Chris Bertram

It is a good long time since we had a sporting thread — and especially one that is utterly incomprehensible to most of our American readers. Today marks “the beginning of the Six Nations”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/rugby_union/fixtures/4777061.stm , and Ireland seem to be everyone’s nailed-on favourites. But I reckon there could be some surprises. Brian Ashton, the new England coach, will play a different kind of game to his predecessor, Wilkinson and Farrell may come good, and Leicester (with a good chunk of the England team) recently beat Munster (with much of the Irish one) in the Heineken Cup. So I’m backing England to do better than expected (and maybe win, pipping Ireland), for the French to be flakey and unpredictable but finish third, and Wales to come in fourth. As for last place, I think Italy might just do it this time and edge out Scotland, maybe by getting a home win against Wales. (The Merseyside derby is today too, so it will be a long stretch in front of the telly.)

There’s a somewhat “weird article in the Guardian today by Simon Tisdall”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1996355,00.html , which rather highlights a question that has been bothering me for a while. There’s been a rumbling debate in the UK for a while now about the possibility that the Scottish National Party might gain a majority in Scotland and then win a referendum on independence, thus ending the union. Tisdall cites possible Kosovan secession as an important possible precedent for this on no stronger grounds than the fact that, like Scotland, Kosovo has been an integral part of a larger entity for several centuries.

Most popular discussion of the Scottish case has simply assumed that Scotland ought to be able to secede if the nationalists win a referendum. But, whatever the merits of that view, it isn’t one that would draw much strength from recent work in political philosophy (so much the worse for political philosophy, I hear you say). Allen Buchanan’s article “Theories of Secession”, (PPA 1997) for example, argues for a remedial right to secede – that is a right, akin, to the right to revolution – to depart an entity if the seceding party has sought and failed to remedy a serious injustice of which they are the victims. Buchanan does not support a “primary right” to secede by national or other groups, partly on the grounds that to grant such a right would generate perverse incentives against many desirable policies, including ones favouring decentralized or devolved administration.

I think the disanalogies between Scotland and and Kosovo are pretty clear. Albanian Kosovans are the recent victims of sustained injustice and rights violations; modern Scots, who provide a good proportion of cabinet minister for the UK, who benefit from significant flows of revenues and who have their own parliament, are not. [1] Kosovans therefore meet Buchanan’s test for a remedial right to secede and Scots do not. Whether permitting Scottish secession would be a good or bad thing _prudentially_ is another question, but I can’t see that it would be _unjust_ to refuse such secession even if there were a majority for it in a referendum. Scottish secession, and the break-up of the UK, might have all kinds of desirable consequences, including for democracy and for the effective control of resources by people, especially if Scotland were to stay within the EU. But as a _right_ , inherent in the Scottish people and exercisable by a one-off vote? I’m not convinced.

fn1. I don’t deny, of course, that Scots have been the victims of serious injustice in the historic past, just that they are presently the victims of such injustice.

I finished Halldor Laxness’s “Independent People”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1860467768/junius-20 a few weeks ago. It took me a very long time to read. Usually this is a sign that I’m not getting on with a book, but not in this case. Rather, Laxness’s prose is so rich, his descriptions are so compelling and his observations so unsettling, that I found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time without taking a break. Certainly it is the best book I’ve read all year, and maybe over the last five or so.

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I’ve just finished watching “Das Leben der Anderen”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/, which I was given on DVD for Christmas. It was a bit of a struggle, linguistically, and I missed a fair bit of dialogue, but it is a very powerful film which I strongly recommend. The setting is East Berlin in 1984 and the plot concerns the Stasi surveillance of a playwright and his lover. I won’t post more in the way of spoilers but I’ll just say that the movie gives a very strong impression of what it must be like to live in a police state and of the corrupting effects of dictatorship on watchers and those they watch. I had “a bit of a disagreement with Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/11/east_germany_ci.html recently about the former GDR, when he took issue with me for saying:

bq. the real problem with East Germany was not its comparative level of economic development or the level of health care its citizens could receive (rather good, actually). It was the fact that it was a police state where people were denied the basic liberties.

I have to say that’s an opinion that has been reinforced by the film: a (far) worse choice of fruit and vegetables is as nothing to the corrosive effects on the soul of a political tyranny. The film also constitutes a very concrete rebuttal of Volokh guest blogger Fernando Tesón’s “strange polemic against political art”:http://volokh.com/posts/1166215181.shtml . Art can contribute to political understanding by making vivid to people what a state of affairs is like in a way that no mere enumeration of facts can. The level of surveillance that citizens of the GDR were subject to is shocking, but it takes art to depict the effect of such a system on their inner lives.

Reading an “article about the current snow shortage in Europe’s ski resorts”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6185345.stm , I came across the following passage:

bq. “Already banks are refusing to offer loans to resorts under 1,500 metres as they fear for their future snow cover.”

This surely presents a tremendous money-making opportunity for global warming “skeptics”. If the banks won’t lend these resorts money, then there’s a gap which the denialists could exploit and thereby make themselves rich. What could possibly go wrong?

