Chapter Review: The Rise of Race Thinking, Racism and the Imperialist Bureaucracy

Racism: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior; the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races

Race thinking: being short of overt racism, it is a mode of thinking or mindset, conscious or not, where race is a factor or category in perceiving people, which tends to create a moral distance between races, thereby making stereotyping and inevitable associations of superiority vs inferiority more easily seen as plausible and likely valid; the stereotyping mindset tends to lock perceptions of individuals in different races into something that is unchangeable due to circumstances of one’s birth; it arises not from accepting that race differences exist, which is harmless, but from thinking about people in terms of race as such

This is a review of chapters 6 and 7 of Hannah Arendt’s influential 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. These chapters are from Imperialism, which are in part two of her three-part book. Part one is Antisemitism, and part three is Totalitarianism. Chapter six is entitled Race Thinking Before Racism, and chapter seven is Race and Bureaucracy. These two chapters describe Arendt’s unique interpretation of the key historical precedents that formed global imperialism from 1887 to 1917 and later political events in Europe that led to the indescribably brutal and dehumanizing totalitarianism that Hitler and Stalin perfected a few decades later.

Chapter Six: Race-Thinking Before Racism: The period of imperialism with its central moral value of endless expansion and accumulation of wealth ran from 1884 until 1914 and the beginning of WWI. Chapter 6 chronicles the rise of race thinking that preceded this period and led to the true racism that was one of the necessary ingredients of imperialism. Race-thinking emerged in the 1700s and developed in the 1800s. It opened the door to romanticized perceptions of non-white races and their cultures. At the time, there was a widespread belief in Europe that all people were equal and that moral value stood in the way of the development of both imperialism and totalitarianism.

Arendt describes race-thinking in France, England, Germany and Prussia as arising for different reasons in response to differing political, geographic and economic conditions. In England, race-thinking developed to help maintain foreign possessions by fostering “unity among people who lived in far-flung colonies beyond seas, separated from the mother country by thousands of miles.” Specifically, the English relied on race-thinking to discourage intermarriage to protect the English lineage. Darwin’s 1859 Origins of the Species bolstered the English vision by including a scientific basis for the competition of the fittest, with the fittest being racially pure English. “Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race as well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral”, but it was used nonetheless to justify all manner of beliefs, including pacifism, cosmopolitanism and imperialism.

In France, the nobility was drawn to the idea that the French aristocracy was of Germanic descent and that theory was used as an instrument to foment internal political discord. The nobility was fighting to maintain power in the face of political change. French race-thinking was influenced by a work of overt racism by the aristocrat Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau in his 1853 work, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Gobineau, whose work became prominent later in the 1800s, wrote that “the fall of civilizations is due to a degeneration of race and that the decay of race is due to the mixture of blood.” Arendt paints a curious picture of Gobineau: “Nobody before Gobineau thought of finding one single reason, one single force according to which civilization always and everywhere rises and falls. . . . He was only a curious mixture of frustrated nobleman and modern intellectual who almost by accident invented racism.” But in France, Gobineau’s idea had to compete with the contradictory French ideal of equality of all.

By contrast, race-thinking in Prussia developed not by the aristocracy for self-defense, but “as a weapon of certain nationalists who wanted the union of all German-speaking peoples and therefore insisted on a common origin.” Similarly, race-thinking in Germany arose and was employed to foster nationalist thinking and national emancipation “in an effort to unite the people against foreign domination.” The foreign domination that stimulated that idea was Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian army.

Thus, race-thinking in France was a weapon to foster civil war, in England a tool for colonial rule, while in Prussia and Germany, it was a tool to build nationalist sentiment, but ultimately it turned out to be a weapon to foment war among nations. Clearly, the origins of race-thinking reflected the circumstances and progression in thinking of the times and it led to varying outcomes in the 20th century.

The Surviving Ideologies: Before “the fateful days of the ‘scramble for Africa,’” Arendt describes race-thinking as part of liberalism, and just one of many ideas competing for public acceptance. Regarding ideology, Arendt asserts that “an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution to ‘all the riddles of the universe’, or to the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.” She goes on:

Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology that interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. . . . . free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views. . . . . Every full-fledged ideology has been created and continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine.

Arendt appears to take a rather dim view of political ideologies in general. That raises the question of what ideology, if any, hers might have been. Nothing in this chapter or the next gives any clear indication.
Chapter six concludes with this: “Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking ever has existed in the civilized world. Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help to racism.” In sum, Arendt sees race-thinking as a doctrine with the appearance of national respectability and tradition that led to racism and “its utter incompatibility with all Western political and moral standards of the past, even before it was allowed to destroy the comity of European nations.”

Chapter seven, Race and Bureaucracy: This chapter focuses on the two key ingredients of colonial imperialism, full-blown racism and the development of a cold, aloof bureaucracy that operated, as much as possible, in strict secrecy with absolutely no governing law, treaty, control or moral constraint from the motherland or any other authority or source, e.g., the Bible. Colonial imperialism was, if nothing else, ruthless, cruel, uncaring and utterly focused on wealth accumulation and expansion. Deaths of millions along the way was mere collateral damage of no consequence whatever.

Two new devices for political organization and rule over foreign people were discovered during the first decades of imperialism. One was race as a principle of the body politic, and the other bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination. Without race as a substitute for the nation, the scramble for Africa and the investment fever might well have remained the purposeless ‘dance of death and trade’ (Joseph Conrad) of all gold rushes. Without bureaucracy as a substitute for government, the British possession of India might well have been left to the recklessness of ‘the breakers of law in India’ (Burke) without changing the political climate of an entire era. Both discoveries were actually made on the Dark Continent.

