Attitude of Possibility

Attitude of Possibility

Putting together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle seems an appropriate metaphor for the challenges ahead of us as a human family. This one took my wife, Ellen, and me, about a week of coming and going. It was a good activity for some frigid, snowy days and evenings. We didn’t count the hours, we simply hovered over the table when the spirit pulled us, either separately or together. We began, as is our practice, by enclosing the frame or establishing the boundaries. From there it was looking for connections of color and shape, using the photo on the lid of the box for clues. It was interesting how many times one of us would hold a piece and not see where it fit, and the other immediately did. I think this approach has some merits to our current challenges.

We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations. (Earth Charter, “Preamble”, 2000)

Nearly twenty years ago people of many nations came together to produce the Earth Charter that emphasized humanity was at a critical moment. It was also at the cusp of launching the Millennium Development Goals, and three years later the release of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.  A few trends have been slowed or redirected, but as recognized when the new Sustainable Development Goals were agreed to by all member states of the United Nations in 2017, we are losing the race to sustainability on many fronts in most every nation.

Those 17 Global Goals, with their 169 targets and 232 indicators, give us all much to do. In their sheer number and breadth it can certainly seem like more than any of us can comprehend or handle, even if we were to take them each up separately.  Thus it might be easier if we could somehow consolidate them in a useful way without losing the necessary detail.

Unbeknownst to me and I suspect 98% of the human family, there has been an international team of scholars wrestling with all of this for years.

Late last year the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) laid out in much detail a possible direction to head. IPSP is an international effort of more than 200 social scientists from every continent representing all the social sciences to try to find a way forward for the entire human family together.  I have not read the three volumes, Rethinking Society for the 21^st Century. 

In fact, I wouldn’t know it existed had I not stumbled on A Manifesto for Social Progress: Ideas for a Better Society, which is a shorter overview of this colossal enterprise written by some of the principal leaders of the effort.

“We cannot simply undertake minor changes, small fine-tuning of policies, and avert the looming crises. A more fundamental transformation is needed. We believe that this transformation is possible… Three main goals must be pursued and achieved in conjunction, and they relate to three fundamental values:

·                  Equity:  reduce inequalities of development between countries and social inequalities within countries;

·                Sustainability: put the planet back on a track that preserves ecosystems and the human beings of future generations;

·                Freedom: expand and deepen basic liberties, the rule of law, and democratic rights for all populations.”

 ( A Manifesto for Social Progress, Cambridge University Press,  2018, p.85)

The authors immediately concede after pointing us in this direction that there will be a natural tendency to attempt to work on any two of the three goals. They go on for several pages with scenarios for any combination of two goals sought while one is missed, whereby all of the scenarios end badly.  While there is consensus in the “direction” the human family should go for true social progress for all, the route they agree on must be worked out. But even getting our communities to support these basic three goals would be a huge step forward.  

While we delve deeper into the individual goals we are apt to lose the importance of their collective wholeness. Recent revival of interest in Goethe’s notion of “wholeness” in nature shows some hope that we might begin to grasp its importance, that in focusing on the parts we miss the whole.  Scientific reductionism has led to many important breakthroughs, discoveries, and new understandings of our world and our place in it, but it has left in its wake an increasing array of largely unintended consequences which we are handing down to current and future generations to struggle with – ecological destabilization and extreme inequality being two prime examples.

Sociologist, Michael Schwalbe, wrote what I believe is a sadly overlooked book about change, especially as it addresses inequality:  Rigging the Game: How Inequality Is Reproduced in Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2008).  ( A new edition was published in late 2014, which I have yet to read.)

Following a long dissection of how the existing rules further increase inequality, Schwalbe offers in his final chapter, “Escaping the Inequality Trap,” a few possibilities.

Of course one danger of diagnosing a problem is the possibility of discovering that it has no solution. No doubt some readers feel this way about the persistence of inequality. It might seem that the game is so securely rigged that it can’t be changed. But then history should tell us that this is not true; the social world is always changing (just look back and see where we came from). What’s more, the only thing worse than a grim diagnosis is no diagnosis at all, because then you have no idea where to look for a solution.

