Right Reason

Thoughts on the Minimum Wage

 

In The New York Times, Arindrajit Dube, a celebrated expert on the economics of the minimum wage, has commentated on the recent study from the University of Washington on the effects of Seattle’s increased minimum wage. In short, Mr. Dube argues that the study’s conclusion that there were big job loses is much more opaque than public commentary would have one believe. I agree with his general sentiments: Empirical claims about something as complex as the minimum wage can only be evaluated at the level of the overall literature, not a single study. By itself, the UW study proves nothing. One study can never prove a broad empirical point. Only a broad population of studies can do so.

 

However, it is not Mr. Dube’s general argument that draw my interest, but his conclusion:

 

"Putting all of those together, along with our evidence from past increases, will give a much more complete picture of how high the minimum wage should go to improve the lives of people at the bottom of the wage scale without throwing lots of people out of work."

To me, this is quite the startling admission: That the minimum wage will throw some people out of work. After all, “throwing lots of people out of work” implies that “throwing few people out of work” is a marginal improvement that is acceptable for public policy. I entirely disagree. Let me quickly go through my reasoning:

We can be reasonable confident that among those people who can no longer find jobs will be among the least advantaged in society. For instance, the people who are going to be priced out of the markets are not the children of the rich who can afford to be sent to unpaid internships to build their resumés. Instead, they are going to be the children of the poor who have no way to build their resumés, as there are very, very few unpaid internships for, say, being a clerk or plumber. There may even be a few poor people of working age whose skills simply do not add enough at the margins to be employable at the minimum wage. Whatever the scenario, I think that it is very unlikely that the marginal effects of increasing the minimum wage do adversely affect some of the most vulnerable in society, for among the most vulnerable will be people whose skills cannot add a lot of value to a business at the margins. They will be at the chopping block first, in the name of economic efficiency.

Moreover, the economic profession have not been able to agree about how much benefit is accrued to society as a result of minimum-wage policies. It is telling that the economics profession has not been able to agree about the effects of an increase in the minimum wage in its literature.I don’t think we should blame this problem of measurement on politics. Instead, I think that we should see the labor market as being so complex and so adaptive that any attempt at measuring the effects of this variable are fraught with difficulty and are also going to reflect local circumstances that will frequently vary from local to local. So, the average effects of the minimum wage are uncertain and we should expect them to always be uncertain, given the limits of measuring complex systems.

 

To me, combining these two considerations lead to the crux of the minimum-wage debate: The minimum wage harms some of the least advantaged people in society for uncertain benefits to others who are more advantaged. How can we pretend that's just? Economic policy is not only a matter of average effects, but also of justice and of who pays the costs at the margins. Contra Mr. Dube, I don’t believe throwing a few people out of work is good enough. Those people also deserve the right to sell their labor and thereby improve their lives by virtue of a natural right to self-preservation. A just minimum-wage policy throws nobody, let alone some of the least advantaged, out of work; hence justice calls for a $0.0 minimum wage.

Robert Citino on Dunkirk

 

Robert M. Citino, one of the foremost German-military historians today, has an interview, "Why the Germans Blew It at Dunkirk,” at Bloombery View about Dunkirk, both the actual event and Christopher Nolan’s movie about said event.

 

On the topic of the infamous Halt-Order, Mr. Citino says:

Remember, Hitler's May 24 Haltbefehl ("stop order") did not stop the Panzers from attacking the Dunkirk beachhead. They were already stopped by virtue of a "close-up order" from the commander of the Panzer Group, General Ewald von Kleist, on May 23rd. Kleist's Panzers were badly strung out and worn down as a result of the high-speed chase across northern France. Some of the other army commanders wanted to keep moving forward. The Army Group commander, General Gerd von Rundstedt, backed Kleist, while the Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, disagreed with Rundstedt, and actually took the Panzer Group out from under his command. It was a mess of the worst sort! When Hitler flew to the front on May 24, it seemed as if the commander he respected the most, Rundstedt, was being sidelined. It also seemed (and this was actually true) that decisions of the highest order were being taken by commanders without looping in Hitler at all -- and that was something the Führer was determined to stop. That was the origins of the May 24 "halt order" -- an attempt by Hitler to reassert his control over events at the front.