Arendt assessed the European moral and political climate that lead to abandonment of traditional values:

In its [gold’s] uselessness in industrial production it bears an ironical resemblance to the superfluous money to the digging of gold and to the superfluous men who did the digging. To the imperialist’s pretense of having discovered a permanent savior for a decadent society and antiquated political organization, it added its own pretense of apparently eternal stability and independence of all functional determinants. It was significant that a society about to part with all traditional absolute values began to look for an absolute value in the world of economics where, indeed, such a thing does not and cannot exist, since everything is functional by definition.

Regarding the superfluous men who joined the imperialist colonial enterprise, ‘the Bohemians of the four continents’, they were “all game for anything from pitch and toss to willful murder”:

Thus, they brought with them, or they learned quickly, the code of manners which befitted the coming type of murderer to whom the only unforgiveable sin is to lose his temper. . . . . The world of native savages was a perfect place for men who had escaped the reality of civilization. . . . . They [native Africans] were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.

For South Africa, settlement by the Dutch Boers, was followed by a few Jewish international financiers who made early financing possible for European wealth. That was followed by development of full-fledged imperialism under Cecil Rhodes, whose first order of business was to displace the Jewish financiers and ultimately the Boers themselves. Social conditions were awful. The racist Boers, basing authority on their own foundational racial origin myth, enslaved natives and hated the Jewish financiers. The Boers reacted instinctively with virulent anti-Semitism. The Boers understood and hated the fact that Jews had a better claim to pre-ordained “chosenness” than themselves. Also, they sensed that Jewish financiers were the harbingers of something very bad for themselves, namely a possibility that the temporary imperialist gold and diamond rush would eventually morph into a “much broader and more permanent business,” which it did.

However, it was the imperialists, not the Jews who completely displaced the Boers. And, it was the Boers themselves who willingly walked away from their own stakes in the gold and diamond rush. In essence, the Boers had gone native and simply abandoned their stolen land and moved farther inland and upland as imperialist civilization, if one can call it that, began to encroach. The Boers remained anti-Semitic even after the imperialists displaced them and took for themselves the Boer share of the wealth.

In developing the imperialist character, racism was discovered and developed in South Africa, while ruthless bureaucracy was discovered and developed in Egypt, India and Algeria. Decades later, the African experience, especially the saga of the Boers, cured the Nazis “of the illusion that the historical process is necessarily ‘progressive’.” In essence, the Boers had completely walked away from European civilization and norms.

Arendt describes Rudyard Kipling as the author of the foundation legend for the British Empire. The myth was that being surrounded by the sea, superior navigation allowed water, wind and sun to be transformed and harnessed for the empire. Navigation made “the Englishman master of the world.” Kipling’s myth also presented “the British as the only politically mature people, caring for law and burdened with the welfare of the world, in the midst of barbarian tribes who neither care or know what keeps the world together.” Apparently, Kipling was unaware of the rest of Europe, at the very least. Or, he just ignored it. Kipling’s great myth help to draw some of the best and worst of English society into believing and participating in the great cause.

The fact that the “white man’s burden” is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism. . . . . Only those who had never been able to outgrow their boyhood ideals and therefore had enlisted in the colonial services were fit for the task. . . . . Strange and curious lands attracted the best of England’s youth since the end of the 19th century, deprived her society of the most honest and the most dangerous elements, and guaranteed, . . . . petrification of boyhood noblesse which preserved and infantilized Western moral standards.

The first imperialist administrator was Lord Cromer, who took the position of British Consul General in Egypt (1883-1907) and served, among other things, for the British race. Cromer was far sighted. He could have ruled India, or taken a high-level position in the British government, but instead he chose the then-obscure Egypt. He correctly foresaw that Egypt was a necessary means for the continued control of India, the crown jewel of the Empire. Cromer developed and perfected the imperialist bureaucracy. At the same time, Cecil Rhodes was developing and perfecting imperialist racism in South Africa. The two necessary ingredients of imperialism had their champions.

At first Cromer had qualms about imperialist ‘hybrid government’ based on (i) individual bureaucrats working in as much secrecy as possible and controlling governance with no controlling law or treaty, and (ii) racism. Cromer was correct to see the only way to fix the inherent instability of imperialism was to either conquer and occupy a land or to leave it entirely. Later, Cromer accepted and began to justify a form of government without any precedent or even a name. Cromer just referred to it as the “hybrid form of government.” Cromer came to conclude that talented bureaucrats with talented staff and working without law or constraints was what the times and circumstances called for. The bureaucrat’s greatest passion would be for secrecy. Secrecy had the effect of not arousing much in the way of national aspiration in the lands the bureaucrats governed.

In South Africa, Cecil Rhodes, despite his personal megalomania, came to the same conclusion as Cromer. Rhodes hated publicity and raged when his name popped up in public from time to time. Regarding secrecy, Arendt comments: “Every growth of democracy or even the simple functioning of existing institutions can only be a danger, for it is impossible for a people to govern a people – the people of India by the people of England.” The drive for secrecy was necessitated by the idea of expansion, which envisioned an endless process (ending in self-destruction and starting anew), not a process of conquering one country at a time.

Regarding the essentially unlimited power of the bureaucrat, Arendt writes:

Then, as Rhodes was insane enough to say, he could indeed “do nothing wrong, what he did became right. It was his duty to do what he wanted. He felt himself a God – nothing less.”

Cromer, was more circumspect on this point, but was essentially in accord with the egomaniac Rhodes in calling the bureaucrats “instruments of incomparable value in the execution of a policy called Imperialism.” In this world, success was evidence lawfulness, and failure was someone else’s fault: “They were monsters of conceit in their success and monsters of modesty in their failure.” In essence, law and human rights were simply incompatible with imperialism.

