Category: Politics

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

Evaluating religiously motivated actions

One interesting claim made by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is that religious values are fundamentally driven by concerns about how circumstances will affect the lives of human beings. For instance, doing what is necessary to get into heaven and avoid hell is ultimately good for you as an individual, even if it involves difficulty and sacrifice during your lifetimes. Similarly, Harris argues that suicide bombers who are partially motivated by the promise of a lavish afterlife are making decisions on the basis of faulty information about how their actions will affect their lives and (possibly) those of others.

Religious believers are arguably trying to maximize human welfare in both this world and the afterlife, which changes their moral calculations:

Religious believers can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, etc., without ever feeling obliged to argue that these practices actually cause suffering. They can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate human misery, while believing that these actions are morally obligatory. This pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm. (p.66 hardcover)

Harris also argues that when “people riot[ed], burn[ed] embassies, and [sought] to kill innocent people” in response to the Danish Mohammed cartoons, they were demonstrating a “terrifying inversion of priorities” in which the strictures of a particular religious doctrine were held to be of greater importance than the personal security (and expression rights) of other people.

While I don’t necessarily agree with Harris completely, I think he is right about one critical thing: it is important to be able to criticize religion on logical grounds. ‘Because my religious beliefs require me to do so’ is not an adeqaute explanation for human behaviour, and we should not let people justify themselves on such an unsatisfying basis. I think it is perfectly fair to point out when a religious belief seems to cause harmful consequences, or when different elements of the same religious doctrine seem to be contradictory. That isn’t to say all religiously motivated actions are harmful or problematic – just that the fact that they are religiously motivated does not set them in a special category where their consequences cannot be rationally contemplated.

Electricity sources in Canadian provinces

As discussed before, one reason why it is so challenging politically to put a price on carbon is because there is large regional disparity in how energy is produced.

This chart – taken from part three of Canada’s latest National Inventory Report to the UNFCCC – shows how each province generates its electricity:

Clearly, it is easier for some provinces to make use of low-carbon options like hydroelectricity than it is for others. Also, much of that hydro capacity was built before policy-makers were seriously concerned about climate change.

That being said, the science is now very clear and the period in which people can justifiably claim ignorance about the climatic consequences of their actions is over. Places that made their energy choices before humanity was aware of all the implications of climate change can make a legitimate case for some adjustment time. That said, the defence of ignorance no longer holds and the clock on that adjustment time is ticking.

Science and morality

I encourage readers to pick up a copy of Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. A friend and I are already reading it, with the intention of discussing it, and my preliminary experience suggests that it will provide good fodder for discussion.

Harris argues that what is good and what is bad ultimately depends on the experiences of conscious beings. Since science can illuminate what those experiences are like and what triggers them, science can speak on moral questions.

Harris also questions the moral authority accorded to religions. Just as religions teach deeply misleading things about the physical nature of the universe (such as that it is 6,000 years old, was created in six days, and contains unchanging species), they arguably teach deeply misleading things about morality, since their prescriptions fail to encourage the well being of conscious beings.

Rather than leap into discussion of these ideas now, I encourage readers to buy or borrow the book. It will be more interesting to discuss on the basis of all of its contents, rather than on the basis of my brief comments on some of the early pages combined with the pre-existing beliefs of myself and readers.

A pan-European electricity grid

Last month, The Economist made a convincing case that a pan-European electricity grid could help Europe move to a future more compatible with a stable climate:

This offshore grid is the germ of a big dream: a Europe-wide system of electricity highways. If it makes sense in the North Sea, it makes even more for wind and solar power from Spain and, one day, solar energy from the Sahara desert. And as well as Norwegian reservoirs, why not store power in existing Alpine valleys? This would reduce the need for more power stations to balance the spikes and troughs of renewables. Moreover if producers could trade energy over the grid in a single market, the benefits could be bigger still. European officials reckon energy savings of some 20-25% would be possible.

Such ideas have nostalgic appeal because the European Union was born from a move to pool energy sources in 1951 in the European Coal and Steel Community. These days the EU can be the community of wind and sun, not to mention gas and nuclear power. The trouble is that such dreams are not cheap. The European Commission this week said that €1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) of investment would be needed in the next decade. Most should come from the industry, but a chunk must also come from already tight public budgets.

