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)

Framing the Monster: The Infinite Faces of Climate Change

Fritz Lang’s masterpiece M (1931) tells the story of a child murderer who becomes the pray of a keen, restless manhunt. Set in the 1920s, the movie depicts a German town where citizens, instead of reacting to the mysterious disappearing of some children, ignore the menace looming over them. It is not by coincidence that the little girl we see in the opening sequence is coming back from school alone: she is playing with a ball, then meets the “monster” and disappears – while her mother is waiting for her at home.

In a society incapable of protecting its younger members (and, therefore, its future), only two types of actors take concrete action: the police and the mob. While the former is risking its reputation (several months of investigation have led nowhere), the latter is being damaged by the never-ending round-ups carried out to catch the killer. Policemen and mobsters know very well that, if they do not act immediately, they will suffer dire consequences. What happens, then? On the one side, a new commissioner takes over the investigation and finds out an effective (and much more efficient) way to solve the case; on the other side, criminals decide to enlist beggars to chase the murderer while watching over children in the streets. Overall, the measures adopted are so effective that both sides end up discovering the identity of the killer quite quickly – and at the very same time.

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.

Idyillic Nightmares

Norman Rockwell, Whispering Sweepstakes (1963)

Connectivity benefits everyone. Those who have none will have some, and those who have a lot will have even more. To demonstrate that, imagine you are a young urban professional living in an American city a few decades from now. (…) Your apartment is an electronic orchestra, and you are the conductor. With simple flicks of the wrist and spoken instructions, you can control temperature, humidity, ambient music and lighting. You are able to skim through the day’s news on translucent screens while a freshly cleaned suit is retrieved from your automated closet because your calendar indicates an important meeting today. (…) You take another sip of coffee, feeling confident that you’ll impress your clients. You already feel as if you know them, though you’ve never met in person, since your meetings have been conducted in a virtual-reality interface. (…) There’s a bit of time left before you need to leave for work – which you’ll get to by driverless car, of course. Your car knows what time you need to be in the office each morning based on your calendar and, after factoring in traffic data, it communicates with your wristwatch to give you a sixty-minute countdown to when you need to leave the house. (…) You think about having another cup of coffee, but then a haptic device (“haptic” refers to technology that involves touch and feeling) that is embedded in the heel of your shoe gives you a gentle pinch – a signal that you’ll be late for your morning meeting if you linger any longer.

This amazing look at our bright future was described in The new digital age: reshaping the future of people, nations and business (pp. 28-30), a 2013 bestseller penned by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Bill Clinton praised it, and Richard Branson described it as “a brilliant guidebook for the next century”. Schmidt and Cohen do love the Digital Age. Unfortunately, their judgement may be slightly biased by the fact that they both work for Google. The former is currently the Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., the multibillionaire corporation parenting Google, while the latter is the CEO of Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by… Google. This implies that the future “of people, nations and business” they present in the book may be heavily influenced by the business plans of their own company.

American Heroes

Over the last few years, two American heroes such as Chris Kyle and Edward Snowden have been portrayed by two Academy Award-winning directors, Clint Eastwood and Oliver Stone, in two features: American Sniper (2014) and Snowden (2016).

Both young and certainly brave, Kyle and Snowden decided, quite early in their lives, to serve their governments – the former in the US Navy SEAL, the latter in the CIA. What made them heroes was the common, strong, will to protect American people: but whereas Kyle decided to go to Iraq to fight an outer enemy in the so-called “War on Terror”, Snowden ended up leaking data and information to oppose the US government itself. Hence, we have two narratives which play with American founding myths and values in profoundly diverse manners.