Arendt concludes chapter seven with these observations on the later, less brutal, British imperialism, which paved the way to the loss of empire:

The happy fact is that although British imperialist rule sank to some level of vulgarity, cruelty played a lesser role between the two World Wars than ever before and a minimum of human rights was always safeguarded. It is this moderation in the midst of plain insanity that paved the way for what Churchill has called “the liquidation of His Majesty’s Empire” and that eventually may turn out to mean the transformation of the English nation into a Commonwealth of English peoples.

Insistence on human rights was from the ‘English Departments’ in London that colonial bureaucrats hated: “The ‘prayer’ which Cromer addressed to Lord Salisbury during his administration of Egypt in 1896, ‘save me from the English Departments’, was repeated over and over again, until in the twenties of this century the nation and everything it stood for were openly blamed by the extreme imperialist party for the threatened loss of India.”

Apparently, British imperialists took their ideology very seriously.

B&B orig: 1/15/19

Chapter Review: Decline of the Nation State; End of the Rights of Man

Refugees entering Europe

Chapter nine of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is the last chapter in part two of the book, Imperialism. Here, Arendt describes the breakdown of the European Nation-State and the rise of the Nation in the period between the two World Wars. The Nation-State had been the guarantor of basic human rights for stateless people, refugees and small numbers of asylum seekers. After the demise of the Nation-State, only the right to asylum survived to some extent and even that was under attack by the Nation. Asylum was never established to protect large numbers of people. Masses of people who were being persecuted in their own countries and tried to flee to another country were simply designated as “stateless”. Stateless status left those people outside all legal structures that could serve to guarantee basic rights, including the right to be alive. No nation wanted stateless people, so unlike all prior history there was no place anywhere for masses of displaced people to go to resettle.

Later, the Nazis under Hitler used this situation to strip all citizenship status from hated populations such as German Jews, converting them into stateless people. Since such people had no human rights whatever, there was no law to prevent putting stateless people in interment camps and then murdering all of them. The breakdown of the Nation-State into the Nation helped pave the way for Hitler and the unspeakable savagery he unleashed.

Arendt writes:

Civil wars which ushered in and spread over the twenty years of uneasy peace were not only bloodier and more cruel than all their predecessors; they were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they left their state they became stateless, the scum of the Earth. . . . . Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some irredeemably stupid fatality. . . . . Hatred, certainly not lacking in the pre-war world began to play a central role in public affairs everywhere . . . . . This atmosphere of disintegration, though characteristic of the whole of Europe between the two wars, was more visible in the defeated than the victorious countries, and it developed fully in the states newly established after the liquidation of the Dual Monarchy and the Czarist Empire. . . . . The very phrase “human rights” became for all concerned – victims, prosecutors, and onlookers alike – the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.

The fall of the Nation-State: Arendt asserts that the Peace Treaties in the wake of WWI failed because the framers of the peace did not understand that conditions for the Nation-State, a homogenous population and firm rootedness to the soil. Those were the social conditions necessary for a Nation-State. One contemporary observer, Kurt Tramples, commented that it was preposterous to think that the Peace Treaties could lead to the rise of a Nation-State: “One glance at the demographic map of Europe should be sufficient to show that the nation-state principle cannot be introduced into Eastern Europe.” It was obvious even then that various ethnic groups would never see one another as equals and when lumped into a single state, they would work to undermine each other. The Treaties were nothing more than an idealistic illusion that arbitrarily “handed out rule to some and servitude to others.”

The political upshot was rather simple: In the transition from Nation-State to Nation, public and government sympathies moved from virtuous rule with equality of all people, including minorities, to protection of the nation, with its despotic and arbitrary form of governance. The new governments in Eastern Europe were opposed in principle by minorities comprising about 25-50% of their populations. On seeing this play out, defenders of the Treaties changed their rationale. Now, the Treaties “had been conceived merely as a painless and humane method of assimilation, an interpretation which naturally enraged the minorities.” Arendt argues this was cynical: “The representatives of the great nations knew only too well that minorities within nation-states must sooner or later be either assimilated or liquidated.” The problem was that assimilation was not effective and it was clear to everyone.

Consciously or not, the Peace Treaties made it plain that only nationals could be full-blown citizens with the full protection of legal institutions and the rule of law. Stripping minorities of their nationality status to render them stateless scum was a preferred tactic. Maybe today that would be called racial or ethnic cleansing. In the rise of stateless masses, Arendt saw that “the transformation of the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation had been completed; the nation had conquered the state, the national interest had priority over law long before Hitler could pronounce ‘right is what is good for the German people.’”

Fleeing to Slovenia

The fall of the Rights of Man: The Peace Treaties after WWI were argued to have been founded on the Rights of Man, which suffered from problems that no one knew how to define or how to defend whatever those rights are conceived to be. Arendt writes of the consequences:

The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable . . . . The first loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes, and this meant the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born . . . . . What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one. . . . . The second loss . . . . . was the loss of government protection, and this did not imply just the loss of legal status in their own, but in all countries. . . . . One of the surprising aspects of our experience with stateless people who benefit legally from committing a crime has been the fact that it seems to be easier to deprive a completely innocent person of legality than someone who has committed an offense.

In other words, a stateless person had more legal protection as a convicted criminal than as an innocent. For example, if an applicable law prohibited arbitrary beating of prisoners by the police or guards, that constituted more protection than what statelessness provided. Once a stateless person became a convicted criminal, they had their rights as a criminal. This helps put in context what statelessness actually meant for millions of people in this bizarre status of legal non-existence.

