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Do as I say, and all that.

3 September 2010 by Mark

I’ve let this space go idle this summer for a variety of reasons, but none that seem to add up to more than procrastination and laziness.  Not that I haven’t been able to keep busy, of course, but what are a few minutes to take down some thoughts?  But since this joint is low traffic anyway, at least I don’t need to worry about losing readership…!

At any rate, what’s been on lately?  Oh right, certain drum-beaters and flag-wavers have gone mental at the thought of brown people doing religion.  Of major concern here, of course, is the politicization of faith in any form, moderate or fundamentalist, since the personal and the public never quite make for the best of bed fellows.  Nevertheless, the cacophonous chorus of xenophobia that seems to have captured the American airwaves, however anecdotal it may yet be, has brought with it all the awkwardness one would expect from a hypocrisy that praises freedom above all else and at all times, except not above pettiness and not all the time.

Anyway, this lust for banishing from sight the things that in one way or another run afoul of our precious sensibilities is as old as the world, so what’s to be done?  Censorship and prohibition always fail on their own incongruities (communism, war on ____, abstinence…take your pick).  Earlier, I was indulging in the not-so-guilty pleasure of old time heavy metal, and this filthy little gem from the mighty Anthrax struck me as particularly relevant:

For the sake of context, it was a response to the PMRC…how quaint that now seems!

Aaaaanyway:

Now I’m startin’ up a posse
And we’ll damn sure make you see
Something that offends you
May not be offensive to me

Barely passable as art, that still pretty much sums it up, no?

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I can’t believe it, I’m actually posting about the footie.

28 June 2010 by Mark

Since there’s nothing original to say about yesterday’s match, I figured why not just go on the record with someone else’s words and maybe see if a larger point can be made. Heh. So, an article in the Berliner Morgenpost portrays a case of local immigrants having their flag-waving rights challenged by an activist non-immigrant population…the twist of course being that the flag in question is the German one.  A telling quote, particularly in regard to broader issues of immigration, integration, and cosmopolitanism:

Aus ihrer Sicht sind wir Migranten.  Sie verstehen nicht, dass Deutsche Deutschland verteidigen, die nicht deutschstämmig sind.

That is:

From their perspective, we are migrants.  They do not understand that Germans defend Germany who are not of German descent.

This seems to get to the heart of current dilemmas in social policy, let alone foreign affairs.  While the national paradigm has its own share of political, sociological, even ethical limitations, the issue of identity across various domains — immigrant, citizen, minority — presents a beautifully complexity. At any rate, back to the football.  The Guardian notes that:

The very odd thing about modern Germany is that it appears to be almost entirely a mystery to the British, who are surprised to discover that the side fielded by Germany today hardly consists of the Aryan specimens on display at the Berlin Olympics. Men of Tunisian, Spanish, Bosnian, Polish and Brazilian ancestry form the German squad, together with the Turkish midfielder Mesut Ozil [sic], who recites the Koran while the German national anthem is sung.

In the same post, we are reminded of this, which I incidentally had the pleasure of finding out about while studying in London: What do all these anecdotal tangents add up to?  I’m not quite sure.  Perhaps that all this World Cup nationalism, despite its occasional ugliness, sure does provide plenty of opportunities to take a look at what we are all becoming. Or, maybe I’m just glad that England’s goin’ home!  They’re goin’ home! They’re goin’!

Update: Der Spiegel seems to have found interest in this story as well.

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Revisiting Sen’s “Development as Freedom”

9 June 2010 by Mark

I’m quite the fan of Amartya Sen’s writing, which I hope has been able to inform at least some of what I’m able to contribute — both in a personal and professional capacity.  At any rate, I returned to Development as Freedom recently, and am quite pleased with the result.  Thus, here is the review quoted in full:

In early March, I had the opportunity to hear Professor Paul Collier, the development economist, speak about issues deemed critical to the future of Africa at a talk hosted by the U.S. Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.  His observations focused on the primacy of managing economic processes, particularly resource extraction, upon which other social issues will ultimately depend.  Shortly thereafter, the British think-tank, Demos, hosted a lecture and live webcast by Amartya Sen, whose views on development are a marked contrast, and indeed conflict, with those of Collier.  Collier holds democracy to be a contingent benefit of economic growth, whereas Sen situates individual freedom and democratic processes as the foundation upon which sustainable economic growth is to be achieved.