They are wrong, however, to claim that rising natural gas consumption is not a major problem. Burning gas may be a better way to get a kilowatt-hour of electricity than burning coal, but both are unacceptable in a world where carbon dioxide concentrations are already dangerously high.

Europe’s improved grid should be connecting energy demand centres to diverse and disparate sources of renewable wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal energy – not perpetuating dependence on fossil fuels.

War photographer

In my photojournalism class, we watched the 2001 documentary War Photographer, about the work of James Nachtwey. The film showed him working in both conflict zones and zones of acute poverty, including Indonesia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. It was interesting and well done, and may well have been a balanced portrayal, but the absence of any kind of critical comment on Nachtwey made it feel somewhat like a hagiography.

It may well be the case that Nachtwey is a talented and self-sacrificing man who has helped to increase public concern about various sorts of severe suffering. At the same time, an account based on his own perspective – along with that of his friends, admirers, and co-workers – cannot make that case convincingly. I suppose this is a fundamental problem with autobiographies. Perhaps there should be some sort of third-party certification process where impartial outsiders compare the content of a book or film with all the information they can gather, and then certify or refuse to certify the content. Of course, not many politicians or other public figures would be willing to go through such a screening.

One potent message conveyed by the film is about extreme poverty. Seeing families living right beside dangerous railroad tracks in Indonesia sends a powerful emotional message. Of course, our intellectual response to seeing that varies depending on a constellation of other beliefs. Some people will see that and think: “This shows why economic growth is such a vital phenomenon, when it comes to improving human welfare”. Others will focus more on distributive justice, and say that the issue is less about enriching everyone, and more about transferring wealth from the affluent to the desperately poor.

Ethics and weapons of mass destruction

Unsurprisingly, my review of Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb generated a discussion on the ethics of the United States using such bombs on Japan in 1945.

In the same book, a moral question with some similar characteristics comes up. Describing the American attack on Iwo Jima, Rhodes explains:

Washington secretly considered sanitizing the island with artillery shells loaded with poison gas lobbed in by ships standing well offshore; the proposal reached the White House by Roosevelt curtly vetoed it. It might have saved thousands of lives and hastened the surrender – arguments used to justify most of the mass slaughters of the Second Worlld War, and neither the United States nor Japan had signed the Geneva Convention prohibiting such use – but Roosevelt presumably remembered the world outcry that followed German introduction of poison gas in the First World War and decided to leave the sanitizing of Iwo Jima to the U.S. Marines.

In the end, 6,821 American marines were killed and 21,865 were injured. 20,000 Japanese troops died, with 1,083 ultimately surrendering.

I presume most readers think the use of poison gas would have been more immoral than attacking with Marines, despite how similar numbers of Japanese troops would likely have been killed in either case. What I am curious about is the reasoning. Is the use of certain kinds of weapons fundamentally unacceptable, regardless of the consequences of their use or non-use? Or would using poison gas on Iwo Jima have established a harmful precedent that would have caused greater suffering later? Or is there some other justification?

Spying on the U.N.

In addition to describing many situations of allies spying on allies, Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story Of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency also describes a number of alleged incidents of the United States and United Kingdom spying on the United Nations, particularly during the led-up to the Iraq War.

Aldrich describes how the NSA and GCHQ used the UNSCOM weapons inspectors in Iraq as “short-range collectors” of signals intelligence (SIGINT). He also describes the bugging of the U.N. headquarters in Iraq during that period, the bugging of the U.N. Secretariat (including Secretary General Annan’s office), and espionage conducted against non-permanent members of the Security Council before the vote that would have authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Aldrich claims that “listening in on the UN was routine” and that “in 1945 the United States had pressed for the UN headquarters to be in New York precisely in order to make eavesdropping easier”.

GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency

Richard Aldrich’s excellent GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency contributes significantly to the public understanding of the role secret intelligence agencies have played in world affairs and the domestic politics of Britain and elsewhere. From the codebreaking of the second world war to the frightening mass surveillance and data mining of the modern era, Aldrich provides a consistently interesting and informative account. Technical details on signals intelligence (SIGINT) techniques are relatively few, but the book contains a lot of new and interesting information running quite close to the present day.

