only to
heterosexuals. The New York Times reported in its February 7, 2004
issue about a couple of gay penguins who are desperately and
recurrently seeking to incubate eggs together.
In the same
article ("Love that Dare not Squeak its Name"), Bruce Bagemihl,
author of the groundbreaking "Biological Exuberance: Animal
Homosexuality and Natural Diversity", defines homosexuality as "any
of these behaviors between members of the same sex: long-term
bonding, sexual contact, courtship displays or the rearing of
young."
Still, that a certain behavior occurs in nature (is
"natural") does not render it moral. Infanticide, patricide,
suicide, gender bias, and substance abuse - are all to be found in
various animal species. It is futile to argue for homosexuality or
against it based on zoological observations. Ethics is about
surpassing nature - not about emulating it.
The more
perplexing question remains: what are the evolutionary and
biological advantages of recreational sex and homosexuality? Surely,
both entail the waste of scarce resources.
Convoluted
explanations, such as the one proffered by Marlene Zuk (homosexuals
contribute to the gene pool by nurturing and raising young
relatives) defy common sense, experience, and the calculus of
evolution. There are no field studies that show conclusively or even
indicate that homosexuals tend to raise and nurture their younger
relatives more that straights do.
Moreover, the arithmetic
of genetics would rule out such a stratagem. If the aim of life is
to pass on one's genes from one generation to the next, the
homosexual would have been far better off raising his own children
(who carry forward half his DNA) - rather than his nephew or niece
(with whom he shares merely one quarter of his genetic material.)
What is more, though genetically-predisposed, homosexuality
may be partly acquired, the outcome of environment and nurture,
rather than nature.
An oft-overlooked fact is that
recreational sex and homosexuality have one thing in common: they do
not lead to reproduction. Homosexuality may, therefore, be a form of
pleasurable sexual play. It may also enhance same-sex bonding and
train the young to form cohesive, purposeful groups (the army and
the boarding school come to mind).
Furthermore,
homosexuality amounts to the culling of 10-15% of the gene pool in
each generation. The genetic material of the homosexual is not
propagated and is effectively excluded from the big roulette of
life. Growers - of anything from cereals to cattle - similarly use
random culling to improve their stock. As mathematical models show,
such repeated mass removal of DNA from the common brew seems to
optimize the species and increase its resilience and efficiency.
It is ironic to realize that homosexuality and other forms
of non-reproductive, pleasure-seeking sex may be key evolutionary
mechanisms and integral drivers of population dynamics. Reproduction
is but one goal among many, equally important, end results.
Heterosexuality is but one strategy among a few optimal solutions.
Studying biology may yet lead to greater tolerance for the vast
repertory of human sexual foibles, preferences, and predilections.
Back to nature, in this case, may be forward to civilization.
Suggested Literature
Bagemihl, Bruce - "Biological
Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" - St.
Martin's Press, 1999
De-Waal, Frans and Lanting, Frans -
"Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape" - University of California Press, 1997
De Waal, Frans - "Bonobo Sex and Society" - March 1995 issue
of Scientific American, pp. 82-88
Trivers, Robert - Natural
Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers - Oxford University
Press, 2002
Zuk, Marlene - "Sexual Selections: What We Can
and Can't Learn About Sex From Animals" - University of California
Press, 2002 |
|
Do extraterrestrials exist?
I. The Six Arguments against SETI
The various
projects that comprise the 45-years old Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (SETI) raise two important issues:
(1) do
Aliens exist and
(2) can we communicate with them.
If they do and we can, how come we never encountered an
extraterrestrial, let alone spoken to or corresponded with one?
There are six basic explanations to this apparent conundrum
and they are not mutually exclusive:
(1) That Aliens do not
exist - click HERE to read the response
(2) That the
technology they use is far too advanced to be detected by us and,
the flip side of this hypothesis, that the technology we us is
insufficiently advanced to be noticed by them - click HERE to read
the response
(3) That we are looking for extraterrestrials
at the wrong places - click HERE to read the response
(4)
That the Aliens are life forms so different to us that we fail to
recognize them as sentient beings or to communicate with them -
click HERE to read the response
(5) That Aliens are trying
to communicate with us but constantly fail due to a variety of
hindrances, some structural and some circumstantial - click HERE to
read the response
(6) That they are avoiding us because of
our misconduct (example: the alleged destruction of the environment)
or because of our traits (for instance, our innate belligerence) or
because of ethical considerations - click HERE to read the response
Argument Number 1: Aliens do not exist (the Fermi Principle)
The assumption that life has arisen only on Earth is both
counterintuitive and unlikely. Rather, it is highly probable that
life is an extensive parameter of the Universe. In other words, that
it is as pervasive and ubiquitous as are other generative phenomena,
such as star formation.
This does not mean that
extraterrestrial life and life on Earth are necessarily similar.
Environmental determinism and the panspermia hypothesis are far from
proven. There is no guarantee that we are not unique, as per the
Rare Earth hypothesis. But the likelihood of finding life in one
form or another elsewhere and everywhere in the Universe is high.
The widely-accepted mediocrity principle (Earth is a typical
planet) and its reification, the controversial Drake (or Sagan)
Equation usually predicts the existence of thousands of Alien
civilizations - though only a vanishingly small fraction of these
are likely to communicate with us.
But, if this is true, to
quote Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi: "where are they?".
Fermi postulated that ubiquitous technologically advanced
civilizations should be detectable - yet they are not! (The Fermi
Paradox).
This paucity of observational evidence may be
owing to the fact that our galaxy is old. In ten billion years of
its existence, the majority of Alien races are likely to have simply
died out or been extinguished by various cataclysmic events. Or
maybe older and presumably wiser races are not as bent as we are on
acquiring colonies. Remote exploration may have supplanted material
probes and physical visits to wild locales such as Earth.
Aliens exist on our very planet. The minds of newborn babies
and of animals are as inaccessible to us as would be the minds of
little green men and antenna-wielding adductors. Moreover, as we
demonstrated in the previous chapter, even adult human beings from
the same cultural background are as aliens to one another. Language
is an inadequate and blunt instrument when it comes to communicating
our inner worlds.
Argument Number 2: Their technology is too
advanced
If Aliens really want to communicate with us, why
would they use technologies that are incompatible with our level of
technological progress? When we discover primitive tribes in the
Amazon, do we communicate with them via e-mail or video conferencing
- or do we strive to learn their language and modes of communication
and emulate them to the best of our ability?
Of course there
is always the possibility that we are as far removed from Alien
species as ants are from us. We do not attempt to interface with
insects. If the gap between us and Alien races in the galaxy is too
wide, they are unlikely to want to communicate with us at all.
Argument Number 3: We are looking in all the wrong places
If life is, indeed, a defining feature (an extensive
property) of our Universe, it should be anisotropically,
symmetrically, and equally distributed throughout the vast expanse
of space. In other words, never mind where we turn our scientific
instruments, we should be able to detect life or traces of life.
Still, technological and budgetary constraints have served
to dramatically narrow the scope of the search for intelligent
transmissions. Vast swathes of the sky have been omitted from the
research agenda as have been many spectrum frequencies. SETI
scientists assume that Alien species are as concerned with
efficiency as we are and, therefore, unlikely to use certain
wasteful methods and frequencies to communicate with us. This
assumption of interstellar scarcity is, of course, dubious.
Argument Number 4: Aliens are too alien to be recognized
Carbon-based life forms may be an aberration or the rule, no
one knows. The diversionist and convergionist schools of evolution
are equally speculative as are the basic assumptions of both
astrobiology and xenobiology. The rest of the universe may be
populated with silicon, or nitrogen-phosphorus based races or with
information-waves or contain numerous, non-interacting "shadow
biospheres".
Recent discoveries of extremophile unicellular
organisms lend credence to the belief that life can exist almost
under any circumstances and in all conditions and that the range of
planetary habitability is much larger than thought.
But
whatever their chemical composition, most Alien species are likely
to be sentient and intelligent. Intelligence is bound to be the
great equalizer and the Universal Translator in our Universe. We may
fail to recognize certain extragalactic races as life-forms but we
are unlikely to mistake their intelligence for a naturally occurring
phenomenon. We are equipped to know other sentient intelligent
species regardless of how advanced and different they are - and they
are equally fitted to acknowledge us as such.
Even so,
should we ever encounter them, aliens are likely to strike as as
being childish and immature. Inevitably, they will find our planet
strange. They will experience a learning curve (perhaps even a
lengthy one). Similar to infants, they are likely to wander around,
tumbling and gaping and clumsily reaching for objects, mute and
possibly blinded by the light. They may be hampered by any number of
things: gravity, the level of oxygen, radiation, and winds. Far from
being a threat, at first they may require our assistance merely to
survive the ordeal.
Argument Number 5: We are failing to
communicate with Aliens
The hidden assumption underlying
CETI/METI (Communication with ETI/Messaging to ETI) is that Aliens,
like humans, are inclined to communicate. This may be untrue. The
propensity for interpersonal communication (let alone the
inter-species variety) may not be universal. Additionally, Aliens
may not possess the same sense organs that we do (eyes) and may not
be acquainted with our mathematics and geometry. Reality can be
successfully described and captured by alternative mathematical
systems and geometries.
Additionally, we often confuse
complexity or orderliness with artificiality. As the example of
quasars teaches us, not all regular or constant or strong or complex
signals are artificial. Even the very use of language may be a
uniquely human phenomenon - though most xenolinguists contest such
exclusivity.
Moreover, as Wittgenstein observed, language is
an essentially private affair: if a lion were to suddenly speak, we
would not have understood it. Modern verificationist and
referentialist linguistic theories seek to isolate the universals of
language, so as to render all languages capable of translation - but
they are still a long way off. Clarke's Third Law says that Alien
civilizations well in advance of humanity may be deploying
investigative methods and communicating in dialects undetectable
even in principle by humans.
Argument Number 6: They are
avoiding us
Advanced Alien civilizations may have found ways
to circumvent the upper limit of the speed of light (for instance,
by using wormholes). If they have and if UFO sightings are mere
hoaxes and bunk (as is widely believed by most scientists), then we
are back to Fermi's "where are they".
One possible answer is
they are avoiding us because of our misconduct (example: the alleged
destruction of the environment) or because of our traits (for
instance, our innate belligerence). Or maybe the Earth is a galactic
wildlife reserve or a zoo or a laboratory (the Zoo hypothesis) and
the Aliens do not wish to contaminate us or subvert our natural
development. This falsely assumes that all Alien civilizations
operate in unison and under a single code (the Uniformity of Motive
fallacy).
But how would they know to avoid contact with us?
How would they know of our misdeeds and bad character?
Our
earliest radio signals have traversed no more than 130 light years
omnidirectionally. Out television emissions are even closer to home.
What other source of information could Aliens have except our own
self-incriminating transmissions? None. In other words, it is
extremely unlikely that our reputation precedes us. Luckily for us,
we are virtual unknowns.
As early as 1960, the implications
of an encounter with an ETI were clear:
"Evidences of its
existence might also be found in artifacts left on the moon or other
planets. The consequences for attitudes and values are
unpredictable, but would vary profoundly in different cultures and
between groups within complex societies; a crucial factor would be
the nature of the communication between us and the other beings.
Whether or not earth would be inspired to an all-out space effort by
such a discovery is moot: societies sure of their own place in the
universe have disintegrated when confronted by a superior society,
and others have survived even though changed. Clearly, the better we
can come to understand the factors involved in responding to such
crises the better prepared we may be."
(Brookins Institute -
Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities
for Human Affairs, 1960)
Perhaps we should not be looking
forward to the First Encounter. It may also be our
last. |
CULTURE
|
What do you currently have in your MP3
player?
I don't have an MP3 player. I feel sad only when I
listen to music. My sadness is tinged with the decomposing sweetness
of my childhood. So, sometimes, I sing or think about music and it
makes me unbearably sad. I know that somewhere inside me there are
whole valleys of melancholy, oceans of pain but they remain untapped
because I want to live. I cannot listen to music - any music - for
more than a few minutes. It is too dangerous, I cannot breathe.
But this is the exception. Otherwise, my emotional life is
colourless and eventless, as rigidly blind as my disorder, as dead
as me. Oh, I feel rage and hurt and inordinate humiliation and fear.
These are very dominant, prevalent and recurrent hues in the canvass
of my daily existence. But there is nothing except these atavistic
gut reactions. There is nothing else - at least not that I am aware
of.
Whatever it is that I experience as emotions - I
experience in reaction to slights and injuries, real or imagined. My
emotions are all reactive, not active. I feel insulted - I sulk. I
feel devalued - I rage. I feel ignored - I pout. I feel humiliated -
I lash out. I feel threatened - I fear. I feel adored - I bask in
glory. I am virulently envious of one and all.