Richard Reeves, director of Demos, has on a number of occasions referred to comments made by Sen following an acclaimed speech at Oxford in 2009.  Responding to why the practical economist had not delved more into pure philosophy during his career, Sen is said to have responded: “Because there are things to be done!” Indeed, it is this pragmatic focus of Sen’s analyses, all the while informed by broad ethical and moral dimensions, that sets him apart as one of the greater minds of our time.  Neither dismissive of the free market, nor satisfied with its limitations, Sen’s dedication to answering questions about the manifest justness of specific arrangements (in economics, politics, and civil society) distinguishes him from development analysts of a more narrow focus.

The 18th century economist Adam Smith is perhaps most associated with notions of the “invisible hand” of the free market.  Elaborated upon in The Wealth of Nations, this view associates self-interested pursuits of wealth with an equitable distribution of the necessities of life.  Yet, in his foundational text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith provided a much broader picture of moral existence than one defined strictly in economic terms.  In a new introduction to the 250th anniversary printing of the book, Sen has taken up Smith’s cause of rooting economic considerations in an understanding of the greater good.

In this light, let us turn to Sen’s Development as Freedom, wherein the Nobel laureate outlined the central place that “our capability to lead the kind of lives we have reason to value” (p. 285) must hold in the process of development.

Sen’s economic philosophy is, above all else, based upon recognizing the heterogeneity of human co-existence.  That is to say, by establishing freedom — and particularly the ability to exercise “free and sustainable agency” (p. 4) — as the basis of development, he does not supplant market-driven or rational choice analysis as much as frame them in a larger context of justice, personal responsibilities, and individual choice.  A formulation that Sen has incorporated throughout his body of work relates to the “extent to which people have the opportunity to achieve outcomes that they value and have reason to value.” (p. 291, [emphasis added])  According to Sen, how we go about valuing our pursuits, our choices, our desires, and our existence cannot be limited to one specific set of factors over another.  “To insist that there should only be one homogeneous magnitude that we value is to reduce drastically the range of our evaluative reasoning.” (p. 77)

Because the capability to act — that is, to choose rather than to be compelled to live a particular way — is central to Sen, his position requires the removal of “unfreedom” from the world’s destitute, and thus his distinction between “underdevelopment (seen broadly in the form of unfreedom) and development (seen as a process of removing unfreedoms and of extending the substantive freedoms of different types that people have reason to value).” (p. 86) Though accusations of anti-liberalism may be made against this argument (for example, that it diminishes the role of the free market), Sen counters with the Aristotelian notion that the market is but a mechanism for achieving the means “to lead the kind of lives we have reason to value.” (p. 14) Specifically, the “merit of the market system does not lie only in its capacity to generate more efficient culmination outcomes.” (p. 27)  Insisting upon one specific set of valuations over another (wealth, utilitarian happiness, etc.) creates a situation wherein “differences in the principles involved relate to the particular information that is taken to be decisive” (p. 55) without being able to make a specific claim (in terms of substantive freedoms) as to why one calculation ought to be preferred.

Conceiving the free market to be representative of substantive individual freedoms requires the removal of barriers to individual capabilities.  The market libertarian argument, for example, centers upon the responsibility of individuals to maximize value and shape the conditions of their life worth living.  Indeed, according to Sen, “there is no substitute for individual responsibility.” (p. 283) However, freedom in the abstract is not the same as freedom in practical terms.  Thus, “the substantive freedoms that we respectively enjoy to exercise our responsibilities are extremely contingent on personal, social, and environmental circumstances.” (pp. 283-284)  Without the freedom to actually act, there can be no expectation of the responsibility to act.  “Responsibility requires freedom.” (p. 284)

Sen’s commitment to democracy is not tied to specific democratic models or efforts to build just societies held together by perfect institutions, but instead approaches the matter from another angle: “using public scrutiny to arrive at agreed diagnoses of manifest injustices on the elimination of which a reasoned agreement could emerge.” The imposition of “perfectly just institutions,” it would seem, is as much a problem for Sen as holding to universal ethics, insofar as both of these fall short in addressing the actual circumstances of local injustices.  Sen’s embrace of the heterogeneity of human life is interwoven with the freedom of individuals to order their lives according to their own valuations but does not expect a universality of values in consequence.  Thus, the practical freedom to live life according to what one may reasonably value is both a method and the purpose of development.

An emphasis on freedom in development policies does not imply that a specific set of criteria are available for alleviating the injustices of underdevelopment, nor that an insistence upon foundational freedoms is at all times possible.  Freedom “cannot yield a view of development that translates readily into some simple ‘formula’.” (p. 297) Yet, absent a specific recognition that freedoms are both means by which to achieve development as well as ends of development, the principles of development policies remain open to negotiation.  What are the measurable results of development policies in the world’s most troubled places if they are not rooted in the “removal of unfreedom”?  Increases in wealth, GDP, security, and so on, can be achieved under conditions of tyranny as well as liberty.

