Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: How to think Page 21 of 22

Snowden, Manning and the role of government secrecy

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On August 2, 2013

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I’ve stayed out of the Manning and Snowden imbroglio because most of what needs to be said is being said by other people.

However there is one issue that is not being made clear enough, but which under-girds all the arguments about their acts: the role of government.

Think of there as being two main ways to view government:

1) Government exists to rule over the people.  The people may have some say in who their rulers are, but once those rulers exist, they make the rules and the people obey.  Government in this view is an independent entity to whom subjects owe their obedience.  Government knows best, and we should do what government tells us to.

2) Government is an instrument acting on behalf of the people. Its position is similar to being a trustee—it is a relationship in which the public gives the government certain powers and resources, and expects the government to act on behalf of the people.  Government, in this view, is a solution to the collective action problem.  How do we act together for the benefit of everyone?

If we are ruled by government, we do not have a defacto right to know what government is doing.  Government knows best, we don’t have all the information, and we should go about our lives, obeying the laws and those who are in positions of power over us.

Imagine that you have a trustee, whom you have given money and the right to make rules to, in order that they might take care of certain of your affairs.  In order to be sure that they are taking care of your affairs, and not their own, or someone else’s who once the money and power is in their hands, is bribing or browbeating them, you must know what actions they are taking.

Transparency, in a democratic system, is predicated on the idea that citizens are the ultimate repository of legitimacy and that citizens have a responsibility and a right to know what is being done on their behalf.  Citizens cannot execute their responsibilities, including voting, volunteering, running for office and supporting primary candidates, if they do not know what government is actually doing.

Thus, in a democracy, the government must be transparent on virtually everything.  Short of actual military secrets, of which there are startlingly few (major deployments are obvious, and often announced), and very specific details like the actual identity of spies, plus personal information not relevant to job performance of government employees, there is almost nothing the government does which should not be available to the public.

Government works for the population. It is the servant of the people.  You cannot supervise your employee, you cannot discipline or fire or even properly reward your employee, if you do not know what your employee is doing with your money and the power you have given your employee.

It is now necessary to talk about the relation of citizens to the government.  The government works for citizens, citizens do not work for the government.  It is not a symmetrical relationship.  Because government works for the people, the people have the right to know what the government does.  Because the people, with the exception of some officials, do not exist to serve the needs of the government, the government does not have a right to know what the people are doing.  Transparency is required by the government, so that its masters, the people, can supervise it.  Again, transparency is not required of the people, except in very specific ways (for example, how much money they made) because they are not in a trustee relationship with the government: it is not their duty to act on behalf of the government.

Every time someone says, “well, if Snowden/Assange/Greenwald/Welsh/ believes in transparency, they should release on their personal emails”, it is a misunderstanding of the relationship between government and the people.  Individuals do not owe government transparency, government owes people transparency because government works for people and has power and money only because it is granted that power by the People.

Now, you can use this argument in support of spying on all the people.  The argument is as follows: “the people have given us the responsibility to protect them, and we believe the only way to protect them is to know everything they do online and as much of what they do offline as possible.  They have given us that grant of authority, and we are using it.”

I am willing to admit that the people could give their government that grant of authority. However, to do so they would have to know that that is what was being done and most people did not know that pre-Snowden.  There would also have to be an election in which “spy on everyone” was the main issue, and there was a party to vote for which was against it.  And, prima-facie, one would expect to at least see polls which showed that citizens wanted to be spied on all the time.

I believe that if such a grant was made, effective democracy would still end (if it hasn’t in many Western countries already).  Once people know they are being spied on 24/7 they change how they behave, and those who have access to that information can easily manipulate them, both overtly through blackmail and covertly by knowing what makes them tick (the exact contents of everything you search online, every email you send, every text you send and every phone call you make, plus in many cities the possibility of a fair bit of tracking of where you go physically each day). Information, in this case, is power.  Once they know how you tick, it’s not hard to figure out how to present information and incentives in such a way that you do what they want.

In this case government becomes the master, the people the servants.  To give full, free democratic consent for a surveillance society, is to sign the death warrant to the type of democracy which is “for the people, by the people”.  Something may remain, it may have elections, it may be called democracy and have all the forms, but it will not be democracy in the essentials.  There are other ways to lose effective democracy, like allowing money to buy the system, of course, and in some countries it appears that has occurred, but the surveillance state is additive (or perhaps multiplicative.)

