Category: Politics

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

Marriage for citizenship

The ongoing struggle for equal rights for gay couples has kept the issue of how states should legislate marriage at the political forefront in recent years. To me, the question of whether two consenting adults – regardless of sex – want to wed is entirely settled, as far as ethics are concerned. Places that restrict that right for same-sex couples are simply bigoted and operating under antiquated laws.

A broader question is the legitimate purposes for which people can get married. Clearly, we don’t believe child-rearing to be an essential component of marriage, or we wouldn’t allow the aged and infertile to do it. What then of those who want to get married because of economic benefits (health care, tax breaks, etc) or in order to acquire citizenship. Does it devalue marriage when people use it for such purposes? Should states try to prevent people from using marriage in that way, by trying to separate those who want to wed for ‘approved’ reasons from those who want to wed for ‘inappropriate’ ones?

I have argued before that states should treat marriage as just another contract. That being said, I do think there could be some validity to the argument that using marriage as a mechanism for achieving legal benefits is something of an affront to its importance as an institution. After all, it is the social importance of marriage that explains why homosexuals want to gain access to it. That being said, it seems like an awkward role for the state to try to determine the reasons why a couple want to wed. Also, a case can be made that immigration law and regulations on healthcare are overly restrictive, as of now, and that any mechanism that opens them up a bit has value.

What do readers think?

Politics and economic anxiety

There is a video circulating online – at least until Disney’s lawyers kill it – that combines old footage of Donald Duck in a dire financial situation with current recordings of Glenn Beck. The point being made seems to be that much of the stregth of the Tea Party movement and individuals like Beck derives from the fear that individuals have about their current financial situation, or near financial future.

I am always curious about the readership of this site, partly because being aware of the situations in which participants find themselves could help illustrate why general currents of thought run in the way they do. To that end, I would be curious to get responses to these questions:

  1. Has anybody reading this site suffered a major financial blow, in response to the global economic crisis that has been ongoing since about 2008? Examples would include getting laid off, having your house foreclosed, etc.
  2. Has anybody suffered a more minor financial blow, such as having to cancel a vacation, experiencing a notable drop in the size of your investment portfolio, etc?
  3. Has anybody suffered from a great deal of anxiety about the state of their current or future economic circumstances, to the extent that it has been one of the top things on their mind?

Whether it is reflected in the readership of this site or not, the difference in perspective between those deeply concerned about current economic conditions and those for who they are a somewhat secondary issue could help to explain much of the political confusion in North America. For instance, the frustration of some people who think we are failing to act on critical long-term problems, because of our obsession with short-term economic performance. And, in contrast, those who are frustrated by the ambition of others to press on with major long-term reforms, at a time when they feel immediate relief is the most pressing priority.

Canada doesn’t deserve a UN Security Council seat

At the moment, Canada is competing for one of the ten non-permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council – the principal international body charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Canada thinks of itself as an internationalist country that has committed itself to peacekeeping and other forms of international assistance. Unfortunately, Canada is also doing virtually everything in its power to worsen the most pressing medium-term threat to international security, namely climate change.

At the moment, the United Nations process designed to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol is going nowhere. While that situation has many causes, one of the most important has been the unwillingness of developed states to make real commitments and take meaningful domestic action. For its part, Canada has adopted targets that would be better than nothing, but which are neither fair now adequate. In order for the world to avoid dangerous climate change, other countries would need to pick up the slack created by Canada’s lack of ambition. Even worse, Canada has no credible plan to meet those targets, and has taken no serious domestic action on climate change.

Right now, Canada is flirting with some of the most dangerous energy options out there. These include unconventional oil and gas, including the oil sands and shale gas, as well as fossil fuel reserves in formerly inaccessible places like the Arctic. Chasing those fossil fuels is foolishness. It commits us to perpetuating an energy system that profoundly threatens future generations, and redirects resources from the task of building a sustainable basis for our society.

As long as Canada continues to behave with such reckless disregard for those outside its borders, including those who are not yet born, it doesn’t deserve the prestige associated with a Security Council seat. To be sure, some of Canada’s international actions have been and are praiseworthy, but that doesn’t counterbalance the way in which Canada is helping to commit the world to a colossal blunder. Ultimately, it may require Canada becoming an international pariah before our government will stand up to the oil and gas sector. Hopefully, it won’t come to that. If Canada loses its bid for this seat on the basis of domestic and international disapproval of our environmental record, perhaps it will be a much-needed signal that our recent conduct has been unacceptable.