 

Mr. Citino also speaks about the Wehrmacht’s command-structure, which is a reoccurring theme in his works:

Many students of World War II still hold to a myth of German efficiency, the notion that the Wehrmacht command was infallible. The Germans had a tradition of allowing commanders a great deal of latitude while on campaign, allowing them to seize opportunities that might otherwise be lost. That tradition was responsible for a great deal of their success. But often, German commanders worked at cross-purposes with one another, requiring a strong hand on the rudder, if you will. Virtually every "blunder" attributed to Hitler in World War II originated in a conflict within the German officer corps that only Hitler had the authority to sort out.

On Dunkirk, Mr. Citinio approves of the movie:

It’s impressive. 'Dunkirk' makes points about the human experience of war -- the almost anonymous and randomized killing, the chaos, the confusion -- but it also makes a far more directed point about the nature of modern war, the interplay of air/sea/land. And, as a German military historian, I would say that the movie provides the best treatment of a Stuka attack ca. 1940 that I have ever seen.

Many of the weaknesses many have identified with Dunkirk, including the anonymity of the characters and the movie's sheer loudness, are, to me, the movies greatest strengths. War does not care about whether its soldiers have interesting ties to home or about their back-story. It just places its soldiers in hell. Moreover, as anyone who has ever fired a rifle knows, war is loud, so very loud.

Dunkirk is truly a movie about Dunkirk. It’s about an organization’s struggle for existence in an almost hopeless situation. Those who have little interest in Dunkirk, or for that matter the cacophony of modern warfare, might have very little interest in Mr. Nolan’s film. But for those who are, Dunkirk is awesome.

Our Lawless Police

 

 

 

Yesterday, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of all charges, including second-degree manslaughter, in the shooting of Philando Castile. Mark Berman of The Washington Post reports:

The Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop was acquitted on all charges by a jury Friday, a decision that came nearly a year after the encounter was partially streamed online to a rapt nation in the midst of a painful reckoning over shootings by law enforcement.

Officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled Castile’s car over in Falcon Heights, a suburb near Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the officer later said he thought Castile matched the description of a suspect in a robbery. The stop quickly escalated.

Yanez fired into the car, saying later he thought Castile was going for his gun, a claim Castile’s girlfriend, sitting in the seat next to him, disputed. She began streaming the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook Live.
…
During the trial, jurors heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, including Yanez, who cried on the stand while saying he did not want to shoot Castile. Yanez testified that he thought his life was in danger at the time, and attorneys for Yanez have argued that Castile caused his own death because of his actions during the traffic stop.
…
Yanez approached the car window and asked Castile for his license and proof of insurance, which the driver handed over, the complaint states. Castile also told Yanez he had a firearm on him, and seconds later, the officer told the driver not to pull out the gun. Castile said he was not taking out the gun, which Reynolds echoed. Yanez screamed, “Don’t pull it out” and pulled his own gun out, firing seven shots at Castile, the complaint states.
…

When Yanez spoke to state investigators a day after the shooting, he told them he was “in fear for my life and my partner’s life.” Yanez told them that he thought Castile was reaching for the gun.

“I thought I was gonna die,” he told investigators, according to the complaint.