Arendt touches on attempts to define the Rights of Man. In America it boiled down to the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the meaning of which is still contested today and always will be. In France they were conceived to be equality before the law, liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty. That is also ambiguous, or in the case of an absolute right to property, unworkable in modern civilization.

The Rights of Man was conceived as inalienable human rights flowing from natural law or nature and not from any God, government or tyrant. Some observers, e.g., Edmund Burke (1729-1797), saw danger in that conception of rights and man, and argued against it. Arendt writes:

. . . . stateless people could see without Burke’s arguments that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger. Because of it they were regarded as savages, and afraid they might end by being considered beasts, they insisted on their nationality as their only remaining and recognized tie with humanity. Their distrust of natural [Rights of Man], their preference for national, rights comes precisely from their realization that natural rights are granted even to savages. Burke had already feared that natural “inalienable” rights would confirm only the ‘right of the naked savage,’ and therefore reduce civilized nations to the status of savagery. . . . . It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man. This is one of the reasons why it is far more difficult to destroy the legal personality of a criminal . . . . . than of a man who has been disallowed all common human responsibilities.

The human condition: Arendt points to the ancient origins of this line of thinking and her conclusions as to its modern meaning:

Since the Greeks, we have known that highly political life breeds a deep-rooted suspicion of this private sphere, a deep resentment against the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made as he is – single, unique, unchangeable. This whole sphere of the merely given, relegated to private life in civilized society, is a permanent threat to the public sphere, because the public sphere is consistently based on the law of equality as the private sphere is based on the law of universal difference and differentiation. . . . . We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. 
. . . . . The reason why highly developed communities, such as ancient city-states or modern nation-states, so often insist on ethnic homogeneity is that they hope to eliminate as far as possible those always present differences and differentiations which by themselves arouse dumb hatred, mistrust and discrimination because they indicate all too clearly those spheres where men cannot act and change at will, i.e., the limitations of human artifice. (emphasis added)

Arendt ends chapter nine with this warning:

Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to come from without. Nature has been mastered and no barbarians threaten to destroy what they cannot understand, as the Mongolians threatened Europe for centuries. Even the emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon from within, not outside our civilization. The danger is that a global interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.

Here, Arendt can be forgiven for ignoring asteroid collisions, supervolcano eruptions and the causes of mass extinctions as sources of a slide from civilization to savagery. A question Arendt raises asks if America today has a barbarian leader that arose from our own midst. One can plausibly argue that point. One can also look at nations like China, North Korea and Russia and ask if barbarians aren’t already in control there.

B&B orig: 1/21/19

Chapter Review: Inequality

Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state

Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole; (in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism

Communism: a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs

Steven Pinker's 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, assesses human progress and the factors that underlie it. Pinker, a self-described optimist, addresses common myths about just how bad things are in the US and for the rest of humanity. Pinker sees far more to be optimistic about than there is to be pessimistic about. In the preface, he writes:

“I will show that this beak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong -- wrong, wrong, flat Earth wrong, couldn't-be-more wrong.”

He follows that with an assertion that what the data shows is not about President Trump. Instead he analyzes what the data says about human well-being and progress in general and sees far more reason for optimism than pessimism. Chapter 9, Inequality deals with data related to wealth inequality and its social effects. If one accepts the data and Pinker’s logic, popular beliefs about wealth inequality are significantly more wrong than right. Maybe wrong enough to be flat Earth wrong. Pinker’s basic conclusion reflects the disconnect between popular belief and his assessment of the data:

Income inequality, in sum, in not a counterexample to human progress, and we are not living in a dystopia of falling incomes that has reversed the centuries-long rise in prosperity. Nor does it call for smashing the robots, raising the drawbridge, switching to socialism, or bringing back the 50s. . . . . Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing. In comparisons of well-being across centuries, it pales in importance next to overall wealth. An increase in inequality is not necessarily bad: as societies escape from universal poverty, they are bound to become more unequal, and the uneven surge may be repeated when a society discovers new sources of wealth. Nor is a decrease in inequality always good: the most effective levelers of economic disparities are epidemics, massive wars, violent revolutions, and state collapse.

Pinker points out that, despite conservative and libertarian political ideology against it, social spending to help the poor and low income earners invariably accompanies the rise of wealth as societies escape universal poverty. Despite existing inequality, the overall human condition has been improving since the Enlightenment in large part because of an increasing proportion of social spending that decreases poverty.

Regarding ideology, Pinker correctly observes that “free-market capitalism is compatible with any amount of social spending.” Thus conservative and libertarian arguments that social spending is socialism or communism are simply wrong. That line of attack subtly deflects attention from the fact that the social spending arising from a free-market capitalist economy, does not come from a socialist or communist economy. In other words, social sending does not convert capitalism to socialism or communism.

Despite widespread assertions that capitalism is callous, data from pre-capitalist economies from the Renaissance until the early 20th century is that European countries spent an average of 1.5% of GDP on the social programs, e.g., assistance for the poor and public education. Some of those countries spent nothing at all. By contrast, modern European states and the US spend over 20% of GPD.

The morality of inequality and poverty: Pinker argues inequality is not a matter of morality nearly as much as poverty is. The moral argument is that everyone should have enough, not the same, as long as lives are reasonably healthy and satisfying. Obviously, the unresolvable debate on that point will boil down to how different people differently define the relevant concepts, e.g., ‘reasonably’ or ‘healthy’.

Popular confusion over inequality and wealth arises from multiple sources, one of which is the lump fallacy. That fallacy holds that wealth is a finite resource such that if one person gets one extra dollar, someone else gets one dollar less. That is not how it works. Wealth is not zero sum because it increases over time. The rich get richer, but the poor and other non-rich also get richer and their lives are longer, healthier and better.