In previous chapters I’ve shown where some of the problems lie. Now I want to use that analysis to suggest how inequality could be greatly reduced, if not (yet) abolished entirely. I don’t mean that I can offer a blueprint for change. But what I can do is to suggest, in general terms, what needs to be done to nudge change in the direction of equality rather than away from it. If we can see what holds inequality in place, we ought to be able to figure out something about how it can be shaken loose.

Schwalbe believes that a key starting place to replace the rules of a rigged game begin with “freeing the imagination”:

The problem, from the standpoint of trying to change a rigged game, is getting a critical mass of people to believe that change is possible and that better alternatives can be created. If only a handful of people venture to imagine alternatives, TINA (There is No Alternative) will prevail and the rigged game will go on.  That’s why people interested in analyzing the status quo and thinking about alternatives form communities in which to share ideas and information. That is what happens, or is supposed to, in colleges and universities and in social change organizations. The problem, from the standpoint of elites who want to preserve the rigged game, is keeping ideas that challenge TINA from catching on beyond a handful of activists and intellectuals. (pp. 241-2)

Schwalbe also argues that two other conditions must be established if the rules of the rigged game that have given us increasing inequality are to be revised -- humanizing others and questioning contradictions. As long as we see others as distinct and not connected to our situation we will be all too likely to ignore their suffering and will not be inclined to work to alleviate it or its causes. If we could think of others as family, the likelihood is we would roll up our sleeves to help address the suffering. Similarly, he notes, “Imagination is often driven by questions, especially those of the What if? variety. Such questions tug our minds beyond the confines of the ordinary and familiar.” (p.244)

In his book, Imagining the University, emeritus professor of higher education Ronald Barnett (University of London) calls on us to reconsider a feasible utopia and to place the idea of the university within it. Barnett lays out the need for such ”freeing the imagination” exercise, challenges the recent and dominant ideas of a university, and provides the scaffolding for constructing approaches to the positive possibilities that are called for as the human family stares into an increasingly complex and fragile future.

Ideas of the university in the public domain are hopelessly impoverished. 'Impoverished' because they are unduly confined to a small range of possible conceptions of the university; and 'hopelessly' because they are too often without hope, taking the form of either hand-wringing over the current state of the university or merely offering a defence of the emerging nature of 'the entrepreneurial university'....

      Why does this matter, and why does it matter at this particular time? At the very moment when the idea of the university should be opening out, it seems to be closing in, at least in the public imagination. The idea of the university has, of course, undergone many shifts and been subject to varying conceptions over time. For some hundreds of years, the idea of the university was - as it might be said - that of the metaphysical university, reflective of inquiry that enhanced humanity's connections with God, or the Universe, or Truth, or Spirit, or even the State. That conception gave way to the research university, which is now giving way to that of the entrepreneurial university, which in turn is closely allied to the emergence of a tacit idea of the corporate university.

    What is striking about this conceptual journey that the idea of the university has undergone - over nearly one thousand years - is that it has gradually shrunk. Whereas the metaphysical university was associated with the largest themes of humanity's self-understanding and relationships with the world, the idea of the university has increasingly - and now especially in its entrepreneurial and corporate incarnations - closed in. The entrepreneurial university is expected to fend for itself, and attend to its potential impact on particular segments of the economy, and become distinctive. This university has abandoned any pretence to be associated with universal themes.

     The idea of the university has closed in ideologically, spatially and ethically. Ideologically, the contemporary envelope of ideas encourages the university to pursue quite narrow interests, particularly those of money (in the service of a national - or even a global - knowledge economy); spatially, the university is enjoined to engage its region, especially with industrial or business organizations in its environs (increasingly its students are also 'local'); and ethically, the university has become focused on its own interests. It will, as a result, close departments of chemistry or physics or modern languages or philosophy because it sees such closures as serving its own (usually financial) interests rather than their being laced in a set of public interests. (pp1-2)

Barnett argues that "imaginative ideas of the university are in short supply and that there are - if only embryonically - many ideas of the university close at hand." He claims that the powers that be resist opening it up to alternative ideas. While his aim is specific to the idea of the university, I find his insights into the usefulness of imagination and the birthing of new ideas particularly compelling. In fact, the need to use his approach for rethinking our economic and political systems in the face of globally shared dilemmas seems perhaps even more essential at the moment. 