In the Gilded Age, it was widely recognized that the “Trusts” (that Ages equivalent of our great megacorporations) controlled government. Eventually Americans were able to undo that.  But conditions were different then, there was no surveillance society, and there was still a very vibrant culture of civic association.

If we believe that government serves the people, then we must be way of any government that either doesn’t wish to tell the people what it is doing on their behalf, or which believes it has a right to know everything its people do.

The final argument is the safety argument, the “we need a surveillance society to be safe from bad men.”  I don’t believe this argument, and others have dealt with it, so for the time being, I will simply end with words from Benjamin Franklin:

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

And though Franklin didn’t say it, I agree that those who who believe that those give up liberty for safety will lose both liberty and safety—and deserve neither.

Start from common humanity

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On June 26, 2013

29 Comments

The basic political principle is that we all share our humanity.  Compassion starts from imaging ourselves in other people’s skin, in feeling that pain and indignities to them, are injuries to our common humanity.  An injury, an injustice, to one of us, is an injury and injustice to all of us.  In this sense, we acknowledge differences, such as gender, skin color, age, health, and our individual experience, and we take them in to account, but we do not let them obscure our common humanity.

When you think this way, when you feel this way, right action, right law, becomes much more clear.

The author Lois McMaster Bujold once had one of her characters asked if she loved someone.  Her reply was, “when he is cut, I bleed.”

Injustice to any of us, hurts us all.  I could explain the connections in technocratic terms, I could talk about how loss of liberty for one is eventually loss of liberty for all, how inequality hurts even those at the top, but at the end it is as simple as injustice to one, is injustice to all.

On Islam, Religion and Love

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On June 26, 2013

41 Comments

As with many things, I’m no expert on Islam.  Nonetheless, within the limitations of my language skills, I’ve done the reading.

One of the things which seems clear from the life of the Prophet, is that he made things better for women and slaves. Zakat is meant to be used, among other things to free slaves.

Mohammed’s first followers were mostly women and poorer men.

Mohammed made things better for them.

But the strength of scripture is also its weakness: what was written is always there.  Absent interpretation from the spirit of what was written, absent living script, it can be used to ossify change.  God’s law in any good teaching, is love.  When we  use scripture, and this is true of secular scripture like the US constitution, against love, against kindness, we do a disservice to the scripture and to the intentions of those who originally preached it.

Interpretation can be used for good or evil.  It can be used to make religious social beliefs not intrinsic to the religion, like female genital mutilation or the divine right of kings.  But it can also be used in the spirit of God’s law of love, to nurture kinder people, and kinder societies.

While intention doesn’t always work out, it is best to start from good intentions and in dealing with religious and spiritual traditions it is best to interpret in line with intention.  For America, this might be a further movement towards freedom and the pursuit of happiness.  For Islam, submission to God, and good works aiding those who need it most.

Ethics 101, Part 3: Forseeable Consequences

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On May 28, 2013

26 Comments

Since we’re on basic ethics, let’s take another basic ethical principle.  It is impossible to have a good society if you do not punish and reward people for the forseeable consequences of their actions.

Let us take the most simple: in a war people die, they are injured, many rapes are committed.  Disease runs rampant, infrastructure is destroyed and people die to to the loss of that infrastructure, such as having sewage mixed in to their drinking water.  If we put sanctions on a country, people will die as a result of the lack of medicines, or food, or jobs.  Even without actual death, people will suffer who would not have suffered otherwise.

These consequences are forseeable.  When we implement the policy, we KNOW people will die. We are responsible for those deaths.  That does not meant that war is never the right thing to do, nor sanctions, but it does mean that the bar is high.  This is why the Allies hung Nazis at Nuremburg, because they started a war from which all the other deaths and rapes and hunger and so on flowed.  Those deaths, that suffering, was the foreseeable consequence of their actions.

The idea of forseeable consequences is fundamental to reasoning about ethics and morality.  It is especially important in reasoning about public policy.