Given the salient role that Mr. Yanez’s fear has played in the trial, it is important to keep in mind the words of Ramsey County Attorney John Choi when he decided to charge Mr. Yanez 

When evaluating the reasonableness of a police officer's use of deadly force, we must take into account that police officers are often required to react quickly—in tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving situations. To justify the use of deadly force, it is not enough, however, for the police officer to merely express a subjective fear of death or great bodily harm. Unreasonable fear cannot justify the use of deadly force. The use of deadly force must be objectively reasonable and necessary, given the totality of the circumstances.Based upon our thorough and exhaustive review of the facts of this case, it is my conclusion that the use of deadly force by Officer Yanez was not justified and that sufficient facts exist to prove this to be true. Accordingly, we filed a criminal complaint this morning in Ramsey County District Court charging Officer Yanez with Second Degree Manslaughter in the death of Philando Castile and two felony counts of Dangerous Discharge of a Firearm that endangered the safety of Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter, the two passengers in the car.

 

I fear that the jury’s findings only corroborate that the American people do not mind that their police frequently act lawlessly. Moreover, I fear that the American people do not mind, even more, that their police frequently act even more lawlessly to the black community in their nation.

Tom Kelly, who represented Mr. Yanez in court, has defended the killing, arguing: “This incident had nothing to do with race. It had everything to do with the presence of a gun. Race did not play a part in the use of deadly force at all. It was the presence of a gun.”

However, the presence of a gun alone should not be considered a just reason for violence, for if it were the police would have a just reason for shooting at a large fraction of the Americans they interact with. In Washington DC v. Heller, the Supreme Court has upheld that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms entirely unconnected with service in a militia. As a result of the Second Amendment, American police must frequently interact with people who lawfully carry firearms.

If Attorney Kelly is right that Mr. Yanez’s actions were just because there was a gun present, then no American who lawfully owns and carries a firearm would be safe interacting with the police. The law, which is supposed to guarantee domestic tranquility and the blessings of liberty among other things, would therefore no longer be doing anything of the sort. Law-abiding Americans would no longer be protected by their law and their interactions with the police are made just that more anarchic. 

In this case, Mr. Yanez is ultimately more than a private citizen. Instead, he is an agent of the state and a member of the police-force in a nation in which the police have frequently chosen to defend their own interests above the general welfare. The shooting of a black man only puts these roles in greater clarity.

The problems are then much wider in scope than Mr. Yanez himself. These problems highlight that there is a structural problem with the police, including the heinous war on drugs, that have frankly given them the power to oppress the black community. Given Attorney Kelly’s defense of Mr. Yanez’s actions, blacks can no longer be confident that they even have Second-Amendment rights.

To me, the jury's decision is clear: The police have a license to kill in this country. That affects blacks much, much more than it does whites. For durable progress to be made on race in this nation, we, the people, need to rescind that license to kill. The police must be made accountable to those that they are said to serve, and right now, they have given American blacks every reason to believe their interests ultimately conflict.

What to do, you ask? The first thing that should be done is to immediately end the war on drugs, which disproportionately harms the black community and which has given the police so many opportunities to exercise unlawful power over the black community.


Addendum:
David French, of The National Review, has commented on the case in "The Philando Castile verdict was a miscarriage of justice":

In recent months we’ve seen a number of cases where courts have excused police for shooting citizens even after the police made mistakes — and the citizens were doing nothing wrong — simply because these citizens were exercising their Second Amendment rights. This is unacceptable, and it represents the most extreme possible deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties.

I understand the inherent danger of police work. I also understand the legal responsibilities of men and women who volunteer to put on that uniform, and the legal rights of the citizens they’ve sworn to protect and serve. I’m aware of no evidence that Yanez panicked because Castile was black. But whether he panicked because of race, simply because of the gun, or because of both, he still panicked, and he should have been held accountable. The jury’s verdict was a miscarriage of justice.

Open Immigration and Firearms: Equivalent Rights?

Will Wilkinson poses the question:

 

 

Let me hazard a response:

The difference between the right of owning a weapon and migrating to another society is that the latter is based on the natural impetus for self-preservation while the latter involves wanting to enter into a society that may have grown prosperous based on entirely different culture. The difference ultimately lies in distinctive notions of the bona vita, of the good life, that are not in play about discussions about the right to self-defense, which the right to bear arms is anchored on.