As has been my practice for a few years, three years ago (almost to the day) I was browsing the new-book shelf at my university library-- they shelve perhaps 100 new titles a day and leave them up for a week. So my chances of even seeing them there is quite iffy. And I certainly don’t look at every book. I skim by call number (subject) and then by title.  The title of one paperback that caught my attention was Change Everything. 

It was classified in economics.  As I pulled it off the shelf and opened it, I discovered the subtitle that convinced me to give it a chance: Creating an Economy for the Common Good. Part of me was resistant to try yet one more economics book as there are now close to two dozen I have consumed in the past few years. I had never heard of the author, Christian Felber, although it became apparent from the back cover that he was a European economist. One quote claimed Felber “is one of the most brilliant economists in Europe.”

Well, I get this far with lots of books. But after reading the rest of the salutary blurbs, a few from names I knew and respected, and reading the forward and his preface, I determined that this was at least worth some investment of my time. Felber, it turns out, is an Austrian economist who writes in German. So the book in my hands was a translation by Susan Nurmi. Boy, am I glad she agreed to do this!! As is my inclination, especially in fields where I have some reading experience, I like to glance at the bibliography to see whom the writer reads and cites. While there were a few economists in English I was familiar with – Herman Daly, Tim Jackson, E.F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Elinor Ostrom, Thomas Picketty, Milton Friedman--the majority were from German and French authors I was unfamiliar with, a real bonus.

As he says early in his preface, “One of the main objectives of this book is to demonstrate, in concrete terms, that there are in fact alternatives to the current economic order” (p. xiv).

But this is not simply a checklist of what we might do to create an economy for the common good, although there are plenty of specific examples already shared in the book.  This is a deeply reflective analysis of why we have the system we have. Felber clearly examines the supposed tenets of our current system and then shows how they are responsible for the shortcomings we see all around us.

Felber then begins to construct an alternative set of tenets, shoring them up with evidence of a better outcome employing a systemic understanding of the interaction of the principles and practices. At the foundation is, of course, a discussion of key values. And it is here the wrestling match must begin with those who believe the system we have only needs a little tweaking to repair the damages that have resulted from its application. As Felber makes clear,

     Two crucial questions pose themselves: what does the “common good” mean and who defines it? As a guiding concept, the Economy for the Common Good has no preconceived meaning except that it signifies how important the well-being of all human beings and the natural world is… the only immanent meaning of the common good concept is that everyone’s well-being counts. Otherwise the concept constitutes nothing more than an umbrella term in the sense of a constitutional goal which sums up the key values of democratic societies. The precise meaning of its individual components can and should be determined democratically. The “common good” is neither divinely handed down nor does it derive from the grace of any emperor.

It should be clear that Felber doesn’t see the system he envisages as some detailed system designed by experts but rather a direction driven by local democratic processes upon shared values. He has a whole chapter on ”advancing democracy” which is central to his thesis. Following that is a chapter on real world examples, and concluding on how we might ”put it into practice.” He begins that last chapter with this quote from Buckminster Fuller:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Felber has not only given us some refreshing ideas; he and his colleagues have begun to put many into practice. By the end of 2014 there were efforts afloat in numerous countries, regions and municipalities involving businesses, government, organizations and individuals to employ the ideas for an Economy for the Common Good and the brilliant Common Good Balance Sheet all businesses and organizations should use to assess their performance for the common good.

Anyone dissatisfied with the current state of affairs will be pleased to see that another world is possible and is being born. You might even want to join the efforts. There is no better place to begin than with this very important and inspiring book. If you don’t have the time to read the full book there is a video of a talk Felber gave last year in Amsterdam that will provide a cursory introduction to ideas and the guy behind them. Although the  video is almost two hours, his presentation from around 6:00 minutes to 46:00 minutes should give you a clue to what we could do to replace the madness of our current economy rules.