I can
appreciate beauty but in a cerebral, cold and "mathematical" way. I
have no sex drive I can think of. My emotional landscape is dim and
grey, as though observed through thick mist in a particularly dreary
day.
I can intelligently discuss other emotions, which I
never experienced - like empathy, or love - because I make it a
point to read a lot and to correspond with people who claim to
experience them. Thus, I gradually formed working hypotheses as to
what people feel. It is pointless to try to really understand - but
at least I can better predict their behaviour than in the absence of
such models.
I am not envious of people who feel. I disdain
feelings and emotional people because I think that they are weak and
vulnerable and I deride human weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Such
derision makes me feel superior and is probably the ossified remains
of a defence mechanism gone berserk. But, there it is, this is I and
there is nothing I can do about it.
To all of you who talk
about change - there is nothing I can do about myself. And there is
nothing you can do about yourself. And there is nothing anyone can
do for you, either. Psychotherapy and medications are concerned with
behaviour modification - not with healing. They are concerned with
proper adaptation because maladaptation is socially costly. Society
defends itself against misfits by lying to them. The lie is that
change and healing are possible. They are not. You are what you are.
Period. Go live with it.
So, here I am. An emotional
hunchback, a fossil, a human caught in amber, observing my
environment with dead eyes of calcium. We shall never meet amicably
because I am a predator and you are the prey. Because I do not know
what it is like to be you and I do not particularly care to know.
Because my disorder is as essential to me as your feelings are to
you. My normal state is my very illness. I look like you, I walk the
walk and talk the talk and I - and my ilk - deceive you
magnificently. Not out of the cold viciousness of our hearts - but
because that is the way we are.
I have emotions and they are
buried in a pit down below. All of my emotions are acidulously
negative, they are vitriol, the "not for internal consumption" type.
I cannot feel anything, because if I open the floodgates of this
cesspool of my psyche, I will drown.
And I will carry you
with me.
And all the love in this world, and all the
crusading women who think that they can "fix" me by doling out their
saccharine compassion and revolting "understanding" and all the
support and the holding environments and the textbooks - cannot
change one iota in this maddening, self-imposed verdict meted out by
the most insanely, obtusely, sadistically harsh judge:
By
me. |
|
What books are you currently
reading?
I devour encyclopedias and other books of reference.
They make me feel in control ("the world is my oyster"). They
buttress my self-perception as an intellectual. They never bore me.
Right now, I am reading a compilation of legal decisions
rendered in Great Britain and the Commonwealth in 1994. In the last
few weeks, I have read a book about Alexander the Great, another
about Hitler (a perennial interest of mine), a verbose and
indecipherable French (how else?) biography of Proust, and a hack
job about Jack the Ripper. In between, I gulped down thriller. I
love mysteries!
Consider Dame Agatha Christie.
I am
a voracious reader of the most convoluted and lexiphanic texts -
yet, there is one author I prefer to most. She gives me the greatest
pleasure and leaves me tranquil and craving for more when I am
through devouring one of her countless tomes. A philosopher of the
mundane, a scholar of death, an exquisite chronicler of decay and
decadence - she is Dame Agatha Christie. I spend as much time
wondering what so mesmerizes me in her pulp fiction as I do trying
to decipher her deliciously contorted stratagems.
First,
there is the claustrophobia. Modernity revolves around the rapid
depletion of our personal spaces - from pastures and manors to
cubicles and studio apartments. Christie - like Edgar Ellen Poe
before her - imbues even the most confined rooms with endless
opportunities for vice and malice, where countless potential
scenarios can and do unfold kaleidoscopically. A Universe of plots
and countervailing subplots which permeate even the most cramped of
her locations. It is nothing short of consummate magic.
Then
there is the realization of the ubiquity of our pathologies. In
Christie's masterpieces, even the champions of good are paragons of
mental illness. Hercules Poirot, the quintessential narcissist,
self-grooming, haughty, and delusional. Miss Marple, a schizoid
busybody, who savors neither human company, nor her inevitable
encounters with an intruding world. Indeed, it is deformity that
gifts these two with their eerily penetrating insights into the
infirmities of others.
Then, there is the death of
innocence. Dame Agatha's detective novels are quaint, set in a
Ruritanian Britain that is no more and likely had never existed.
Technologies make their debut: the car, the telephone, the radio,
electric light. The very nature of evil is transformed from the
puerile directness of the highway robber and the passion killer - to
the scheming, cunning, and disguised automatism of her villains.
Crime in her books is calculated, the outcome of plotting and
conspiring, a confluence of unbridled and corrupted appetites and a
malignant mutation of individualism. Her opus is a portrait of our
age as it emerged, all bloodied and repellent, from the womb the
dying Victorian era.
Christie's weapons of choice are simple
- the surreptitious poison, a stealthy dagger, the cocked revolver,
a hideous drowning. Some acquaintance with the sciences of Chemistry
and Physics is indispensable, of course. Archeology comes third. But
Christie's main concerns are human nature and morality. The riddles
that she so fiendishly posits cannot be solved without taking both
into account.
As Miss Marple keeps insisting throughout her
numerous adventures, people are the same everywhere, regardless of
their social standing, wealth, or upbringing. The foibles, motives,
and likely actions of protagonists - criminals as well as victims -
are inferred by Marple from character studies of her village folks
back home. Human nature is immutable and universal is Christie's
message.
Not so morality. Formal justice is a slippery
concept, often opposed to the natural sort. Life is in shades of
gray. Murders sometimes are justified, especially when they serve to
rectify past wrongs or prevent a greater evil. Some victims had it
coming. Crime is part of a cycle of karmic retribution. The
detective's role is to restore order to a chaotic situation, to
interpret reality for us (in an inevitable final chapter), and to
administer true and impartial justice, not shackled by social or
legalistic norms.
Thus, nothing is as it seems.
It
is perhaps Christie's greatest allure. Beneath the polished,
petite-bourgeois, rule-driven, surface, lurks another world, replete
with demons and with angels, volcanic passions and stochastic
drives, the mirrors and the mirrored, where no ratio rules and no
laws obtain. Catapulted into this nightmarish, surrealistic
landscape, like the survivors of a shipwreck, we wander, bedazzled,
readers and detectives, heroes and villains, damsels and their
lovers, doomed to await the denouement. When that moment comes,
redeemed by reason, we emerge, reassured, into our reinstated,
ordered, Before Christ(ie) existence.
Her novels are the
substance of our dreams, woven from the fabric of our fears, an open
invitation to plunge into our psyches and courageously confront the
abyss. Hence Christie's irresistibility - her utter acquaintance
with our deepest quiddity. Who can forgo such narcissistic pleasure?
Not your columnist, for sure! |
|
Piracy continues to grow: What will happen
to the music and film industries and culture in
general?
This is a complex issue, best broken down to these
questions:
Q. What do you know about people illegally
downloading files over the internet?
A. I know what everyone
knows from being exposed to the news media and to lawsuits filed by
publishers: the phenomenon is widespread and most of the millions of
exchanged files are music tracks and films (though book rip-offs are
not unknown as well).
Q. Why do you think people are taking
part in these electronic transactions? Does the cost of purchasing
the media come into play?
A. It's a complex canvass of
motivations, I guess. Many media products (especially in developing
and poor countries) are overpriced in terms of the local purchasing
power. Illegally downloading them is often an act of protest or
defiance against what disgruntled consumers perceive as excessive
profiteering. It may also be the only realistic way to gain
ownership of coveted content.
The fact that everything -
from text to images - is digital makes replication facile and
enticing. Illegal downloading also probably confers an aura of
daring and mystique on the "pirates" involved (whose life may
otherwise be a lot drearier and mundane).
Additionally,
these products resemble public goods in that they are nonrivalrous
(the cost of extending the service or providing the good to another
person is (close to) zero) and largely nonexcludable.
Most
products are rivalrous (scarce) - zero sum games. Having been
consumed, they are gone and are not available to others. Public
goods, in contrast, are accessible to growing numbers of people
without any additional marginal cost. This wide dispersion of
benefits renders them unsuitable for private entrepreneurship. It is
impossible to recapture the full returns they engender. As Samuelson
observed, they are extreme forms of positive externalities
(spillover effects).
Moreover, it is impossible to exclude
anyone from enjoying the benefits of a public good, or from
defraying its costs (positive and negative externalities). Neither
can anyone willingly exclude himself from their remit.
Needless to emphasize that media products are not public
goods at all! They only superficially resemble public goods. Still,
the fact that many books, music, and some films are, indeed, in the
public domain further exacerbates the consumer's confusion. "Why can
I (legally) download certain books and music tracks free of charge -
but not others?" - wonders the baffled surfer, who is rarely versed
in the intricacies of copyright laws.
Q. Do you think this
leads to a feeling of disrespect toward the various pieces of media
by the person that steals it so frequently? (If I download music all
the time, will I lose interest in it?)
A. I am not sure that
the word "respect" is relevant here. People don't respect or
disrespect music - they enjoy it, like it, or dislike it. But
frequent illegal downloading of media products is, probably, the
outcome of disrespect towards content intermediaries such as
publishers, producers, and retail outlets. I don't know for sure
because there is no research to guide us in this matter, but I would
imagine that these people (wrongly) perceive content intermediaries
as parasitic and avaricious.
Q. Downloading is still a
widespread act today. The threats of lawsuits and legal action
against downloaders hasn't stopped the problem. What, in your
opinion, needs to be done to stop this behavior?
A. Law
enforcement activities and lawsuits are already having an effect.
But you cannot prosecute thousands of people on a regular basis
without suffering a commensurate drop in popularity and a tarnished
image. People do not perceive these acts as self-defense but as
David vs. Goliath bullying. Sooner or later, the efficacy of such
measures is bound to decline.
Media companies would do
better to adopt new technologies rather than fight them. They must
come forth with new business models and new venues of dissemination
of content. They have to show more generosity in the management of
digital rights. They have to adopt differential pricing of their
products across the board, to reflect disparities in earnings and
purchasing power in the global marketplace. They have to transform
themselves rather than try to coerce the world into their antiquated
and Procrustean ways of doing things.
Q. Psychologically
speaking, is there a certain kind of person who is more likely to
take part in this behavior? Do you feel that this is a generational
issue?
A. I cannot but speculate. There is a dearth of data
at this early stage. I would imagine that illegal downloaders are
hoarders. They are into owning things rather than into using or
consuming them. They are into building libraries and collections.
They are young and intelligent, but not affluent. They are
irreverent, rebellious, and non-conformist. They may be loners who
network socially only online. Some of them love culture and its
artifacts but they need not be particularly computer-savvy.
More here:
The Demise of Intellectual Property?
http://samvak.tripod.com/nm047.html |
|
What sports do you play and how
often?
I hate and detest sports viscerally and virulently. I
am not sure why. Perhaps it is because I am terrified by crowds. The
mob is the antonym of civilization.
The love of - nay,
addiction to - competitive and solitary sports cuts across all
social-economic strata and throughout all the demographics. Whether
as a passive consumer (spectator), a fan, or as a participant and
practitioner, everyone enjoys one form of sport or another.
Wherefrom this universal propensity?
Sports cater to
multiple psychological and physiological deep-set needs. In this
they are unique: no other activity responds as do sports to so many
dimensions of one's person, both emotional, and physical. But, on a
deeper level, sports provide more than instant gratification of
primal (or base, depending on one's point of view) instincts, such
as the urge to compete and to dominate.
1. Vindication
Sports, both competitive and solitary, are morality plays.
The athlete confronts other sportspersons, or nature, or his (her)
own limitations. Winning or overcoming these hurdles is interpreted
to be the triumph of good over evil, superior over inferior, the
best over merely adequate, merit over patronage. It is a vindication
of the principles of quotidian-religious morality: efforts are
rewarded; determination yields achievement; quality is on top;
justice is done.
2. Predictability
The world is
riven by seemingly random acts of terror; replete with inane
behavior; governed by uncontrollable impulses; and devoid of
meaning. Sports are rule-based. Theirs is a predictable universe
where umpires largely implement impersonal, yet just principles.
Sports is about how the world should have been (and, regrettably,
isn't). It is a safe delusion; a comfort zone; a promise and a
demonstration that humans are capable of engendering a utopia.
3. Simulation
That is not to say that sports are
sterile or irrelevant to our daily lives. On the very contrary. They
are an encapsulation and a simulation of Life: they incorporate
conflict and drama, teamwork and striving, personal struggle and
communal strife, winning and losing. Sports foster learning in a
safe environment. Better be defeated in a football match or on the
tennis court than lose your life on the battlefield.