My moral point of view is idiosyncratic from a modern point of view, so I should explain myself a bit and I shall do so through the lens of two authors: Larry Arnhart and Hugo Grotius.

Mr. Arnhart provides a persuasive interpretation of natural right as being those conditions necessary to achieve human flourishing in human societies. As Mr. Arnhart points out in Darwinian Natural Right: “The moral opinions that drive political controversies are ultimate opinions about the best way of life for human beings, about how human beings must live to satisfy their natural desires” (p. 1). Natural rights are therefore those faculties that people tend to need, by virtue of the principles of human nature, to acquire a good life. Unlike the right to self-defense, whence philosophers and jurists have derived the right to own a firearm, the capability to migrate from one society to another is not an essential precondition for human flourishing across all cultural contexts and can therefore not be reasonable considered a right transcending all those cultural contexts.

Grotius then provides an understanding of rights as flowing from human sociability and from the fact that human beings are creatures who derive almost all their advantages from social intercourse. In The Rights of War and Peace, Grotius argues that all rights derive from sociability: “This Sociability… or this Care of maintaining Society in a manner conformable to the Light of human understanding, is the Fountain of Right, properly so called; to which belongs the Abstaining from that which is another’s, and the Restitution of what we have of another’s, or of the Profit we have made by it, the Obligation of fulfilling Promises, the Reparation of a Damage done through our own Default, and the Merit of Punishment among Men” (pp. 85-6). Here, Grotius properly identifies human rights largely with commutative justice and abuses of rights as the taking of what is properly another’s. He makes that connection again in The Rights of War and Peace when he writes that “Justice… consists wholly in abstaining from that which is another Man’s” (p.120). Unlike the case of denying ownership of firearms, denying a would-be immigrant access to a nation is not a violation of commutative justice, and so can reasonably be said to not be a violation of right.

 

Let me dwell more on these themes: The most basic of all conditions for human flourishing is self-preservation. A dead or gravely wounded animal cannot be a flourishing one, and so it is reasonable, by any animal’s very nature, that they tend towards actions that preserve themselves. Self-preservation takes a significant role in Grotius’ system of jurisprudence. He described it as being “that Instinct whereby every Animal seeks its own Preservation, and loves its Condition, and whatever tends to maintain it” (p. 180). In order to guarantee that people are free to pursue virtue and the good life, laws must principally guarantee self-preservation; hence, across history, it is seen as the utmost of tyranny for rulers to arbitrarily deny people their self-preservation by unlawfully killing or imprisoning them. Grotius also testifies to the right of self-preservation as being antecedent to all other rights: “’tis the first Duty of every one to preserve himself in his nature State” (Ibid).

It is impossible to entirely separate the gun-ownership from concerns of self-preservation: Firearms, especially handguns, are great equalizers. Even at a great physical and training disadvantage, one human beings can still pose a mortal threat to another human being. The right to bear arms emerges out of a right to protect one’s property. George Orwell’s article “Don't let Colonel Blimp ruin the Home Guard” is most celebrated by gun-lovers for his observation that “that rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy.” However, I think he makes an even more worthwhile observation in “You and the atomic bomb,” when he observed that firearms are an inherently democratic weapon that give power to the people, so to speak:

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, thanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon—so long as there is no answer to it—gives claws to the weak.
The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day.

One may not agree with citizens having the right to own assault rifles or other military-grade firearms. Nevertheless, I think that it is unreasonable to argue that firearms have nothing to do with the impetus for self-preservation in society. After all, those who might not be able to fend of an attacker can have their minds put at ease by owning a pistol. Moreover, the right to own a pistol is essentially related to concerns of commutative justice: The question is whether a citizen can claim an object, in this case a firearm, as his own, and so the legal question is a question of right.