Felber isn’t alone in imagining a new set of rules for the economy. Check out some of the following new economy sites. The possibilities are plentiful!

New Economics Foundation

Next System Project

New Economy Coalition

Association for Heterodox Economics

If there is an author/thinker who always nudges me to rethink possibilities, to question contradictions, and to see things in a new light it’s Charles Eisenstein. Charles Eisenstein, who has the uncanny ability to look at the world with fresh eyes, has penned an urgent read in my mind: Climate – A New Story (North Atlantic Books, 2018). 

As author David Abram writes,

What a blast of sanity! Eisenstein’s corrective is a bracing piece of work, dazzlingly  thorough and eloquent in its articulation. He writes from within an uncannily woke worldview, enacting a full-bodies way of thinking that discerns and feels into the complex entanglement of our lives with every facet of this breathing biosphere. This book is visionary and prophetic, achingly grounded and useful to the max.

As Abrams suggests, it is packed with perspective you just won’t find anywhere else. I stumbled upon Eisenstein when he was speaking at a conference I attended in 2012 where he spoke on “We Are Relationship: The Transition to a Collaborative Society.” I was stunned at the wisdom oozing out of this guy and immediately ordered Sacred Economics, which he had just published. It was indeed, like his talk, transformative.

This book has a similar feel but comes to us from concerns with the climate as the North Star for thinking about how we might address our human predicament. He begins with a look at the spectrum of how folks think about climate change, from what he labels “Climate catastrophism” = we’re doomed and it’s too late, to the other end, “climate skepticism” = that it’s not happening, or if it is happening it has little to do with human activity, or if it is attributable to human activity, it isn’t dangerous. Eisenstein looks under the covers of all of these points of view. What he suggests is truly eye opening.

As one reviewer notes,

Flipping the script on climate change, Eisenstein makes a case for a wholesale reimagining of the framing, tactics, and goals we employ in our journey to heal from ecological destruction. With research and insight, Charles Eisenstein details how the quantification of the natural world leads to a lack of integration and our “fight” mentality. With an entire chapter unpacking the climate change denier’s point of view, he advocates for expanding our exclusive focus on carbon emissions to see the broader picture beyond our short-sighted and incomplete approach. The rivers, forests, and creatures of the natural and material world are sacred and valuable in their own right, not simply for carbon credits or preventing the extinction of one species versus another. After all, when you ask someone why they first became an environmentalist, they’re likely to point to the river they played in, the ocean they visited, the wild animals they observed, or the trees they climbed when they were a kid. This refocusing away from impending catastrophe and our inevitable doom cultivates meaningful emotional and psychological connections and provides real, actionable steps to caring for the earth. Freeing ourselves from a war mentality and seeing the bigger picture of how everything from prison reform to saving the whales can contribute to our planetary ecological health, we resist reflexive postures of solution and blame and reach toward the deep place where commitment lives.

Given my own work in recent years it would be especially remiss of me to ignore the specific emphasis Eisenstein offers in the last of his suggested policies and changes he urges us to pursue: Demilitarize society.

The environmental crisis invites us to change our priorities and put earth healing first, make ecological-social healing the primary conditioning parameter on every political  decision. The military mind puts defeat of the enemy first instead. More tangibly, the military sucks up prodigious amounts of energy, materials, money, and human talent. Tens of thousands of the best scientists and engineers devote their lives to developing weaponry. Millions of healthy, capable, idealistic young people join the military. And of course, the money squandered on weaponry is enough to fund probably all other proposals in this book. (p,276)

For a video interview with Charles that explores his ideas see here.

In recent months, an example of this kind of possibility thinking has come forward in the proposal for a Green New Deal. Like the International Panel on Social Progress it points direction not the route. It addresses several of Sustainable Development Goals at the same time. It is based upon freeing the imagination, humanizing others, and questioning assumptions. In short, it has the spirit and attitude of possibility.