The
contestants are not the only ones to benefit. From their detached,
safe, and isolated perches, observers of sports games, however
vicariously, enhance their trove of experiences; learn new skills;
encounter manifold situations; augment their coping strategies; and
personally grow and develop.
4. Reversibility
In
sports, there is always a second chance, often denied us by Life and
nature. No loss is permanent and crippling; no defeat is
insurmountable and irreversible. Reversal is but a temporary
condition, not the antechamber to annihilation. Safe in this
certainty, sportsmen and spectators dare, experiment, venture out,
and explore. A sense of adventure permeates all sports and, with few
exceptions, it is rarely accompanied by impending doom or the
exorbitant proverbial price-tag.
5. Belonging
Nothing like sports to encourage a sense of belonging,
togetherness, and we-ness. Sports involve teamwork; a meeting of
minds; negotiation and bartering; strategic games; bonding; and the
narcissism of small differences (when we reserve our most virulent
emotions – aggression, hatred, envy – towards those who resemble us
the most: the fans of the opposing team, for instance).
Sports, like other addictions, also provide their proponents
and participants with an "exo-skeleton": a sense of meaning; a
schedule of events; a regime of training; rites, rituals, and
ceremonies; uniforms and insignia. It imbues an otherwise chaotic
and purposeless life with a sense of mission and with a direction.
6. Narcissistic Gratification (Narcissistic Supply)
It takes years to become a medical doctor and decades to win
a prize or award in academe. It requires intelligence, perseverance,
and an inordinate amount of effort. One's status as an author or
scientist reflects a potent cocktail of natural endowments and hard
labour.
It is far less onerous for a sports fan to acquire
and claim expertise and thus inspire awe in his listeners and gain
the respect of his peers. The fan may be an utter failure in other
spheres of life, but he or she can still stake a claim to adulation
and admiration by virtue of their fount of sports trivia and
narrative skills.
Sports therefore provide a shortcut to
accomplishment and its rewards. As most sports are uncomplicated
affairs, the barrier to entry is low. Sports are great equalizers:
one's status outside the arena, the field, or the court is
irrelevant. One's standing is really determined by one's degree of
obsession. |
|
How do you explain the rise in "fame"
culture?
There is an implicit contract between a celebrity and
his fans. The celebrity is obliged to "act the part", to fulfil the
expectations of his admirers, not to deviate from the roles that
they impose and he or she accepts. In return the fans shower the
celebrity with adulation. They idolize him or her and make him or
her feel omnipotent, immortal, "larger than life", omniscient,
superior, and sui generis (unique).
What are the fans
getting for their trouble?
Above all, the ability to
vicariously share the celebrity's fabulous (and, usually, partly
confabulated) existence. The celebrity becomes their
"representative" in fantasyland, their extension and proxy, the
reification and embodiment of their deepest desires and most secret
and guilty dreams. Many celebrities are also role models or
father/mother figures. Celebrities are proof that there is more to
life than drab and routine. That beautiful - nay, perfect - people
do exist and that they do lead charmed lives. There's hope yet -
this is the celebrity's message to his fans.
The celebrity's
inevitable downfall and corruption is the modern-day equivalent of
the medieval morality play. This trajectory - from rags to riches
and fame and back to rags or worse - proves that order and justice
do prevail, that hubris invariably gets punished, and that the
celebrity is no better, neither is he superior, to his fans.
But, as I said in my response to a previous question, ours
is a narcissistic civilization. Celebrities either start out as
narcissists, their celebrity a mere ploy to quench their thirst for
adulation (narcissistic supply) - or they are rendered narcissistic
by their fame.
But can narcissism be acquired or learned?
Can it be provoked by certain, well-defined, situations?
Robert B. Millman, professor of psychiatry at New York
Hospital - Cornell Medical School thinks it can. He proposes to
reverse the accepted chronology. According to him, pathological
narcissism can be induced in adulthood by celebrity, wealth, and
fame.
The "victims" - billionaire tycoons, movie stars,
renowned authors, politicians, and other authority figures - develop
grandiose fantasies, lose their erstwhile ability to empathize,
react with rage to slights, both real and imagined and, in general,
act like textbook narcissists.
But is the occurrence of
Acquired Situational Narcissism (ASN) inevitable and universal - or
are only certain people prone to it?
It is likely that ASN
is merely an amplification of earlier narcissistic conduct, traits,
style, and tendencies. Celebrities with ASN already had a
narcissistic personality and have acquired it long before it
"erupted". Being famous, powerful, or rich only "legitimized" and
conferred immunity from social sanction on the unbridled
manifestation of a pre-existing disorder. Indeed, narcissists tend
to gravitate to professions and settings which guarantee fame,
celebrity, power, and wealth.
As Millman correctly notes,
the celebrity's life is abnormal. The adulation is often justified
and plentiful, the feedback biased and filtered, the criticism muted
and belated, social control either lacking or excessive and
vitriolic. Such vicissitudinal existence is not conducive to mental
health even in the most balanced person.
The confluence of a
person's narcissistic predisposition and his pathological life
circumstances gives rise to ASN. Acquired Situational Narcissism
borrows elements from both the classic Narcissistic Personality
Disorder - ingrained and all-pervasive - and from Transient or
Reactive Narcissism.
Celebrities are, therefore, unlikely to
"heal" once their fame or wealth or might are gone. Instead, their
basic narcissism merely changes form. It continues unabated, as
insidious as ever - but modified by life's ups and downs.
In
a way, all narcissistic disturbances are acquired. Patients acquire
their pathological narcissism from abusive or overbearing parents,
from peers, and from role models. Narcissism is a defense mechanism
designed to fend off hurt and danger brought on by circumstances -
such as celebrity - beyond the person's control.
Social
expectations play a role as well. Celebrities try to conform to the
stereotype of a creative but spoiled, self-centered, monomaniacal,
and emotive individual. A tacit trade takes place. We offer the
famous and the powerful all the Narcissistic Supply they crave - and
they, in turn, act the consummate, fascinating albeit repulsive,
narcissists. |
POLITICS
|
Should any territory have the right of
self-determination if a majority of the population votes in favour
of doing so?
The new state of Kosovo has been immediately recognized
by the USA, Germany, and other major European powers. The Canadian
Supreme Court made clear in its ruling in the Quebec case in 1998
that the status of statehood is not conditioned upon such
recognition, but that (p. 289):
"...(T)he viability of a
would-be state in the international community depends, as a
practical matter, upon recognition by other states."
The
constitutional law of some federal states provides for a mechanism
of orderly secession. The constitutions of both the late USSR and
SFRY (Yugoslavia, 1974) incorporated such provisions. In other cases
- the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom come to mind - the supreme
echelons of the judicial system had to step in and rule regarding
the right to secession, its procedures, and mechanisms.
Again, facts on the ground determine international
legitimacy. As early as 1877, in the wake of the bloodiest
secessionist war of all time, the American Civil War (1861-5), the
Supreme Court of the USA wrote (in William vs. Bruffy):
"The
validity of (the secessionists') acts, both against the parent State
and its citizens and subjects, depends entirely upon its ultimate
success. If it fail (sic) to establish itself permanently, all such
acts perish with it. If it succeed (sic), and become recognized, its
acts from the commencement of its existence are upheld as those of
an independent nation."
In "The Creation of States in
International Law" (Clarendon Press, 2nd ed., 2006), James Crawford
suggests that there is no internationally recognized right to secede
and that secession is a "legally neutral act". Not so. As Aleksandar
Pavkovic observes in his book (with contributions by Peter Radan),
"Creating New States - Theory and Practice of Secession" (Ashgate,
2007), the universal legal right to self-determination encompasses
the universal legal right to secede.
The Albanians in Kosovo
are a "people" according to the Decisions of the Badinter
Commission. But, though, they occupy a well-defined and demarcated
territory, their land is within the borders of an existing State. In
this strict sense, their unilateral secession does set a precedent:
it goes against the territorial definition of a people as embedded
in the United Nations Charter and subsequent Conventions.
Still, the general drift of international law (for instance,
as interpreted by Canada's Supreme Court) is to allow that a State
can be composed of several "peoples" and that its cultural-ethnic
constituents have a right to self-determination. This seems to
uphold the 19th century concept of a homogenous nation-state over
the French model (of a civil State of all its citizens, regardless
of ethnicity or religious creed).
Pavkovic contends that,
according to principle 5 of the United Nations' General Assembly's
Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly
Relations and Co-operation Among States in Accordance With the
Charter of the United Nations, the right to territorial integrity
overrides the right to self-determination.
Thus, if a State
is made up of several "peoples", its right to maintain itself intact
and to avoid being dismembered or impaired is paramount and prevails
over the right of its constituent peoples to secede. But, the right
to territorial integrity is limited to States:
"(C)onducting
themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and
self-determination of peoples ... and thus possessed of a government
representing the whole people belonging to the territory without
distinction as to race, creed, or colour."
The words "as to
race, creed, or colour" in the text supra have been replaced with
the words "of any kind" (in the 1995 Declaration on the Occasion of
the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations).
Yugoslavia
under Milosevic failed this test in its treatment of the Albanian
minority within its borders. They were relegated to second-class
citizenship, derided, blatantly and discriminated against in every
turn. Thus, according to principle 5, the Kosovars had a clear right
to unilaterally secede.
As early as 1972, an International
Commission of Jurists wrote in a report titled "The Events in East
Pakistan, 1971":
"(T)his principle (of territorial
integrity) is subject to the requirement that the government does
comply with the principle of equal rights and does represent the
whole people without distinction. If one of the constituent peoples
of a state is denied equal rights and is discriminated against ...
their full right of self-determination will revive." (p. 46)
A quarter of a century later, Canada's Supreme Court
concurred (Quebec, 1998):
"(T)he international law right to
self-determination only generates, at best, a right to external
self-determination in situations ... where a definable group is
denied meaningful access to government to pursue their political,
economic, social, and cultural development."
In his seminal
tome, "Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Appraisal" (Cambridge
University Press, 19950, Antonio Cassese neatly sums up this
exception to the right to territorial integrity enjoyed by States:
"(W)hen the central authorities of a sovereign State
persistently refuse to grant participatory rights to a religious or
racial group, grossly and systematically trample upon their
fundamental rights, and deny the possibility of reaching a peaceful
settlement within the framework of the State structure ... A racial
or religious group may secede ... once it is clear that all attempts
to achieve internal self-determination have failed or are destined
to fail." (p. 119-120) |
|
Does a state have the right to attack or
intervene in another country that has not attacked said state, if
the country has committed grave injustices or crimes against
humanity?
In an age of terrorism, guerilla and total warfare the
medieval doctrine of Just War needs to be re-defined. Moreover,
issues of legitimacy, efficacy and morality should not be confused.
Legitimacy is conferred by institutions. Not all morally justified
wars are, therefore, automatically legitimate. Frequently the
efficient execution of a battle plan involves immoral or even
illegal acts.
As international law evolves beyond the
ancient percepts of sovereignty, it should incorporate new thinking
about pre-emptive strikes, human rights violations as casus belli
and the role and standing of international organizations, insurgents
and liberation movements.
Yet, inevitably, what constitutes
"justice" depends heavily on the cultural and societal contexts,
narratives, mores, and values of the disputants. Thus, one cannot
answer the deceivingly simple question: "Is this war a just war?" -
without first asking: "According to whom? In which context? By which
criteria? Based on what values? In which period in history and
where?"
Being members of Western Civilization, whether by
choice or by default, our understanding of what constitutes a just
war is crucially founded on our shifting perceptions of the West.
Imagine a village of 220 inhabitants. It has one heavily
armed police constable flanked by two lightly equipped assistants.
The hamlet is beset by a bunch of ruffians who molest their own
families and, at times, violently lash out at their neighbors. These
delinquents mock the authorities and ignore their decisions and
decrees.
Yet, the village council - the source of legitimacy
- refuses to authorize the constable to apprehend the villains and
dispose of them, by force of arms if need be. The elders see no
imminent or present danger to their charges and are afraid of
potential escalation whose evil outcomes could far outweigh anything
the felons can achieve.
Incensed by this laxity, the
constable - backed only by some of the inhabitants - breaks into the
home of one of the more egregious thugs and expels or kills him. He
claims to have acted preemptively and in self-defense, as the
criminal, long in defiance of the law, was planning to attack its
representatives.
Was the constable right in acting the way
he did?
On the one hand, he may have saved lives and
prevented a conflagration whose consequences no one could predict.