However one decides the issue of whether it is a right to bear arms, it is certainly a right that is directly related to the most animal, and therefore most fundamental, principle of human nature: The instinct for self-preservation.

 

This is not the case with immigration. While self-defense is natural to our animal nature, emigration derives from a desire to live in complex societies that have evolved through artificial means, including the civilizing process, and which take their character from the ideas of those that inhabit them. Nobody is migrating these days in order to go live in an otherwise uninhabited patch of land. Instead, immigrants are generally attracted to the opportunities that different societies can offer them. Those societies are organized entities that have, over generations, accumulated variations deriving from the ideas of those inhabitants. They are ultimately the products of human artifice and it is not unreasonable to assume that such artifice might include excluding outsiders. People’s desire to immigrate may be entirely natural and praiseworthy; however, that desire does not imply they can justly immigrate wherever they like because of the concern for preserving the ideas that have made a society so prosperous to begin with.

The reason is that it is entirely plausible for some people to think that any person’s pursuit of happiness might harm the general welfare of a society based on entirely different ideas. As Garett Jones has argued in “Do immigrants import their economic destinies?”: “Government policies don’t radiate from subterranean mineral deposits: they are in large part the product of its voting citizens. And in the long run, new citizens lead to new policies.” I would go even further and argue that the very customs, let alone government-policies, that make any society possible are the product of living citizens perpetuating the customs that previous citizens established. Edmund Burke eloquently expressed this idea when he wrote that society was a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born.” Introducing new people with radically different ideas might lead to unintended consequences to that partnership that cannot be adequately foreseen and so policy-makers can be reasonable in a moderate desire to limit the introduction, via immigration, of ideas that might undermine that partnership.

 

A tragic aspect of the conversation about immigration is that so many people decide to leave their country because their own nations are no longer conducive to their own flourishing. However, I believe that most refugee-policy is a matter of beneficence, not justice.

After all, there is no violation of commutative justice that happens when one nation erects a wall against another, however unseemly that wall might be. No citizen of one nation can say that they own citizenship in another nation—and it needs to be emphasized ad nauseum that citizenship is an artificial construction of social evolution, not a universal impetus in human nature. Citizens in one nation can say, probably unreasonably in most situations but reasonably in some, to those wanting access to their own nation: Heal thy own nation. That is certainly a harsh statement, maybe unreasonably so from a beneficent point of view, but that is certainly not an unjust statement. After all, there is no violation of commutative justice going on, just a denial of access.

 

Ultimately, I think that the open-immigration debate terribly frames the practical question at hand by conjuring up a right and crying out: Justitia fiat, et pereat mundus! However, policy is never a binary; rather, it is a matter of decisions at the margins. Modern nations do not face the question of letting in everybody or nobody; instead, they let some people in and exclude others. The practical question is on the margins and deciding the marginal person who should be excluded. Should, say, Great Britain exclude known Wahhabists? I would say that it should. Should it exclude Christians, and for that matter many Muslims, fleeing persecution in Syria? I would say not.

Enshrining open immigration as a human right ex nihilo is a form of rational constructivism that we have reason to think might harm social order. Rather than treat the social partnerships we have inherited as carte blanche to remake in our own image, we should be happy, as the stewards of those partnerships, to improve policy at the margins.

 

 

Bibliography
Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
Grotius. Hugo. 2005. The Rights of War and Peace. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Art on Saturday

 

I had the pleasure of visiting the National Gallery of Art earlier this evening. As is to be expected, I was only able to make my way through a small fraction of the exhibits in the hour or so that I was there. The main exhibit I looked at was on French paintings that were exhibited at American museums during the 18th century and there was another exhibit on French expressionism, with plenty of Pissaro's urban paintings on display. Much to my enjoyment, there was an entire room dedicated to John Constable and J.M.W. Turner in their role as British landscape artists. 

