Madeleine Albright and the Debacle of Western Politics

I am bored by reading people who are allies, people of roughly the same views. What is interesting is to read the enemy, because the enemy penetrates the defences.
Isaiah Berlin

Anyway, distinctions no longer mattered in a dance of death, where all the dancers spun on the edge of nothing.
Anna Kavan, Ice (1967)

The darker the reality, the brighter the speech.
Jacques Ellul

64th Secretary of State of the United States (and first woman to serve in that position). Chair of the Albright Stonebridge Group and Albright Capital Management. Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Chair of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. President of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, American highest civilian honor, in recognition of her contributions to international peace and democracy…

With such an impressive curriculum, one could assume that Madeleine Albright is fully capable of providing a satisfying, in-depth analysis of the increasing weakness afflicting liberal democracies all over the world. Brexit, the rise of Trump and the ongoing protests in Paris are just a few examples of an underlying malaise which is channeling popular rage against the traditional establishment. What is happening? The answer she provides in her latest book – Fascism: A warning (2018) – is not clear at all. And she is the first one to admit it:

In my twenty-plus years as a professor, I have learned to ask myself, when I am not getting good answers, whether it is because I haven’t been looking in the right places. I wonder now whether we, as democratic citizens, have been remiss in forming the right questions. (pp. 249-250)

Ambassadors of “Progress”: the Rosy Agenda of Steven Pinker

[I]f you want a description of our age, here is one: the civilization of means without ends.
Richard Livingstone, On Education (1956)

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)

The most recent best-seller by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now (2018), is not only Bill Gates’ new “favourite book of all times”. It is also full of facts. Facts, numbers, percentages, charts – all employed “to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of 21^st century” (p. 5). After examining a wide set of “variables” – such as freedom, health, peace, safety, democracy, equal rights, literacy, knowledge, intelligence and happiness – Pinker explains that these variables “can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress” (p. 51).
As simple as that: “progress” can be embedded into a formula as if it represented a measurable, observable variable of the physical world. Since all these parameters have increased over time, the conclusion is, indeed, a wonderful piece of news (you may have overlooked it). The Enlightenment “has worked – perhaps, the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science and humanism are unappreciated as well” (p. 6).

Should We Teach All Students to Think like Scientists?

Issues such as climate change illustrate that scientists, even if armed with overwhelming evidence, are at times powerless to change minds or motivate action. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, people in the U.S., one of the countries that emits the most carbon, were among the least concerned about the potential impact of climate change. (…) For many, knowledge about the natural world is superseded by personal beliefs. (…) It is imperative for the next generation of leaders in science to be aware of the psychological, social and cultural factors that affect how people understand and use information. (…)
Scientists cannot work in silos and expect to improve the world, particularly when false narratives have become entrenched in communities. This is especially true in tackling issues such as public trust in vaccines, a topic that is flooded with misleading information, despite a lack of legitimate scientific evidence supporting the view that they are unsafe.

It is very easy to agree with these observations by social psychologist Peter Salovey, current President of Yale University – and, in general, I do agree with him. Referring to climate change, Salovey properly points out that, at least in the US, the public do not seem to be very concerned about it. The reasons of such attitude, instead of being sought (only) in the lack of science literacy and technical reasoning ability, should be also identified in the power of personal beliefs, that can lead people to frame issues in ways which conflict with scientific evidence.

Melting Hopes: Why We Need a New Narrative on Climate Change

I am old enough to notice a marked similarity between attitudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most of us think that something unpleasant may soon happen, but we are as confused as we were in 1938 over what form it will take and what to do about it. Our response so far is just like that before the Second World War, an attempt to appease. (…) Because we are tribal animals, the tribe does not act in unison until a real and present danger is perceived.
James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (2006)

What observed by English scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock more than ten years ago is a good starting point to attempt to understand why it was only in 2015 that an international agreement on climate change like that of Paris was set. The first thing to observe is that, even if there is a highly complex problem that may represent a serious menace to mankind’s survival on a global scale, politicians and citizens’ approach to it is – to say the least – quite contradictory, highly polarized, too often leading to simple inaction.

The Finger and the Moon

One of the most daunting aspects about technology is represented by the highly unpredictable consequences it always implies. Mankind creates and shapes technology, but we may argue that the latter tends to produce – as we are reminded by Newton’s Third Law of physics – an almost “equal and opposite reaction”. Sometime, the outcomes are better than expected; sometimes, they are worse; sometimes, they are not expected at all, and they may even turn out to reverse the effect initially meant to be obtained. We could say, by using the own words of French poet Paul Valery, that we are increasingly embedded into a very complex ICT-led system “that is leading us… we do not know and can by no means imagine where”.

Take the internet, for instance. It was initially conceived to connect electronic devices and people by creating a horizontal network: the core idea was to communicate and share data and information in a simpler and faster manner. Economic elements appeared to be secondary, if not irrelevant at all. With the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, this idea was brought to the entire globe and gradually spread to a massive scale, ending up involving billions of people. After more than 25 years, many people are enjoying the advantages brought by the internet. But the incoming revolution so widely praised in the 1990s seems to be producing also unexpected and unintended outcomes.

“Apes, Together, Strong.”

The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them. They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete. One viewpoint “wins out”. Then the people act out this view, or their representative are instructed to act it out, and this they promptly do.
C. Wright Mills, “The Power Elite” (1956)

This is the way democracies should ideally work, isn’t it? C. Wright Mills, one the most prominent American sociologist of the last century, presented this plain description in his seminal essay The Power Elite (1956) and defined it as a “set of images out of a fairy tale” if compared to the reality of the US political system. Mill’s observation was (and still is today) very difficult to contest: after all, the quotation above could have been used much more properly to describe a Greek model of ancient democracy. Such a model entails the presence of a public of free, equal citizens who, benefiting from their specific status, do have the opportunity of debating public issues, adopting decisions and (directly or indirectly) executing them. As discussed in a previous post, in the Greek polis this public domain (koinon) was based on two fundamental elements: speech (lexis) and action (praxis). The former requires communication; the latter implies the will to translate ideas into concrete outcomes; both need data and information.