On the other hand, by ignoring the edicts of the village council and
the expressed will of many of the denizens, he has placed himself
above the law, as its absolute interpreter and enforcer.
What is the greater danger? Turning a blind eye to the
exploits of outlaws and outcasts, thus rendering them ever more
daring and insolent - or acting unilaterally to counter such
pariahs, thus undermining the communal legal foundation and,
possibly, leading to a chaotic situation of "might is right"? In
other words, when ethics and expedience conflict with legality -
which should prevail?
Enter the medieval doctrine of "Just
War" (justum bellum, or, more precisely jus ad bellum), propounded
by Saint Augustine of Hippo (fifth century AD), Saint Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274) in his "Summa Theologicae", Francisco de Vitoria
(1548-1617), Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), Hugo Grotius (1583-1645)
in his influential tome "Jure Belli ac Pacis" ("On Rights of War and
Peace", 1625), Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1704), Christian Wolff
(1679-1754), and Emerich de Vattel (1714-1767).
Modern
thinkers include Michael Walzer in "Just and Unjust Wars" (1977),
Barrie Paskins and Michael Dockrill in "The Ethics of War" (1979),
Richard Norman in "Ethics, Killing, and War" (1995), Thomas Nagel in
"War and Massacre", and Elizabeth Anscombe in "War and Murder".
According to the Catholic Church's rendition of this theory,
set forth by Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops in his Letter to President Bush on
Iraq, dated September 13, 2002, going to war is justified if these
conditions are met:
"The damage inflicted by the aggressor
on the nation or community of nations [is] lasting, grave, and
certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been
shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious
prospects of success; the use of arms must not produce evils and
disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated."
A just war
is, therefore, a last resort, all other peaceful conflict resolution
options having been exhausted.
The Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy sums up the doctrine thus:
"The principles of the
justice of war are commonly held to be:
Having just cause
(especially and, according to the United Nations Charter,
exclusively, self-defense);
Being (formally) declared by a
proper authority;
Possessing a right intention;
Having a reasonable chance of success;
The end being
proportional to the means used."
Yet, the evolution of
warfare - the invention of nuclear weapons, the propagation of total
war, the ubiquity of guerrilla and national liberation movements,
the emergence of global, border-hopping terrorist organizations, of
totalitarian regimes, and rogue or failed states - requires these
principles to be modified by adding these tenets:
That the
declaring authority is a lawfully and democratically elected
government.
That the declaration of war reflects the popular
will.
(Extension of 3) The right intention is to act in just
cause.
(Extension of 4) ... or a reasonable chance of
avoiding an annihilating defeat.
(Extension of 5) That the
outcomes of war are preferable to the outcomes of the preservation
of peace.
Still, the doctrine of just war, conceived in
Europe in eras past, is fraying at the edges. Rights and
corresponding duties are ill-defined or mismatched. What is legal is
not always moral and what is legitimate is not invariably legal.
Political realism and quasi-religious idealism sit uncomfortably
within the same conceptual framework. Norms are vague and debatable
while customary law is only partially subsumed in the tradition
(i.e., in treaties, conventions and other instruments, as well in
the actual conduct of states).
The most contentious issue
is, of course, what constitutes "just cause". Self-defense, in its
narrowest sense (reaction to direct and overwhelming armed
aggression), is a justified casus belli. But what about the use of
force to (deontologically, consequentially, or ethically):
Prevent or ameliorate a slow-motion or permanent
humanitarian crisis;
Preempt a clear and present danger of
aggression ("anticipatory or preemptive self-defense" against what
Grotius called "immediate danger");
Secure a safe
environment for urgent and indispensable humanitarian relief
operations;
Restore democracy in the attacked state ("regime
change");
Restore public order in the attacked state;
Prevent human rights violations or crimes against humanity
or violations of international law by the attacked state;
Keep the peace ("peacekeeping operations") and enforce
compliance with international or bilateral treaties between the
aggressor and the attacked state or the attacked state and a third
party;
Suppress armed infiltration, indirect aggression, or
civil strife aided and abetted by the attacked state;
Honor
one's obligations to frameworks and treaties of collective
self-defense;
Protect one's citizens or the citizens of a
third party inside the attacked state;
Protect one's
property or assets owned by a third party inside the attacked state;
Respond to an invitation by the authorities of the attacked
state - and with their expressed consent - to militarily intervene
within the territory of the attacked state;
React to
offenses against the nation's honor or its economy.
Unless
these issues are resolved and codified, the entire edifice of
international law - and, more specifically, the law of war - is in
danger of crumbling. The contemporary multilateral regime proved
inadequate and unable to effectively tackle genocide (Rwanda,
Bosnia), terror (in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East),
weapons of mass destruction (Iraq, India, Israel, Pakistan, North
Korea), and tyranny (in dozens of members of the United Nations).
This feebleness inevitably led to the resurgence of "might
is right" unilateralism, as practiced, for instance, by the United
States in places as diverse as Grenada and Iraq. This pernicious and
ominous phenomenon is coupled with contempt towards and suspicion of
international organizations, treaties, institutions, undertakings,
and the prevailing consensual order.
In a unipolar world,
reliant on a single superpower for its security, the abrogation of
the rules of the game could lead to chaotic and lethal anarchy with
a multitude of "rebellions" against the emergent American Empire.
International law - the formalism of "natural law" - is only one of
many competing universalist and missionary value systems. Militant
Islam is another. The West must adopt the former to counter the
latter. |
|
Are we witnessing the end of the American
empire?
I sure hope so.
The United States is one of the
last remaining land empires. That it is made the butt of opprobrium
and odium is hardly surprising, or unprecedented. Empires - Rome,
the British, the Ottomans - were always targeted by the disgruntled,
the disenfranchised and the dispossessed and by their self-appointed
delegates, the intelligentsia.
Yet, even by historical
standards, America seems to be provoking blanket repulsion.
The Pew Research Center published in December 2002 a report
titled "What the World Thinks in 2002". "The World", was reduced by
the pollsters to 44 countries and 38,000 interviewees. Two other
surveys published last year - by the German Marshall Fund and the
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations - largely supported Pew's
findings.
The most startling and unambiguous revelation was
the extent of anti-American groundswell everywhere: among America's
NATO allies, in developing countries, Muslim nations and even in
eastern Europe where Americans, only a decade ago, were lionized as
much-adulated liberators.
Four years later, things have
gotten even worse.
Between March and May 2006, Pew surveyed
16,710 people in Britain, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India,
Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, Turkey
and the United States.
Only 23% of Spaniards had a positive
opinion of the USA, down from 41% the year before. A similar drop
was evinced in India (from 71% to 56%), Russia (from 52% o 43%),
Indonesia (from 38% to 30%), and Turkey (from 23% to 12%). In
Britain, America' s putative ally, support was down by one third
from 2002, to 50% or so. Declines were noted in France, Germany, and
Jordan, somewhat offset by marginal rises in China and Pakistan.
Two thirds of Russians and overwhelming majorities in 13 out
of 15 countries regarded the conduct of the USA in Iraq as a greater
threat to world peace that Iran's nuclear ambitions. The distinction
formerly made between the American people and the Bush
administration is also eroding. Majorities in only 7 of 14 countries
had favorable views of Americans.
"People around the world
embrace things American and, at the same time, decry U.S. influence
on their societies. Similarly, pluralities in most of the nations
surveyed complain about American unilateralism."- expounded the year
2002 Pew report.
Yet, even this "embrace of things American"
is ambiguous.
Violently "independent", inanely litigious and
quarrelsome, solipsistically provincial, and fatuously ignorant -
this nation of video clips and sound bites, the United States, is
often perceived as trying to impose its narcissistic pseudo-culture
upon a world exhausted by wars hot and cold and corrupted by vacuous
materialism.
Recent accounting scandals, crumbling markets,
political scams, human rights violations, technological setbacks,
and rising social tensions have revealed how rotten and inherently
contradictory the US edifice is and how concerned are Americans with
appearances rather than substance.
To religious
fundamentalists, America is the Great Satan, a latter-day Sodom and
Gomorrah, a cesspool of immorality and spiritual decay. To many
European liberals, the United states is a throwback to darker ages
of religious zealotry, pernicious bigotry, virulent nationalism, and
the capricious misrule of the mighty.
According to most
recent surveys by Gallup, MORI, the Council for Secular Humanism,
the US Census Bureau, and others - the vast majority of Americans
are chauvinistic, moralizing, bible-thumping, cantankerous, and
trigger-happy. About half of them believe that Satan exists - not as
a metaphor, but as a real physical entity.
America has a
record defense spending per head, a vertiginous rate of
incarceration, among the highest numbers of legal executions and
gun-related deaths. It is still engaged in atavistic debates about
abortion, the role of religion, and whether to teach the theory of
evolution.
According to a series of special feature articles
in The Economist, America is generally well-liked in Europe, but
less so than before. It is utterly detested by the Muslim street,
even in "progressive" Arab countries, such as Egypt and Jordan.
Everyone - Europeans and Arabs, Asians and Africans - think that
"the spread of American ideas and customs is a bad thing."
Admittedly, we typically devalue most that which we have
formerly idealized and idolized.
To the liberal-minded, the
United States of America reified the most noble, lofty, and worthy
values, ideals, and causes. It was a dream in the throes of
becoming, a vision of liberty, peace, justice, prosperity, and
progress. Its system, though far from flawless, was considered
superior - both morally and functionally - to anything ever
conceived by Man.
Such unrealistic expectations inevitably
and invariably lead to disenchantment, disillusionment, bitter
disappointment, seething anger, and a sense of humiliation for
having been thus deluded, or, rather, self-deceived. This backlash
is further exacerbated by the haughty hectoring of the ubiquitous
American missionaries of the "free-market-cum-democracy" church.
Americans everywhere aggressively preach the superior
virtues of their homeland. Edward K. Thompson, managing editor of
"Life" (1949-1961) warned against this propensity to feign
omniscience and omnipotence: "Life (the magazine) must be curious,
alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve this without being
holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all, or a Peeping Tom."
Thus, America's foreign policy - i.e., its presence and
actions abroad - is, by far, its foremost vulnerability.
According to the Pew study, the image of the Unites States
as a benign world power slipped dramatically in the space of two
years in Slovakia (down 14 percent), in Poland (-7), in the Czech
Republic (-6) and even in fervently pro-Western Bulgaria (-4
percent). It rose exponentially in Ukraine (up 10 percent) and, most
astoundingly, in Russia (+24 percent) - but from a very low base.
The crux may be that the USA maintains one set of
sanctimonious standards at home while egregiously and nonchalantly
flouting them far and wide. Hence the fervid demonstrations against
its military presence in places as disparate as South Korea, Japan,
the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.
In January 2000, Staff
Sergeant Frank J. Ronghi sexually molested, forcibly sodomized
("indecent acts with a child") and then murdered an 11-years old
girl in the basement of her drab building in Kosovo, when her father
went to market to do some shopping. His is by no means the most
atrocious link in a long chain of brutalities inflicted by American
soldiers overseas, the latest of which are taking place in Iraq. In
all these cases, the perpetrators were removed from the scene to
face justice - or, more often, a travesty thereof - back home.
Americans - officials, scholars, peacemakers, non-government
organizations - maintain a colonial state of mind. Backward natives
come cheap, their lives dispensable, their systems of governance and
economies inherently inferior. The white man's burden must not be
encumbered by the vagaries of primitive indigenous jurisprudence.
Hence America's fierce resistance to and indefatigable obstruction
of the International Criminal Court.
Opportunistic
multilateralism notwithstanding, the USA still owes the poorer
nations of the world close to $200 million - its arrears to the UN
peacekeeping operations, usually asked to mop up after an American
invasion or bombing. It not only refuses to subject its soldiers to
the jurisdiction of the World Criminal Court - but also its
facilities to the inspectors of the Chemical Weapons Convention, its
military to the sanctions of the (anti) land mines treaty and the
provisions of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, and its industry to
the environmental constraints of the Kyoto Protocol, the rulings of
the World Trade Organization, and the rigors of global intellectual
property rights.
Despite its instinctual unilateralism, the
United States is never averse to exploiting multilateral
institutions to its ends. It is the only shareholder with a veto
power in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), by now widely
considered to have degenerated into a long arm of the American
administration. The United Nations Security Council, raucous
protestations aside, has rubber-stamped American martial exploits
from Panama to Iraq.
It seems as though America uses - and
thus, perforce, abuses - the international system for its own, ever
changing, ends. International law is invoked by it when convenient -
ignored when importune.
