Rational Philosophy

UN Ambassador Andrew Young

I am sure that many have cried at some point since 11pm last night. My own tears caught me by surprise. I was emptying the dishwasher this morning as I listened to NPR. Ambassador Andrew Young, the first black ambassador to the UN, (who witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr) was speaking in calm, measured praise of Obama and the weight of the history of Obama’s accomplishment. I’m not black, but in the upsurge of emotion that brought my tears I felt suddenly, immediately aware of what this moment meant historically in a country with such a poor record of racial discrimination, both overt and covert — it was a mixture of relief and joy.

This joy is in part the very pure philosophical joy of a good thing happening, a thing that will change the future. In Andrew Young’s words: “a victory of grace over greed, of vision over violence.”

Can change really happen and if so how?  This is the country that twice elected George W. Bush. Many who voted-in perhaps the worst president in the nation’s history, twice, must have decided to vote for Obama over McCain. So are we a conservative nation simply disillusioned by a lousy president, or are we a nation newly and differently inspired, a changed nation?

Barack Obama Victor

I can’t know the answer. I can only give an opinion based on what I see and hear.  Obama and his campaign team have wrought change by reaching out and engaging people with new ideas. These ideas have rubbed up against old, automated, reactive ways of thinking. Obama has spent the last couple of years asking people why we should see the intractable problems of the country as hopelessly intractable. He’s also stood and overtly and covertly challenged people to find him wanting because of the color of his skin, or the unamericanness of his name, or the power of his rational intellect.

Many failed to meet this challenge. After all 47% of America voted for McCain, or against Obama. That’s tens of millions of people who have proven themselves insusceptible to a force for powerful, positive change.

The world is now a different place. Obama’s skill and insight in his campaign promise great things for his presidency. Thank you, Barack.

On the philosophy of accountability in our schools, government, banks, and life in general…

I love this quote from George Bush, speaking yesterday at an elementary school in Chicago. “Look, I recognize some people don’t like accountability, [...] accountability says if you’re failing, we’re going to expose that and expect you to change. Accountability also says that when you’re succeeding you’ll get plenty of praise.” Ah, and they said he’d never learn.

Bush was talking about the grandly ill-conceived free-market assault on education — the “No Child Left Behind” act. Again in Bush’s words: “The philosophy behind No Child Left Behind was in return for money there ought to be results.”

Bush seems to have a very personal feeling for this philosophy. It speaks to him. After all, he came to power under the same diktat from big business and wealthy donors. ‘We’ll fund your campaign and support you in your bid for the presidency, but we expect results.’ And he delivered by cutting taxes, protecting and facilitating industry and big business interests, and handing down spectacularly rewarding contracts in the defense and reconstruction industries.

Unfortunately, the presidency shouldn’t be founded on that kind of accountability. Bush should have felt accountable to the people of the country before big business, because they invested their trust in him, not because they invested money in him. When we conceive of Bush’s presidency in this way it is no surprise that he has seemed to feel no real accountability for his most grievous failures as president — taking us into a war under false pretenses, endorsing illegal and cruel detention and torture, carrying out secret surveillance programs, reacting with lamentable indifference to the flooding after Katrina, and denying, deriding and tampering with the scientific evidence for global warming.

Likewise, the most important thing we invest in our schools is our trust in them to educate our children as well as they can and as well as we wish. When they fail, we should hold them accountable by finding ways to improve their performance. In some schools this will demand smaller classrooms, in others, new teachers, or a different school leader, in others perhaps a different teaching method or catchment approach. But when does it ever make sense to hold them accountable by removing funds? How does that help the children?

Which brings me to think that accountability and trust may be inextricably related from a philosophical perspective. We might test this theory with an example from the world of finance. Bear Stearns CEO, James Cayne stepped down today, the latest in a string of departures from the top spots of financial institutions embattled by the sub-prime loan crisis. My question is this: Have these corporate leaders felt compelled to step down because they squandered investors’ money or because they betrayed their trust?

The answer seems to be that whether Cayne and others felt a sense of personal and direct responsibility for the losses (some didn’t), they all felt a responsibility for the lost trust as evidenced by that financial mismanagement.

Similarly, we want our teaching establishments to feel responsible for educating our children, not for investing education funds. And we want our government to feel responsible for serving our common interests, not repaying campaign contributions.

On voting in Iowa (and elsewhere).

As has been vividly demonstrated in Kenya in recent days, and as we experienced directly here in the US at the closing stages of the last presidential election, voting often produces more losers than winners. Today is caucus and primary day in Iowa. The presidential voting process begins. But what are we voting for, and why?

In some democratic systems, such as in the UK, people vote for a party rather than a person. Of course, a strong, popular and capable party leader can make a great deal of difference in which party people vote for, but it’s not quite the same as throwing the choice of party leader out to the popular vote. I focus on this difference to help illustrate the point that in a democracy our vote counts toward a particular result — the future government of the nation — and that rationally we should use our vote to try to help bring about the future government that we believe we prefer.

This may seem obvious, but I think it’s not.

Political pundits, the media, political campaign managers and even candidates get confused during the voting process. They become obsessed by the process itself, on what needs to be done to get elected. But getting elected and running a successful government require two very different sets of skills.