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Dispensing with jargon

9 June 2010 by Mark

I’ve got a piece up for work on the nature of information sharing challenges, not dissimilar from some of the themes I’ve discussed here in the past.  So, in the name of shameless self-promotion, here’s an outtake:

The language of better communication has come to take on an almost dogmatic character.  Particularly within official circles the terms: coordinate, cooperate, collaborate, partnership, interagency, need to share, etc. are regularly invoked.  Where the limitations of rigid hierarchies have been exposed, the calls to engage horizontally across lines of authority have been raised.  Resources and expertise need not be consolidated in one place (a single agency or funding stream) if they can at least be made accessible to the range of participants in a common endeavor, yet this does not take into account a variety of sources of institutional inertia that make information sharing a much more challenging exercise in practice than theory.  Why is it that, despite considerable attention and effort, effective information management and information sharing remains elusive?

…

The responsibility for getting information management right should not fall only on those parts of the organization already taxed by making the best of confusing, dangerous, and rapidly shifting conditions.  There are fundamental questions that must be asked about the assumptions that have gone into building organizational processes and the technology architecture choices that have followed them.  This is not about theorizing the endless possibilities of the open Web, but about recognizing the limitations of idealized institutional designs, then scaffolding processes and capabilities to the realities of complex environments in the context of the digital information economy.

The full text can be found here.

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More thoughts on Collier

10 March 2010 by Mark

My previous post contained little more than an overview of Paul Collier’s recent talk at the U.S. Africa Command, but I wanted to return to a few of the implications it seemed to contain.  Whereas Collier emphasized the centrality of managing specific economic processes to the future stability/prosperity of African societies, I wonder about the viability of frameworks that depend upon extending the same paradigms that have already been pushed to the breaking point in recent decades.  Specifically, the “methodological nationalism” currently at the heart of regional and international institution-building (AU,UN, etc.) seems an odd premise for macroeconomic development in a thoroughly globalized world.  While power plays between dominant actors are of course already well underway in Africa, it is essential for those with the means and/or foresight to shape circumstances to recognize that perhaps the future will resist being managed in any centralized or grand strategic manner.

Collier seemed to make a move in this direction by calling for a “whatever works” approach to development at local levels; capabilities of organizations across the board should be sought out and encouraged, but with a particular view to bestowing accountability upon the national government.  Resources should be centrally delegated, it would seem, but be applied locally.  Thus, distributed capacities are the best way of effecting local progress, but a measure of deference is needed to both bolster central authority AND give government the space it needs to prove its credibility.  Such a situation might create odd tensions in terms of legitimacy, of course, as the argument seems a bit tautological…but the institution-as-process vice institution-as-moment distinction helps overcome that problem somewhat.  Still, this seems to equate sovereignty with legitimacy.

Regarding human rights being “our dialogue”: maybe I was taken a bit by Berlin’s memorials and “Mahnmale” this past weekend, but that notion just doesn’t sit well with me.  Whatever a proper arrangement of resources and increases in real income make possible in terms of security/stability, we should be careful that our policies do not relativize the human condition to a point wherein justice becomes a subset of economic measures.  I mean neither to suggest universal morality (of which I’m increasingly skeptical) nor to advocate cultural imperialism (which is indefensible in practical terms, at the least).  Rather, I wonder if the intended implication is actually that social justice cannot be improved upon absent specific economic processes?  In this case, the value-neutrality of commerce becomes a bit problematic, particularly in light of the financial debacles that developed countries seem to be calling upon themselves recently.

Whether or not categorical ideas of justice are made explicit — in constitutional charters, in common law — it doesn’t seem unreasonable to associate healthy politics with premises that are perhaps less tangible, but no less real, than economic growth.  Thus, I’m certainly not imputing anything to Collier, since I should think his reluctance to make blanket statements about rights implied more nuance than indecision.  At the same time, unquantifiable notions of justice may have a profound impact in their own right on the political culture of torn societies, providing references from which to derive institutions of governance.

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar.  Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt.

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Paul Collier at AFRICOM

4 March 2010 by Mark

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to swing across town to the not uncontroversial U.S. Africa Command for a lecture given by Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and someone who understands substantially more about African governance and economic arrangements than most of us ever will.  I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but considering the criticisms that have been directed at American foreign policy, and particularly its militarization, it deserves to be noted that some folks know things and others have plenty of room to catch up.  The talk was particularly intriguing considering its setting, and — at least for me — generated more questions than immediate answers.  I’ll trust that is a good thing.