In short, America is a bully. It is
a law unto itself and it legislates on the fly, twisting arms and
breaking bones when faced with opposition and ignoring the very
edicts it promulgates at its convenience. Its soldiers and
peacekeepers, its bankers and businessmen, its traders and diplomats
are its long arms, an embodiment of this potent and malignant
mixture of supremacy and contempt.
But why is America being
singled out?
In politics and even more so in geopolitics,
double standards and bullying are common. Apartheid South Africa,
colonial France, mainland China, post-1967 Israel - and virtually
every other polity - were at one time or another characterized by
both. But while these countries usually mistreated only their own
subjects - the USA does so also exterritorialy.
Even as it
never ceases to hector, preach, chastise, and instruct - it does not
recoil from violating its own decrees and ignoring its own
teachings. It is, therefore, not the USA's intrinsic nature, nor its
self-perception, or social model that I find most reprehensible -
but its actions, particularly its foreign policy.
America's
manifest hypocrisy, its moral talk and often immoral walk, its
persistent application of double standards, irks and grates. I
firmly believe that it is better to face a forthright villain than a
masquerading saint. It is easy to confront a Hitler, a Stalin, or a
Mao, vile and bloodied, irredeemably depraved, worthy only of
annihilation. The subtleties of coping with the United States are
far more demanding and far less rewarding.
This
self-proclaimed champion of human rights has aided and abetted
countless murderous dictatorships. This alleged sponsor of free
trade is the most protectionist of rich nations. This ostensible
beacon of charity contributes less than 0.1% of its GDP to foreign
aid (compared to Scandinavia's 0.6%, for instance). This upright
proponent of international law (under whose aegis it bombed and
invaded half a dozen countries this past decade alone) is in avowed
opposition to crucial pillars of the international order.
Naturally, America's enemies and critics are envious of its
might and wealth. They would have probably acted the same as the
United States, if they only could. But America's haughtiness and
obtuse refusal to engage in soul searching and house cleaning do
little to ameliorate this antagonism.
To the peoples of the
poor world, America is both a colonial power and a mercantilist
exploiter. To further its geopolitical and economic goals from
Central Asia to the Middle East, it persists in buttressing regimes
with scant regard for human rights, in cahoots with venal and
sometimes homicidal indigenous politicians. And it drains the
developing world of its brains, its labour, and its raw materials,
giving little in return.
All powers are self-interested -
but America is narcissistic. It is bent on exploiting and, having
exploited, on discarding. It is a global Dr. Frankenstein, spawning
mutated monsters in its wake. Its "drain and dump" policies
consistently boomerang to haunt it.
Both Saddam Hussein and
Manuel Noriega - two acknowledged monsters - were aided and abetted
by the CIA and the US military. America had to invade Panama to
depose the latter and to molest Iraq for the second time in order to
force the removal of the former.
The Kosovo Liberation Army,
an American anti-Milosevic pet, provoked a civil war in Macedonia
tin 2001. Osama bin-Laden, another CIA golem, restored to the USA,
on September 11, 2001 some of the materiel it so generously bestowed
on him in his anti-Russian days.
Normally the outcomes of
expedience, the Ugly American's alliances and allegiances shift
kaleidoscopically. Pakistan and Libya were transmuted from foes to
allies in the fortnight prior to the Afghan campaign. Milosevic has
metamorphosed from staunch ally to rabid foe in days.
This
capricious inconsistency casts in grave doubt America's sincerity -
and in sharp relief its unreliability and disloyalty, its short term
thinking, truncated attention span, soundbite mentality, and
dangerous, "black and white", simplism.
In its heartland,
America is isolationist. Its denizens erroneously believe that the
Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is an economically
self-sufficient and self-contained continent. Yet, it is not what
Americans trust or wish that matters to others. It is what they do.
And what they do is meddle, often unilaterally, always ignorantly,
sometimes forcefully.
Elsewhere, inevitable unilateralism is
mitigated by inclusive cosmopolitanism. It is exacerbated by
provincialism - and American decision-makers are mostly provincials,
popularly elected by provincials. As opposed to Rome, or Great
Britain, America is ill-suited and ill-equipped to micromanage the
world.
It is too puerile, too abrasive, too arrogant and it
has a lot to learn. Its refusal to acknowledge its shortcomings, its
confusion of brain with brawn (i.e., money or bombs), its
legalistic-litigious character, its culture of instant gratification
and one-dimensional over-simplification, its heartless lack of
empathy, and bloated sense of entitlement are detrimental to world
peace and stability.
America is often called by others to
intervene. Many initiate conflicts or prolong them with the express
purpose of dragging America into the quagmire. It then is either
castigated for not having responded to such calls - or reprimanded
for having responded. It seems that it cannot win. Abstention and
involvement alike garner it only ill-will.
But people call
upon America to get involved because they know it rises to the
challenge. America should make it unequivocally and unambiguously
clear that - with the exception of the Americas - its sole interests
rest in commerce. It should make it equally known that it will
protect its citizens and defend its assets, if need be by force.
Indeed, America's - and the world's - best bet are a
reversion to the Monroe and (technologically updated) Mahan
doctrines. Wilson's Fourteen Points brought the USA nothing but two
World Wars and a Cold War thereafter. It is time to
disengage. |
|
Do you actively or economically
collaborate with any social organization, NGO, etc.?
NGOs do more evil than good.
Consider the
typical NGO employees:
Their arrival portends rising local
prices and a culture shock. Many of them live in plush apartments,
or five star hotels, drive SUV's, sport $3000 laptops and PDA's.
They earn a two figure multiple of the local average wage. They are
busybodies, preachers, critics, do-gooders, and professional
altruists.
Always self-appointed, they answer to no
constituency. Though unelected and ignorant of local realities, they
confront the democratically chosen and those who voted them into
office. A few of them are enmeshed in crime and corruption. They are
the non-governmental organizations, or NGO's.
Some NGO's -
like Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Amnesty
- genuinely contribute to enhancing welfare, to the mitigation of
hunger, the furtherance of human and civil rights, or the curbing of
disease. Others - usually in the guise of think tanks and lobby
groups - are sometimes ideologically biased, or
religiously-committed and, often, at the service of special
interests.
NGO's - such as the International Crisis Group -
have openly interfered on behalf of the opposition in the last
parliamentary elections in Macedonia. Other NGO's have done so in
Belarus and Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Israel, Nigeria and Thailand,
Slovakia and Hungary - and even in Western, rich, countries
including the USA, Canada, Germany, and Belgium.
The
encroachment on state sovereignty of international law - enshrined
in numerous treaties and conventions - allows NGO's to get involved
in hitherto strictly domestic affairs like corruption, civil rights,
the composition of the media, the penal and civil codes,
environmental policies, or the allocation of economic resources and
of natural endowments, such as land and water. No field of
government activity is now exempt from the glare of NGO's. They
serve as self-appointed witnesses, judges, jury and executioner
rolled into one.
Regardless of their persuasion or modus
operandi, all NGO's are top heavy with entrenched, well-remunerated,
extravagantly-perked bureaucracies. Opacity is typical of NGO's.
Amnesty's rules prevent its officials from publicly discussing the
inner workings of the organization - proposals, debates, opinions -
until they have become officially voted into its Mandate. Thus,
dissenting views rarely get an open hearing.
Contrary to
their teachings, the financing of NGO's is invariably obscure and
their sponsors unknown. The bulk of the income of most
non-governmental organizations, even the largest ones, comes from -
usually foreign - powers. Many NGO's serve as official contractors
for governments.
NGO's serve as long arms of their
sponsoring states - gathering intelligence, burnishing their image,
and promoting their interests. There is a revolving door between the
staff of NGO's and government bureaucracies the world over. The
British Foreign Office finances a host of NGO's - including the
fiercely "independent" Global Witness - in troubled spots, such as
Angola. Many host governments accuse NGO's of - unwittingly or
knowingly - serving as hotbeds of espionage.
Very few NGO's
derive some of their income from public contributions and donations.
The more substantial NGO's spend one tenth of their budget on PR and
solicitation of charity. In a desperate bid to attract international
attention, so many of them lied about their projects in the Rwanda
crisis in 1994, recounts "The Economist", that the Red Cross felt
compelled to draw up a ten point mandatory NGO code of ethics. A
code of conduct was adopted in 1995. But the phenomenon recurred in
Kosovo.
All NGO's claim to be not for profit - yet, many of
them possess sizable equity portfolios and abuse their position to
increase the market share of firms they own. Conflicts of interest
and unethical behavior abound.
Cafedirect is a British firm
committed to "fair trade" coffee. Oxfam, an NGO, embarked, three
years ago, on a campaign targeted at Cafedirect's competitors,
accusing them of exploiting growers by paying them a tiny fraction
of the retail price of the coffee they sell. Yet, Oxfam owns 25% of
Cafedirect.
Large NGO's resemble multinational corporations
in structure and operation. They are hierarchical, maintain large
media, government lobbying, and PR departments, head-hunt, invest
proceeds in professionally-managed portfolios, compete in government
tenders, and own a variety of unrelated businesses. The Aga Khan
Fund for Economic Development owns the license for second mobile
phone operator in Afghanistan - among other businesses. In this
respect, NGO's are more like cults than like civic organizations.
Many NGO's promote economic causes - anti-globalization, the
banning of child labor, the relaxing of intellectual property
rights, or fair payment for agricultural products. Many of these
causes are both worthy and sound. Alas, most NGO's lack economic
expertise and inflict damage on the alleged recipients of their
beneficence. NGO's are at times manipulated by - or collude with -
industrial groups and political parties.
It is telling that
the denizens of many developing countries suspect the West and its
NGO's of promoting an agenda of trade protectionism. Stringent - and
expensive - labor and environmental provisions in international
treaties may well be a ploy to fend off imports based on cheap labor
and the competition they wreak on well-ensconced domestic industries
and their political stooges.
Take child labor - as distinct
from the universally condemnable phenomena of child prostitution,
child soldiering, or child slavery.
Child labor, in many
destitute locales, is all that separates the family from
all-pervasive, life threatening, poverty. As national income grows,
child labor declines. Following the outcry provoked, in 1995, by
NGO's against soccer balls stitched by children in Pakistan, both
Nike and Reebok relocated their workshops and sacked countless women
and 7000 children. The average family income - anyhow meager - fell
by 20 percent.
This affair elicited the following wry
commentary from economists Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardorif, and
Robert Stern:
"While Baden Sports can quite credibly claim
that their soccer balls are not sewn by children, the relocation of
their production facility undoubtedly did nothing for their former
child workers and their families."
This is far from being a
unique case. Threatened with legal reprisals and "reputation risks"
(being named-and-shamed by overzealous NGO's) - multinationals
engage in preemptive sacking. More than 50,000 children in
Bangladesh were let go in 1993 by German garment factories in
anticipation of the American never-legislated Child Labor Deterrence
Act.
Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, observed:
"Stopping child labor without doing anything else could
leave children worse off. If they are working out of necessity, as
most are, stopping them could force them into prostitution or other
employment with greater personal dangers. The most important thing
is that they be in school and receive the education to help them
leave poverty."
NGO-fostered hype notwithstanding, 70% of
all children work within their family unit, in agriculture. Less
than 1 percent are employed in mining and another 2 percent in
construction. Again contrary to NGO-proffered panaceas, education is
not a solution. Millions graduate every year in developing countries
- 100,000 in Morocco alone. But unemployment reaches more than one
third of the workforce in places such as Macedonia.
Children
at work may be harshly treated by their supervisors but at least
they are kept off the far more menacing streets. Some kids even end
up with a skill and are rendered employable.
"The Economist"
sums up the shortsightedness, inaptitude, ignorance, and
self-centeredness of NGO's neatly:
"Suppose that in the
remorseless search for profit, multinationals pay sweatshop wages to
their workers in developing countries. Regulation forcing them to
pay higher wages is demanded... The NGOs, the reformed
multinationals and enlightened rich-country governments propose
tough rules on third-world factory wages, backed up by trade
barriers to keep out imports from countries that do not comply.
Shoppers in the West pay more - but willingly, because they know it
is in a good cause. The NGOs declare another victory. The companies,
having shafted their third-world competition and protected their
domestic markets, count their bigger profits (higher wage costs
notwithstanding). And the third-world workers displaced from locally
owned factories explain to their children why the West's new deal
for the victims of capitalism requires them to starve."
NGO's in places like Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar, Bangladesh,
Pakistan, Albania, and Zimbabwe have become the preferred venue for
Western aid - both humanitarian and financial - development
financing, and emergency relief. According to the Red Cross, more
money goes through NGO's than through the World Bank. Their iron
grip on food, medicine, and funds rendered them an alternative
government - sometimes as venal and graft-stricken as the one they
replace.
