Readers Write, the Categorical Imperative
Okay, Claire. Trump is bad. But what are we supposed to do about it?
I’ve received a number of lovely letters, for which I thank my readers. I’ve asked permission to publish the letters below. If you’d like to send mail for publication, please do. Be sure to tell me, specifically, whether you’d like me to use your name. You may want the credit. You may want the anonymity. You may want one or the other badly. But I can’t know unless you tell me.
Take just a minute to read something that’s been oddly neglected in the media storm over Ukraine: Zelenskyy’s maiden speech to the UN General Assembly.
Distinguished President,
Your Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen!
On behalf of Ukraine, I congratulate you, Mr. President, on having been elected President of the 74th session of the UN General Assembly. Ukraine supports the implementation of all ambitious priorities of this year's Assembly.
Let us be honest, everyone present here has different interests, views, values and problems. But there is one thing that unites us all. Each of you, ladies and gentlemen, had the first speech from this rostrum.
Please recall your feelings at that moment. Every one of you, respected and honored today, was once a beginner yet a sincere world politician. And then, a cocktail of pragmatism, skepticism and harsh geopolitical reality has not yet managed to quench your passion, romanticism and unwavering belief that the world can be changed for the better.
Remember how important it was to tell the problems and troubles of your country and your people to the world back then. How important it was to be heard.
I have the same feelings today.
Let me tell you one story. The story of a person for whom “being heard” has become the meaning of life. For this man had a divine voice. He was called one of the best baritones and countertenors in the world. His voice was heard at Carnegie Hall in New York, Notre Dame Cathedral, Covent Garden in London and Grand Opera in Paris. Each of you could have personally heard his incredible singing. But unfortunately, there is one thing that will not allow you to do so. I’ll show you. It looks like this.
Here, he pulls out a bullet. The video directs you to the right place. I’ve actually started it a few seconds before, so you can see how the audience reacts:
To be charitable, they are perhaps taking notes on his speech. I don’t know who they are. But I confess my first thought was, “They’re checking their Instagram feeds to see how many ‘likes’ their vacation photos have accrued,” and, “Our world is a dystopian nightmare.”
On reflection, that’s pure projection. For all I know, they’re his aides, and they’ve been told to Tweet the speech to get the message out. For all I know, they’re checking their phones because their husbands or brothers are at the front, and this livemap is the only hint they have about whether they might be alive or dead.
Mind you, that’s a dystopian nightmare too. But it’s somehow more bearable than one in which the assembled audience became bored, tuned him out, and swiped right on on Tinder.
12.7 millimeters that not only stopped his career, but also stopped his life. It costs 10 dollars. And, unfortunately, today on our planet it is the value of human life.
There are thousands of such stories, millions of such bullets. Welcome to the XXI century. A century of opportunities. Where instead of "being heard" you have an opportunity to be killed.
The name of the man I’ve told you about was Wassyl Slipak. He was a Ukrainian, a soloist of the Paris National Opera who was killed in Donbas defending Ukraine from the Russian aggression.
In the spirit of “not spinning the news,” I should point out that according to Wikipedia—which may well have been edited by a Russian troll—he joined 7th Battalion of the Volunteer Ukrainian Corps of the Right Sector. I don’t know if that’s true. If it is, it means our hero got mixed up with Pravy Sektor, a group whose sensibilities have made it a bit too easy for Russia to portray them as Nazis. You can read about them here. It does not mean he was a Nazi. People of many ideologies were drawn to their volunteer corps. It means if I want to know the truth, I’d probably have to go to Ukraine and personally exhume his body. Russia has indeed polluted the information environment so badly that there’s just no way for me to tell from here what’s true and what’s their bullshit.
The war in Donbas has already lasted five years and five years have passed since Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. Despite the existence of international law and hundreds of organizations designed to defend it, our country defends its own sovereignty and territorial integrity with weapons in its hands and losing its citizens.
More than 13 thousand people killed. 30 thousand wounded. One and a half million people were forced to leave their homes. Every year, these monstrous numbers are heard here, but with one correction—every year these numbers get bigger.
The end of the war, the return of all the occupied Ukrainian territories and the prevailing of peace are my tasks. But not at the cost of our citizens' lives, not at the cost of freedom or the right of Ukraine to its own choice.
That is why we need the support of the world. I understand: everyone present here has their own state concern and other people's problems should not worry you more than your own. But in today’s world, where we live, there is no longer someone else’s war. None of you can feel safe when there is a war in Ukraine, when there is a war in Europe.
And it can be fatal to think that this does not concern you and will never affect you. You can't think of the global and close your eyes to the details or, as it may seem, even trifles. Because that's how the foundation for the two world wars was laid. And tens of millions of human lives became the price of inattention, silence, inaction or unwillingness to sacrifice one's ambitions. Have humanity started to forget these dreadful lessons of history?
