Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a classic spy novel, written for those who enjoy the suggestion of authenticity. Rather than indulging in the over-the-top pyrotechnics found in some spy thrillers, Le Carré’s characters are cautious and meticulous. In particular, the protagonist George Smiley is a kind of antithesis to the James Bond stereotype: fat, clad in fogged spectacles, burdened with an unfaithful wife, but nonetheless at the top of the game when it comes to counterintelligence operations in the United Kingdom.

The setting – Britain during the Cold War – permeates the book. I will admit that it is a bit amusing to read about the high drama of spies speeding along obscure motorways connecting small British cities, rather than jetting around between glamorous national capitals. At the same time, Le Carré does capture what I would expect to be the key geopolitical dynamics of the time: the superpower competition between Russia and America, with the United Kingdom in the middle in a diminished post-imperial role. Le Carré talks about how British agents were: “Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away.” It makes you wonder who will be elevated and who will be lowered, forty years from now.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy includes some observations that border on the philosophical. Le Carré raises the question of oversight, and the difficulty of trusting spies (p. 74 paperback) ; he explains how the wily opponent seeks not perfection, but advantage from his actions (194) ; the ways in which the false identities a person maintains actually express the person they conceal (213); how intelligence services have an incentive to puff up the competence of their opponents, to get more support for themselves (316); how “survival” is “an infinite capacity for suspicion” (337); how the essence of betrayal is to “overtly pursue… one aim and secretly achieve its opposite” (354); how a state’s secret services provide a measure of its political health (365); and how treason becomes “a matter of habit” once initial motivations become fuzzy and continuing on the same course seems the simplest option (377). The comment about enemy capabilities is especially relevant today, as gigantic state security bureaucracies justify themselves on the basis of the threat from a few dangerous malcontents hanging around in caves and radical discussion forums online.

Le Carré’s writing is full of examples of clever observation, which both appeals to the reader’s curiosity and makes the characters themselves seem more interesting and authentic. The book is also peppered with authentic-seeming espionage tradecraft, in areas like following people, transmitting information securely, sending coded signals, and handling in-person meetings. Probably technology has changed some of that since 1974, but perhaps not all that much. The paranoid world of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which it is unclear which of the authorities can be trusted, has many parallels with the world today.

Freedoms and loyalties

Modern political life is complicated, in terms of the obligations and allegiances people possess. For instance, it is entirely sensible to say that a person has simultaneous and differing obligations toward family, friends, co-workers, fellow citizens, humanity as a whole, and even all of nature. These obligations can be contradictory. For instance, one’s family might be best served by choices that would harm fellow citizens or humanity as a whole.

There is an important distinction between freedoms in the abstract and freedoms in practice. For instance, one might have the right to legal counsel but be financially unable to secure adequate representation (especially in civil matters). Similarly, the most fundamental of abstract freedoms – sovereignty over one’s own mind and body – are frequently interfered with by states. Despite that interference, however, I think the logic underlying them is sound. What happens to a person’s body and mind should be up to that person. If another person or a government forces something upon you without your informed consent, they have violated important rights, even if they were trying to do good. That’s not an assertion of the fundamental validity of rights, but rather part of a utilitarian calculus. It’s simply the case that a world where the fundamental rights of individuals are respected is better than a world in which they are violated and ignored. It’s the collectivity of outcomes that really matters, but the collectivity is often served best by treating all individuals decently.

It seems to me that our highest loyalty should be to humanity as a whole, or perhaps to the collection of all species with a reasonably rich mental life. It is impossible to behave unethically toward an inanimate object. Crushing a rock to powder can only be a problem if, in so doing, you negatively affect the mental lives of thinking beings. At the same time, there are many smaller groups of humans that demand and frequency receive loyalty, often manifested in behaviours that harm humanity as a whole.

There are clear-cut examples of this: if you are in the army and ordered to use biological weapons against a civilian population, you have been placed in a situation where someone is asserting that your loyalty to them should trump the concern you have for other living beings. In such circumstances, it seems admirable to refuse by asserting the greater importance of loyalty to humanity compared with loyalty to your army or loyalty to your country.

Ultimately, we are all in a complicated ethical position. We have sovereignty over our bodies and minds, but we never have individual security. We are all vulnerable to the will of others and, in cases where it contradicts our own will, we do not have the power to resist the whole world. We will also frequently be punished for obeying higher loyalties rather than lower ones, partly because an important way through which lower loyalties are maintained in the general population is by punishing those that violate them (though consent accompanies coercion in most systems of control).

On the basis of our particular combination of capabilities and options, all we can do is try to behave in the way that best respects our ethical obligations, such as they can be determined on the basis of determined and selfless examination.