Local businessmen, politicians, academics, and even
journalists form NGO's to plug into the avalanche of Western
largesse. In the process, they award themselves and their relatives
with salaries, perks, and preferred access to Western goods and
credits. NGO's have evolved into vast networks of patronage in
Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
NGO's chase disasters with
a relish. More than 200 of them opened shop in the aftermath of the
Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999-2000. Another 50 supplanted them
during the civil unrest in Macedonia a year later. Floods,
elections, earthquakes, wars - constitute the cornucopia that feed
the NGO's.
NGO's are proponents of Western values - women's
lib, human rights, civil rights, the protection of minorities,
freedom, equality. Not everyone finds this liberal menu palatable.
The arrival of NGO's often provokes social polarization and cultural
clashes. Traditionalists in Bangladesh, nationalists in Macedonia,
religious zealots in Israel, security forces everywhere, and almost
all politicians find NGO's irritating and bothersome.
The
British government ploughs well over $30 million a year into
"Proshika", a Bangladeshi NGO. It started as a women's education
outfit and ended up as a restive and aggressive women empowerment
political lobby group with budgets to rival many ministries in this
impoverished, Moslem and patriarchal country.
Other NGO's -
fuelled by $300 million of annual foreign infusion - evolved from
humble origins to become mighty coalitions of full-time activists.
NGO's like the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and the
Association for Social Advancement mushroomed even as their agendas
have been fully implemented and their goals exceeded. It now owns
and operates 30,000 schools.
This mission creep is not
unique to developing countries. As Parkinson discerned,
organizations tend to self-perpetuate regardless of their proclaimed
charter. Remember NATO? Human rights organizations, like Amnesty,
are now attempting to incorporate in their ever-expanding remit
"economic and social rights" - such as the rights to food, housing,
fair wages, potable water, sanitation, and health provision. How
insolvent countries are supposed to provide such munificence is
conveniently overlooked.
"The Economist" reviewed a few of
the more egregious cases of NGO imperialism.
Human Rights
Watch lately offered this tortured argument in favor of expanding
the role of human rights NGO's: "The best way to prevent famine
today is to secure the right to free expression - so that misguided
government policies can be brought to public attention and corrected
before food shortages become acute." It blatantly ignored the fact
that respect for human and political rights does not fend off
natural disasters and disease. The two countries with the highest
incidence of AIDS are Africa's only two true democracies - Botswana
and South Africa.
The Centre for Economic and Social Rights,
an American outfit, "challenges economic injustice as a violation of
international human rights law". Oxfam pledges to support the
"rights to a sustainable livelihood, and the rights and capacities
to participate in societies and make positive changes to people's
lives". In a poor attempt at emulation, the WHO published an inanely
titled document - "A Human Rights Approach to Tuberculosis".
NGO's are becoming not only all-pervasive but more
aggressive. In their capacity as "shareholder activists", they
disrupt shareholders meetings and act to actively tarnish corporate
and individual reputations. Friends of the Earth worked hard four
years ago to instigate a consumer boycott against Exxon Mobil - for
not investing in renewable energy resources and for ignoring global
warming. No one - including other shareholders - understood their
demands. But it went down well with the media, with a few
celebrities, and with contributors.
As "think tanks", NGO's
issue partisan and biased reports. The International Crisis Group
published a rabid attack on the then incumbent government of
Macedonia, days before an election, relegating the rampant
corruption of its predecessors - whom it seemed to be tacitly
supporting - to a few footnotes. On at least two occasions - in its
reports regarding Bosnia and Zimbabwe - ICG has recommended
confrontation, the imposition of sanctions, and, if all else fails,
the use of force. Though the most vocal and visible, it is far from
being the only NGO that advocates "just" wars.
The ICG is a
repository of former heads of state and has-been politicians and is
renowned (and notorious) for its prescriptive - some say meddlesome
- philosophy and tactics. "The Economist" remarked sardonically: "To
say (that ICG) is 'solving world crises' is to risk underestimating
its ambitions, if overestimating its achievements."
NGO's
have orchestrated the violent showdown during the trade talks in
Seattle in 1999 and its repeat performances throughout the world.
The World Bank was so intimidated by the riotous invasion of its
premises in the NGO-choreographed "Fifty Years is Enough" campaign
of 1994, that it now employs dozens of NGO activists and let NGO's
determine many of its policies.
NGO activists have joined
the armed - though mostly peaceful - rebels of the Chiapas region in
Mexico. Norwegian NGO's sent members to forcibly board whaling
ships. In the USA, anti-abortion activists have murdered doctors. In
Britain, animal rights zealots have both assassinated experimental
scientists and wrecked property.
Birth control NGO's carry
out mass sterilizations in poor countries, financed by rich country
governments in a bid to stem immigration. NGO's buy slaves in Sudan
thus encouraging the practice of slave hunting throughout
sub-Saharan Africa. Other NGO's actively collaborate with "rebel"
armies - a euphemism for terrorists.
NGO's lack a synoptic
view and their work often undermines efforts by international
organizations such as the UNHCR and by governments. Poorly-paid
local officials have to contend with crumbling budgets as the funds
are diverted to rich expatriates doing the same job for a multiple
of the cost and with inexhaustible hubris.
This is not
conducive to happy co-existence between foreign do-gooders and
indigenous governments. Sometimes NGO's seem to be an ingenious ploy
to solve Western unemployment at the expense of down-trodden
natives. This is a misperception driven by envy and avarice.
But it is still powerful enough to foster resentment and
worse. NGO's are on the verge of provoking a ruinous backlash
against them in their countries of destination. That would be a
pity. Some of them are doing indispensable work. If only they were a
wee more sensitive and somewhat less ostentatious. But then they
wouldn't be NGO's, would they?
Interview granted to Revista
Terra, Brazil, September 2005
Q. NGOs are growing quickly in
Brazil due to the discredit politicians and governmental
institutions face after decades of corruption, elitism etc. The
young people feel they can do something concrete working as
activists in a NGOs. Isn't that a good thing? What kind of dangers
someone should be aware before enlisting himself as a supporter of a
NGO?
A. One must clearly distinguish between NGOs in the
sated, wealthy, industrialized West - and (the far more numerous)
NGOs in the developing and less developed countries.
Western
NGOs are the heirs to the Victorian tradition of "White Man's
Burden". They are missionary and charity-orientated. They are
designed to spread both aid (food, medicines, contraceptives, etc.)
and Western values. They closely collaborate with Western
governments and institutions against local governments and
institutions. They are powerful, rich, and care less about the
welfare of the indigenous population than about "universal"
principles of ethical conduct.
Their counterparts in less
developed and in developing countries serve as substitutes to failed
or dysfunctional state institutions and services. They are rarely
concerned with the furthering of any agenda and more preoccupied
with the well-being of their constituents, the people.
Q.
Why do you think many NGO activists are narcissists and not
altruists? What are the symptoms you identify on them?
A. In
both types of organizations - Western NGOs and NGOs elsewhere -
there is a lot of waste and corruption, double-dealing,
self-interested promotion, and, sometimes inevitably, collusion with
unsavory elements of society. Both organizations attract
narcissistic opportunists who regards NGOs as venues of upward
social mobility and self-enrichment. Many NGOs serve as sinecures,
"manpower sinks", or "employment agencies" - they provide work to
people who, otherwise, are unemployable. Some NGOs are involved in
political networks of patronage, nepotism, and cronyism.
Narcissists are attracted to money, power, and glamour. NGOs
provide all three. The officers of many NGOs draw exorbitant
salaries (compared to the average salary where the NGO operates) and
enjoy a panoply of work-related perks. Some NGOs exert a lot of
political influence and hold power over the lives of millions of aid
recipients. NGOs and their workers are, therefore, often in the
limelight and many NGO activists have become minor celebrities and
frequent guests in talk shows and such. Even critics of NGOs are
often interviewed by the media (laughing).
Finally, a slim
minority of NGO officers and workers are simply corrupt. They
collude with venal officials to enrich themselves. For instance:
during the Kosovo crisis in 1999, NGO employees sold in the open
market food, blankets, and medical supplies intended for the
refugees.
Q. How can one choose between good and bad NGOs?
A. There are a few simple tests:
1. What part of the
NGO's budget is spent on salaries and perks for the NGO's officers
and employees? The less the better.
2. Which part of the
budget is spent on furthering the aims of the NGO and on
implementing its promulgated programs? The more the better.
3. What portion of the NGOs resources is allocated to public
relations and advertising? The less the better.
4. What part
of the budget is contributed by governments, directly or indirectly?
The less the better.
5. What do the alleged beneficiaries of
the NGO's activities think of the NGO? If the NGO is feared,
resented, and hated by the local denizens, then something is wrong!
6. How many of the NGO's operatives are in the field,
catering to the needs of the NGO's ostensible constituents? The more
the better.
7. Does the NGO own or run commercial
enterprises? If it does, it is a corrupt and compromised NGO
involved in conflicts of interest.
Q. The way you describe,
many NGO are already more powerful and politically influential than
many governments. What kind of dangers this elicits? Do you think
they are a pest that need control? What kind of control would that
be?
A. The voluntary sector is now a cancerous phenomenon.
NGOs interfere in domestic politics and take sides in election
campaigns. They disrupt local economies to the detriment of the
impoverished populace. They impose alien religious or Western
values. They justify military interventions. They maintain
commercial interests which compete with indigenous manufacturers.
They provoke unrest in many a place. And this is a partial list.
The trouble is that, as opposed to most governments in the
world, NGOs are authoritarian. They are not elected institutions.
They cannot be voted down. The people have no power over them. Most
NGOs are ominously and tellingly secretive about their activities
and finances.
Light disinfects. The solution is to force
NGOs to become both democratic and accountable. All countries and
multinational organizations (such as the UN) should pass laws and
sign international conventions to regulate the formation and
operation of NGOs.
NGOs should be forced to democratize.
Elections should be introduced on every level. All NGOs should hold
"annual stakeholder meetings" and include in these gatherings
representatives of the target populations of the NGOs. NGO finances
should be made completely transparent and publicly accessible. New
accounting standards should be developed and introduced to cope with
the current pecuniary opacity and operational double-speak of NGOs.
Q. It seems that many values carried by NGO are typically
modern and Western. What kind of problems this creates in more
traditional and culturally different countries?
A. Big
problems. The assumption that the West has the monopoly on ethical
values is undisguised cultural chauvinism. This arrogance is the
21st century equivalent of the colonialism and racism of the 19th
and 20th century. Local populations throughout the world resent this
haughty presumption and imposition bitterly.
As you said,
NGOs are proponents of modern Western values - democracy, women's
lib, human rights, civil rights, the protection of minorities,
freedom, equality. Not everyone finds this liberal menu palatable.
The arrival of NGOs often provokes social polarization and cultural
clashes. |
PHILOSOPHY
|
How do you find the balance between
working to live and living to work?
In his book, "A Farewell to Alms" (Princeton University
Press, 2007), Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University
of California, Davis, suggests that downward social mobility in
England caused the Industrial Revolution in the early years of the
19th century. As the offspring of peasants died off of hunger and
disease, the numerous and cosseted descendants of the British upper
middle classes took over their jobs.
These newcomers infused
their work and family life with the values that made their luckier
forefathers wealthy and prominent. Above all, they introduced into
their new environment Max Weber's Protestant work ethic: leisure is
idleness, toil is good, workaholism is the best. As Clark put it:
“Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming
values for communities that previously had been spendthrift,
impulsive, violent and leisure loving.”
Such religious
veneration of hard labor resulted in a remarkable increase in
productivity that allowed Britain (and, later, its emulators the
world over) to escape the Malthusian Trap. Production began to
outstrip population growth.
But the pendulum seems to have
swung back. Leisure is again both fashionable and desirable.
The official working week in France has being reduced to 35
hours a week (though the French are now tinkering with it). In most
countries in the world, it is limited to 45 hours a week. The trend
during the last century seems to be unequivocal: less work, more
play.
Yet, what may be true for blue collar workers or state
employees - is not necessarily so for white collar members of the
liberal professions. It is not rare for these people - lawyers,
accountants, consultants, managers, academics - to put in 80 hour
weeks.
The phenomenon is so widespread and its social
consequences so damaging that it has acquired the unflattering
nickname workaholism, a combination of the words "work" and
"alcoholism". Family life is disrupted, intellectual horizons
narrow, the consequences to the workaholic's health are severe: fat,
lack of exercise, stress - all take their lethal toll. Classified as
"alpha" types, workaholics suffer three times as many heart attacks
as their peers.