GCHQ’s history

The Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) is Britain’s version of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) or Canada’s Communication Security Establishment (CSE). They are primarily the governments interceptors and decrypters of communications: from the telemetry data from the missile tests of foreign powers to (increasingly) the electronic records tracking the communication and behaviour of all ordinary citizens. Aldrich covers the history of GCHQ from the second world war virtually up to the present day: with long sections on the U.S.-U.K. intelligence alliance; the Cold War; progressing intelligence technologies; overseas listening stations and decolonization; terrorism; secrecy, the media, and oversight by politicians and the public; the post-Cold War era; and the modern day.

Aldrich describes an extraordinary number of cases of allies spying on one another: from the United States and United Kingdom during the interwar and WWII periods to India bugging Tony Blair’s hotel room during a Prime Ministerial visit to the considerable espionage conducted by the U.S. and U.K. against the United Nations Security Council and Secretariat in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. It is safe to assume that everybody is spying on everybody all the time. Indeed, in the later chapters, GCHQ describes how private organizations and organized crime groups are increasingly getting into the game. For instance, he alleges that British banks have paid out billions of Pounds to hackers who have gotten into their systems and blackmailed them.

GCHQ also documents the collusion between private companies and espionage organizations, going back at least to the telegraph and earliest submarine cables. Right from the beginning, the owners and operators of these communication links secretly passed along data to intelligence organizations, which was used for purposes of diplomatic and military espionage, as well as to gain economic advantage through industrial espionage. Aldrich also describes how private companies have been made to build back doors into their products so that organizations like GCHQ and the NSA can crack the communications of people using them. This applied to manufacturers of cryptographic equipment in neutral countries like Switzerland during the Cold War.

Aldrich also argues that the Data Encryption Standard (DES) was intentionally weakened to allow NSA snooping, though I have read elsewhere that the NSA actually used its expertise to strengthen the algorithm. Aldrich does a good job of describing one deep tension in the current mandate of GCHQ: on one hand, it is increasingly encouraged to help private British companies like banks secure their computer and communication systems. At the same time, it tries to preserve back doors and insecure communication methods in products used by others, so as not to undermine its own espionage mandate. Similarly, Aldrich talks on a number of occasions about the tension between using intelligence information and protecting the sources and methods used to acquire it. While it may be especially damning to condemn the dubious actions of a foreign power using their own intercepted and decrypted communication, doing so inevitably informs them that you are reading their traffic. Something similar is true when it comes to using surreptitiously acquired information to prosecute criminal trials.

GCHQ contains lots of information on the spotty record of the world’s intelligence services, when it comes to predicting major events. He describes many situations where policy-makers were caught by surprise, because their spy services didn’t pass along warning. These include the Yom Kippur War, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and others. Aldrich also describes the Iraq-WMD fiasco, what it shows about the analysis of intelligence services, and what some of its broader political ramifications were.

At many points, Aldrich identifies how GCHQ and the NSA are by far the most costly intelligence services of the U.K. and U.S. respectively. The NSA dwarfs the CIA, just as GCHQ dwarfs MI5 and MI6 in staffing and resources. This is reflective of the special importance placed on intercepted communications by policy-makers. It is arguably also demonstrative of how GCHQ has been able to use the deep secrecy of its work to evade government scrutiny and secure considerable material support.

GCHQ’s present

The last section of Aldrich’s book is positively frightening. He describes how the fear of terrorism has driven a massive increase in technical surveillance – certainly within the U.K. but very likely elsewhere as well. He describes how a 2006 European law requires telephone and internet companies to retain comprehensive records of the communications of their customers for ten years, and how the government is planning to store their own copy of the information for data mining purposes. Aldrich explains:

The answer [to why the government wants its own copy of the data] is ‘data mining’, the use of computers to comb through unimaginable amounts of information looking for patterns and statistical relationships. This practice now constitutes the most insidious threat to personal liberty. What makes surveillance different in the age of ubiquitous computer and the mobile phone is that our data is never thrown away. Machines routinely store millions of details about our everyday lives, and at some point in the future it will be possible to bring these all together and search them.

Aldrich quotes a disturbing warning from the retiring Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald GC. Macdonald warns that powers are being irreversibly granted to the state, and that “we may end up living with something we can’t bear.”

