Month: December 2016

KCDR

That stands for “Kick the Can Down the Road,” today’s most popular approach to political problems impossible to solve with measures acceptable to a majority of voters. The origin of the phrase is obscure but it may relate to the game of hide-and-seek, where someone kicking the can freed all prisoners and started the game over. Today’s political meaning is that opposing sides can both take credit for seeming to have settled a dispute, while in reality merely agreeing to nothing more than to resume negotiations later. New game. Back to Step One.

Current examples abound : Israel–Palestine negotiations, China–Hong Kong relations, the status of Taiwan, Obamacare, gun-control, global warming, tax reform, women’s rights, abortion, and evolution versus creationism in our schools, to cite a few. The discussions drag on, all the familiar talking points are dusted off and polished up and aired out, we become red-faced and exasperated, no opinions are changed, and we agree to kick the can down the road.

What seems to be common to all these bitter disputes? They pit supporters of change against defenders of the status quo. Progressives versus Conservatives, if you prefer. Those who fight for change predict eventual success because they are “on the right side of history,” and counsel patience. Those who prefer to leave things they way they are filibuster and drag their feet and cite their obstructionism as victory, believing that in the end the reformers will run out of energy and nothing will change. Stalemate. Meanwhile, the world somehow continues to function. A tough decision has once more been postponed. Progressives tend to see this as impending catastrophe; conservatives see it as catastrophe averted.

Political scientists tend to see it as just the way politics has always worked. Some of them, at least, see stalemate as preferable to open confrontation. Confrontation, in the form of an “up or down” voting decision, produces only gloating winners and sore losers and resentment, they say, while procrastination preserves everyone’s pride, at least a façade of diplomatic or legislative dignity, and the hope of eventually finding a formula for accommodation — sometime in the future — “down the road”.

Let’s take just one really sticky example : the Israeli occupation of Palestine : Would the imposition of a two-state division, under the supervision, say, of the UN and enforced by an international military force really solve the problem or would it merely drive ancient hatreds underground and give rise to insurgencies on both sides? Would Shas give up its interpretation of the Torah because some international diplomat told them to cool it? Would Hamas relinquish its vision of driving all Jews back into the sea because Mahmoud Abbas agreed to recognize Israel as a Jewish state? Both Israelis and Palestinians are dying from bullets and rockets and bombs in a today’s low-level war of attrition, (the Palestinians, to be sure, in far greater numbers.) but wouldn’t those numbers be much higher if a settlement were imposed by outsiders? Isn’t it to everyone’s benefit to keep the loss of life and property as low as possible by kicking the can down the road with every new peace summit? Best Mahmoud Abbas and Bibi Netanyahu play to their constituencies and let thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis get on with their daily lives, as G-d and Allah (were they asked) would surely want them to do. The futures of everyone’s children are worth far more than the drawing of surveyors’ lines in the desert sands.

Similarly, America’s Republicans and Democrats will surely sicken and die as their leaders bicker over who gets what share of the health-care dollar, and liberals and conservatives will blame each other for the impasse, but even in stalemate some minor progress has already been achieved. If Obama had insisted on an all-or-nothing win (as Clinton did) and been convincingly defeated (as Clinton was), or if the Koch Brothers had insisted on no change at all and provoked bloody demonstrations (abortion providers have already been shot, remember), we would be worse off as a nation. We are talking about our children. By taking what was available and giving up what wasn’t Obama and Boehner agreed to kick the can down the road, both earning themselves reputations in their own constituencies as wimps. That’s not a win for either side, but it’s surely a win for millions of newly insured people. The issue will be back. The road is not straight.

Women, in spite of their unfair and possibly unwished-for monopoly on the biology of procreation, will presumably eventually see a decision on whether they are to continue being second-class citizens or will become full partners in helping to solve the world’s problems. What would be accomplished by extermination of the Taliban? Closing girls’ schools and denying women access to courts cannot forever survive in a part of the world where men refuse to face their responsibilities to educate themselves so as to be able to govern effectively. Trying to get it done from outside the Ummah on an accelerated schedule has so far produced only worse misogyny and misery. Kicking the problem down the road has at least the potential for the non-zealot population in Muslim countries to express its own disapproval and initiate its own reforms, without the intervention of Western bombs and drones. Kicking the can down the road would also have the advantage of putting an end to the creation new militant insurgents with every newly destroyed village in Afghanistan.