It also applies to things like the subprime real-estate bubble, the use of derviatives, the piling on of leverage, the policies of neo-liberalizing money-flows first, trade second and immigration third.  All of these things have, and had, forseeable consequences.  People have died, lost their jobs, lost their houses, been beaten by their spouses, gone without meals, had their countries erupt in revolution because of the financial fraud and manipulation engaged in by bankers, brokers, central bankers and politicians in the run-up to the financial crisis on 2007/8.  The consequences were forseeable, they were forseen by many people (I did, and am on the record as having done so), and the actions taken by bankers and their compatriots were fraudulent on the face.

Entire countries have gone in to permanent depression as a result of the forseeable consequences of their actions.  Then various countries, especially in Europe, doubled down on austerity. Austerity has never worked to bring an economy out of a financial crisis or depression, and it never will.  It does not work, and this is well known.  Engaging in austerity has forseeable consequences of impoverishing the country, reducing the size of the middle class and grinding the poor even further into misery.  It also has the forseeable consequence of making it possible to privatize parts of the economy the oligarchs want to buy.

It is done, it has been done and it will be done because of those forseeable consequences.  They are all either desirable to your masters or, if not desirable, irrelevant compared to the advantages austerity offers them.

These are, if not criminal acts, then unjust and evil acts, done to enrich a few at the expense of the many, with disregard for the consequences to the many, including death, hunger and violence.

One of the reasons I write so little these days, is that there is so little point.  Basic ethical principles are routinely ignored even on the so-called left.  Basic principles of causation are ignored.  Basic economic reality is ignored.  And virtually everyone in the so-called democracies is scrambling to pretend that they have no responsibility for anything that has happened.

If someone does something with forseeable consequences they are responsible for those forseeable consequences.  Just because an act has bad forseeable consequences doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken, the alternatives may be worse, but whether the action should be taken or not, the decision has consequences.

I will, if I continue being irritated, deal at some point with the idea of alternate scenarios.  Too often we pretend that there are only two options, say “bailing out bankers” or “doing nothing” and ignore that there were other possibilities, like “forcing bondholders and shareholders to take their losses, nationalizing the banks and breaking them up.”

As a society we have in the last few decades and are today making decisions with entirely forseeable consequences (as with climate change) that will kill a few hundred million people to well over a billion people.  We know it will happen, and we’re doing it.

We are monsters.  And we tolerate monsters.  And we get worked up over exactly the wrong things, “ooh a single soldier was killed”, rather than what is going to kill the children we care about, like global warming, or the people who have or will kill hundreds of thousands, like George W Bush, or Putin or people who are engaging in ongoing serial murdering like Barack Obama.  We ignore financial fraud, we ignore… well, why go on, the list is endless.

Forseeable consequences.  We’re awash in them, and we don’t care.

The Cassandra Complex

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On March 9, 2013

28 Comments

The prophet Cassandra was blessed with the ability to foretell the future: but cursed that no one would believe her.

Except that this is the way that prophecy works, if people believe a dire prophecy, it generally doesn’t come true.  My friend Stirling Newberry calls this a “self-unfullfilling prophecy”.

This relates also to the joke about nobodies, as in “nobody predicted the financial crash.”  Because if you predicted it, you’re a nobody.  So you have fools saying “it couldn’t have been predicted” when it very clearly was.  I even publicly predicted the exact month the stock market would crash, about a year in advance.  Every once in a while I get an email from someone who saved a lot of money by listening.

Well, ok, every once in a very long time.  Most people read it, shrugged, and didn’t do anything.

There are a lot of organizations you want run by pessimists (for example, nuclear reactors.)  The sort of people who have posters proclaiming “Murphy was an optimist” on their walls.  The sort of people who told the Japanese how to fix their reactors in the 80s, who had they been listened to, would have avoided an meltdown.

But the problem with such people is that they run themselves out of jobs.  They make prophecies, scare people, get the problems fixed, and so their prophecies don’t happen.  Absent major disasters for long enough, people become complacent and decide they don’t need to spend money, time and trouble on the warnings of fools whose prophecies never come true.  They look at all the money they can save, or make, by getting rid of regulations, gutting inspections and running without precautions, and they realize that that even if something bad happens, the odds of them being held accountable are infinitesimal.  After all, when the Japanese financial bubble burst, senior people committed suicide.