Personally, I think all this is much more dangerous than terrorism. If the choice is between tolerating a few terrorist attacks per year and building up a gigantic secret alliance between government and private companies, designed to track all the details of the lives of individuals, I would prefer the terrorism. After all, terrorist groups are weak outlaw organizations with limited resources. The state, by contrast, is massive, potent, permanent, and not always subject to effective oversight. Our fear of a few bands of fanatics (collectively far less dangerous than smoking or car crashes) is driving us into giving the state unparalleled ability to monitor everybody.

The book is similar in purpose to Matthew Aid’s The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency, though I think Aldrich’s book is significantly better. I recommend the entire book to history buffs and those with an interest in intelligence or the Anglo-American alliance. The last section – on the growing power of the state in response to terrorism – I recommend to everybody.

Finland’s nuclear waste dump

This is interesting: Finland is building a radioactive waste dump meant to store the stuff safely for at least 100,000 years. They are in the process of building a new nuclear reactor and – rather admirably – their law requires that the waste be dealt with domestically, rather than exported.

I have argued previously that I would feel more comfortable with the construction of new nuclear plants in Canada if the utilities building them also had to build adequate waste storage facilities before the power plants became operational.

The Warrior’s Honour

It is strange to read Michael Ignatieff’s The Warrior’s Honour now, when he is leader of the official opposition rather than a journalist. Back in 1998, Ignatieff described the purpose of the book:

I wanted to find out what mixture of moral solidarity and hubris led Western nations to embark on this brief adventure in putting the world right.

Ignatieff is making reference to the whole notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’ which emerged strongly after the scale of both killing and western inaction in the 1994 Rwandan genocide became apparent. The book is certainly dated in some ways, which can be a liability. At the same time, it has value insofar as it does express one perspective of that time, and facilitates consideration of what has changed since.

The central concept of Ignatieff’s book is the ethics of warriors themselves – the internal moral forces that sometimes help to constrain behaviour within the most limited bounds of ethics, even in wartime. He explores the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as special representatives (‘enforcers’ is too strong a word) of the Geneva Conventions. He explains how Henry Dunant – founder of the organization – established a continuing tradition in which delegates of the ICRC have “made their pact with the devil of war” and “accept[ed] the inevitability, sometimes even the desirability of war” while “trying, if it is possible, to conduct it according to certain rules of honour.” Ignatieff also describes the consequences when warriors abandon honour, as he alleges took place during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when former neighbours destroyed their collective homeland driven by “the narcissism of minor difference.”

The Warrior’s Honour is not an especially practical book. The tone is more mournful and ambiguous than certain or persuasive. It doesn’t offer much guidance to those trying to decide how to respond to the humanitarian emergencies of today. Ignatieff’s book does more to describe the predicament than to suggest paths out of it, though that is a valuable undertaking in itself. In the conclusion, he explains:

The chief moral obstacle in the path of reconciliation is the desire for revenge. Now, revenge is commonly regarded as a low and unworthy emotion, and because it is regarded as such, its deep moral hold on people is rarely understood. But revenge – morally considered – is the desire to keep faith with the dead, to honour their memory by taking up their cause where they left of. Revenge keeps faith between generations; the violence it engenders is a ritual form of respect for the community’s dead – therein lies its legitimacy. Reconciliation is difficult precisely because it must compete with the powerful alternative morality of violence. Political terror is tenacious because it is an ethical practice. It is a cult of the dead, a dire and absolute expression of respect.

One has to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better for humanity to simply forget the outrages of the past, given the tragic way in which they perpetuate conflict into the present and future. Like feuding gangs, human beings feel this constant compulsion to respond to every slight with a larger slight, and pay back every rape and murder with two more.

Given the course of Michael Ignatieff’s life, the book also highlights the tragic theatrical character of government and opposition. As a journalist, Ignatieff could grapple with major political and ethical questions with a kind of integrity and with acceptance that the answers derived from history are usually imperfect and uncertain. As a politician, he must engage in a much less sophisticated slinging back-and-forth of accusations. One of many unfortunate facts about political life is that proximity to power tends to be accompanied by a cheapening of discourse.