Major themes, if I can try to summarize, were:

  1. the certain growth in resource extraction across the continent in the coming decade(s)
  2. the primacy of economic factors for addressing insecurity
  3. the appropriate state of government-controlled force in developing and war-torn nations

Specifically, Collier challenged the notion that political solutions should be sought as a first resort to governance problems.  The electoral process is not necessarily associated with legitimacy, accountability, or security, but may in fact exacerbate conflicts by tying electoral victory and defeat to the agendas of warring parties and making constructive political discourse a virtual impossibility.  We should be wary of over-investing in the “magic potion” of elections — a realization towards which the devout liberal democrat may perhaps feel revulsion, I think, but which is crucial to understanding the entanglements of security, economic growth, and political legitimacy.

In order to overcome the “zero-sum” mentality that pervades conflict-prone societies, mechanisms of legitimacy must be made viable prior to the emergence of a healthy political culture.  This is where Collier’s emphasis on economic growth comes into play (particularly considering the possibilities and risks of the coming African resource boom).  Although I would have liked to hear more about what specific measures are most significant in this regard — public health, mortality, and literacy, for example, were not discussed — a key insight was that “institutions are not events, they are processes.”  Thus, insofar as legitimate commerce, leading to expanded employment of otherwise marginalized demographics (namely: young, impressionable men) — can be enabled regardless of political arrangements, significant steps can still be taken toward reducing conflict and associated traumas inflicted upon civilian populations.

A key signal of a government’s willingness to engage internal politics in good-faith, so Collier, is achieved by significantly cutting military expenditures post-conflict in order to avoid further marginalizing past rivals and reigniting tensions.  While resources can be made available for more constructive purposes in this manner, matters of security initially become the responsibility of external peacekeepers…whose exit strategy, it follows from the above, should be guided by economic rather than political milestones.  Responding to a question on the issue of human rights, Collier was reluctant to accommodate for any more than basic protections.  Using the example of Afghanistan, he warned against imposing too much of an external agenda that is unrealizable and can even be counter-productive: “human rights is our discourse.”  I did not take this to be a surrender to relativism as much as a recognition that certain fundamental rights, as we prefer to understand them, depend on such a variety of factors for their realization that they can hardly be aspired toward independent of the robust institutional mechanisms previously discussed.

At any rate, the extent to which these lessons will inform policy “on the ground” remains to be seen.  Indeed, how much leeway can actually exist within the dense bureaucracy of military programs, operations, missions, and exercises to address decidedly non-military issues?  And more to the point: If legitimacy has a corollary relationship with demilitarization, as Collier seems to have implied, what is the place for such cooperative military endeavors as this American command?  To quote Collier, the pursuit of “gesture politics” is insufficient.  We’ve heard that security comes first, but the experiences of military activism over the last decade alone are reason enough to be wary.  The stated intentions of Africa Command encompass both military and civil-society matters, but the efficacy of the means have yet to prove out against the ends…nor will they be able to in the near term.

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Take your pick

22 February 2010 by Mark

John Yoo:

“What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally—”

“Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.”

“To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?” the OPR investigator asked again.

“Sure,” said Yoo.

David Petraeus:

“I have always been on the record, in fact since 2003, with the concept of living our values, and I think that whenever we have perhaps taken expedient measures they have turned around and bitten us in the backside.”

And there you have it.

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Morality, one way or the other

18 February 2010 by Mark

The New York Times has published quite a head-scratcher of an opinion piece today.  Its concern is with efforts by Western military leadership in Afghanistan to limit civilian deaths, stating that specific policies to restrict the use of air strikes are based on a well-intentioned but immoral lie.  The substance of the piece is hardly more than the usual trope:

  • War is messy – “For Afghan civilians who are dying in greater numbers every year, the fact that fewer deaths are caused by pro-government forces is cold comfort.”
  • Keep all options on the table – “It is only a matter of time before the Taliban see flares and flyovers for what they are: empty threats.”
  • Victory!TM – “Once begun…the goal of even a ‘long war’ should be victory in as short a time as possible, using every advantage you have.”

The real gem, though, is this passage that (one has to assume) was written without malice or contempt:

So in a modern refashioning of the obvious — that war is harmful to civilian populations — the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim.

Wow.

There are already more informed dismissals of this kind of thinking in circulation, but it surely requires a special kind of rationalization to causally separate military “success” from dead civilians.  While certain goals can be achieved despite unfathomable “collaterals” and definitions of success can be tweaked to match circumstances, where does one come off calling for the deprioritization of civilian impacts in a conflict that seems to be fundamentally about civilian/military/insurgent/government entanglements?

