A few weeks ago, I learned that a place I’d been visiting since I was a kid – and where I worked the summer and hunting season after college — was to go on the auction block in September, leaving only memories and an uncertain future. After scrambling a bit with travel arrangements, I finally found myself in open spaces, windows down, driven onward to the mountains by some of the best music ever made.

Glorious.

Most of the following week was spent on horseback, discovering new approaches to landscapes that have been a small but significant part of my life since I was eight. The elk herd in the high country made the icy rain streaming off my hat brim a mere inconvenience. Meadows of alpine flowers, moose, and deer accompanied the constant search for a new trail, an untouched path into the next valley and the valley after that.

When I went to work in this place I had no plan for what to do with myself, and though that is still mostly the case these several years later, I was thrown off balance a bit by the flood of memories reminding me of who – and how – I once was. Am I now what I thought I might become? How many moments was I too blind, too consumed, to recognize along the way? What if…? What if…?

As the smoke curled up beyond the trees toward the Milky Way and thoughts of everything that might have been slowly gave way to sleep, I couldn’t help but pine for that 22-year-old’s swagger. I should hope there’s still some of it left…somewhere.

“We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” the general said.

And this?

Bollier asked him, “And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with a pregnancy?”

DeGraaf drew groans of protest from some House members when he responded, “I have spare tire on my car.”

“I also have life insurance,” he added. “I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for.”

We’ve got a loooong way to go, people.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Sen. Graham (R-SC):

If I could do something about behavior that puts our troops at risk, I would.

…

Any time an American acts in a way that puts our troops at risk, I feel the need to speak out.

…

I just don’t like the idea of free speech being used as a reason to put our troops at risk. They’ve got enough problems already. I really believe that responsibility ought to be part of free speech.

First, how exactly did the troops get put in harms way, and stretched thin across the globe, in the first place? Second, why is “Congress shall make no law” such a tough nut to crack?

This conflation of fundamental societal principles and military prerogatives is a bizarre spectacle to witness, I’ll say that much.

Update: Looks like The Dish was on this already. How derivative of me.

Update II: Exum deals with this issue rather well, here.

BLUF: Friedman wishes the President best of luck in the West’s latest military intervention. Solid.

Here’s the catch. Friedman paints with such broad strokes that any historical nuance fades away under sweeping narratives that somehow allow a delineation between the ‘old’ Middle East up to, I dunno, 2010? and the ‘new’ Middle East that has after ”half a century suddenly, from the bottom up, decide[d] to join history.” To be fair, that paragraph deserves to be quoted in full:

When an entire region that has been living outside the biggest global trends of free politics and free markets for half a century suddenly, from the bottom up, decides to join history — and each one of these states has a different ethnic, tribal, sectarian and political orientation and a loose coalition of Western and Arab states with mixed motives trying to figure out how to help them — well, folks, you’re going to end up with some very strange-looking policy animals. And Libya is just the first of many hard choices we’re going to face in the “new” Middle East.

Really? All those weird entanglements of tribes and ethnicities and coalitions and political cultures are going to define our ‘hard choices’ now? What about that other stuff Friedman championed?

At any rate, now that we know how complex the region is as a whole — “fraught with moral and political ambiguities”, as it were – the outcome of the conflict in Libya is all the more significant. Indeed, now that external forces, led by the U.S., France, and Britain, continue to escalate their role in the country, it is essential that the specifics of this endeavor are not divorced from general issues at stake in Africa and the Middle East.

Notwithstanding strategic complexities and confounding regional/sub-regional/supra-regional dynamics, as well as the ‘problematic’ track record of Western intervention in the Orient, it has apparently become acceptable to reduce our conflicts to simple formulas and a dash of luck:

I hope Qaddafi’s regime collapses like a sand castle, that the Libyan opposition turns out to be decent and united and that they require just a bare minimum of international help to get on their feet. Then U.S. prestige will be enhanced and this humanitarian mission will have both saved lives and helped to lock another Arab state into the democratic camp.

Dear Lord, please make President Obama lucky.

I also wish for great things to come about with a “bare minimum” of effort. Usually, things don’t work out that way.

…generate a credible threat of force from the government’s own army. In much of Africa, the national army is the force most feared by presidents. Leaders go to considerable lengths to keep the army happy, but coups are still common. Because neither African governments nor the international community want to encourage coups, they have taken the line that the military should simply stay out of politics at all costs. This is understandable, but misguided: it’s better to set guidelines as to the very limited circumstances under which the ousting of an incumbent ruler would be legitimate.

The legitimacy of the incumbent remaining in power is not at question here, and the international community has spoken quite plainly on the matter.  The precedent that such an approach to transferring power could set, however, seems gratuitously risky in a political climate where legitimate rule and accountable militaries are already tenuous propositions.  Perhaps it is too cliché to make ‘Pandora’s Box’ -type arguments, but what Collier fails to elaborate upon is how exactly the terms of such “very limited circumstances” for legitimate military coups should come about, or what they would look like once agreed to by some yet-to-be determined process.

I’m reminded that Collier’s position is generally the one of the realist, having little time for political ideals when the management of economic forces is at stake.  Consequently, it is not a drastic step to advocate for legitimizing political coups as tools of regional and international order as circumstances require; such methods would be but means toward economic growth from which, in turn, democracy and human rights could eventually follow.  The order that these process are bound to take is clear.  It would be naïve to pretend that the incitement or encouragement of coups and insurrections have not found their place in the muddy waters of foreign relations.  Still, embracing such an approach in order to avoid the difficulties of external intervention — and at the likely cost of massive further internal destabilization — is highly problematic when placed in juxtaposition to notions of the rule of law…regardless of the legal standing of the existing order.

Oh dear, I’m afraid I might have just made a Kantian argument.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.