Having lived to a greater age than nearly all of his thousands of victims, and having succeeded in evading justice, the butcher Pinochet is “dead at last”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6167237.stm .

We CTers don’t agree about everything, and here’s a case in point. I was reading Jon’s excellent “Global Justice”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745630669/junius-20 the other day and was arrested by the following sentences:

bq. When we face the question of how state borders should be drawn, it would be utopian in the pejorative sense to consider carving up territories from an imaginary state of nature. That is not a problem we will ever face. Because the current world is already divided into states, the question we must face concerns the possibility of redrawing existing borders. (p. 89)

Here Jon is echoing, and, indeed, referencing, similar sentiments by other philosopher, including Allen Buchanan whose “Theories of Secession” I was reading about the same time. Of course I agree with them both that, as a practical problem, we’re never going to face the issue of justifying state acquisition of territory _ab initio_. But the task of political philosophy isn’t just to provide practical guidance, it is also to produce critical understanding, and, anyway, there’s the question of the moral attitude individuals ought to adopt to the territorial (and other) claims of states. States claim the moral right to coerce those within their territory, to prevent others from crossing their frontiers, to deport aliens etc etc. We may have to live with the territoriality of states as a fact of life, but depending on whether we think state claims are justified (or could be justified) we’ll think differently about the morality of people who try to cross borders and people who try to stop them (among other issues). We’ll also think differently about history. The rise of the modern state and the claim of states to jurisdiction (separately or communally) over the earth’s surface, has been at the expense of non-state forms of organization, of tribal peoples, of anarchists. Simply accepting the legitimacy of statist territorial claims shuts out the perspective of the losers in an disturbingly peremptory fashion.

One of the most annoying responses we get from our students is when we ask what (if anything) might justify some aspect of social life (income inequality, say) and they shrug and reply “That’s just the way the world is”. Maybe. And maybe it always will be. But that doesn’t mean we should shirk the task of justification. Of course there’s a difficulty here, because we often aspire to practicality. But utopianism _in the pejorative sense_ is surely theorizing that assumes crazy things about human nature (universal perfect altruism, for example). Discussing state jurisdiction isn’t like this. We have states _now_ but they aren’t a permanent feature of the human condition in the way that some psychological or physiological facts plausibly are.

(Recommendation: A. John Simmons, “On the Territorial Rights of States” , _Philosophical Issues_ 35(2001) (Supplement to _Nous_ ).)

Over at Econolog, TCS writer and right-wing hack Arnold Kling reports, under the headline “The Stern Swindle”:http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/11/the_stern_swind.html , that Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta “criticizes the Stern report”:http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/dasgupta/Stern.pdf for applying a very low discount rate to the interests of future generations. Kling writes:

bq. What Dasgupta is saying is that the approach Stern uses to evaluate intertemporal trade-offs would, if applied generally, suggest that our consumption should drop from over 80 percent of GDP to 2.5 percent, in order to leave the target legacy to our children. What Dasgupta’s comment does is crystallize for me the magnitude of the intellectual swindle that Stern is attempting to pull off. Any time you assign a far-from-plausible interest rate to a long-term intertemporal problem, you get distorted results.

What Dasgupta _actually says_ :

bq. I have little problem with the figure of 0.1% a year the authors have chosen for the rate of pure time/risk discount….(p. 6)

Dasgupta’s real argument is that Stern shouldn’t adopt the egalitarian approach it does to intergenerational well-being whilst being _at the same time_ indifferent to inequality among members of the present generation. Dasgupta thinks the well-being of the actual poor should take priority over climate change abatement. Of course, we’ve heard arguments along these lines before, but Dasgupta, as someone with a record of concern for development and the well-being of the global poor, is someone who should be taken seriously when voices them and might be expected to devise and support policies that benefit the worst off. Right-wing hacks, are, needless to say, a different matter.

(Dasgupta’s critique seems to me to support the idea that economies like China and India shouldn’t be pressured into climate change abatement because the value of the benefits their growth brings to the poorest outweighs the harms to future generations. It doesn’t look anything like so plausible to claim that the least advantaged would be similarly harmed by the wealthier countries cutting back their carbon emissions.)

The clock has hit zero, and as soon as the ball is dead, the game is over. Gloucester, the unbeaten league leaders, are one point ahead thanks to a late penalty. Bristol, having led for most of the match, now face defeat. But they don’t panic, they go through the phases in the driving wind and torrential rain, umpteen times without a knock-on, edging closer to the line. Jason Strange, Bristol’s replacement fly-half waits in the pocket. The ball comes back to him. Everyone knows what will happen next. The Gloucester forwards charge him down, but the kick is away and the ball sails between the posts. The stadium erupts as nine thousand voices chant Bristol! Bristol! and eighteen thousand arms are raised aloft. Over the tannoy comes the sound of the Spencer Davis Group. Duh Duh Duh Duh Duh Dah! Duh Duh Duh Duh Duh Dah! So glad you made it! So glad you made it! “Top of the league”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,377-2471412,00.html.