Ukraine remembers them. And Ukraine has always demonstrated its willingness to provide peace in a civilized way. And took steps towards international security. For example, when it gave up its nuclear capability, which at the time was larger than in the UK, France and China combined.
Because it seemed to us that we were all building a different, new world. Where you do not need to have a nuclear weapon to be heard. Where you will be respected for deeds, not for nuclear warheads.
After all, in this “new” world, our country has lost part of its territories and is losing its citizens almost daily.
That is why, if not Ukraine than who has the right to speak today about the need to rethink and revise current world rules?
Of course, we do not question the authority of international institutions, in particular the United Nations. But we must admit that the mechanisms are not flawless. They start failing and therefore need an update
United Nations. But let’s be honest—are nations really united today? And even if so, what exactly unites them?
Disasters and wars.
We always hear calls for fair change, just promises, announcement of new initiatives from this highest platform in the world. It is time to make sure that they are always backed by real deeds. Because in the modern world, where the human life costs 10 dollars, words have been devalued long ago.
Let us remember the goal of the UN’s establishment in 1945? To maintain and strengthen peace and international security. But what shall we do when the very basis of international security is at stake?
For any war today—in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Yemen or any other corner of the planet, regardless of the number of casualties—is the greatest threat to the entire civilization. Because in 2019, homo sapiens still resolves conflicts by killing. Throughout its existence, humanity has been constantly finding new ways to overcome distance, transfer information, cure diseases.
And only one thing remains unchanged: contradictions between nations and states are still resolved not by words, but by missiles.
Not by word. But by war.
Don’t think that war is far away. Its methods, technology and weapons have made our planet not so big anymore. And today, the time I spent on the last paragraph is enough to destroy the Earth completely.
This means that each leader is responsible not only for the fate of his own country, but also for the fate of the whole world. In my opinion, we all need to realize that a strong leader is not the one who, without batting an eyelid, sends thousands of soldiers to death. A strong leader is the one who protects everyone’s life.
Now let us answer ourselves—what do our meetings give to humanity? If for someone it is only a political theater where they play a role and declare light intentions, which are then crossed out by dark actions?
It’s not just a rostrum. And not a scene. And seven and a half billion inhabitants of the planet are not just spectators, but direct participants in real life. The basics of this life scenario are laid here. And today it depends on everyone present whether it will be life at all.
Honestly, I would really like to call this speech “15 minutes that changed the world”. But I am well aware that changing something that has existed for thousands of years is simply impossible in 15 minutes. And behavioral theories say that war is an integral part of human nature. But the world is changing and people are changing with it. And if we once learned writing, mathematics, invented the wheel, penicillin and conquered space, humanity still has a chance.
Being aware of danger for civilization, we must generate other meanings. And fight for a new human mentality where aggression, anger and hatred will be atrophied feelings.
Ladies and Gentlemen! On this day, September 25, Erich Maria Remarque died. And 90 years ago the world saw his novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.” I recall the words from its preface: “This is an attempt to tell about a generation crippled by war. About those who fell victim to it, even fleeing shells.” And 90 years ago the world saw another novel. It's Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” Here’s a quote from it: “War cannot be won by victories. The one who wins the war never stops fighting … ”
The world must remember: every next crippled generation is a path to a new war. Which is impossible, just impossible to win with victories.
Someone says now: “There will be no World War III. It will be the last one”. I hope this phrase is an awareness of the threat to the planet, not an announcement.
Thank you!
From a reader who prefers to be anonymous: “You need to make it easier to find the “donate” button and make sure it’s on every email you send.”
Claire: Whoa, seriously? You mean I haven’t done that enough? I thought I was at serious risk of irritating my readers.
But if you say so!
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From Turkish Airlines:
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Note to self: Take the address for Turkish Airlines off the mailing list.
Not to worry. One of this list’s subscribers is a Turkish Airlines pilot. D., you may hand-deliver the newsletter to your colleagues, if you think they’d enjoy it. (Best to do it discreetly, I am sure it will soon be banned in Turkey.)
The Obama Administration never did a damned thing for press freedom, or any other kind of liberty, in Turkey. I was outraged—I still am—by the Obama Administration’s silence about this, and its silence about so many other issues that should have been sources of concern to anyone who believes certain rights are inalienable and universal.
Instead, I lived through this.
Until the election of Donald Trump, I would have said Barack Obama was the worst catastrophe I could imagine befalling American foreign policy.
I hear readers saying, “Are you serious, Claire? What about Bush? He got us into two wars. And we lost them both. Do you understand the suffering this has caused? How could Obama have been worse?”
He was worse because he combined cowardly and irresponsible isolationist instincts with a hypocritical piety that permitted Americans to think these instincts were noble, instead of feeling properly ashamed of them.