Triceratops power

If my sources are to be believed, a major upheaval is about to occur in Canadian politics, with the emergence and near-certain electoral dominance of the Triceratops Party. They promise to be everything the Rhinoceros Party was times three, and more fossilized to boot.

While their party platform hasn’t been made public yet, I have been fortunate enough to see an advance copy. Some of the highlights:

  • Lacross stadiums for all swing ridings
  • Granting the Order of Canada to Muammar Qaddafi, for his services to the Department of National Defence (justification of costly weapons systems)
  • Supporting Canada’s ongoing effort to return the global climate to the state it occupied during the Late Cretaceous Period
  • The replacement of Canada’s $1000 candidate registration fee with a $1000 grant for anybody willing to run, as an addition to Canada’s Economic Action Plan
  • The appointment of the largest male and female moose that can be found as King and Queen of Canada (criminal cases henceforth to take the form Alces Rex v. Defendant)
  • Nationalization of the Hell’s Angels, to be merged with Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.
  • Mandating 10% of the seats in the House of Commons and Senate for the Work Less Party
  • Replacement of those actual seats with La-Z-Boy style recliners
  • Allowing the under-16 children of backbenchers to vote on behalf of their MP parents
  • Granting aristocratic titles to the unemployed, as a way of bolstering their spirits (for instance, Duke, Earl, Baroness, etc)
  • Granting all Canadians the right to live for free in Vancouver for a year, on a rotating basis – and applying a corresponding obligation to live in Ottawa
  • Pre-emptively removing the polar bear from the $2 coin, so people will be less sad when they go extinct
  • Re-locating the provinces alphabetically, from west to east, to aid schoolchildren in memorizing them
  • Re-naming all provincial capitals ‘Alberta City’, ‘Manitoba City’, etc for the same reason
  • Criminalizing public nudity and pre-marital sex among non-human animals
  • Allowing the appointment of corporations to the senate, as well as the post of Governor General
  • Banning fighting and bodychecking from hockey, substituting freestyle rap battles
  • Requiring MPs to pass a short quiz on the contents of a bill, before they can vote on it
  • Two free cups of coffee per day for all Canadians, to bolster productivity
  • Creating the false impression in the United States that Canada is an absolute monarchy threatened by jihadists, then using the billions of dollars in aid to reduce university tuition
  • Replacement of the maple leaf at the centre of the Canadian flag with a stylized triceratops head
  • Prohibiting echolocation by bats, since it gives them an unfair advantage
  • Requiring all British Columbian provincial premiers to change their name to ‘Amor De Cosmos’ for the duration of their time in power
  • Putting giant papier mache birthday cakes on top of Canada’s nuclear power stations, to make them look more festive and less frightening
  • Destroying a couple of random asteroids, in order to deter any others that might be considering crashing into the Earth
  • Eliminating the laws against slander and libel, while creating a legal obligation for public figures to have a sense of humour
  • Incentives to encourage wombats and platypodes to immigrate to Canada

The party is open to platform suggestions, so please consider providing some as comments.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Ordinarily, the multi-generational family story is my least favourite kind of novel. I usually find them tedious and uncompelling. It speaks especially well of Junot Diaz’s book, then, that I found it engagingly written and worthwhile, though a rather darker read than I was expecting.

Diaz succeeds in giving distinct voices to his multiple narrators, though it wouldn’t have hurt to identify them at the beginning of each section. The book is also full of poignant and clever descriptions, though they may be a bit crass for some tastes. Diaz’s writing includes many untranslated Spanish passages, some of which at least provide hints of meaning to speakers of English and French, while some of which are simply incomprehensible without assistance. It also includes numerous references to science fiction and fantasy books, which are a passion of the novel’s titular figure.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is the way in which it effectively expresses the experience of living in a dictatorship that is also a police state: the arbitrary arrests, the inconsistent application of justice, the torture, the rapes, the fear, the spying between neighbours, the absurdity, and the inevitable abuse of power by the secret police. Diaz is very effective at conveying an impression (I cannot judge how accurate) of what the Dominican Republic was like under Rafael Trujillo, the man who looms over the book but whose assassination is relegated to a long footnote.

Reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao could serve as a bit of a vaccine for those who are frustrated by the imperfections of democracy and who wonder whether a benevolent despot might do better. With visceral language that makes for anxious reading, Diaz expresses the injustices that arise when power exists without oversight.

Flex your rights: anonymity

Being able to speak anonymously on the internet is an important right, in this age of increasingly constant surveillance. Because of organizations like the NSA, GCHQ, and Canada’s CSE, we can never know when our private conversations are actually being intercepted.

One tiny way to push back is to continue to be bold in asserting the importance of freedom of speech, even what circumstances compel that right to be used anonymously.