The point of this blog has been about conjuring up new ideas and possibilities that might nudge us all toward a better life on a single, finite, and magical planet together. There are no certainties. We really don’t know what is possible until we try. What each of these authors has led me to believe is that there is some deeper harmony between reason, emotion and intuition that makes us human. When we tap it all and find other voices to deepen the harmony we’re better off.

Speaking of harmony, if you don't believe change is possible, the story of Playing for Change that started simply with a videographer finding street musicians in various places around the world and then connecting them is a moving antidote to that hardening of the mental arteries. This initial travel experience has now evolved into a global band with live performances and into an inspiring launch of music schools in the developing world. If the story doesn't move you, the music should.

Perhaps the anthem for the new age is best represented in one of the Playing for Change Band's version of this song, "A Change is Gonna Come.” Or this just released, “Seeds of Freedom.” Change is inevitable, so be the change you want to see in the world. It's possible!!!

Two Books - Real Gifts

I have a pile of about 10 books I’m wading through, but two are of special note as I write this. As I noted in my last blog of 2017 I have the privilege of reading, and especially of reading books. For the past few years I’ve read on average between 20-30 nonfiction works cover-to-cover per year. With our world moving more quickly, our attention spans shorter, much of the reading that is done by the many of us is short, sometimes limited to 140 characters. Complexity is avoided. These two books offer a reason for exploring depth through thoughtful analysis.

I picked up Ben Fountain’s Beautiful Country Born Again based upon a couple of high recommendations like the one from Bill Moyers –

“But here, too, is a finely spun analysis of how the two major parties lost their way, opening for an outlier like Trump the opportunity of a lifetime. Fountain has given us an original, informed and deeply felt take on the forces and stresses bearing down on America.”

We lived through this period, but reading this page turner, by a truly gifted writer (and teacher of writing) had me see and feel it a little deeper than I had. The downside and a possible reason to skip it, is that he offers no direction from here. Thus we may understand as Moyers notes, but what do we do? 

This is not the case with the second book, and perhaps the most important one. Charles Eisenstein, who has the uncanny ability to look at the world with fresh eyes has penned an urgent read in my mind, Climate – A New Story (North Atlantic Books 2018). As author David Abram writes,

“What a blast of sanity! Eisenstein’s corrective is a bracing piece of work, dazzlingly thought through and eloquent in its articulation. He writes from within an uncannily woke worldview, enacting a full-bodies way of thinking that discerns and feels into the complex entanglement of our lives with every facet of this breathing biosphere. This book is visionary and prophetic, achingly grounded and useful to the max.”

I’ll be honest, I’m only 116 pages into this 300 pager, but as Abrams suggests, it is packed with perspective you just won’t find anywhere else. I stumbled upon Eisenstein when he was speaking at a conference I attended in 2012 where he spoke on “We Are Relationship: The Transition to a Collaborative Society”. I was stunned at the wisdom oozing out of this guy and immediately ordered a book, Sacred Economics that he had just published. It was indeed, like his talk, transformative.

This book has a similar feel but comes to us from concerns with the climate as the North Star for thinking about how we might address about our human predicament. He begins with a look at the spectrum of how folks think about climate change –from what he labels “Climate catastrophism” = ‘we’re doomed and it’s too late, to the other end “climate skepticism” = that it’s not happening, or that if it is happening it has little to do with human activity, or if it is attributable to human activity, it isn’t dangerous. Eisenstein looks under the covers of all of these points of view. What he suggests is truly eye opening.

                                           

I won’t say more until I finish the book. But I believe there is enough wisdom regardless of which arguments you may choose to accept or reject within it, that we would each benefit from sitting with those ideas and seriously pondering them. I have even ordered a second copy of the book to lend out to nearby friends because I suspect most bookstores and libraries will not have this book available. That is a huge lost for us all.

Time to Empty Your Pockets

I just made my self read the nine page "Executive Summary" of the recently (November 14) released Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission . It was all I could do to keep from gagging. I won't put myself through the full 116 pages, especially as I scanned the make-up of the commission and the list of those who gave testimony. It's definitely the swamp.