Some of my favorite pieces: 

 

Venice: The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore by J.M.W. Turner

 

 

Wivenhoe Park by John Constable

 

 

Portrait of a Young Woman in White by Circle of Jacques-Louis David

 

 

Boulevard Des Italiens Morning, Sunlight by Camille Pissarro

Pope Francis vs Donald Trump on Saudi Arabia

 

 

A fascinating new article has been published in Foreign Affairs by Victor Gaetan, titled "Why Trump and Francis Diverge on Saudi Arabia."

In that article, Mr. Gaetan discusses the tension between how Pope Francis and President Donald Trump have entirely different views about the Wahhabist absolute monarchy that is Saudi Arabia. The Vatican condemns Saudi Arabia because it is a nation that persecutes Christianity domestically, has played a critical role in the wars in both Syria and Yemen, and, perhaps most fundamentally, is aligned with an intolerant branch of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism. 

An excerpt from the article:

A key source of tension between the House of Saud and the Holy See is Saudi limits on Christian religious expression. Some 1.5 million Catholics currently reside in the Kingdom, most of them guest workers from the Philippines. They have no way to practice their faith. Mass is only available to Christian diplomats at a few foreign embassies and is off limits to foreign national laborers. (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI met with King Abdullah in 2007, inspiring discussion of opening a Catholic Church, but nothing came of it.) Non-Muslim signs of religious devotion, from rosaries to Bibles, are banned. Meanwhile, the Holy See has collaborated with governments in Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, where Christian populations—and tolerance of Christianity—have grown over the past ten years, to establish Catholic places of worship.

Second, Catholic experts on terrorism consider the official Saudi faith of Wahhabism, an eighteenth-century Salafi movement founded on the peninsula, to be a destabilizing source of extremism. For the Holy See, Wahhabism’s threat is existential: Wahhabi intolerance and money fuel violence against Christians and other communities across the Middle East and beyond. To counter this threat, the Vatican is cultivating relationships with non-Wahabbist Islamic cultural centers such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which Francis visited last month. Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam, Sheik Ahmad el-Tayeb, visited Francis in Rome last year, an especially significant development given that Tayeb led a boycott against the Vatican in 2011 after Benedict commented on anti-Christian violence in Egypt. Many hope that the renewed relationship will give new momentum to Christian–Muslim dialogue.

Wariness about Wahhabism also applies to Syria, where local Catholic leaders remain skeptical regarding a Saudi-backed regime change. It is a simple calculus: Christian communities, whether Orthodox or Catholic, have been protected by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad before that; Sunni extremism could bring Sharia law and second-class status for Christians. In the Church’s view, it does not bode well for Trump to plant himself so squarely in the Saudi camp.

Third, the Vatican has opposed Saudi Arabia’s particularly aggressive war in Yemen, a relatively tolerant country with some respect for religious freedom. The Vatican classifies Saudi Arabia’s bombing in Yemen as an archetypical “unjust war”—inessential to the country’s survival, launched without negotiating first, and ruthlessly devastating to non-combatants. In an air campaign highly dependent on U.S. support, Saudi Arabia has dropped cluster bombs and other devastating munitions on Yemeni civilian populations, including schools and medical clinics.

 

Another interesting aspect of the Vatican's relationship with the Muslim world that Mr. Gaetan highlights in the article is its cordial relationship with Shia Iran: 

Analysts typically describe the Saudi–Yemeni conflict in terms of Sunni–Shia rivalry, with Saudi Arabia facing off against the Houthi rebels, mainly Zaydi Muslims, who, at least originally, had loose ties to Shia Iran. Although the Vatican has no link to the Houthi movement, it is generally sympathetic to Shia Islam, which has highly educated clerics organized hierarchically, a theology with Christian parallels, and a general respect for the Catholic Church and its faithful. The Vatican has developed a sympathetic relationship with Iran’s religious leadership and was highly supportive of the U.S.–Iranian nuclear deal. The modern diplomatic relationship between the two dates back to 1954, and was maintained throughout the Islamic Revolution. Iran’s embassy in Rome is one of the largest, most active missions to the Holy See, which sees Iran as key to solving the crisis in Syria.