There are no easy choices left for the coalition presence in Afghanistan, and unwinding what some see as the certain machinations of empire is not only about doing the “right” or “wrong” thing.  Nevertheless, a specific commitment  to limit casualties, even at increased risk, should hardly be so controversial.  It has nothing to do with assuming war can be made “fair and humane” and everything to do with connecting the means of fighting with the purpose of the Western presence in the first place.  There’s enough of a disconnect there already without relinquishing the duties of just combatants toward noncombatants.

But what do I know.  I sit at a desk and read books.

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Regarding an information strategy

20 January 2010 by Mark

I’m wary that anything I may write herein will trivialize the catastrophe that frames these considerations.  That, certainly, is not my intention.

As a detached observer of the scenes currently unfolding in Haiti, it is hard not to wonder how on earth the responders at hand will ever manage to return some semblance of normalcy to that wretched, devastated place.  Every step, any step, forward is surely a testament to human decency.  That some sense might be made of the informational chaos unleashed by the earthquake, let’s hope that those organizations in the midst of it all are able to lower their drawbridges to each other just enough.  I take a keen interest in understanding how barriers to trust and cooperation might be overcome, and this situation seems to provide ample cause to put certain organizational/cultural differences aside.

Wired’s Danger Room discusses some of the data and information sharing efforts from the military side (imagery and such) and points toward two distinct “collaborative portals” that the U.S. Southern Command has put in place for the present response effort…two unclassified portals, one “for official use” and one for everyone else — the academics, the NGOs, the IOs, and the non-military U.S. government.  Classified or not, if experience and organizational inertia are anything to go by, it would seem that this represents a certain redundant measure of unnecessary redundancy.  But that’s only a superficial impression.

As it turns out, the tool set being put forward must be enduring a trial “under fire”, so to speak, since development and testing were still underway when the earthquake occurred.  Going live with a system the day after an event seems a bit late to build the trust and working relationships needed during such a time, but circumstances are what they are.  Still, “collaboration” is not a feature.  Either it will occur or it won’t, and those of us with an interest in the matter ought look to enable it where we can and limit the barriers that even our best intentions might put in our way.  From provisioning capabilities to reifying assumptions about information, the paradigms within which we might not even be aware we operate can be wholly unconducive to what needs to be achieved.

The problem of developing and maintaining shared knowledge is one of near immeasurable complexity, and only few will get it right, so I fear that one-offs and ad-hocery still continue to define constructive informational spaces.

Godspeed, the task is too important.

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Der Lebenskunst

8 December 2009 by Mark

Or, To the Art of Life.

I fear that what follows may reveal a level of seriousness either entirely appropriate or wholly insufficient for the purpose of meaningful living.  Of course, I don’t intend to bother with any kind of metaphysical treatments, but rather: Wherein do I find my comforts, my joys and pains, indeed my Grundlagen?  Whence comes my composure, and when do I fail it?  Am I able to rise beyond myself, and for the right reasons?  Perhaps the means of answering such questions are more worthwhile than the answers themselves.

Work has taken me out of town for a while and, absent the usual habits of home, I’ve tried to focus my available time on reading.  And not without consequences.  What is to be made of it, for example, when with each of Clamence‘s mounting discrepancies I see the case being built against myself?  Not, of course, in every indictment, but as a thoroughly contradicted being.  Maybe I am too moved by literature, or perhaps the purpose I set as a concern is one of reflection, revision…and ambiguity.  Another way: Who is left to blame for shortcomings when mimicking the “art” rather than nurturing it in one’s self?  I daresay that in so doing, the pieces are all there, though the purpose is not.

Chacun exige d’être innocent, à tout prix, même si, pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel.

Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.

The quote I’ve placed at the top of the page — “Qui, cher monsieur, qui couchera sur le sol pour nous?” — is from the same book, and in it I find a profound solace; who, indeed, will share our burdens, in this lifetime, here and now?  And the answer:

Oui, nous en serons tous capables un jour, et ce sera le salut.

Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.

That said, I continue to find myself reluctant (unwilling? unable?) to attach myself too strongly to any particular line of thinking…if for no other reason but that I’ve found there only the unsatisfying limitations of generalities.  Value, if there is such a thing, has always appeared in the cracks and creases of ideas, in their Gegensätze.  Or rather, if the loss of nuance associated with the realization, the politicization, of thought continues to be a disappointment, “so beweist das nichts anderes, als daß die Politik eben alles verdirbt.“ Along the way, I may have slipped inadvertently into postmodern tendencies, but that seems to be well enough under control.

At any rate, I sat alone at dinner this evening, reflective, contemplative — and at the next table an old man, alone, hunched over his bowl of soup.  The symbolism nearly ended me.

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