Some thoughts and news

A sobering thought or two

Comments to me here recently raised the issue of how to assess what politicians and others say and do. The argument is that one needs to look at both words and deeds. This blast got me thinking:

An example is Biden's campaign pledge to end new oil drilling on public lands and federal waters. This summer he announced plans for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska. So you have words and then action. Promises and realities. .... Climate activists were angered. Then again, the fossil fuel industry was not satisfied either because it wasn't enough to drive prices down and meet energy needs for Europe (and line their pockets in the process). I see this disjuncture of word and deed as largely a byproduct of what I interpret as unwise sanctions policies. So, we have his rhetoric (no new drilling), the reality (announces new drilling) and then judgments will vary about just how to explain the disjuncture in this case since they don't line up.

Is Biden hypocritical or pragmatic here? Is he going too far or not far enough in terms of ramping up oil production here? Are the sanctions well planned or did the US and Europe shoot themselves in the foot with them?

My response:

I don't know how to answer any of those questions. I'm not sure there is any definitive answer. Most people who support or oppose Biden will probably mostly answer with their biases, e.g., group or tribe loyalty, and/or how they define applicable concepts, e.g., hypocrite vs. pragmatic, or well planned vs. shot in the foot.

Is politics more inscrutable than discernable? Seems so, at least on initial impression. Stepping back, if modern politics is mostly inscrutable, history cannot be any less so, but could be (probably is) more so.

Response to my response:

There is no one definitive answer to questions like that. That's part of what I'm saying. At this level (that of interpreting political actions in terms of broader conceptions of what is good, bad, productive, harmful) there frequently are not "definitive answers."

So, is it even possible to assess words and deeds? In politics and history, maybe it usually isn't. I melted down into a blob of confusion and philosophical nihilist thoughts, but I got better after a while. 

Me before I got better

Fun times in Mexico

Meanwhile, someone hacked the Mexican military. What they found was disquieting. Maybe another democracy is on the verge of falling to autocrats, plutocrats and kleptocrats. But who knows, maybe that would be an improvement . . . . . nah, never mind. The NYT writes:

A major hack targeting Mexico’s Defense Ministry has shed light on the country’s most secretive and powerful institution, documenting its expanding influence over the civilian government, attempts to evade cooperation on a landmark human rights investigation and spying on journalists using the spyware known as Pegasus.

Detailed in the data breach are the military’s own internal probes and suspicions that powerful government officials, like state governors and the current interior minister, are linked to organized crime networks, including drug cartels.  

As journalists in Mexico search through the enormous hack, the information revealed in news articles so far has illuminated the military’s growing hold over civilian institutions and its close relationship with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The Mexican military has a history of human rights abuses and massacres of civilians, and has long resisted oversight and accountability. The leaked emails show — in military officials’ own words — how the institution maneuvers to sidestep the government, empower itself and protect its own members, however junior.

Things do not look so good for democracy in our neighbor to the south. 

Global moral order - status update

This is from a review of a 2017 book:

More than hundred years ago Andrew Carnegie established Church Peace Union aimed at fostering world peace by promoting dialogue among the world’s faiths. .... Michael Ignatieff’s 2017 book, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World, initially was conceived as part of the celebration of the centennial of Carnegie’s project. The idea of the book was “to commemorate the illusions about moral progress that gave rise to Carnegie’s bequest in 1914, as well as to investigate what moral globalization looks like in the twenty-first century”; ....

In each location, Ignatieff finds a common emphasis on what he describes as “ordinary virtues” – the collection of habits and intuitions such as trust, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation. These are not the result of abstract moral reasoning, but are rather “unreflexive and unthinking”. In all locations, as Ignatieff underlines, the individuals they talked to never separated their own private dilemmas from the wider social context of conflict in which they lived: “Generalities about human obligation and moral reasoning [mean] little”; instead, “context was all” (рр. 26–27). .... ordinary people think through moral situations in terms of concrete human relations with their family and friends.

The book shows that in view of the actions of individuals within a local community, the language of human rights is ambiguous. As Ignatieff argues, the human rights revolution has changed what many of us believe about the duty of states; but he doubts it has changed us (р. 216). At the same time, the spread of democracy and of the idea of human rights universalized the notion that citizens have a right to be heard. .... So, Ignatieff writes, “we are in a new moral era in which the struggle for equality has produced a clamor, sometimes violent, for recognition and acknowledgment” (р. 28).

.... the most striking feature of the ordinary virtue perspective is how rarely any of the participants evoked universal principles of any kind – that is, ideas of general obligation to human beings as such – and how frequently they reasoned in terms of the local, the contingent, the here and now, what they owed those near to them and what they owed themselves.

Well, if morals are local but our big problems and existential threats are global, we're possibly hosed. Someone needs to figure some way to globalize moral values that are anti-self destructive and unite the disunited. At present, that does not appear to be possible. 

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for raising the words and deeds issue, and pointing out Ignatieff’s research and the book review.