The message briefly is this: Be Afraid!!  Be Really Afraid!!!  Every corner of the planet has some state or terrorist out to get us and the only way to prevent this is for us to build a bigger military industry with lots of technological gizmos as fast as we can. Nary a word about personnel. No mention of earlier concerns (before Trump administration) about the role of climate change. No hint that increased diplomacy might reduce these alarming fears. Simply our already bloated military footprint needs to be bigger.

Having recently finished Harvard Professor of International Relations Stephen Walt's, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (2018) an insightful read into the foreign policy establishment since WWII, this playbook is perfectly predictable.  

If this passes as leadership and our spineless Congress bows adoringly to everything military ( to do otherwise would be to be seen as either unpatriotic or weak on defense - big political no-no), you can bet that Republicans and too many Democrats will not raise taxes to cover these costs, but rather will cut funding for health care, environmental protection, transportation, infrastructure, renewable energy, etc.

Ironically, a report was released at nearly the same time last week from Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs that looked at the cost of our wars since 9/11 and shows the bill comes in at $5.9 Trillion. Most of the folks on the commission or giving testimony have been either making the policy or otherwise supportive of one that has given us "17 years of fighting; thousands of US soldiers killed and many thousands more injured; hundreds of thousands of civilians killed; millions of refugees; and the costs go on."

I have been meaning to go back and read the similar playbook that accompanied George W. Bush into the White House from the Project for a New American Century. How coincidentally that the title of their playbook, which included attacking Iraq even before 9/11, was titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses", another militaristic approach to foreign policy. And where did that get us????

We need to call this out, stand up to robbing our treasury to fund the arms lobby, and seek to develop a world order built on the rule of law, diplomacy, sustainable development, and shared leadership. The American empire project will end. If we follow the militarists it will end a lot uglier than if we build trust, cooperation, and address our shared challenges - climate change, growing income inequality, adequate health care access, clean water, good food and livelihoods for all.

We should be putting our shoulders together to address the Sustainable Development Goals all United Nations member states have agreed to. Throwing money at the military is a fool's errand.

The Narcotic of Power

I still have two chapters to go before I finish Philippe Sands penetrating 2005 book, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules, so what follows might have been improved if I had finished before sharing these thoughts.  I can’t be sure if what follows is inspired by that engaging book, or the recent storm over the Supreme Court, or recent decisions by the current administration to withdraw from and ignore legal agreements, or the fight to end gerrymandering or the corruption of democracy generally. Probably all of the above and more are responsible.

What all of these things point me towards is the use of power.  The old saying that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” seems truer with each passing day. The framers of our constitution were certainly concerned with the abuse of power and shaped that constitution with some purpose to create a “balance of powers”. But even that was contextualized in the moment. Women and blacks and indigenous people were not presumed to have any power, and the constitution certainly isolated them from it. The supposedly strict constitutionalists amongst us who try and interpret everything in the constitution literally, fail to appreciate how flawed the Constitution was from the start. That’s why it has been continually amended.

No one seeks to be on the bottom of the power ladder. Neither is this is a partisan issue. Neither major party prefers to be in the minority. When it finds itself in that position the minority party hopes that there are rules that prevent the majority party from annihilating the minority. If we believe in equity, we must have protections for all from the concentration and the abuse of power by some. Constraining the accumulation of dominant power and moving towards governance that is designed to share power is precisely what our founders sought with the original constitution, despite its shortcomings more obvious to us since. It is also what Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were hoping to establish globally with the drafting of the Atlantic Charter and later the creation of the United Nations.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a fundamental statement of individual freedom from the abuse of power. UDHR passed overwhelmingly 70 years ago and remains the bedrock of individual rights, which have been expanded with subsequent conventions like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1977) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1977).

Let me try and put some flesh on the bones of these thoughts using the examples from which I opened this blog.

Philippe Sands is a noted British legal scholar, teacher and practicing attorney who has specialized in international law and been involved in numerous important cases of international legal arenas. In Lawless World, published in 2005, Sands walks us through a number of cases that demonstrate how the U.S. (and sometimes with British support) has frequently confounded other nations by undercutting global agreements in their development stage, refusing to support many, and ignoring when it’s inconvenient, its own international agreements since WWII. In great detail and with clear prose and argument he addresses many moments in recent history including the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, Geneva Conventions, UN Charter, International Court of Justice and more. Of course there is voluminous amount of material since the Bush Administration came to office, although the book ends as Bush is starting his second term.