[Update: 12 October 2010] Canada’s bid was unsuccessful. Hopefully, the embarassment will encourage Canada to play a more constructive role in future climate change negotiations.

Democracies and the wisdom of crowds

There are no perfect democratic systems; all those that have ever existed, that exist now, and that will exist have flaws.

In systems like Canada’s, voters choose between individual candidates. And yet, the platforms and leadership of parties are usually much more important for the direction of policy-making than the identity of individual Members of Parliament. By contrast, there are countries with systems of proportional representation in which the importance given to individuals is too little. That leaves voters without a direct mechanism for electing especially wise or capable people, and can diminish the level of awareness assemblies have to local issues.

On many other dimensions, the structure and character of democratic governments differ – whether the issue is the lobbying system, electoral law, federal versus central states, or something else. Each particular set of circumstances aids some groups (think of how Canada’s first-past-the-post system helps the Bloc Quebecois) while harming others (think of the Greens).

In the end, it isn’t possible for every country to establish a government that incorporates every desirable feature. Quite simply, some of them directly contradict others. What could be possible, however, is to exploit the wisdom of crowds. If we recognize that our system of government has deficiencies that manifest themselves in problematic policies, keeping an eye on policy development in other jurisdictions can serve as a bit of a counter to that. This already happens, for example, as when people turn to Scandinavia when discussing drug or childcare policies.

Taking a step further, it is possible for the political decisions in other democratic places to directly affect the situation in Canada. One major mechanism for this is when courts apply foreign precedents, particularly when dealing with new areas of law, or issues in which societal expectations are changing. Every time a judge presented with a case on gay rights or intellectual property gives consideration to what is happening in Europe or New Zealand or India, they are taking advantage of the diversity in policies that accompanies the diversity in forms of democratic government.

The ultimate example is something like the European Union, which actually incorporates 27 democratic governments and has decision-making power of its own. One of the reasons why it is such an exciting experiment is because of the potential it was for allowing the flaws of each constituent state to be partially counterbalanced by the sensible overall character of the consensus.

Of course, all this is anathema to the kind of old school patriots who are fearful of foreign precedents in domestic courts and cling as much as possible to the original words and meanings of founding documents. That is not an entirely irrational attitude. It is certainly possible that following the wisdom of crowds will produce a worse outcome than going it alone will. Overall, however, I think that a greater degree of international policy coordination is likely to be beneficial. Partly, that is a consequence of the extreme interconnectedness and interdependence of human beings today. The happenings in one political jurisdiction have never been more relevant and important to the inhabitants of all others. That – along with the potential to smooth the rough edges of our domestic political systems – is a major reason for making our sovereignties a bit more porous.

Debating the oil sands

On November 13th, Green Party leader Elizabeth May will be debating Ezra Levant, the author of Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands. The event is taking place at the Library and Archives Canada on November 13th.

2:30pm – showing of the film “Mine Your Own Business”

4:00pm – approximate debate start time

It should be interesting. I may show up myself to ask Ms. Levant about the oil sands, climate change, and the importance of cumulative emissions.

I found out about the event via Apt 613.

How much will the Democrats suffer?

As the mid-term elections approach in the United States, speculation about the outcome is increasing. The smart money seems to be on a pretty substantial defeat for the Democrats – probably losing their majority in the House of Representatives, but probably hanging on in the Senate (where only 1/3 of members face election this year).

To some extent, the probable Democratic defeat is the product of disappointment with the Obama administration. If so, it strikes me as deeply irrational. While you can certainly argue that the Obama administration should have been more ambitious in areas like climate change policy or financial regulation, it seems inconceivable that a Republican victory would aid progress on either front. Rather, it would serve primarily to further castrate a once-promising administration.

Hopefully, the infighting between Tea Party sorts and the rest of the Republican Party will somewhat diminish the strength of the resurgence of the right. Similarly, it is to be hoped that supporters of a progressive agenda will be willing to set aside their self-righteousness for long enough to pull a lever or two in a booth somewhere.

I say that not because I think the Democrats are an especially good party, but rather because it seems nearly certain that a Republican controlled Congress would produce even worse outcomes, both for those living within the United States and for those around the world who are affected by its politics.