Did anyone responsible for the nuclear meltdown in Japan commit suicide?

No.

They should have.  And I’m quite serious about that.

When accountability goes away, when the elites no longer believe they have a responsibility to anyone but themselves, and often not even that, your society is in for disaster after disaster.

And so, in the US, you have the Iraq war, Katrina, the great financial collapse, weather disaster after weather disaster without anything being done to protect against the next one. You have the near-absolute certainty of a billion or more incremental deaths from climate change, the near-certainty of drought in large parts of the world, the near-certainty of dust-bowls, and on and on.

And they yawn.  They laugh at the Cassandras.  Maybe they even know the Cassandras are right

The next age will take its prophets very seriously.  And they will  produce self-unfulfilling prophecies.  And so the cycle will go on.

Unless we learn how to break this, and many other cycles, we are doomed by the sad human fact that the vast majority of people don’t really learn from anyone’s experience but their own.  And one day it will catch  up to us, and it will push us to extinction, because we now have the means, and more than the means to destroy ourselves utterly.  If we do not grow up as a species, if we do not gain wisdom, we may not be long for this world.

Edit: changed wording on suicides to make clear that the people RESPONSIBLE did not commit suicide.

The coming catastrophes and the Rawlsian veil of ignorance

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On February 4, 2013

45 Comments

A just society, according to Rawls, is a society whose structure, whose rewards and punishments, are set up before we know what position we will hold in it.  The Rawlsian veil of ignorance cuts deeper than most people realize.  Take for example old-fashioned meritocracy: grades, schooling, intelligence.  Should intelligence be highly rewarded?  Would you set up society to reward the smart heavily if you didn’t know you’d be smart?  Most of smart is your parents, in terms of nutrition, education and genetics.  You don’t choose your parents, you can’t know that you’ll be smart before you’re born.  Smart is mostly not a choice, neither is healthy, nor a type A personality, and so on.

The great problem we have today in improving our society, in fixing our economy, is that so many people don’t want to give up what they have.  If you work in the health insurance industry in the US, an evil industry whose job is to deny care in exchange for money, for example, your job needs to go away. It is a job which does more harm than good.  If you work in peteroleum extraction, well, most of those jobs need to go away.  If you work in a large bank or brokerage, well, your job needs to change in a way that will deprive you of your high bonuses, and which will leave many bankers and traders unemployed, because banking done in a way that build society rather than tears it down probably doesn’t need your skill set.  We need a lot less accountants, a lot less administrators at universities, a lot less soldiers, a ton less spies, far fewer people working in the military-industrial complex, and on and on.

But what the past 40 years have proven is this: if you lose your job, you’re on your own.  If you’re in your 40s and 50s and you lose a good job, you’ll probably never, ever, have a good job ever again.  People who are displaced by economic change, good or bad, aren’t taken care of.  We have reduced retraining, made welfare and unemployment insurance harder to get, increased university tuition, not made efforts to find or create new, good jobs.  We hire foreigners to take over the job of older techies, since they cost too much.

People know, they know and they are right, that economic change, in our society, could cost them everything.  Their job and any prospect of a good job.  Their house.  Their marriage.  Their health care and even their life.

So they grasp tightly to what they have, and everyone fights to make sure that nothing really changes.  Each person, with their little or big piece of the pie, fights viciously to keep it whether it’s good for society or not.  They are right to do so.

This is why we can only have change after catastrophe: after war and famine and revolution, because only in extremis, only when, as in WWII, people realize that everyone is in it together, will they be willing to take care of each other.  And only in time of catastrophe, when so many have lost everything, will they be willing to change society.  Catastrophe forms a Rawlsian veil on the future: you don’t know, after the age of catastrophe, what your position in society will be. Not knowing that, it behooves you to make that society as equitable as possible.

This is the argument for catastrophe: that we will not, cannot, make the changes required to avoid catastrophe until we have lost or truly, existentially, fear the loss of everything.  We will not be fair and kind to each other till we have no choice, we will not be fair and kind to others till we know we need that for ourselves.

This is sad, pathetic even, an indictment of humanity.  Does it have to be so?  I hope not, but I fear it does.

