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)

“Climate Change” or “Climate Crisis”?

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Do the expressions “global warming” and “climate change” refer to the very same thing? In other words: can they be used as synonyms? The answer is no – not really.
As clearly explained on the NASA website,

Global warming refers to the upward temperature trend across the entire Earth since the early 20th century, and most notably since the late 1970s, due to the increase in fossil fuel emissions since the industrial revolution. Worldwide since 1880, the average surface temperature has gone up by about 0.8 °C (1.4 °F), relative to the mid-20th-century baseline (of 1951-1980).

Climate change refers to a broad range of global phenomena created predominantly by burning fossil fuels, which add heat-trapping gases to Earth’s atmosphere. These phenomena include the increased temperature trends described by global warming, but also encompass changes such as sea level rise; ice mass loss in Greenland, Antarctica, the Arctic and mountain glaciers worldwide; shifts in flower/plant blooming; and extreme weather events.

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.

On Thin Ice. Weaponizing the Right to Free Speech to Mislead Public Opinion

For its remarkable degree of complexity and multivalence (Jamieson, 2014; Marshall, 2014), climate change represents a serious challenge also from a legal perspective. If, on the one side, “global warming litigation represents familiar legal territory”, on the other “it involves threats of widespread injuries that are uncertain in timing, scope, and intensity” while inculpating “corporations, individual citizens, and governments from all countries, and results from human activities fundamental to modern society” (Pidot, 2006, p. 1).

When it comes to consider a law case such as that involving Canadian climate scientist (and now politician) Andrew Weaver, complexity and multivalence become evident as soon as one understands the slippery ground on which cases like this are usually built.

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.

The Loop of Democracy

Irrational Absurd Triangle Escher Triangle Geometry

Back in 1992, American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama published the influential essay The End of History and the Last Man. His main thesis pointed out that, after the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy was destined to become, gradually, the final form of government. After 25 years, we may argue that (somehow) he was right – but probably not for the reason he thought. Even if we certainly live in deeply chaotic times, history is far from being come to an end. Nevertheless, liberal democracies may represent the final (or terminal) form of government (at least in Western countries) not because they are the best option available, but because of the incapability of conceiving something different. In other words, I fear we are not moving forward since we are short-sighted, and not because we have found a settlement so good that it is preferable not to leave it.

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.

Rising Idiocracies? A Political Reflection

Whenever I think about contemporary politics (and about western political leaders in particular) there is always a movie sequence that comes to my mind: the final scene of Burn After Reading, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen almost ten years ago. The always excellent J.K. Simmons plays a CIA Superior who is questioning an Officer (David Rasche) about the result of an operation aimed at recovering a mysterious disk. The problem is that they have made an incredible mess, casualties included. The CIA Superior suggests they should learn something from the errors committed, but since they do not know exactly what they have done, there cannot be a lesson to learn. Next time, things will likely get even worse.

The Coen’s movie, full of dumb characters who cause serious damage while barely realizing it, may be interpreted as the portrait of a country (or, maybe, of the entire western society) whose politics has reached its terminal state: harmful idiocy. If one considers – just to make a few recent examples – the arrogant and devastating foreign policies of the Bush and Obama administrations, UK former Prime Minister David Cameron’s suicidal referendum about Brexit, the ineptitude of former French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s very questionable policies on immigration and the agonizing, ridiculous Italian political class, the doubt is as chilling as inevitable. Is there an epidemic of criminal idiocy spreading throughout our societies, or this is just the inevitable outcome of decades of bad education, greed and very short-sighted decisions?