But what are the social and economic roots
of this phenomenon?
Put succinctly, it is the outcome of the
blurring of boundaries between work and leisure. This distinction
between time dedicated to labour and time spent in the pursuit of
one's hobbies - was so clear for thousands of years that its gradual
disappearance is one of the most important and profound social
changes in human history.
A host of other shifts in the
character of work and domestic environments of humans converged to
produce this momentous change. Arguably the most important was the
increase in labour mobility and the fluid nature of the very concept
of work and the workplace.
The transitions from agriculture
to industry, then to services, and now to the knowledge society,
increased the mobility of the workforce. A farmer is the least
mobile. His means of production are fixed, his produce mostly
consumed locally - especially in places which lack proper
refrigeration, food preservation, and transportation.
A
marginal group of people became nomad-traders. This group exploded
in size with the advent of the industrial revolution. True, the bulk
of the workforce was still immobile and affixed to the production
floor. But raw materials and finished products travelled long
distances to faraway markets. Professional services were needed and
the professional manager, the lawyer, the accountant, the
consultant, the trader, the broker - all emerged as both parasites
feeding off the production processes and the indispensable oil on
its cogs.
The protagonists of the services society were no
longer geographically dependent. They rendered their services to a
host of geographically distributed "employers" in a variety of ways.
This trend accelerated today, with the advent of the information and
knowledge revolution.
Knowledge is not geography-dependent.
It is easily transferable across boundaries. It is cheaply
reproduced. Its ephemeral quality gives it non-temporal and
non-spatial qualities. The locations of the participants in the
economic interactions of this new age are transparent and
immaterial.
These trends converged with increased mobility
of people, goods and data (voice, visual, textual and other). The
twin revolutions of transportation and telecommunications really
reduced the world to a global village. Phenomena like commuting to
work and multinationals were first made possible.
Facsimile
messages, electronic mail, other forms of digital data, the Internet
- broke not only physical barriers but also temporal ones. Today,
virtual offices are not only spatially virtual - but also temporally
so. This means that workers can collaborate not only across
continents but also across time zones. They can leave their work for
someone else to continue in an electronic mailbox, for instance.
These technological advances precipitated the transmutation
of the very concepts of "work" and "workplace". The three
Aristotelian dramatic unities no longer applied. Work could be
performed in different places, not simultaneously, by workers who
worked part time whenever it suited them best.
Flextime and
work from home replaced commuting (much more so in the Anglo-Saxon
countries, but they have always been the harbingers of change). This
fitted squarely into the social fragmentation which characterizes
today's world: the disintegration of previously cohesive social
structures, such as the nuclear (not to mention the extended)
family.
All this was neatly wrapped in the ideology of
individualism, presented as a private case of capitalism and
liberalism. People were encouraged to feel and behave as distinct,
autonomous units. The perception of individuals as islands replaced
the former perception of humans as cells in an organism.
This trend was coupled with - and enhanced by -
unprecedented successive multi-annual rises in productivity and
increases in world trade. New management techniques, improved
production technologies, innovative inventory control methods,
automatization, robotization, plant modernization,
telecommunications (which facilitates more efficient transfers of
information), even new design concepts - all helped bring this
about.
But productivity gains made humans redundant. No
amount of retraining could cope with the incredible rate of
technological change. The more technologically advanced the country
- the higher its structural unemployment (i.e., the level of
unemployment attributable to changes in the very structure of the
market).
In Western Europe, it shot up from 5-6% of the
workforce to 9% in one decade. One way to manage this flood of
ejected humans was to cut the workweek. Another was to support a
large population of unemployed. The third, more tacit, way was to
legitimize leisure time. Whereas the Jewish and Protestant work
ethics condemned idleness in the past - the current ethos encouraged
people to contribute to the economy through "self realization", to
pursue their hobbies and non-work related interests, and to express
the entire range of their personality and potential.
This
served to blur the historical differences between work and leisure.
They are both commended now. Work, like leisure, became less and
less structured and rigid. It is often pursued from home. The
territorial separation between "work-place" and "home turf" was
essentially eliminated.
The emotional leap was only a
question of time. Historically, people went to work because they had
to. What they did after work was designated as "pleasure". Now, both
work and leisure were pleasurable - or torturous - or both. Some
people began to enjoy their work so much that it fulfilled the
functions normally reserved to leisure time. They are the
workaholics. Others continued to hate work - but felt disorientated
in the new, leisure-like environment. They were not taught to deal
with too much free time, a lack of framework, no clear instructions
what to do, when, with whom and to what end.
Socialization
processes and socialization agents (the State, parents, educators,
employers) were not geared - nor did they regard it as their
responsibility - to train the population to cope with free time and
with the baffling and dazzling variety of options on offer.
We can classify economies and markets using the work-leisure
axis. Those that maintain the old distinction between (hated) work
and (liberating) leisure - are doomed to perish or, at best,
radically lag behind. This is because they will not have developed a
class of workaholics big enough to move the economy ahead.
It takes workaholics to create, maintain and expand
capitalism. As opposed to common opinion, people, mostly, do not do
business because they are interested in money (the classic profit
motive). They do what they do because they like the Game of
Business, its twists and turns, the brainstorming, the battle of
brains, subjugating markets, the ups and downs, the excitement. All
this has nothing to do with money. It has everything to do with
psychology. True, money serves to measure success - but it is an
abstract meter, akin to monopoly money. It is proof shrewdness, wit,
foresight, stamina, and insight.
Workaholics identify
business with pleasure. They are hedonistic and narcissistic. They
are entrepreneurial. They are the managers and the businessmen and
the scientists and the journalists. They are the movers, the
shakers, the pushers, the energy.
Without workaholics, we
would have ended up with "social" economies, with strong
disincentives to work. In these economies of "collective ownership"
people go to work because they have to. Their main preoccupation is
how to avoid it and to sabotage the workplace. They harbour negative
feelings. Slowly, they wither and die (professionally) - because no
one can live long in hatred and deceit. Joy is an essential
ingredient of survival.
And this is the true meaning of
capitalism: the abolition of the artificial distinction between work
and leisure and the pursuit of both with the same zeal and
satisfaction. Above all, the (increasing) liberty to do it whenever,
wherever, with whomever you choose.
Unless and until Homo
East Europeansis changes his state of mind - there will be no real
transition. Because transition happens in the human mind much before
it takes form in reality. It is no use to dictate, to legislate, to
finance, to cajole, or to bribe. It was Marx (a devout
non-capitalist) who noted the causative connexion between reality
(being) and consciousness. How right was he. Witness the prosperous
USA and compare it to the miserable failure that was communism.
From an Interview I Granted
Question: In your
article, Workaholism, Leisure and Pleasure, you describe how the
line between leisure and work has blurred over time. What has
allowed this to happen? What effect does this blurring have on the
struggle to achieve a work-life balance?
Answer: The
distinction between work and leisure times is a novelty. Even 70
years ago, people still worked 16 hours a day and, many of them, put
in 7 days a week. More than 80% of the world's population still live
this way. To the majority of people in the developing countries,
work was and is life. They would perceive the contrast between
"work" and "life" to be both artificial and perplexing. Sure, they
dedicate time to their families and communities. But there is little
leisure left to read, nurture one's hobbies, introspect, or attend
classes.
Leisure time emerged as a social phenomenon in the
twentieth century and mainly in the industrialized, rich, countries.
Workaholism - the blurring of boundaries between leisure
time and time dedicated to work - is, therefore, simply harking back
to the recent past. It is the inevitable outcome of a confluence of
a few developments:
(1) Labour mobility increased. A farmer
is attached to his land. His means of production are fixed. His
markets are largely local. An industrial worker is attached to his
factory. His means of production are fixed. Workers in the services
or, more so, in the knowledge industries are attached only to their
laptops. They are much more itinerant. They render their services to
a host of geographically distributed "employers" in a variety of
ways.
(2) The advent of the information and knowledge
revolutions lessened the worker's dependence on a "brick and mortar"
workplace and a "flesh and blood" employer. Cyberspace replaces real
space and temporary or contractual work are preferred to tenure and
corporate "loyalty".
Knowledge is not geography-dependent.
It is portable and cheaply reproduced. The geographical locations of
the participants in the economic interactions of this new age are
transparent and immaterial.
(3) The mobility of goods and
data (voice, visual, textual and other) increased exponentially. The
twin revolutions of transportation and telecommunications reduced
the world to a global village. Phenomena like commuting to work and
globe-straddling multinationals were first made possible. The car,
the airplane, facsimile messages, electronic mail, other forms of
digital data, the Internet - demolished many physical and temporal
barriers. Workers today often collaborate in virtual offices across
continents and time zones. Flextime and work from home replaced
commuting. The very concepts of "workplace" and "work" were rendered
fluid, if not obsolete.
(4) The dissolution of the classic
workplace is part of a larger and all-pervasive disintegration of
other social structures, such as the nuclear family. Thus, while the
choice of work-related venues and pursuits increased - the number of
social alternatives to work declined.
The extended and
nuclear family was denuded of most of its traditional functions.
Most communities are tenuous and in constant flux. Work is the only
refuge from an incoherent, fractious, and dysfunctional world.
Society is anomic and work has become a route of escapism.
(5) The ideology of individualism is increasingly presented
as a private case of capitalism and liberalism. People are
encouraged to feel and behave as distinct, autonomous units. The
metaphor of individuals as islands substituted for the perception of
humans as cells in an organism. Malignant individualism replaced
communitarianism. Pathological narcissism replaced self-love and
empathy.
(6) The last few decades witnessed unprecedented
successive rises in productivity and an expansion of world trade.
New management techniques, improved production technologies,
innovative inventory control methods, automatization, robotization,
plant modernization, telecommunications (which facilitates more
efficient transfers of information), even new design concepts - all
helped bring workaholism about by placing economic values in the
forefront. The Protestant work ethic ran amok. Instead of working in
order to live - people began living in order to work.
Workaholics are rewarded with faster promotion and higher
income. Workaholism is often - mistakenly - identified with
entrepreneurship, ambition, and efficiency. Yet, really it is merely
an addiction.
The absurd is that workaholism is a direct
result of the culture of leisure.
As workers are made
redundant by technology-driven productivity gains - they are
encouraged to engage in leisure activities. Leisure substitutes for
work. The historical demarcation between work and leisure is lost.
Both are commended for their contribution to the economy. Work, like
leisure, is less and less structured and rigid. Both work and
leisure are often pursued from home and are often experienced as
pleasurable.
The territorial separation between "work-place"
and "home turf" is essentially eliminated.
Some people enjoy
their work so much that it fulfils the functions normally reserved
to leisure time. They are the workaholics. Others continue to hate
work - but feel disorientated in the new leisure-rich environment.
They are not taught to deal with too much free and unstructured
time, with a lack of clearly delineated framework, without clear
instructions as to what to do, when, with whom, and to what end.
The state, parents, educators, employers - all failed to
train the population to cope with free time and with choice. Both
types - the workaholic and the "normal" person baffled by too much
leisure - end up sacrificing their leisure time to their
work-related activities.
Alas, it takes workaholics to
create, maintain and expand capitalism. People don't work or conduct
business only because they are after the money. They enjoy their
work or their business. They find pleasure in it. And this is the
true meaning of capitalism: the abolition of the artificial
distinction between work and leisure and the pursuit of both with
the same zeal and satisfaction. Above all, the (increasing) liberty
to do so whenever, wherever, with whomever you
choose. |
|
What is a friend?
What are friends for and how can a friendship be
tested? By behaving altruistically, would be the most common answer
and by sacrificing one's interests in favour of one's friends.
Friendship implies the converse of egoism, both psychologically and
ethically. But then we say that the dog is "man's best friend".
After all, it is characterized by unconditional love, by unselfish
behaviour, by sacrifice, when necessary. Isn't this the epitome of
friendship? Apparently not. On the one hand, the dog's friendship
seems to be unaffected by long term calculations of personal
benefit. But that is not to say that it is not affected by
calculations of a short-term nature. The owner, after all, looks
after the dog and is the source of its subsistence and security.
People – and dogs – have been known to have sacrificed their lives
for less. The dog is selfish – it clings and protects what it
regards to be its territory and its property (including – and
especially so - the owner). Thus, the first condition, seemingly not
satisfied by canine attachment is that it be reasonably unselfish.
There are, however, more important conditions:
For a
real friendship to exist – at least one of the friends must be a
conscious and intelligent entity, possessed of mental states. It can
be an individual, or a collective of individuals, but in both cases
this requirement will similarly apply.