On the other hand there are controversies that come with deadlines that won’t permit the can to be kicked down the road any further without serious consequences. KCDR is not a panacea.

As an example, take climate change. The concept of a tipping point is in direct contradiction to the premise of KCDR. There comes a time when the can may no longer be kicked without irreversible consequences. If someone doesn’t make a decision and take action by a definable deadline, the results become predictable and frightening. Either the gods must be relied on to come to the planet’s rescue, or the inhabitants of the planet will have to take matters into their own hands. Either way, the decision must be made now, before the tipping point is reached. Procrastination is not an option.

So there are certain cans that cannot safely be kicked. They are booby-trapped. It has been said that a sizeable asteroid headed our way would serve to unite us more effectively than all the speeches of all the great political thinkers who have ever lived. Non-partisan techies would suddenly have to be put in charge, and the crazies could go up on their mountain tops and pray to their hearts’ content. Many members of our Congress and the Duma and the Chinese National Peoples’ Congress could go up there with them. The problem would concern not only our great grandchildren, but it would also inescapably include us as well. Kicking the can down the road would not be a viable option.

If that were to happen, and the engineers were to succeed, and the planet were to be saved, would we have learned some kind of lesson? What would the lesson be? What do you think?

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The trolley problem

The Trolley Problem is more than a hundred years old. Some sadistic professor of Ethics dreamed it up for one of his classes : You are standing by a trolley line, next to a large lever that controls a switch toward which a runaway trolley is rolling. The switch controls a spur. On the main track are five people, who will be killed if the switch isn’t thrown. On the spur there is just one person standing on the track. What is the right thing for you to do? If you throw the switch, only the single person dies. If you don’t — if you do nothing — five people will die, but you have had no part in it.

When you first start to think about it, it sounds pretty easy. One dead is better than five dead, no? So pull the lever.

But this ignores the back story, as they say on the TV soaps. How did the situation arise in the first place? Pure accident? Who forgot to set the brake? Is there such a thing as an accident, or is an omnipotent God always in charge, and you would be trying to overrule Him if you interfered? What do you know about the people involved? Are the five people a band of muggers planning to rob the one, or are they on their way to choir practice? Is the single person a living saint, on whose continuing ministrations a hundred unfortunates might be depending for their support? Is he, or she, a genius from whose brain there might some day emerge a solution to some of mankind’s most pressing problems? You obviously have no time to determine any of these things. Then how can you think of playing God? If you elect to just walk away no one can fault you, because you didn’t do anything and no one was watching. You can’t even fault yourself, because you have no idea how the event when it finally happens would have played out if you had interfered. Do you have any “right” to interfere? Do you have a “duty” to interfere? Can a simple refusal to act be called interferance?

Looking at the problem from another viewpoint, ask yourself how much the mere numbers count? How many strangers’ lives would be willing to sacrifice if the one were a member of your own family? One or two? Five? A thousand?

Whatever solution the ethics class finally arrived at, it is doubtful that there was consensus. The teacher’s point was exactly that. There isn’t necessarily a right answer or a wrong answer. Life is complicated.

So now here we are, in the middle of one of the complications. As if there weren’t sufficiently many interlocking considerations in the original trolley problem, it has now become — for those of us who rely on our cars to get through life — the self-driving car problem.

Let us say that I am a programmer and I have been hired by a software start-up to help write the programs that will control the behavior of the self-driving cars we all say we would welcome and the automobile manufacturers say they will be producing in the millions in just a few years. These cars will be guardians of our safety as well as our chauffeurs. They will observe all the traffic laws, never miss a sign, know all the rules, watch the yellow lines and the white lines and the speedometer and be our nannies as well as our chauffeurs. They will be controlled by software (always characterized as “sophisticated” although in reality it is just a chain of determinedly simple yes-or-no gates) that will allow us, as riders, to sit back with our café lattes and our cell-phones and glance occasionally at the scenery before we arrive safely at Aunt Mabels’ house.

Until we come to the trolley problem.

It’s an intersection. The light is green. Traffic is moving briskly. Suddenly there appears directly ahead a mother with a baby carriage, crossing against the light. We, coffee cup in one hand, cell phone in the other, eyes on a storefront with an interesting window display, have no time to take over and act, or not.