It was his attitude. It was the legitimation of the idea that it’s okay to lose wars. Not such a big deal to allow ISIS to regroup in Iraq. Okay to allow Assad to torture, slaughter, and gas every human being in Syria. Those places aren’t our business: wrong wars, wrong people.
He gave Americans permission to think that human rights are just for Americans. It’s silly, he said implicitly, to worry that people overseas might actually be quite a bit like us in their desire not to be raped, terrorized, and murdered by their governments—or in their longing to speak their minds without being locked up. He dressed this up as “wisdom,” “restraint,” and “pragmatism,” and this allowed people who voted for him to feel morally very nice.
He was the one who began with this nonsense about NATO allies being freeloaders. Throwing our weight around in defense of human rights was, in his view, the fetish of “who think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak.” He styled himself “courageous” for not believing that “every problem has a military solution.” We were not the “indispensable nation” on the world stage. Indeed, we were much like Iraq ourselves: It was time to focus on “nation-building here at home.”
“Why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force?” he asked about Ukraine. As if Americans were clamoring to go to war in Ukraine.
This is a fairly academic way of describing his foreign policy:
What galled me was that at the same time, we were congratulating ourselves. I was living in a country that was the object of US foreign policy. I knew exactly how large the distinction was between what we told ourselves about our solemn commitment to human rights and what we actually did.
I didn’t think it could be worse.
L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu. The maxim comes from François de la Rochefoucauld, and it means that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and it is infinitely wiser than I had understood.
One more word about Ukraine. I assume by now you’ve all read the transcript. I also presume most Americans have not. A significant number will thus genuinely be persuaded it’s all hearsay and fake news and a Deep State plot and an illegitimate effort to reverse the outcome of an election Democrats didn’t like.
But you’ve read the transcript. So you either
Know that isn’t so;
Can’t believe he hasn’t been impeached already, or;
You’re telling yourself something this:
The man’s a complete son-of-a-bitch. He’s also stupider than even I imagined. He’s indelibly disgraced the office he holds. I want to die of shame. But what do I do? The Democrats have gone insane. Shit, they may even nominate Bernie Sanders! If I say the plain truth about the President, Bernie Sanders could be elected. Then it won’t just be Ukraine. Russia will be uncontainable, and so will every other enemy of the United States, and we’re going to wind up spending 16 trillion dollars—yes, trillion, he really said that, yes, he said trillion, as in, twelve zeros after the one, more than you’d have on hand if you’d earned sixteen million bucks a day every single day since the birth of Christ—on reversing the industrial revolution and modernity. Oh, and we’ll legalize abortion through toddlerhood. And my wife’s going to be forced to wax some pervert’s hairy balls. So it is my active moral responsibility to lie about what’s in that transcript—to others and myself—to forestall the even greater catastrophe of a Sanders presidency.
This is a genuine moral dilemma.
I’ve received a number of letters like the one below, but I think this one best summarizes the sentiment. Steve Fleischer has kindly given me permission to use his name:
I am writing to defend President Trump—as distasteful a job as I have undertaken in quite awhile, but necessary in this time of NeverTrumpers.
First, I will concede that Trump is a bully, a liar, an abuser of both men and women (though obviously in different ways), an illiterate, and almost certainly despicable (though I have never met him). I could go on, but we probably agree on this paragraph.
All that having been said, Trump is also a prime example of Carlyle’s Hero, a man who reflects both his times and the times’ need for a hero.
Compare Trump with what the American political system has given us as alternatives—everything that I said about Trump could probably have been said about Mrs. Clinton (minus perhaps the literacy part).
When faced with such an unpleasant choice, American voters picked the lesser of the two evils (I know that Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote, but we are governed by the Electoral College). And Americans have been well rewarded:
My savings in the stock market have appreciated*;
Those of my friends who want to work have found some employment (though not necessarily good jobs);
Business owners feel a new sense of opportunity through the loosening of regulations (though the uncertainty of the tariff policies are removing the gains made);
The confrontation with China is necessary in order to protect our technology and industry;
Trump has said what needed to be said about the NATO countries’ shirking of responsibilities;
Trump has (temporarily) curbed Washington’s war impulses; and
Trump has focused the debate on immigration (I believe in meritorious immigration and do not want an accident of geography to determine our immigration policies).* I follow the Trump investment plan—what Trump wants, Trump gets; lower energy prices, lower interest rates, etc. And Trump signals what he wants so investors have plenty of opportunity to buy/sell in anticipation and wait for Trump to get his wishes.
I could go on, but the fundamental question is: “Am I better off today than I would have been under Mrs. Clinton?” I have no doubt that I am better off. (I wish that we had better choices, but the 2020 election does not promise to provide any better choices than did the last one.)