It is such issues I will discuss in my coming book.  Are we bound to the wheel of causality even in our own societies, or can we take control of our own destinies?

Yes, the American people are responsible

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On December 19, 2011

164 Comments

Let me respond to the idea that Americans are not responsible for what is happening to America, especially poorer Americans.

No.  Sorry, but no.  Sure, their guilt isn’t as great as that of the liberal class, or the financiers, or various other folks, but they are still responsible.  It was a democracy.  There were ways to stop it from getting to this.  In a democracy, the PEOPLE are held responsible.  Yes, there were forces working to stop it from being a democracy, but they voted for people like Reagan and the members of Congress, and so on.  Whether you think the 2000 or 2004 elections were stolen (yes on the first, maybe on the second) they let it get to the point where it could be stolen.  They didn’t riot in 2000.  They reelected George Bush after everyone knew he was torturing scum.

I’m not letting them off the hook.  Sorry.

The pathetic attempts of Americans to pretend they’re good people and don’t deserve what’s happening to them are just that, pathetic.  Yeah, some of them are good, but not enough.  It’s just that simple.

Take some goddamn responsibility.

Until Americans get that they are responsible, they will not also get that they can change things.  If Americans are powerless, if it’s “not their fault” that also means they can’t fix it.

This is basic, like everything else I have to explain these days, it seems.

Sadly America is no longer the issue.  While it is theoretically possible it could be saved, the odds are so low the fight is pointless for anyone not an American (and even there, if you can leave, you should).  We are now in triage, trying to save other nations.  The center did not hold.  So be it, the provinces are on their own, and must do what they can, for themselves.

And the people who continue to apologize for the American public, pretending that Americans as a group are not complicit… yeah, well, whatever.  Doesn’t matter now.  But that sort of “it’s not your responsibility” BULLSHIT is part of why America is going down.

“It’s not your responsibility” means “don’t pay attention, don’t try and change it.”

Do not judge public figures on how “nice” they are

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On December 18, 2011

41 Comments

Newshoggers has a roundup of Hitchens posts.  Most of them are generally positive towards Hitchens.  For example:

But I guess all that is why I want to put down for the record that in addition to all those things, Hitchens was incredibly kind and giving with his time. Every time I met him over the past seven years he greeted me like an old friend, and as far as I could see, every fan he met got his full attention. Even when he was dying, he had time to sit down with a little girl to figure out what books should be on her reading list.

Or:

Sometimes, Christopher Hitchens was a fucking asshole, and said and wrote things that were beneath him. Most of the time, he was brilliant. I’m deeply sorry that I never met him.

Or Dawkins:

Every day of his declining life he demonstrated the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch was in a foxhole, and he dealt with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to be able to muster. And in the process, he showed himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love.

He helped get over 100K people killed (that’s the very conservative #, it’s probably over 500K). He worked really hard to do that. That is more than being “an asshole”. He could personally be an asshole, and I would not give a damn. He was a public figure, a public intellectual, and I do not judge public figures based on whether they are “nice” in person or died a good death or had beliefs about the supernatural which match mine. Anyone who does so is morally defective. That sort of “I’d like to have a beer with him” reasoning led directly to George Bush, Jr.

You get the pundits and leaders you deserve, example 5,242,176.

I don’t, personally, think Hitchens was brilliant most of the time, but let’s say he was.  So what?  He helped commit the same war crime Nazis were hung for.  In a just world, he would have been hung or locked up for life, alongside Henry Kissinger, whom he hated and George Bush, whose policies he helped push.

Contemptible.  If you knew him personally, I can forgive your love of him, I have loved evil people.  But an intellectual has the responsibility to separate those personal feelings from judgement. Hitchens was an evil man.  Helping kill large numbers of people in an unprovoked war is not just a war crime, it is, as was noted at Nuremburg, the crime from which all war crimes come — every rape, every death, every person who lost their home, every person tortured with power drills in Iraq, every dead child—those are Hitchens legacy.

The refusal to hold people responsible for the entirely forseeable results of policies they work hard to enable is also evil.  It is at the root of why you no longer have functioning democracies.

Hitchens was a bad man whose legacy is enabling a war crime.  If you do not think so, you are part of the reason why things like Iraq happen.

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