Pope Francis and the Vatican are ultimately right. If the United States really wanted to advance peace in the Near East, it would pursue further détente with Iran and stop selling Saudia Arabia billions of dollars worth of weapons. 

On a side note, the problems with American policy transcend the person of Donald Trump and his administration. For over a generation, the United States has portrayed Iran as the evil empire in this area of the world all while casting a blind eye of the House al-Saud's patronage of Wahhabist causes that preach jihad. Moreover, the problem isn't even particularly American. Even Justin Trudeau's administration in Canada has gone ahead with an, albeit much, much smaller, arms-deal with Saudi Arabia. 

Comparing Rome and China: The Influences of island-geography

 

Earlier this week, I had an email on Tyler Cowen's post on the question of why Chinese civilization has been so successful in establishing a centralized hegemony over a population around the same size featured on Marginal Revolution. In that post, Rome vs. China, I look at how geographic factors, lacking in China, contributed to the unraveling of the Roman Empire: 

 

On the comparison of China and Rome, one of the factors that immediately came to my mind was a combination of (2) and (4): The Roman Empire faced a much more complex logistical problem of maintaining territorial integrity than did China and its territorial integrity could be destroyed from a sea campaign.

These two themes actually did greatly contribute to Rome’s unraveling during the Crisis of the 5th Century: One of the under-appreciated aspects of the Crisis of the 5th Century that led to the Fall of the Roman Empire was the loss of North Africa to the Vandals. Peter Heather provides a short description of how destructive the loss of North Africa was to the empire in The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006):

“No other single blow could have done the Empire so much harm. At a stroke. Geiseric had removed from Aetius’ control the richest provinces of the Roman west, with the result that financial crisis looked How was it allowed to happen? Presumably, after four and a half years of relative peace, and thinking that Geiseric was going to keep the treaty made in February 435, people took their eyes off the ball. There was, I suspect, simply too much instability in other parts of the empire for troops to be left in Carthage on a ‘what if?’ basis. The Visigothic war in particular, brought to an end just before Geiseric made his move, had probably demanded every available man. So with the Carthage garrison at minimum strength, the cunning Vandal had taken full advantage.” (p. 289)

Here, I see the theme of (4) in your blog post: “[China] has a large space of relatively flat plains.” Chinese generals did not face the same complex logistical problems that Roman ones did in deploying their military force across their nation.

When North Africa was lost, retaking it to reassert territorial integrity was not as easy as simply marching a couple of legions there. If it were that easy, I very much doubt the Vandals could have held onto North Africa. Instead, the Roman Empire needed to launch a sea campaign, which is theme (2) of your post: “when it comes to naval warfare — more common for Europe — small countries have a chance to punch above their weight, witness England and Portugal.”

In 468 both the Western and Eastern Empires launched a massive joint campaign to take back North Africa. However, the armada they had launched was smashed at the Battle of Cape Bon by a much smaller Vandal fleet that had the weather gauge to its advantage. Punching above their weight, the Vandal kingdom of North Africa was able to beat back a campaign manned and funded by both Ravenna and Constantinople—a feat that would have been close to impossible on land.

The failure of that armada to land on North Africa doomed half of the Roman world to extinction, for without the North African provinces, the Western Roman Empire could not reassert its hegemony over the centrifugal forces now at full force across Gaul and Hispania. The difficulties of maintaining optimal deployments of troops in an empire largely bifurcated (at least in scale of importance) by a sea and the hazards of warfare at sea conspired to make the problem of maintaining imperial territorial integrity too difficult for Roman politics to solve during the Crisis of the 5th Century, contributing to the total collapse of that integrity in the west. Had the Western Roman Empire not been encumbered by (2) and (4) the survival of said integrity is certainly imaginable—and within the capability its resources offered it.