The lump fallacy fosters a bias that, like most human biases, is hard to shake. Punker argues that people falsely believe that a person who gets richer took that increase from everyone else. Pinker cites the example of JK Rowling, now a billionaire from selling Harry Potter books, movies, and stuff. Her unequal wealth arose from consumer choices to buy her stuff, not from her taking anything from anyone, but from people enjoying what they voluntarily bought from her.

Given the reality of how capitalism (and probably every other system) works, sometimes the lump fallacy is not a fallacy and sometimes it is. The devil is always in the details. For Rowling, most people would probably see some or all of her wealth as legit. But there really are some who prosper from crime, political corruption and other non-merit-based means. Pinker acknowledges this.

In addition to the lump fallacy, another psychological factor in public discontent is a perception that a person’s situation looks poor compared to what rich people have. Usually, people who feel poor by looking at the rich are themselves increasing their own standard of living by income increases and by the usually invisible benefits of improvements in technology.

Debunking the Spirit Level Theory?:Some have argued that inequality is a major source of unhappiness that leads to increased rates of homicide, imprisonment, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, obesity, etc. Pinker calls this the ‘Spirit Level Theory’, which is named after the influential book, The Spirit Level, which makes this argument. Despite its influence among liberals, research has shown that the theory is wrong:

“Kelly and Evans held constant the major factors that are known to affect happiness, including GDP per capita, age, sex, education, marital status, and religious attendance, and found that the theory ‘comes to shipwreck on the rock of the facts.’ In developing countries, inequality is not dispiriting but heartening: people in the more unequal societies are happier.”

While that is probably true in developing countries, the US is not considered one of those countries. Whether that debunks the Spirit Level Theory is unclear. Pinker believes it does.

Unfairness vs merit: Another source of unhappiness with inequality is a widespread perception that wealth accumulation is unfair for the rich. Pinker cites data showing that people will generally accept that people who do or contribute more than others deserve more. But when people perceive unfairness, they resent it. That leads to conflation of wealth with unfairness in the minds of many people. To his credit, Pinker acknowledges the elephant in the room:

“In addition to the effects on individual psychology, inequality has been linked to several different kinds of society-wide dysfunction, including economic stagnation, financial instability, intergenerational immobility, and political influence peddling. . . . . The influence of money on politics is particularly pernicious because it can distort every government policy, but it’s not the same issue as income inequality. . . . . Economic inequality, then, is not itself a dimension of human well-being, and it should not be confused with unfairness or with poverty.”

Pinker argues that how rich a very rich person is relative to other very rich people isn't important because all very rich people can get politicians to pay attention to what they want. From that he concludes that inequality is not a dimension of human well-being. He argues that (1) correlation and causation between money and political corruption is not proven, and (2) the situation calls for electoral reform, not criticism of inequality.

That logic strikes this observer as weak and not persuasive. However, people will differ in how they assess this. For example, many or most conservatives and Evangelical Christians believe that being rich is a sign of success, moral superiority, and moral and/or social authority. To them, rich people buying what they want from politicians is not a matter of corruption. Instead, it is a matter of good and moral people helping to shape government for the betterment of the entire society. There may be some truth in it, but there arguably is much that isn’t so true.

Conclusion: Overall, Pinker makes a solid case that the sources and impacts of inequality are mostly misunderstood. The impact of the generosity of American society to the poor and low income people is rather opaque to most people. Policies and programs such as the earned income tax credit and social spending programs do much more than most people believe.

This review covers only 23 pages as one of the 23 chapters in Pinker’s 453 page book, Enlightenment Now. This book is highly recommended for people who want to get an evidence-based view of politics and society. A myriad of myths and fallacies are questioned, many debunked entirely.[1] In all, Pinker's emphasis on attacking false realities is important and timely for obvious reasons, i.e., the other elephant in the room.

Footnote:
1. A children's program (aimed at middle school?) being broadcast by the truTV channel, Adam Ruins Everything, is very much like Pinker's book. It debunks an amazing range of myths common in American society. For example, Adam ruins cowboys by arguing, among other things, that (1) most cowboys were hispanic or black, not white, (2) gun control laws in most western towns were far stricter than they are now because towns were for working, not for shooting at bad guys, (3) prostitutes, not cowboys built the towns and civilized the American West, and (4) the life of the cowboy was a matter of three holes: (a) you sleep in this hole (a tent), (b) you work in this hole (a hole in the ground), and (c) you die in this hole (a grave next to the work hole). Adam does the same thing to modern science - he just rips it to pieces, e.g., citing the irreproducibility crisis, political-commercial control over funding priorities, etc. Adam's arguments are backed by evidence he provides in the programs and at the website linked to above.

B&B orig: 1/30/19

Chapter Review: The Environment

Energy efficiency increases

The Environment is chapter 10 of Steven Pinker’s 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Pinker argues that although there are major barriers to dealing with global warming, there are also sound reasons for conditional optimism that it is still possible to significantly soften its impacts. His arguments point out that to a large extent, the environmental problem is significantly solvable. Implementing solutions will require social and political will, some reasonably expectable technological progress, and reliance on existing technologies. He comments, that “The key idea is that environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given the right knowledge. Despite a half-century of panic, humanity is not on an irreversible path to ecological suicide. The fear of resource shortages is misconceived.”

Pinker and others envision a new approach to environmentalism, called by various names such as Ecomodernism or Ecopragmatism. The first idea is that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics will necessarily lead to some pollution. We cannot escape entropy, and from that point of view, humans have never lived in harmony with the environment. We deforested and made species go extinct as we hunted them for food. A second insight of Ecopragmatism is that industrialization has been good for humanity and costs of pollution must be weighed against benefits such as escape from extreme poverty and public education. A third concept is that the human well-being vs environment tradeoff has been and continues to be significantly affected by technology. As technology develops, benefits such as calories, home heating, electricity, and gas mileage all continue to generate less pollution, including less CO2 emission into the atmosphere.