To leave anonymous comments on this site, just use whatever made-up name you like, including ‘anonymous’. If you use anon@sindark.com as your email address, you will get an anonymous logo beside your comment.

None of this is intended as an endorsement of the amorphous group ‘Anonymous‘.

Environmentalism and the anthropocene

The term ‘environmentalist’ is not consistently applied. In some circumstances, it is such a generic concept that it would include virtually everybody. If you don’t think we should fill the Grand Canyon with radioactive waste, perhaps you are an environmentalist. In other places, ‘environmentalist’ is a dirty word that politicians feel the need to distance themselves from, using labels like ‘conservationist’.

At the same time, there is enormous disagreement on the scale at which changes in environmental policy and behaviour need to take place. There seem to be people who genuinely think that things like plastic grocery bags are the true environmental scourges of our age (a sort of local environmentalism), but who do not see the planet as a whole as imperilled by human behaviour.

The term ‘anthropocene’ refers to the new geological era in which humanity is the most powerful force affecting what happens on Earth. We are much more influential now than the slow forces that made the climate change in the past. Barring an impact from a meteor or asteroid – or perhaps some kind of megavolcanic event – humanity will remain firmly in charge for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps we need another word for people who recognize this: that in an important sense there is no ‘wilderness’ left, and that the fate of the entire planet now comes down to human decisions. Recognizing this doesn’t mean that you care a lot about nature or wilderness – or even about humanity. It is just a recognition that on this spinning ball of iron (with a glaze of water on the surface and a whiff of atmosphere around) there are about seven billion bipedal primates who are running the show, albeit without a great deal of long-term thinking, ethical deliberation, or wisdom.

The Moral Landscape

Traditionally, science is understood as having limited authority on ethical questions. While scientific knowledge is useful for understanding the world better – including in ways that change our moral thinking – the idea that you can have a scientific answer to a moral question is usually rejected. That position is itself rejected by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values. Harris argues that we can use science to develop an objective sense of what is good for human beings and what is not, and that we can judge various practices using that scale. The book sharply and effectively criticizes both religious perspectives on the nature of the world and moral relativism. Indeed, the author’s principle project seems to be the development of a non-religious alternative to relativism, based around cognitive science. For the most part, his argument strikes me as a convincing one. That, in turn, has some important implications for political debates.

Harris’ book is a complex one that makes many different arguments and points. Often, he is able to illustrate his logic through clear examples, though some of them feel a bit cliched. He could also have devoted more attention to criticizing intuitive moral reasoning within western societies. He manages some elegant and convincing rebuttals, such as his response to the scapegoat problem on page 79 of the hardcover edition.

One key element of Harris’ argument is the view that it is the conscious life of animals that matters, when it comes to the basis of ethics: “[Q]uestions about values – about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose – are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures”. He argues this point convincingly, and suggests that we can build from that claim and from factual understanding of cognitive science to robust ethical judgements. Harris pays relatively little attention to non-human animals, but that is clearly an area into which such thinking can be extended, when it comes to questions like factory farming or veganism. Harris says that: “The only thing wrong with injustice is that it is, on same level, actually or potentially bad for people”. A richer ethical theory might incorporate the interests of other conscious organisms in some way.

Some of Harris’ concerns do seem a bit exaggerated. For instance, when he walks about the danger of “the societies of Europe” being “refashion[ed]” into “a new Caliphate”. He also has a bit too much faith in the power of brain scans as they now exist. Being able to track which parts of the brain receive more blood flow than others is useful, but doesn’t necessarily allow us to develop nuanced pictures of complex ideas and thought processes. As such, his argument that since functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of people thinking about mathematical equations resemble those of people considering ethical propositions, we should consider that evidence that the two are similar things.

Ultimately, the argument made in The Moral Landscape is utilitarian. We can come to know the basics of what makes up a good human life, and we should arrange states and global society so that people can experience them (and so that they avoid experiencing the worst things, like slavery and total personal insecurity). He makes the important point that we cannot expect to know all the consequences of particular choices, but we can nonetheless reach firm conclusions about important problems. Societies that provide education for women are better than societies that keep them in ignorance. That claim can be justified, according to Harris, by carefully examining the mental lives of people living in both kinds of society.

In particular, Harris highlights how societies that are based upon secular ethics consistently do better in measurable ways than those which are most explicitly modeled on religious ethics. “Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands”, Harris explains, “which are consistently the most atheistic societies on earth – consistently rate better tan religious nations on measures like like expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, economic equality, economic competitiveness, gender equality, health care, investments in education, rates of university enrollment, internet access, environmental protection, lack of corruption, political stability, and charity to poorer nations, etc”. He attributes the claim to P. Zuckerman’s 2008 book Society Without God.