Smoking and climate change

Tristan keeps telling me that ozone depletion and acid rain are poor comparisons for climate change. Yes, they were major environmental problems that were identified scientifically, and then dealt with legislatively. But addressing them only really involved a small number of organizations, and processes that could be fairly readily replaced. Addressing the issues didn’t require much social or political change.

That’s fair enough, but perhaps there is an alternative comparison that is useful: smoking. Watching Mad Men constantly reminds me of how much of a transformation there has been in the public attitude toward smoking in the past few decades. While part of that was certainly driven by personal fear (smoking will kill you personally, climate change will not), the transition also involved moral arguments about the effects of secondhand smoke on unconsenting others. And it involved government imposing increasingly harsh regulations on an industry that was highly profitable, powerful, and fundamentally opposed to having its products restrained by law.

Perhaps growing awareness of the harms fossil fuels impose on others – including those in future generations – could help to drive a similar cultural shift. We have promising alternatives to fossil fuels, but our political system is still unwilling to take on the industries that want to keep us reliant on them. Perhaps smoking suggests that could change.

Reasons to be hopeful

Climate change is a daunting problem, about which humanity is doing far too little. While all the characteristics that make climate change a massively difficult thing to deal with are daunting, there are also numerous reasons to be hopeful about humanity’s future. Those who are alive now are likely to live to see the question of how much the climate changes decided, either in favour of unconstrained burning of fossil fuels accompanied by unconstrained warming, or shifted decisively toward zero-carbon forms of energy and a sustainable future.

That potential shift represents a major opportunity for humanity. For tens of thousands of years, human societies functioned using renewable forms of energy: primarily sunlight embedded in crops and biomass. Since about 1750, humanity has benefited from the massive burst of embedded energy accessible in fossil fuels. The evidence of that energy is everywhere: from highways to high rises. Now, we are obliged by pragmatism and ethics to swap out the unsustainable core of all our society’s undertakings and replace it with one that is compatible with the potentially unending string of human generations which could follow this one. If the generations alive now, and those that will be born soon, manage to achieve that transition, they will have effected one of the most importance changes in the history of humanity: a great shift from a global society built on the weak and threatening foundation of fossil fuels to one that can be relied upon indefinitely.

The rate of change in human societies is easy to underestimate, and yet the world has been transformed to an enormous extent in each of the past few centuries. Those transformations have largely been uncoordinated – arising from disparate actors making choices in response to the local incentives they face, as well as their worldviews and ideologies. Functional worldviews now must be exactly that: perspectives that are capable of taking seriously the bounded, finite, and interconnected nature of the world in which we live. If we are capable of driving the emergence of such worldviews, it seems as though the benefits could be numerous. Dealing with climate change requires that we act selflessly in anticipation of problems that science has uncovered, lurking out in future decades. If we can learn to respond intelligently to that threat – and press the emergence of a political and economic system that has that capability – it seems that humanity will be knit together in a newly intentional way. A way that includes the recognition of mutual interconnection and vulnerability, which appreciates how changes that unfold across long timescales can nonetheless require present and enthusiastic action, and which may be capable of addressing the many other problems which threaten humanity, albeit not as profoundly as climate change seems to.

In a way, the fossil fuel industry itself demonstrates the kind of human capabilities that are now required. Whereas extracting oil was once a comparatively simple matter, the global network of systems that extracts, processes, and uses fossil fuels is the product of a massive investment of resources and ingenuity across decades. Capabilities like deepwater drilling and the upgrading of heavy oils demonstrate what the combination of capital and human intellect can produce. Until now, most renewable forms of energy have been bit players from a societal perspective. As it becomes increasingly clear that the future of our energy system lies in the use of such technologies, it is fair to hope that some of those resources and intellectual capabilities will be turned to the project of their deployment and improvement.

The challenge facing us is an enormous one: one that requires a new level of global coordination across all continents and across the decades and centuries ahead. It is reasonable to see it as a test of humanity – whether we can behave collectively in an intelligent way, responding to a problem that is anticipated rather than immediately obvious, or whether we really are just a swarm which cannot be coordinated. While my reasons for hope may not be wholly rational, pressing ahead with the possibility of success in mind is surely preferable to despairing at the difficulty of the problem.