Two Laws

My theme today is difficult to formulate because it deals with “laws” that are genuine enough but are not laws we can test using the kinds of experiments that yield reliable Laws of Nature. Today I’m interested in two such laws, one in the economic and one in the international sphere. When the laws are violated, chaos tends to be the inevitable result.

An Economic Law

The economic law I have in mind is that just societies require a balance between freedom and its constraint. Freedom is to let people do. Constraint must come from government. If the organized power is abused, all but a relatively small portion of the population will become impoverished. If free markets are abused, all but a relatively small portion of the population will become impoverished as well because Monopoly will become a genuine fact of life. Rightly defined, monopoly is simply excessive power in the hands of a few. For this reason widespread economic inequality is a form of monopoly.

We are now violating that law because government is becoming an instrument of economic power—rather than its regulator. As a consequence of that, we’re witnessing the formations of classes that combat with one another. The sense of social unity, not surprisingly, is fraying quite visibly—even at the neighborhood level. Cracks are appearing all over the place. Calling them ethnic or racial is an altogether secondary phenomenon. The family is beginning to fail as an institution. Deadlocks are appearing everywhere—and when resolved are resolved only temporarily.

Income inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient. It stood at 0.397 in 1967 and at 0.477 in 2012 as measured at the household level—a 20 percent increase. A Gini of zero represents total equality; therefore the higher the ratio the greater the inequality. The U.S. is one of the more unequal economies in the world. The decline of families is illustrated by the drastic decline in the proportion that married-couple families with children represent among total households. That number was 40.3 percent in 1970 and 19.6 percent in 2012. By contrast, households with children headed by single adults were 10.6 percent of households in 1970, 17.8 percent in 2012. Two thirds of these households are headed by women.

A sign of fraying unity is the militarization of police—almost as if new borders are springing up inside the United States.

An International Law

The law I have in mind here is that sovereignty ought to be restricted to definable geographical territories. This means that nations should defend their territories, not their interests. Interests are almost impossible to define precisely enough to implement a policy of defending them coherently. Such is clearly the case today when I view the American reaction of the Islamic State’s expansions from Syria into Iraq. It does not threaten U.S. territory in any real sense. The only real solution would be to incorporate Syria and Iraq into the U.S. domain by outright conquest. And doing so would violate other long standing international laws.

The shift in the use of our national military—from defense of our borders to the pursuit of such intangibles as “national interest” matches our equipping local police with armored vehicles and the like domestically.

I wonder where these deviations from sensible obedience to visible laws will lead. I can extend the trends I see into the future by imagination—absent any genuinely effective and forceful reform—such as those, for instance, that Teddy Roosevelt undertook to curb the power of the trusts. The scenario that urges recognition is the separation of the United States into independent regions. Will that eventually take place? I think yes—unless we manage to “reinvent” the concept of governance somehow before the shatter takes an effective hold.

As for the international problem of trying to be the United States of the Globe, that effort, I fear, will have to wait until we’ve managed put our house in order again. And once that happens, we’ll probably be happy just to defend our borders.

In Praise of Principles

Surprising although it may appear, even a quite pragmatic and seemingly self-centered idea, like national interest, can underpin a rational foreign policy. Surprise diminishes when I go on and see that national interest, at the level of the individual, translates into the protection of life, limb, and living space. Therefore George F. Kennan (1904-2005), the diplomat and thinker, who advocated an abstemious foreign policy based on national interest alone—resistant to humanitarian or moralistic temptations—was really urging a policy easily defended using Natural Law.

I once saw a mouse raise itself up on its hind legs as one of our cats was playing a terminal game with it. The mouse was trying to fend off the cat with its front legs. It was an astonishing if brief spectacle.

Policy based on principle must, of course, never be permitted to become legalistic or sophisticated. National interest does not include protecting the properties overseas of our commercial sector—never mind even more vaguely described interests like access to oil or other resources. Preemptive strikes and the euphemistically called “regime change” cannot be justified by national interest. And interventions on humanitarian grounds? Now that’s the tough one. Fact is, we must say no to that. Such interventions effectively translate into denial of sovereignty to others—also denial of the rights of people to govern themselves. In a very real sense Syria is undergoing an internal process of change. Call it democracy by other means. Now if we had a genuinely effective world government and a world army, then, of course, such mayhem as we see in Syria would be put down. But before such a condition actually arises, the End of Time may have to dawn.