The U.S. of course wants to promote an image as the true democracy and law abiding nation, but Sands demolishes that image with a plethora of cases. He looks carefully at the legal gymnastics used to try and justify the U.S. illegal invasion of Iraq, the illegal detention of non-combatants, the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers, the undermining of the Kyoto Protocol and on and on.

Sands makes the plea for establishing rules that we can agree to and then following them, even if we don’t like them. Can you imagine a baseball game where one team decided you needed four strikes for a strikeout to give their hitters a better chance? The recent decisions to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and the Nuclear agreement with Iran and other nations are just more of the same. It is interesting to note that even fifteen years ago Sands identified John Bolton, current National Security Advisor, as a detestor of international agreements. No surprise that he has helped engineer the recent U.S. abandonment of global agreements.

Prof. Michael Schwalbe wrote an unfortunately under-read book, Rigging the Game: How Inequality is Reproduced in Everyday Life, that depicts with crystal clarity how the rules are rigged against the poor. It is a clear example of the abuse of power. An abusive power I might add that has been consolidated with recent additional tax cuts for the wealthiest amongst us. 

But the inequality we face is not simply an economic one. As noted political scientists Kay Schlozman,Sydney Verba, and Henry Brady have documented in several recent books, paralleling income inequality is political inequality. Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Failed Promise of Demoracy(2012) offers 693 pages of evidence In this hefty, multiple award winning tome, Schlozman and colleagues review a huge number of studies and discern, what a reasonable person might easily infer, that the growing economic inequality parallels a growing political inequality.

 They followed that up this year with Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the People’s Voice in the New Gilded Age (2018).Their evidence is compelling, but If that wouldn’t provide sufficient research evidence try this.

 “According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.” So reports Ellen  Brown, founder of the Public Banking Institute in “How America Became an Oligarchy”

See also Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s Captured: The Corporate Capture of AmericanDemocracy to see how the abuse of power often tied to wealth and privilege  has infiltrated and ‘captured’  the executive agencies and the courts. It’s the reason that so many books are coming out that focus on the death or dying of democracy.

The recent Supreme Court brou-ha-ha is a clear example of using power to squash the minority. It started when the Senate majority refused to hold a hearing and vote on President Obama’s nomination of Merick Garland in 2016. The abuse of power has grown with the Republican erasure of the filibuster rule and then consummated in the rush job to get  Mr. Kavanagh on the bench without the full review of  documents of his past record, or a thorough investigation of allegations regarding sexual assault and drinking.

Moving to a world where we look at power as not one of “power over” but rather as “power with” is a major step. Perhaps nowhere is this most visible than with the global concerns over climate change. Just last month we saw the release of the International Panel on Climate Change’s recent report that sees catastrophe less than a generation away if we don’t dramatically reverse direction in our consumption and release of carbon. This is not something one community or one nation can adequately confront. It should unite us as one human family on a single planet with a shared future. Does one nation believe it can or should try to survive the potential catastrophe alone? Especially if that nation is more responsible per capita than any other nation for the coming catastrophe?

Economist Jared Bernstein made an interesting point years ago describing basic worldviews distinctions between YOYO’s and WITT’s. YOYO’s Bernstein says, are those that believe that You're On Your Own, the pull-yourself-up-by-the- bootstraps approach and that hard work is all that is necessary for success. WITT’s, Bernstein argues, believe that We’re  In This Together and believe more in fundamental democracy and giving a hand-up as captured in the New Deal.

Roosevelt expanded that idea from application within the U.S. to consideration for a global family. While the US was a main driver of this post-WWII effort, we reserved for ourselves and the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council, a power-over veto that has hampered the possibility of reaching the promise from which the UN was born. This perhaps was cornerstone of what has been the US belief in its own exceptionalism. Unfortunately it is an anathema of a truly global democracy that Roosevelt hope to evolve. In recent years as Philippe Sands so clearly depicts as does Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard  in his new tome, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (2018), America has defied international agreements whenever they are inconvenient. It’s an abuse of power and the rest of the world recognizes the hypocrisy, even if we citizens are in denial.