Pinker points to historical data showing that when a country develops, it prioritizes growth over the environment. Over time, that changes as affluence supports concern for both modernity and the environment: “when they can afford both electricity and clean air, they'll spring for the clean air.” Societies with sufficient affluence tend to be ones that pressure governments and businesses into protecting the environment. Countries such as China and India are now both concerned about their own environmental problems, due to pressure from their people and from the downsides that pollution is inflicting on their economies and their people.

Pinker refers to ecopessimists as advocating unworkable solutions such as giving up on modern things and going back to a simpler life. People simply will not do that and advocating it psychologically damages the idea that something can be done to deal with climate change.

Deforestation decreases

The resource scarcity fallacy: Since the 1970s, dire predictions of resource scarcity and ensing social collapse have all proven false. Pinker comments: “Indeed, most metals and minerals are cheaper today than they were in 1960. . . . . Humanity does not suck resources from the Earth like a straw in a milkshake . . . . . Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get it at the less accessible deposits, for find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes. . . . . In reality, societies have always abandoned a resource for a better one long before the old one was exhausted.”

Pinker asserts that existing data on oil spills shows another common fallacy, namely that environmental protection is not compatible with economic growth: “. . . . seaborne oil transport has become vastly safer. . . . . even as less oil was spilled, more oil was shipped.”

Oil spill data

Other fallacies are prevalent, e.g., organic farming, “which needs more land to produce a kilogram of food, is neither green nor sustainable.” Pinker acknowledges and then rebuts a tendency of environmentalists to respond to such arguments “with a combination of anger and illogic. . . . . But for many reasons, it’s time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution.”

Climate change skepticism: Deniers and skeptics of global warming are in full retreat, at least among experts, but not among vested interests and political ideologues.

“Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges . . . . . have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced. A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that ‘the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against the hypothesis.’ Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet. In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. . . . . I can state that this is nonsense: physical scientists have no such agenda, and the evidence speaks for itself.” (emphasis added)

To be clear, denying warming and accusing the scientists of bad intentions or conspiracy is a fanatical and mendacious campaign of pure lies and nonsense by people who know better and self-delusion by people who don't.

Dematerialization: Progress in technology is causing dematerialization of all kinds of formerly material consumer goods. The digital revolution replaces material things with bits. For example, smart cell phones replace land lines, answering machines, phone books, cameras, street maps and other formerly physical things. Social media leads many young people to show and describe their experiences and preferences, e.g., music, travel and brand of beer, instead of showing pictures of cars and clothes. Dematerialization is changing criteria of social status. These trends reduce adverse impacts on the environment.

Psychological barriers: A number of psychological barriers must be acknowledged and dealt with. Research strongly suggests that people are more likely to accept the reality of global warming if the problem is presented properly: “people are likelier to accept the fact of global warming when they are told that the problem is solvable by innovations in policy and technology than when they are given dire warnings about how awful it will be.”

Other barriers include (1) a cognitive bias that leads people to ignore thinking in terms of the proper scale of the problem, and (2) a misplaced sense of morality that really is not particularly moral. Most people are poor at seeing global warming in terms of the scale of what needs to be done. The scale we are dealing with is tens of billions of tons of CO2 per year. When people propose sacrifices might feel morally good to propose, and maybe even live up to, but are trivial in terms of dealing with the problem, e.g., don't fly on airplanes or buy jewelry or pottery because those things are energy intensive. Aviation accounts for 1.5% of CO2 emissions, while jewelry and pottery are much smaller.

The moral problem runs deep. People advocating for environmental protection tend to dehumanize political opposition, “politicians are pigs”, which fosters a punitively aggressive mindset, “make the polluters pay.” Pinker makes the moral issue quite clear: “by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice. . . . . But however virtuous these displays may feel, they are a distraction from the gargantuan challenge facing us. The problem is that carbon emissions are a classic public goods game, also known as a Tragedy of the Commons.”

Pinker notes that to deal with the Tragedy of the Commons, essentially all economists advocate a carbon tax or some analogous scheme. In economic terms, letting pollution go for free externalizes the cost. Imposing a cost incentivises less reliance on carbon energy sources. Unfortunately, a carbon tax is vehemently opposed by conservative political ideologues and the fossil fuel industry. The tax is the basis for nutty, unfounded allegations of deep state conspiracy theories and quack attacks on the expert science community. In a sense, this is another moral issue. Global warming deniers generally see efforts to impose a carbon tax as immoral. People on the other side tend to see not acting, e.g., by imposing a carbon tax, as immoral.

Nuclear power: Pinker argues that another necessary tool has to be an increase in the use of nuclear power. No other existing technology can come close to providing the amount of power needed to deal with the billions of tons of CO2 we generate each year. He notes that reactor design in the US has not been standardized, which drives cost up: “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the US the figures are reversed.” The US needs to standardize reactor design, or adopt an existing design, and it needs to do so urgently.

The prospect of nuclear power raises unwarranted psychological barriers such as fear of radiation poisoning, images of easily imagined catastrophe, distrust of technology and misplaced fears articulated the many progressive supporters of the traditional Green movement in the 1970s. Pinker argues fears of nuclear power are unwarranted:

“It's often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power those who know the least are the most frightened. . . . . engineers have learned from accidents and near-misses and have progressively squeezed more safety out of nuclear reactors, reducing the risks of accidents and contamination far below those of fossil fuels.”