Worse than a Rorschach Blot

My subject is the National Interest, not psychology, ink, or blots. And my purpose is to contemplate how well that concept works in justifying policy decisions such as bombing this coast line or that. And I’ll give you my conclusion right out of the box. Using a concept like National Interest translates into saying, “I can do whatever I damned well please.”

Now for the fun part. To use something as a justification, it ought to be capable of description in some rational, traceable, and somewhat measurable way. Let’s take such a justification. It may be policy to defend the U.S. population by keeping its borders secure. Very well. We can draw lines on a map that closely approximate the actual borders of the United States, including the 12-mile limit sanctioned by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Now, grant you, even here, I could create insurmountable problems. I’ve learned this years ago studying fractal geometry. It turns out that applying fractal methods, the U.S. borders are infinitely long. Fortunately Great Nations made up entirely of Conscious Bacteria do not as yet confront us, so defending borders as we know them is still in the ballpark of the rational, traceable, and somewhat measurable.

We’re also still in the ballpark if we define national interest as the protection of the U.S. population. That would justify action to protect our citizens, even if they are elsewhere, from harm by groups that violate international law or those prevailing where they happen to be. But problems already surface at this point. Theoretically such an interest would apply equally to a single person whose rights have been violated by a very powerful and large country at the very center of its large geographical landmass. But would that also necessitate going to war with that country?

But is it in the National Interest generally to defend people against “bad things that can happen?” In the future? Whatever they might be? That one fails the test. Irrational, untraceable (the future actually is, is untraceable), and immeasurable.

But let me illustrate that more narrowly. Supposing some of our petroleum companies have invested millions in risky exploratory ventures somewhere far away—and some foreign land now seizes these assets and nationalizes them. Better yet, what if some country that supplies one-sixty-fourth of our total imports of oil is attacked by a third party that, in the past, has expressed hostile attitudes toward us and does not trade with us now? Here the national interest becomes extremely fuzzy. Our national interest might include getting cheap gas, and that invasion, not of our land but another party A’s, by a third party B, might, if it succeeds, eventually cause our gas price to rise by a cent or two. Should our national interest therefore cause us to mount a major military expedition to defend A from B?

In both cases above, the government as such is not a party. Investors invest where they please, importers import from where they wish. The national interest is difficult to define much better than the way I have defined it: we’d all rather not pay as much as we usually have to.

The moment we get away from something as basic as the defense of our shores or of our citizens, the National Interest rapidly turns wondrously fuzzy. An infinity of interests start to be part of it, virtually all of these private, undertaken freely, usually for gain. Tracing them all out is impossible in practice. It’s certainly logical to keep terrorists and their weapons outside our borders. Trying to transform entire foreign regions in the name of National Interest, preemptive wars and the like, is not justified by rationality, traceability, and precision. To say that a stable Egypt is central to the U.S. National Interest is merely to say that we don’t like unpredictability. But nobody does. To think that we can actually manage these fuzzy balls of total ambiguity amounts to claiming that we can see precisely what each of Rorschach’s ten ink-blot cards actually represents.

Only it’s actually worse. I discovered today that Hermann Rorschach didn’t actually use ink blots. Rather, he discovered a way to design very interesting figures, with a meaning built in but made ambiguous, and to make them look like blots. I have this from a chapter of scholarly book (here). That makes good sense after you view the ten chart close up (visible here).  Unfortunately I could not discover, from the document itself, either the title of the book or the name of its author. In Rorschach’s blots, a certain meaning is intended, but in many of our claims to act in the National Interest, all that we can discover is that that interest is a mask behind which anything might be justified—if it sells to a benighted public that only wants it, whatever it is, cheaper, sooner, and better.

That blot above is Number 7, also from the already linked Wikipedia site.