The Limits of Our Thoughts

The reading pile keeps getting bigger. Each morning upon grabbing the coffee and nestling into a corner of the couch, I reach for one of the books in my reading pile. On the coffee table in front of the couch are the magazines that pile up – The Sun, The Atlantic, The Nation, Yes Magazine.

Today I grabbed a recent addition to the book pile, Stephen Walt’s new The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (2018).

It’s one of the best reads of 2018 if not the 2000s. I’ve got two chapters left, about 70 pages of the 360 ( 70 pages are notes, themselves worth reading). Anyone interested in foreign policy should read this critique of the “establishment” since WWII through early 2018 and why policy alternatives to what Walt, describes as “liberal hegemony” never seem to change whether Clinton, Bush, Obama or Trump sits in the oval office. Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University.

Also in the pile and partially read are:

Noam Chomsky. Optimism Over Despair: On Capitalism, Empire and Social Change (2017)

Richard Falk. The Costs of War: International Law, The UN, and World Order After Iraq (2008)

Shampa Biswas. NuclearDesire: Power and Post Colonial Nuclear Order (2014)

Richard Falk. Humanitarian Intervention and Legitimacy Wars: Seeking Peace and Justice in the 21st Century (2015)

Liam Young. Rise: How Jerey Corbyn Inspired the Young to Create a New Socialism (2018)

Christopher Bertram. Do States Have the Right to Exclude Immigrants (2018)

Also in the pile but not yet started other than the introductions are

George Orwell. TheRoad to Wigan Pier (1937) which Ellen just read and highly recommended it for it’s pertinence.

Gretel Van Wieren. Food Farming and Religion: Emerging Ethical Perspectives (2018) Stumbled upon on the new book shelf and noted that author was an MSU professor (I have not met) but in the intro she highlights work of two other MSU profs I do know.

Peter Plastrik and John Cleveland. Life After Carbon: The Next Global Transformation of Cities (2018)

Noam Chomsky. Who Rules the World (2016)

I often wonder how the brain and impulse drive the selection of items for the pile and how it then integrates the ideas as I read them. Based on past experience I may not finish all of them, and certainly as the Walt book shows, some other title will get added to the pile and potentially take precedence over others. Usually when that happens,  like Walt’s book, the writing is excellent and ideas more compelling or perhaps fresh, innovative or at least new to me.

I admittedly don’t absorb anymore the full detail as I read the pages. I tend to carry forward the general intent of the book along with its tone. In some cases I note certain quotes and page references for possible future use. In many cases the references lead to other titles added to the pile or websites to investigate.

I recognize all this as a privilege that I have, or at least make the time, to delve into this playground of ideas. Of course, scholars like Walt or the others represented in the pile, dedicate even more of their time and energy into delving deeper into segments of the world of ideas than I do. But most of those are within a narrower band width of human thought than I can manage. So it intrigues me as I interact more and more with elected officials and their staff, to consider how much they read, how limited that time is and perhaps again how narrow the area of focus.

Mr. Trump, who appears to celebrate not reading, except teleprompters,  is at the abysmal end of this scale. But what of Senator X,  Representative Y, or foreign policy staffer Z.  How many books have any of them read in the past year? What is the longest policy report they have completely read from an academic journal, think tank, or government agency? It concerns me that the responses would be closer to Trump than to Walt, or even me. While Walt doesn’t discuss this information deficit directly thus far in his book, his notion of how the foreign policy elites constrain the limits of consideration helps me understand why new ideas, or even the reconsideration of failed policies, seem “foreign” to most elected officials.

Expanding our horizons and possibilities in our increasingly complex world through reading of serious, thoughtful, and sometimes lengthy writings might help all of us appreciate the limitations of our electoral system and those that represent us. Ignorance is not bliss.