There must be a minimal
level of identical mental states between the terms of the equation
of friendship. A human being cannot be friends with a tree (at least
not in the fullest sense of the word).
The behaviour must not be
deterministic, lest it be interpreted as instinct driven. A
conscious choice must be involved. This is a very surprising
conclusion: the more "reliable", the more "predictable" – the less
appreciated. Someone who reacts identically to similar situations,
without dedicating a first, let alone a second thought to it – his
acts would be depreciated as "automatic responses".
For a
pattern of behaviour to be described as "friendship", these four
conditions must be met: diminished egoism, conscious and intelligent
agents, identical mental states (allowing for the communication of
the friendship) and non-deterministic behaviour, the result of
constant decision making.
A friendship can be – and often is
– tested in view of these criteria. There is a paradox underlying
the very notion of testing a friendship. A real friend would never
test his friend's commitment and allegiance. Anyone who puts his
friend to a test (deliberately) would hardly qualify as a friend
himself. But circumstances can put ALL the members of a friendship,
all the individuals (two or more) in the "collective" to a test of
friendship. Financial hardship encountered by someone would surely
oblige his friends to assist him – even if he himself did not take
the initiative and explicitly asked them to do so. It is life that
tests the resilience and strength and depth of true friendships –
not the friends themselves.
In all the discussions of egoism
versus altruism – confusion between self-interest and self-welfare
prevails. A person may be urged on to act by his self-interest,
which might be detrimental to his (long-term) self-welfare. Some
behaviours and actions can satisfy short-term desires, urges, wishes
(in short: self-interest) – and yet be self- destructive or
otherwise adversely effect the individual's future welfare.
(Psychological) Egoism should, therefore, be re-defined as the
active pursuit of self- welfare, not of self-interest. Only when the
person caters, in a balanced manner, to both his present
(self-interest) and his future (self-welfare) interests – can we
call him an egoist. Otherwise, if he caters only to his immediate
self-interest, seeks to fulfil his desires and disregards the future
costs of his behaviour – he is an animal, not an egoist.
Joseph Butler separated the main (motivating) desire from
the desire that is self- interest. The latter cannot exist without
the former. A person is hungry and this is his desire. His
self-interest is, therefore, to eat. But the hunger is directed at
eating – not at fulfilling self-interests. Thus, hunger generates
self-interest (to eat) but its object is eating. Self-interest is a
second order desire that aims to satisfy first order desires (which
can also motivate us directly).
This subtle distinction can
be applied to disinterested behaviours, acts, which seem to lack a
clear self-interest or even a first order desire. Consider why do
people contribute to humanitarian causes? There is no self-interest
here, even if we account for the global picture (with every possible
future event in the life of the contributor). No rich American is
likely to find himself starving in Somalia, the target of one such
humanitarian aid mission.
But even here the Butler model can
be validated. The first order desire of the donator is to avoid
anxiety feelings generated by a cognitive dissonance. In the process
of socialization we are all exposed to altruistic messages. They are
internalized by us (some even to the extent of forming part of the
almighty superego, the conscience). In parallel, we assimilate the
punishment inflicted upon members of society who are not "social"
enough, unwilling to contribute beyond that which is required to
satisfy their self interest, selfish or egoistic, non-conformist,
"too" individualistic, "too" idiosyncratic or eccentric, etc.
Completely not being altruistic is "bad" and as such calls for
"punishment". This no longer is an outside judgement, on a case by
case basis, with the penalty inflicted by an external moral
authority. This comes from the inside: the opprobrium and reproach,
the guilt, the punishment (read Kafka). Such impending punishment
generates anxiety whenever the person judges himself not to have
been altruistically "sufficient". It is to avoid this anxiety or to
quell it that a person engages in altruistic acts, the result of his
social conditioning. To use the Butler scheme: the first-degree
desire is to avoid the agonies of cognitive dissonance and the
resulting anxiety. This can be achieved by committing acts of
altruism. The second-degree desire is the self-interest to commit
altruistic acts in order to satisfy the first-degree desire. No one
engages in contributing to the poor because he wants them to be less
poor or in famine relief because he does not want others to starve.
People do these apparently selfless activities because they do not
want to experience that tormenting inner voice and to suffer the
acute anxiety, which accompanies it. Altruism is the name that we
give to successful indoctrination. The stronger the process of
socialization, the stricter the education, the more severely brought
up the individual, the grimmer and more constraining his superego –
the more of an altruist he is likely to be. Independent people who
really feel comfortable with their selves are less likely to exhibit
these behaviours.
This is the self-interest of society:
altruism enhances the overall level of welfare. It redistributes
resources more equitably, it tackles market failures more or less
efficiently (progressive tax systems are altruistic), it reduces
social pressures and stabilizes both individuals and society.
Clearly, the self-interest of society is to make its members limit
the pursuit of their own self-interest? There are many opinions and
theories. They can be grouped into:
Those who see an inverse
relation between the two: the more satisfied the self interests of
the individuals comprising a society – the worse off that society
will end up. What is meant by "better off" is a different issue but
at least the commonsense, intuitive, meaning is clear and begs no
explanation. Many religions and strands of moral absolutism espouse
this view.
Those who believe that the more satisfied the
self-interests of the individuals comprising a society – the better
off this society will end up. These are the "hidden hand" theories.
Individuals, which strive merely to maximize their utility, their
happiness, their returns (profits) – find themselves inadvertently
engaged in a colossal endeavour to better their society. This is
mostly achieved through the dual mechanisms of market and price.
Adam Smith is an example (and other schools of the dismal science).
Those who believe that a delicate balance must exist between the
two types of self-interest: the private and the public. While most
individuals will be unable to obtain the full satisfaction of their
self-interest – it is still conceivable that they will attain most
of it. On the other hand, society must not fully tread on
individuals' rights to self-fulfilment, wealth accumulation and the
pursuit of happiness. So, it must accept less than maximum
satisfaction of its self-interest. The optimal mix exists and is,
probably, of the minimax type. This is not a zero sum game and
society and the individuals comprising it can maximize their worst
outcomes.
The French have a saying: "Good bookkeeping –
makes for a good friendship". Self-interest, altruism and the
interest of society at large are not necessarily
incompatible. |
|
Did God create the world in seven days, or
do you believe in the theory of evolution?
Scientific theories are not subject to "belief" - they
are subject to Popperian falsification: they yield predictions which
experiments can then confirm or prove false. Your question is,
therefore, meaningless. Evolution has proven itself over the last
150 years in the sense that its main predictions have yet to be
falsified.
All theories - scientific or not - start with a
problem. They aim to solve it by proving that what appears to be
"problematic" is not. They re-state the conundrum, or introduce new
data, new variables, a new classification, or new organizing
principles. They incorporate the problem in a larger body of
knowledge, or in a conjecture ("solution"). They explain why we
thought we had an issue on our hands - and how it can be avoided,
vitiated, or resolved.
Scientific theories invite constant
criticism and revision. They yield new problems. They are proven
erroneous and are replaced by new models which offer better
explanations and a more profound sense of understanding - often by
solving these new problems. From time to time, the successor
theories constitute a break with everything known and done till
then. These seismic convulsions are known as "paradigm shifts".
Contrary to widespread opinion - even among scientists -
science is not only about "facts". It is not merely about
quantifying, measuring, describing, classifying, and organizing
"things" (entities). It is not even concerned with finding out the
"truth". Science is about providing us with concepts, explanations,
and predictions (collectively known as "theories") and thus endowing
us with a sense of understanding of our world.
Scientific
theories are allegorical or metaphoric. They revolve around symbols
and theoretical constructs, concepts and substantive assumptions,
axioms and hypotheses - most of which can never, even in principle,
be computed, observed, quantified, measured, or correlated with the
world "out there". By appealing to our imagination, scientific
theories reveal what David Deutsch calls "the fabric of reality".
Like any other system of knowledge, science has its
fanatics, heretics, and deviants.
Instrumentalists, for
instance, insist that scientific theories should be concerned
exclusively with predicting the outcomes of appropriately designed
experiments. Their explanatory powers are of no consequence.
Positivists ascribe meaning only to statements that deal with
observables and observations.
Instrumentalists and
positivists ignore the fact that predictions are derived from
models, narratives, and organizing principles. In short: it is the
theory's explanatory dimensions that determine which experiments are
relevant and which are not. Forecasts - and experiments - that are
not embedded in an understanding of the world (in an explanation) do
not constitute science.
Granted, predictions and experiments
are crucial to the growth of scientific knowledge and the winnowing
out of erroneous or inadequate theories. But they are not the only
mechanisms of natural selection. There are other criteria that help
us decide whether to adopt and place confidence in a scientific
theory or not. Is the theory aesthetic (parsimonious), logical, does
it provide a reasonable explanation and, thus, does it further our
understanding of the world?
David Deutsch in "The Fabric of
Reality" (p. 11):
"... (I)t is hard to give a precise
definition of 'explanation' or 'understanding'. Roughly speaking,
they are about 'why' rather than 'what'; about the inner workings of
things; about how things really are, not just how they appear to be;
about what must be so, rather than what merely happens to be so;
about laws of nature rather than rules of thumb. They are also about
coherence, elegance, and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and
complexity ..."
Reductionists and emergentists ignore the
existence of a hierarchy of scientific theories and meta-languages.
They believe - and it is an article of faith, not of science - that
complex phenomena (such as the human mind) can be reduced to simple
ones (such as the physics and chemistry of the brain). Furthermore,
to them the act of reduction is, in itself, an explanation and a
form of pertinent understanding. Human thought, fantasy,
imagination, and emotions are nothing but electric currents and
spurts of chemicals in the brain, they say.
Holists, on the
other hand, refuse to consider the possibility that some
higher-level phenomena can, indeed, be fully reduced to base
components and primitive interactions. They ignore the fact that
reductionism sometimes does provide explanations and understanding.
The properties of water, for instance, do spring forth from its
chemical and physical composition and from the interactions between
its constituent atoms and subatomic particles.
Still, there
is a general agreement that scientific theories must be abstract
(independent of specific time or place), intersubjectively explicit
(contain detailed descriptions of the subject matter in unambiguous
terms), logically rigorous (make use of logical systems shared and
accepted by the practitioners in the field), empirically relevant
(correspond to results of empirical research), useful (in describing
and/or explaining the world), and provide typologies and
predictions.
A scientific theory should resort to primitive
(atomic) terminology and all its complex (derived) terms and
concepts should be defined in these indivisible terms. It should
offer a map unequivocally and consistently connecting operational
definitions to theoretical concepts.
Operational definitions
that connect to the same theoretical concept should not contradict
each other (be negatively correlated). They should yield agreement
on measurement conducted independently by trained experimenters. But
investigation of the theory of its implication can proceed even
without quantification.
Theoretical concepts need not
necessarily be measurable or quantifiable or observable. But a
scientific theory should afford at least four levels of
quantification of its operational and theoretical definitions of
concepts: nominal (labeling), ordinal (ranking), interval and ratio.
As we said, scientific theories are not confined to
quantified definitions or to a classificatory apparatus. To qualify
as scientific they must contain statements about relationships
(mostly causal) between concepts - empirically-supported laws and/or
propositions (statements derived from axioms).
Philosophers
like Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel regard a theory as scientific if
it is hypothetico-deductive. To them, scientific theories are sets
of inter-related laws. We know that they are inter-related because a
minimum number of axioms and hypotheses yield, in an inexorable
deductive sequence, everything else known in the field the theory
pertains to.
Explanation is about retrodiction - using the
laws to show how things happened. Prediction is using the laws to
show how things will happen. Understanding is explanation and
prediction combined.
William Whewell augmented this somewhat
simplistic point of view with his principle of "consilience of
inductions". Often, he observed, inductive explanations of disparate
phenomena are unexpectedly traced to one underlying cause. This is
what scientific theorizing is about - finding the common source of
the apparently separate.
This omnipotent view of the
scientific endeavor competes with a more modest, semantic school of
philosophy of science.
Many theories - especially ones with
breadth, width, and profundity, such as Darwin's theory of evolution
- are not deductively integrated and are very difficult to test
(falsify) conclusively. Their predictions are either scant or
ambiguous.
Scientific theories, goes the semantic view, are
amalgams of models of reality. These are empirically meaningful only
inasmuch as they are empirically (directly and therefore
semantically) applicable to a limited area. A typical scientific
theory is not constructed with explanatory and predictive aims in
mind. Quite the opposite: the choice of models incorporated in it
dictates its ultimate success in explaining the Universe and
predicting the outcomes of
experiments. |
|
|
30
visits
[samvaknin]
Sam
Vaknin
Skopje-Macedonia
|
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