All in all, the psychological and political barriers to dealing with global warming are high. But given the incredibly high stakes, not trying amounts to playing Russian Roulette (or Climate Casino, as one expert calls the do-nothing attitude) with modern civilization and billions of lives, and maybe, on a very bad day, the existence if the human species itself. Trying to deal with the problem carries some risk, but not trying carries far more risk.

B&B orig: 1/31/19

Chapter Review: The Totalitarian Movement

Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975

The Totalitarian Movement is chapter 11 in Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. This chapter focuses on two topics, totalitarian propaganda and totalitarian organization.

1. TOTALITARIAN PROPAGANDA: Arendt argues that propaganda is a tool totalitarian ideology uses to deal with the outside world, not just within the movement itself:

The essential point is that the necessities for propaganda are always dictated by the outside world and that the movements themselves do not actually propagate but indoctrinate. Conversely, indoctrination, inevitably coupled with terror, increases the strength of the movements or the totalitarian government’s isolation and security from outside interference. Propaganda is indeed part and parcel of “psychological warfare”; but terror is more. . . . . Where the rule of terror is brought to perfection, as in concentration camps, propaganda disappears entirely; it was even expressly prohibited in Nazi Germany. Propaganda, in other words, is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalitarianism for dealing with the nontotalitarian world; terror, on the other hand, is the very essence of its form of government.

The scientific basis of propaganda: The Nazis learned from how American businesses applied propaganda to market to the public. Those methods were incorporated into totalitarianism propaganda methods. Totalitarian propaganda emphasized the “scientific” basis of its claims in the same way that business marketing propaganda did in the US. That was the way to reach and persuade the masses. Arendt argues:

“Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. . . . Totalitarian propaganda raised scientificality to and its technique of making scientific statements in the form of predictions to a height of efficiency of method and absurdity of content because, demagogically speaking, there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can reveal its merits.”

The latter assertion is quite insightful. Positing claims in terms of future performance does tend to deflect from flaws in arguments the propagandist does not want people to even think about, much less discuss. That tactic is highly effective, and both politicians and marketers still use it to this day. In the case of politicians, their track record is dismal, just barely better than random guessing and much worse than validated computer algorithms.

The infallible leader: Arendt argues that totalitarian leaders cannot admit any error because they are the center of everything. The difference between a totalitarian leader and everyone else is that the leader has much more power and an unfettered willingness to use it to make his mistakes go away, even if the consequences are mass murder and mass destruction:

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. . . . . Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true. The Nazis did not hesitate to use, at the end of the war, the concentrated force of their still intact organization to bring about as complete a destruction of Germany as possible, in order to make their prediction that the German people would be ruined in case of defeat.

She argues that the irrational infallible leader illusion rested on (1) appeal to always correct forces of history and nature that will always manifest themselves, even in the face of short-term defeat and ruin, and (2) the leader was literally a powerful social institution where he was the only person who knew what he was doing. Sociology reveals that social institutions are powerful shapers of perceptions of reality, morals and even thinking: “society not only controls our movements, but shapes our identity, our thought, and our emotions.” Social institutions are therefore, to a significant extent, “structures of our own consciousness.”

Leader infallibility arises once the totalitarian is in power and cannot be challenged any longer:

The method, like other totalitarian propaganda methods, is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive . . . . . Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such. . . . . What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system [social institution] of which they are presumably part.

Which contemporary politicians do ‘extreme contempt for facts’ remind us of?[1]

2. TOTALITARIAN ORGANIZATION: Arendt argues that the forms of a totalitarian organization were “completely new”, which is an extremely rare thing in politics where almost nothing is new. The origins of new forms of political organization are unclear, but Hitler was an early proponent and maybe he was the source or one of the sources of the social and political power that this new organizational concept could deliver to the leader.

The most strikingly new organizational device of the movements in their prepower stage is the creation of front organizations, the distinction drawn between party members and sympathizers. . . . . We do not know who first decided to organize fellow travelers into front organizations, who first saw in vaguely sympathizing masses . . . . . a decisive force in itself. . . . . Hitler was the first to say each movement should divide the masses which have been won through propaganda into two categories, sympathizers and members. . . . . Hitler, consequently, was the first to devise a conscious policy of constantly enlarging the ranks of sympathizers while at the same time keeping the number of party members strictly limited. . . . . The ingeniousness of this device during the movements’ struggle for power is that the front organizations not only isolate the members but offer them a semblance of outside normalcy which wards off the true impact of true reality more effectively than mere indoctrination. . . . . The world at large, on the other side, usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called fanatics; through them the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.

Not only were sympathizers organized into groups or societies to look like parts of regular societies, such as teachers for Hitler, lawyers for Hitler, policemen for Hitler, coal miners for Hitler, and if it existed, sociologists for Hitler (a group that would have later been exterminated because sociology is by its nature completely inimical to totalitarianism because its function is to see through social lies), these groups served to continually isolate party members from reality. In other words, the fellow travelers in front organizations worked on two fronts to serve two different goals. One was to make the pre-power movements look normal to the outside world. The other was to insulate party members from the real world, freeing them to form increasingly radical and murderous groups of party members based in part on their increasing levels of detachment from reality and all moral concerns.

Arendt commented: “They [party members] are so well protected against the reality of the nontotalitarian world that they constantly underestimate the tremendous risks of totalitarian politics.”

Digression – A personal speculation: At this point, one can see what Senator Joseph McCarthy was so fearful of in the 1950s. He had a point. His tactics were illegal, immoral and ineffective, but at least there was a solid reason for fear and an instinctive response in self-defense. In view of Arendt’s version of history, it would seem that one could argue what Russia and China are doing today in their relentless attacks on democracy and personal freedoms is vaguely akin to what Hitler and Stalin did in their time. Societies and communications technology would seem to make the route to power that worked for Hitler and Stalin probably not possible today.