The particular skills required to govern the country don’t change much over time: Without integrity, effectiveness and vision things will go awry.

Whether a candidate (or party) claims to have the answer to fixing health care, or saving social security, or countering terrorism really makes no difference if they can’t demonstrate a track record of integrity, effectiveness and vision. Conversely, if a candidate honestly admits that they don’t currently have definite and convincing answers to such issues (how could any one candidate possibly have all the answers?) this demonstrates integrity without necessarily proving them ineffective and lacking in vision.

The pundits, the media, the campaign machine and the candidate make the voter’s task inordinately more difficult by masking the candidate’s key qualities behind a screen of distracting and tear-inducing smoke.

The other part of the voter’s task is to ask himself or herself what kind of government he or she prefers. Again, this seems obvious, but again I would claim it isn’t. If we focus on particular issues we risk losing sight of the big picture. Issues shift. New issues arise. The kind of government we prefer really doesn’t change much over time. That’s why political systems the world over tend to polarize to a greater or lesser degree into the opposing camps of conservative and liberal, republican and democrat, right wing and left wing, fascist and socialist.

The kind of government we prefer tends to fall somewhere along this spectrum. If the party we would normally vote for has swung too far one way, perhaps we feel a swing back in the other direction is called for. But fundamentally we tend to prefer a government that aligns better with our ideological bent.

To those in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and across the country I say, forget the hoopla, look past the mud that’s been slung, dig into the record of the candidates on matters of integrity, effectiveness and vision, and vote for a leader who lacks none of these and for a government whose ideology promises to set the country on a course that you will feel happy about four years from now.

I make no apology for belaboring the point that George Bush, who so clearly lacks integrity and effectiveness and who’s vision has been so muddled and ill-founded that it’s mired the country in a dire war, set back international relations thirty years, hobbled the country’s finances, and introduced a deplorable set of incursions on basic human rights, was elected to the highest office in the country not once but twice. We can only hope that this year’s voting process turns the tide.

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It’s interesting watching Giuliani run for president. While living in New York for the past fifteen years I’ve had some awareness of Giuliani and his perspectives. I feel as though I know him to some extent. His appearance before the National Rifle Association (the NRA) last week was fascinating. In an attempt to try to secure the NRA’s endorsment he felt obliged to defend his mayoral record of criticism of the NRA and his steadfast lobbying over that period for stricter gun control.

We all change our minds. It is important and inevitable for rational thinkers to revise and amend their thinking in the light of deeper or broader understanding. Often, politicians seem not to be permitted this right. And often politicians don’t try to exercise it, choosing instead to spin their ‘beliefs’ to best negotiate the current political waters.

Here is what Giuliani said to the NRA:

“At the time, what I was doing during the time that I was mayor was taking advantage of every law and every interpretation of every law that I could think of to reduce crime.”

On the face of it, there seems no reason to question that this is correct. It seems completely in accord with Giuliani’s recor. It also seems to concord with his declared intention at the time — to reduce crime and make New York a safer place.

But what is Giuliani’s intention now? And how do we interpret, philosophically, his shift in stance on gun control?

I’m not trying to think this through in order to lambast Giuliani. I know I, too, change my mind and wonder whether I’m doing so to suit my own ends. What seems to be important is to ask the question.

Giuliani’s priorities have changed. He is no longer the mayor of New York City. Therefore he has a new perspective. His goal in speaking to the NRA to further his political ambitions. But the critical question seems to be this: Did he intend to further his political ambitions by forging an allegiance with a powerful conservative group, or did he intend to further his political ambitions by speaking his mind and presenting his revised perspective on the importance and scope of gun control?

It is easy to jump to the first conclusion. I did when I first heard about Giuliani’s address. And then when watching clips of Giuliani’s address he seems sincere and thoughtful. Parsing the language of his U-turn we find that he sounds reasonable. He’s changed his mind, we think.

But if we parse his statements in a different way, if we look for Giuliani’s approach to arriving at rational convictions, statements and acts, we can draw a disturbing conclusion. What Giuliani declares is that he was using every means possible to make New York a safer place. He exorts this approach in his speech to the NRA saying that he used the same strategy in every aspect of his mayorship. Giuliani sees nothing wrong in this. He was trained to do this. He was, by all accounts, a very successful prosecutor of the cases that he prosecuted (although he was criticized for dropping the ones he didn’t feel confident about).

Giuliani’s philosophy, it seems, and by his own declaration, is one of exigency. I do what I do in order to achieve the result I want to achieve. Since the result is desirable, my actions are justified.

This philosophy is excellent so long as one has goals that are noble and altruistic. But a person who holds this philosophy is unlikely to consistently hold noble and altruistic goals because they are accustomed to setting goals based on need or desire.

An anecdote that will be familiar to all of those who lived through Giuliani’s mayorship. Giuliani had a dislike of ferrets. He pursued this dislike with all of the tenacity that he pursued everything else. He banned the keeping of ferrets as pets. Can a man who will issue laws against small mammals in the midst of a crackdown on crime in one of the world’s biggest cities really be expected to keep a perspective on the demand for exigency?