(Bristol, recently bankrupt and in the lower divisions, came up for last season and survived, just. The bookies had us as nailed on favourites for relegation. But here we are, top of the league, with Wasps, Sale, Bath and now Gloucester among the vanquished. It probably won’t last, but these are moments to remember always, and that was one of the best finishes to a sporting event that I’ve ever experienced.)

UPDATE: the moment at YouTube:

Ferenc Puskás, whose Hungarian team thrashed England at Wembley in 1953 with tactics that anticipated “total football”, and who is widely considered to have been one of the great talents of all time, has died. Obits and articles: “Brian Glanville in the Guardian”:http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,1950662,00.html, “Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2006/11/17/best_beckenbauer_platini_zidan.html, “Soccernet”:http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=392277&cc=5739, “Football365”:http://www.football365.com/story/0,17033,8750_1694091,00.html, “Simon Barnes in the Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,27-2458213,00.html, “Times obituary”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,27-2458262,00.html .

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has “responded”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/11/xxx.html to “my claim”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/13/relativities-local-and-global/ that, once societies have achieved a certain threshold level, continued growth in output doesn’t matter that much (and that inequalities among such societies matter little, certainly when set beside the absolute poverty of the global poor). Tyler writes:

bq. Just as the present appears remarkable from the vantage point of the past, our future may offer comparable advances in benefits. Continued progress might bring greater life expectancies, cures for debilitating diseases, and cognitive enhancements. Millions or billions of people will have much better and longer lives. Many features of modern life might someday seem as backward as we now regard the large number of women who died in childbirth for lack of proper care. Most of all, economic growth limits and mitigates tragedies. It is a simple failure of imagination to believe that human progress has run its course.

I think what is most striking about what Tyler writes here is the way in which he runs together human progress and economic growth, as if they were the same thing. I’ll leave to one side any moralized or perfectionist thoughts about human progress and just notice that there’s a basic distinction to be made between scientific and technological development and economic growth in the sense of increased per capita GDP. Capitalism’s advocates have always had a tendency to equate progress with increased output, but there are other possibilities, chief among them being that output remains constant and people become progressively freed from burdensome toil. Jerry Cohen has some trenchant observations about Max Weber’s enslavement to a Tyler-like view towards the end of his _Karl Marx’s Theory of History_ (p. 321 and thereabouts). If the passage were online, I’d link. But you should all own a copy anyway.

The other thing to note is the way Tyler holds out the carrot of the benefits of medical technology, including “cognitive enhancements”. If scientific progress can come apart from growth in GDP I could just suggest that giving up on growth in one sense doesn’t necessarily require us to forgo such future benefits. (And I could also point to a list of societies that have innovated in medical technology despite not being at the front of economic development: the British invention of MRI scanning in the 1970s being a case in point.) But it is worth noting that the really great advances in longevity (so far) have mainly come from improvements in diet and public health and rather less from hi-tech. Maybe Tyler thinks that all this will change in the future and that we need to incentivize innovators now so that the benefits of “cognitive enhancements” trickle down to ordinary Westerners and then to the global poor. I’m unconvinced.

Christopher Hitchens “writes”:http://www.slate.com/id/2152548/ :

bq. What is to become, in the event of a withdrawal, of the many Arab and Kurdish Iraqis who do want to live in a secular and democratic and federal country? We have acquired this responsibility not since 2003, or in the sideshow debate over prewar propaganda, but over decades of intervention in Iraq’s affairs, starting with the 1968 Baathist coup endorsed by the CIA, stretching through Jimmy Carter’s unforgivable permission for Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, continuing through the decades of genocide in Kurdistan and the uneasy compromise that ended the Kuwait war, and extending through 12 years of sanctions and half-measures, including the “no-fly” zones and the Iraq Liberation Act, which passed the Senate without a dissenting vote. It is not a responsibility from which we can walk away when, or if, it seems to suit us.

Well there’s a rather obvious answer, isn’t there? The United States could offer to resettle all and any such people in the United States (with, perhaps, a smaller quota coming to the UK). No doubt those states where the war was most enthusiastically supported would be the first to make generous offers to the Arab would-be immigrants. Come to think of it, why didn’t Kinky Friedman make this part of his election platform?

In the past few weeks John and Henry have engaged in arguments with Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson on the subject of whether relative wealth matters. To be sure, that isn’t the ostensible focus of the dispute with Tyler, which is about demographics. But digging deeper, the crux of Tyler’s argument has been that Europe’s ageing population matters because it will lead to lower growth rates and that the compounding effect of these will be that Europe’s position relative to the US (and China, and India) will decline, and that that’s a bad thing for Europeans. Whilst Tyler insists that these global relativities matter enormously, Will suggests that domestic relativities between individuals matter hardly at all. Since I think of Will and Tyler as occupying similar ideological space to one another, I find the contrast to be a striking one, and all the more so because I think that something like the exact opposite is true. That is to say, I think that domestic relativities matter quite a lot, and that global ones ought to matter a good deal less (if at all) just so long as the states concerned can ensure for all their citizens a certain threshold level of the key capabilities.

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From chapter 6 of E.M Forster’s _Howard’s End_ (1910):

“Evening, Mr. Bast.”

“Good-evening, Mr. Bast.”