So instead, enemies of democracy and freedom turn to the most effective modern propaganda techniques possible, social media and propaganda or fake ‘news’ sources. Building front organizations may not be so effective today due to, e.g., the ease of fact checking. That said, one must look very, very carefully at groups who support President Trump. Although Trump does not have the intellect or work ethic to be a totalitarian, but he very much would like to be an authoritarian dictator. The parallels between Trump’s tactics and immorality and those of Hitler and Stalin are not trivial.

Rotting the status quo from within – duplication of social institutions: In the critical, short period of time when social institutions and norms finally fall to the totalitarian, front groups served as pre-existing institutions to replace the existing groups and institutions. Professional organizations were quickly replaced by the front groups. Front groups of lawyers, doctors, and most everyone else were ready to step in and act as if nothing had changed, when in fact everything had changed.

The important factor for the movements is that, even before they seize power, they give the impression that all elements of society are embodied in their ranks. (The ultimate goal of Nazi propaganda was to organize the whole German people as sympathizers.) . . . . . This technique of duplication, certainly useless for the direct overthrow of government, proved extremely fruitful in the work of undermining actively existing institutions and in the “decomposition of the status quo”, which totalitarian organizations invariably prefer to an open show of force. . . . . The practical value of the fake organizations came to light when the Nazis seized power and were ready at once to destroy the existing teachers’ organizations, with another teachers’ organization, the existing lawyers’ clubs with a Nazi-sponsored lawyers’ club, etc. They could change overnight the whole structure of German society – and not just political life – precisely because they had prepared its exact counterpart within its own ranks.

Footnote: 1. President Trump, Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, and others.

B&B orig: 2/3/19

Chapter Review: Democracy

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, 2016

This discussion reviews chapter 14 of Steven Pinker's 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard. Getting right to it, Pinker argues:

Since the first governments first appeared about 5,000 years ago, humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny. In the absence of a government or powerful neighbors, tribal peoples tend to fall into cycles of raiding and feuding, with death rates exceeding those of modern societies, even including their most violent eras.

Pinker cites the necrometician (corpse counter) Matthew White as arguing: “Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority.”

White claims the corpse count is millions for anarchy compared to hundreds of thousands for murdering tyrants. That seems to ignore the tens of millions that the totalitarians Stalin and Hitler amassed. As Hannah Arendt argues, mass murdering dictators are not the same thing as mega-murdering totalitarians. Presumably, White accounted for that corpse count.

Continuing, Pinker then argues:

One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny. But it's not the only reason: democracies have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.

Citing various politicians and others, Pinker pointed out that prospects for democracy have appeared bleak in recent decades. One recent wave of pessimism was in the 1970's, which was immediately followed by a new wave of countries moving to democracy, including Greece, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia.

Critics of democracy argued that democratization is “a conceit of Westerners projecting their tastes onto the rest of the world, whereas authoritarianism seemed to suit most of humanity just fine.” Pinker responds: “Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by their governments? Most obviously, in a non-democratic country, how could you tell? The pent-up demand for democracy might be enormous, but no one dares express it lest they be jailed or shot.”

Pinker has a good point there. And, he makes two more good points based on cognitive biology:

The other is the headline fallacy: crackdowns make the headlines more often than liberalizations. Availability bias could make us forget about all the countries that became democratic bit by bit. As always, the only way to know which way the world is going is to quantify. (emphasis added)

Just to flog this live horse once more, rely on facts, do not reject, deny or distort them, whether you like it or not. That requires moral courage. Political, economic, religious and philosophical ideologues generally do not have enough of it to deal with reality for what it is.

Continuing further,

Why has the tide of democratization repeatedly exceeded expectations? . . . . . The awe is reinforced by a civics class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference. By that standard, the number of democracies is zero in the past, zero in the present and almost certainly zero in the future. Political scientists are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people's beliefs, and by the tenuous connections of their preferences to their votes and to the behavior of their representatives. Most voters are ignorant not of just current policy options but of basic facts . . . . . Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded . . . . . When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote for a candidate with the opposite one. . . . . Nor does voting even provide much of a feedback signal about a government's performance. Voters punish incumbents for recent events over which they have dubious control, such as macroeconomic swings and terrorist strikes, or no control at all, such as droughts, floods, even shark attacks [and bad outcomes of local football games].

Pinker points out that 20th century philosopher Karl Popper astutely observed that democracy is not so much an answer to the question of who should rule, but more a solution of how to “dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.”

Pinker argues that the freedom to complain is central to democracy: “The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won't punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.”

Uppity citizens indeed.

Pinker argues that it is easy to be deceived about a lack of progress for democracy:

But progress has a way of covering its tracks. As our moral standards rise over the years, we have become alert to harms that would have gone unnoticed in the past. . . . . the information paradox: as human rights watchdogs admirably look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse, they find more of it . . . . but if we don't compensate for their keener powers of detection, we can be misled into thinking there is more abuse to detect.

Enlightenment Now published in February of 2018. Pinker was aware of Trump, and the rise of authoritarian movements in Europe and elsewhere. The anti-democracy momentum associated with those forces has not abated and instead appears to still be gaining strength. One can begin to see in aggregated poll data that the hit Trump took to his popularity from the recent government shutdown is just beginning to fade.

Is Pinker too optimistic, naïve or otherwise off base in his vision of the future of democracy and the rule of law, as implied by its inherent constraints against silencing its complaining uppity citizens? President Trump has made it clear that he wants to silence a free press that he sees as the enemy of the people.

B&B orig: 2/6/19