I will quit here before I wear out my welcome (bold assumption there), but I wanted to give you the gift of doubt about Trump.
P.S. I agree with your comments about writing; just writing this note forced a discipline on my thoughts that would never have appeared in a conversation.
I disagree with a number of particulars here, particularly that Trump “said what needed to be said” about NATO allies’ shirking. Nothing needed to be said that would destroy the credibility of the NATO alliance. When Germans are wargaming this scenario and running the headline “Do We Need the Bomb?” on the front page of Welt am Sonntag, we may safely conclude that Trump has said things that didn’t need to be said. I’ll return to this point in a subsequent newsletter.
But I do take seriously the question many of you have sent to me: What’s the alternative? The Democrats have gone insane.
I don’t think they’ve gone quite as insane as the fever-dreams would have it, but let’s assume that’s true. Some of the things they’ve been saying sound legit insane to me. It may be playing to the base before the inevitable pivot to the center, but their base is legit insane.
Does that mean we should tell ourselves untruths about Donald Trump and his fitness for office?
It all depends on our moral system. This is a classic dilemma. Are you a consequentialist? Or are you a non-consequentialist, with, for example, a deontological moral system?
Or are you, perhaps, immoral?
Let’s see what the consequentialists have to say about this. For a consequentialist—Bentham and Mill are the examples we’re all familiar with—morality is entirely about producing the right consequences. The most common view among consequentialists is that your action should maximize the sum total of human happiness.
I’ll pull out a few species of consequentialism from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy so that you can decide what kind of consequentialist you are. (Philosophers have been trying to refine this one for a while, because the thought experiments always work out ugly—really ugly.)
Plain Consequentialism: Of all the things a person might do at any given moment, the morally right action is the one with the best overall consequences. (This is a tricky one, because, for example, it means you should be off donating a kidney right now, not reading this newsletter.)
Plain Scalar Consequentialism: Of any two things a person might do at any given moment, one is better than another to the extent that its overall consequences are better than the other’s overall consequences. (This is the version of consequentialism that allows you to keep your kidney and feel like a reasonably decent person even though you’re not selling everything you own and donating the proceeds to a children’s hospital in Zaire.)
Expectable Consequentialism: The morally right action is the action whose reasonably expectable consequences are best. This is the version that gets you out of trouble if you gave money to a charity that you thought was funding a children’s hospital, but it turned out the charity was a front for organized crime.
Rule Consequentialism: An action is morally right if and only if it does not violate the set of rules of behavior whose general acceptance in the community would have the best consequences—that is, at least as good as any rival set of rules or no rules at all. (By this point, you may as well be a deontologist.)
Consequentialism might be useful to you if you’re trying to defend Trump. The consensus consequentialist view is this:
A fifty percent chance of a definitely good outcome is half as good as that good outcome itself, and a ten percent chance is one tenth as good.
I leave it up to you to work out the probabilities; decide if this moral system is right for you; and if so, whether you should pretend there’s nothing notably wrong with Trump’s behavior.
(I caution that while you’re free in the United States to pursue any moral system that strikes your fancy, you aren’t free to have your own legal system. Consult with your attorney before adopting any form of consequentialism as your North Star.)
Now let’s discuss non-consequentialist moral systems, such as those espoused by Locke and Kant—who are, frankly, prestige moral brands for a reason. (You might want to take a quick detour here to The Critique of Pure Reason. It’s a translation I’ve never seen before, but I reckon it’s fine. It’s a quick read, so give it a skim and come back in five minutes.)
Then let’s consider the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. For all the obvious reasons, Kant finds utilitarianism intellectually vacuous and morally repugnant and he rejects it as reiner Dreck.
Is there such a thing as a moral law, Kant asks? Yes. There are categorical imperatives: moral dicta that must be followed, no matter the circumstances, because to follow them is good, in and of itself, and that is an end, in and of itself. Whereas a consequentialist would say, “Murder is wrong because it makes people unhappy,” Kant would reply, “No. It is just categorically wrong.”
If this is a moral law, though, why would rational people choose evil? Why is it so hard to distinguish good from evil? The problem is perplexing. He suspects that people must be using flawed reasoning. They’re just not thinking it through clearly enough.
If we use the correct moral law, he suggests, we can avoid making moral mistakes and then rationalizing them—a flaw, he noticed, to which people are awfully prone.
If you’re inspired by this system of thought, you might want to ask questions like these:
On what maxim am I acting?
Does it involve a lie?
Is that categorically wrong?
Does defending Trump’s latest outrage make you want to vomit? Are you stricken with guilt because you just don’t want to do it anymore, but you feel you must, because otherwise Bernie Sanders will be president, which would mean our country will be reduced to starvation and the Woke Left will fill your kids’ heads with evil moral relativism?
You might want to try the categorical imperative.
Just tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.