Now to a computer programmer a second or two is an enormous succession of if-then decision opportunities — enough nanoseconds to go through the entire State Motor Vehicle Statutes backwards and forwards. In the real world there is room for only two or maybe three choices, and there is little in the statutes that would be of help.

To our left, on the other side of the yellow line, is oncoming traffic, in particular one large truck which our program has been watching as it swung a bit over the yellow line to get around a halted bus. On the right is an SUV that has overshot the stay-behind white line on the cross street and intrudes far enough into the intersection that we cannot possibly avoid hitting it if we swerve to miss the mother and child. Either of those options, according to the readings of speed, direction, and inertia instantly available to our decision-making CPU will almost surely result in severe injuries, or even fatalities, either to the mother and her baby or the occupants of the truck and the bus or the SUV, as well as to the driver and passengers in the car our program is driving.

The mother and baby should have obeyed the light. The truck should have stayed inside the yellow line. The bus should have stopped closer to the curb. The SUV should have stopped short of the white line. Too late for any of that. Spin the arrow to your choice. Where does it land?

How much extra did we pay the dealer for our car’s computer safety system, which the salesman assured us would protect us and our loved ones from our own inattention or that of other drivers? To whom therefore is owed our system’s primary allegiance? To our own protection? To the numbers? To the truck driver (who has a family)? To the SUV driver (ditto)? To the mother? To the baby? Throw the switch — or do nothing?

Think of the rejoicing in the offices of AmbulanceChasers LLP when the gory photographs surface. The maker of the automobile probably has the deepest pockets and can therefore expect to find the most hands clutching at them. “Safety? Was my client’s safety assured as the salesman asserted?” But the software start-up, my employer, probably has a at least one billionaire venture capitalist on the board who would be rendered deeply embarrassed by the idea of a mother and baby carriage sacrificed to his search for profit. Whichever victim my software chooses has, of course, only himself to blame, but that will not deter the lawyers — nor should it. The legal profession decrees that someone has to be blamed. Contingency fees beckon. How high up the ladder can the claims go? Even perhaps as far up as the legislators who allowed the lobbyists for the car companies to write the rules allowing them to escape responsibility? Maybe even up as far as to the techie cheerleaders for Artificial Intelligence who have encouraged the public to believe that moral decisions can ever be made by machines?

I wonder how long it would take me to ditch my computer science degree and try for one in law instead?

 

 

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The resistance

“We Are Now The Resistance”

That’s what my friend wrote after the Trump Triumph (or the Donald Debacle, in her view).

The reference was obvious. The Resistance in Europe during WWII was a loosely organized, fervently supported, ferociously suppressed opposition to Hitler’s invasion. Especially strong in France, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, it flourished underground in a population being occupied and oppressed by a foreign power. (How much it may or may not have actually accomplished in the fight for liberation is a matter to be debated by historians, but that’s another story.) Many of its members died, caught and executed by the Nazis. Many of their family members also died, also executed by the Nazis in retribution and as a way to inspire fear among the survivors who might be contemplating joining up. Whole villages sometimes paid with their lives for the deed of a single captured suspect —guilty or not. Houses were burned, razed, vengefully obliterated by the storm troopers (SS), and, sad to say, even sometimes by regular army soldiers acting under orders and under threat of being shot for “insubordination”.

My wife was born in Belgium. Her father had been granted American citizenship because of service to the AEF in WWI. She was ten years old when the Germans came. Her family included seven brothers and sisters. They fled Antwerp for the Ardennes countryside where they hoped to find a food supply for such a large family. As an American their father was denied the right to work. The family joined the Resistance. As a child on a bicycle, my wife-to-be put her little dog (and a few eggs or potatoes begged from sympathetic farmers) in its basket, and she could travel unmolested from town to town — Han-sur-Lesse, Rochefort, Dinant — with a memorized phrase in her mind (“Do you have any large potatoes? Ours are almost used up.”), providing a communication link to the guerillas plotting to blow up a bridge or a stretch of railroad tracks. Did she truly understand the risks? Was it right of the family to put her at risk? Hard to say.

When the B-17 crashed on a nearby hillside and ten dazed flyers emerged, there was no question among the villagers in Éprave what to do. The Americans were hidden in the deep woods (that also concealed the wreckage, and kept the Germans from finding about them), fed from already scant food supplies, and eventually passed along to other underground rescue groups and returned to England. All ten, plus all nine family members, plus who knows how many other villagers, could have been shot if one single member of the chain had been a weak link. Inspiring story. Frightening.