Harris’ purpose is not a dispassionate one, focused on description. He says clearly that: “[c]hanging people’s ethical commitments… is the most important task facing humanity in the twenty-first century”. I am not sure if I quite agree. You can argue that people need to change the fundamental basis of their ethical views in order to deal with a world of 6.7 billion people. Alternatively, you can see the problem as the disconnect between the choices people make and the ethical views they already possess. If people could directly see the consequences of their choices, I think their existing ethical systems would often drive them to behave otherwise. It is because the consequences are mostly hidden – largely imposed on people in other places, and in the future – that people often make choices that are so oblivious to the harm they are forcing upon other conscious creatures. Harris argues that “one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions”. I think that is especially true when it comes to economics, public policy, and the environment.

Why not a world of 690 million?

As David MacKay’s book describes in detail, producing enough energy for everyone on Earth to live like the average European is possible using renewable forms of energy, though it would require a colossal effort and the conversion of a huge amount of land into renewable energy facilities like wind farms and concentrating solar plants.

Given that, the case for reducing population size within rich economies seems even stronger. Would Canada really be a worse place if it had a population of 50% what it does now? What about 10%? As long as the transition was gradual and done in an appropriate way, it could lead to a world in which there are more resources available per person, where the planet is better suited to dealing with our wastes, and where more of the planet can be left in some kind of a wild state, rather than converted for human purposes. Rather than cities that constantly spill beyond green zones into sprawling suburbs, we could live comfortably in the facilities we already have. With fewer workers around, each would be able to demand higher wages and benefits. There would also be more capital available per person for investment.

With a global population 1/10th of the current size, there would obviously be fewer brains out there, so the absolute pace of innovation would probably slow. At the same time, it would give the planet some welcome relief from the relentless pressure than human beings put on it, and would offer an opportunity for humanity to learn to live in a sustainable way before it destroys itself.

If the average number of children per woman can be reduced to well below the replacement rate, a falling population could result. The means of encouraging that need not be coercive, and many of them are beneficial in themselves. Better sexual education can be provided, particularly for girls. Universal access to contraception can likewise be provided, at the same time as women are given better educational opportunities and better treatment in the workplace. Governments can halt policies intended to promote large families, and instead concentrate on the task of reducing the burden humanity is placing on the Earth to a level that can be borne indefinitely. It would also be nice if improved mechanisms were developed for men to control their fertility, including through the development of drugs akin to hormonal birth control pills, which allow for fertility to be temporarily suspended.

People often assume that population control in poor countries with fast-growing populations is the key issue, when it comes to population and the environment. That view misrepresents the relative impact of different lifestyles, and the level of inequality that exists when it comes to resource use and waste production. The most important thing is probably to have fewer absolute gluttons – like Canadians, Americans, and Australians – and to work on providing the energy needs of the people who remain using safe, renewable sources of energy.

Ahead of the curve

When confronted with a crisis like the ongoing nuclear accident in Japan, individuals are faced with some difficult choices. Usually, the authorities tell them to take very modest precautions, like not drying your laundry outdoors if you live close to the plant. Individuals themselves can take additional precautions, but risk causing knock-on effects if they do.

An obvious example is trying to move farther from the accident site. It probably improves your personal safety to be farther away, but may be an ineffective approach if everyone tries to do it at once. That actually creates a stronger personal incentive to take early action. If you leave early – before most people are excessively concerned – you might actually make it. If you wait until the government tells everyone to leave, you might find yourself stuck in a relatively chaotic mass of scared people.

A less dramatic example is avoiding certain potentially risky activities, like consuming products from pastured animals. After nuclear accidents in other places, things like milk, wool, and meat have been contaminated. It is pretty clear why that is a risk – animals that graze across a wide area of pasture get exposed to whatever level of fallout has accumulated over all that land. The same is probably true of fish and other marine organisms that either filter large amounts of water or eat other animals that do.

All told, the situation in a disaster area may be a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma. The best choice for you may be to flee and/or take precautions, but doing so could cause problems for others. Furthermore, trying to do either of those things at the same time as everyone else is more difficult than taking action before others do. That risks creating a ‘run on the bank’ scenario, however, as people farther and farther from the disaster area rush to deplete pharmacies of potassium iodide, or to purchase air-filtering equipment.

Open thread: Libya

I haven’t had time to write anything about the ongoing situation in Libya, but I thought it would be worthwhile to have a discussion thread on the topic.

How do people interpret what is happening? As a democratic uprising? As a civil war? As a combination of the two?

What, if anything, should the international community do? Would imposing a no-fly zone be legal? Would it be a good idea?