Remarks On France's Totalitarian Secularism

 

From The Economist's "Muslim attire: The state and the veil":

France is different. The roots of French political secularism, known as laïcité, go back to the revolution of 1789 and to an anti-clerical campaign in the early 20th century. By 1904 some 10,000 religious schools had been shut; thousands of priests fled France. 'We have torn human conscience from the clutches of faith,' declared René Viviani, a Socialist minister.

Anti-Muslim sentiments in France is a symptom of a much more deep-total totalitarian secularism. The fact is that faith, genuine faith nourished by good deeds, cannot simply not a private matter. France's laïcité laws force a rather totalitarian view of society upon its citizens in which they have to all but renounce their faiths in order to be French.

 

France's laws against practicing Islam in public therefore isn't just a matter of Islam in particular, but a matter of how French law treats of religion in general. Laïcité forces public atheism upon French citizens who do no harm to others and is therefore, as a matter of general principle, contrary to human liberty. It's one thing for citizens or France, or any other nation for that matter, to vote for a woman who wears a veil in public, on account of such practices being against what they believe their national characteristics to be, it's quite another thing to ban such a practice. 

Scène de Juillet 1830

 

During the evenings, I have been listening to Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast, which I can wholeheartedly recommend. In particular, I've been repeatedly listening to the most recent cycle, on France's July Revolution. The podcast has brought to mind one of my favorite paintings, Léon Cogniet's Scène de Juillet 1830. With very little actual imagery, Cogniet is able to communicate the course of the July Revolution and the violent process that any revolution goes through. As a piece of art, it is breathtakingly simple and effective: 

 

Some More Thoughts on Casuistry

 

 

Human beings free will. Although it is certainly marred by concupiscence and circumstances, free will provides the human species with the ability to choose their actions and to make judgments about what ends in life are worthwhile. Perhaps a better word than ‘free will’ might be autonomy. ‘Autonomy’ derives from two Greek roots: ‘αὐτός’—’self’ and ‘νόμος’—’law’. An autonomous agent is therefore one capable of choosing his own laws, his own rules. (I can thank James Caton for making this point to me.) Across our daily lives, we can see choose different rules for themselves and, very frequently, we can infer their behavior from what kind of rules they have chosen.

Human beings are autonomous. They can therefore choose their own rules. For this reason, it is imperative that we choose them wisely and prudently. Casuistry provides a method for human reason, which like human will we must remember is marred by concupiscence and circumstances, to formulate abstract rules that can be applied to particular cases. A principle that should inform all casuistic reasoning is that rules should first be able to decide easy cases before they are applied to harder cases. The reason for this is twofold: 1) Easy cases are those scenarios that define daily life and we should first know what to do in ordinary circumstances before we can think about extraordinary cases; and 2) Moral reasoning needs the principles first decided in the easy cases in order to properly decide the hard ones. A casuistry of easy cases is therefore prior, both in terms of actual life and in terms of the difficulty of reasoning, than a casuistry of hard cases.

The moral rules derived from thinking about hard cases might be adapted to solving those hard cases (though even that much is dubious), but they will not be adapted to giving answers to the more probable issues of human life. Yes, the extraordinary cases may be more visceral and they may therefore enchant the imagination, but the ordinary cases are the problems that populate most of human life. Furthermore, those ordinary cases are more easily decidable. The rules that we formulate from thinking about them are therefore more probable than those that we formulate from thinking about hard cases. Moreover, we often need the rules derived from the former in order to test those derived from the latter. The abuse of casuistry comes from when we neglect the need of disciplining our daily lives with moral rules and instead decide to simply justify our lives with arbitrary rules. When we do not live out our rules in daily life, we are always in danger of fitting our life to a narrative rather than fitting our lives to proper and virtuous rules.

Formulating moral rules based on hard cases first is putting the donkey before the cart. A donkey cannot effectively push a cart, nor can hard cases effectively guide a moral life.