To compare that story to the prospect that Americans who didn’t want Trump will now call themselves “The Resistance” is to compare small acts of petty non-cooperation to the heroism we can now look (safely) back on with pride. Is that presumptuous? Of course, but at the same time there are parallels : lessons to be learned.

First, each member of the Belgian underground was an army of one, making a personal decision. Few farmers in the Ardennes were tempted to favor German rule over joining the Resistance (although there were some). Placard-carrying rallies in the streets were out of the question, for obvious reasons. You did your thing, as unobtrusively as possible, hoping that all the small things would add up. Going public about what you were doing was not an option.

Second, you tried hard not to know too much. Fear of torture — not for yourself perhaps, but that you might not prove strong enough to protect your friends. You kept a low profile and did as much good as you could within the boundaries of the rules imposed by the occupiers. If you compared notes with anyone else, you did it only when you were quite certain of where they stood.

Thirdly, you didn’t expect quick results. A train wreck on a remote stretch of track in the woods was a victory, but it could only be celebrated in a candle-lit root cellar with a few trusted collaborators. The Germans would never acknowledge that it happened. There were no medals. No applause.

Does any of this apply to unorganized resistance to Trump?

If you hope to block him, the most effective tactic is to be a Wallenberg and not an Eichmann. If you are a cop and you are told to stop and frisk middle-eastern-looking men, you can just not bother. If you are a clerk at the immigration service office asked to pry into the family relationships of people applying for asylum, you can “forget” to fill out that part of the questionnaire. If you are an employer requested to prepare a list of employees with “Mexican-sounding” names, you can misplace that request in a pile of other papers. If you are asked by your employer to eavesdrop in the workplace to spot “illegals” you can wear blocking earbuds (or better yet, quit that job and look for another one). If there is a directive instructing all Muslims to register, you can buy yourself a chador and add your name to the list. (Some Germans actually did wear yellow stars.) I t will take officials a long time to do all the resulting research necessary to clear 40 million people. You can wear middle-eastern clothing, and say “Inshallah” whenever you get a chance. If you are drafted to build a wall, you can forget to put the cement in the mix, so that even a child will be able to push it over. At the very least, if everyone around you is extending a stiff-armed salute, you can make sure your middle finger is the stiffest part.

And you can restrain your impatience. Our Constitutionally-protected institutions grind slowly, and they can be made to grind almost unbelievably slowly if the bureaucrats in charge of staffing them choose to deliberately procrastinate (think Mitch McConnell). This is only going to be (if we’re lucky) a four-year aberration, after which we will have a chance to go back to our normal way of governing, with a normal chief executive, and experienced professional politicians in charge. Donald damage cannot be entirely avoided, but it can be considerably ameliorated by thoughtful foot-dragging. The key is not to be impatient and get steamed up. Do your own thing, on your own.

The big thing will be patience. You are not likely to convert any rednecks, or any of the “Put her in Jail” or “Build that wall!” crowd, even after the election emotions calm down. Time and lack of results will have to do that. But you can try to make friends across no-man’s land, against the day when we go back to thoughtful government rather than reality-show excitement. You are not in the Ardennes. Your life is not in danger. The lives of your family and friends are not in danger. Your house will not be razed (although it may be repossessed, which will give you, if you happen to be the repo man, another opportunity to mess up some paperwork and produce unending and life-saving delay). Your village will not be deliberately destroyed. You may lose your job, infuriate a superior, frustrate a wall-builder, but these are not fatal.

So go and do your thing, and keep quiet about it. The Force is with you.

 

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Arnold

Some thirty years ago (31,to be precise) I wrote a story for the Sherman Sentinel called “Double Agent”. I intended it as a spoof. Its hero was someone I named Arnold Zwischen, which in German means “between”. I portrayed him as the smallest boy in his school class, being constantly victimized by two rival separate equal-opportunity gangs of bullies who enjoyed watching their respective leaders give him knuckle rubs, arm twists, and finger bending exercises whenever they could catch him. One day in the bathroom (he had been in a stall with his feet up out of sight, hoping to be overlooked) he happened to overhear the leader of one gang planning to organize an ambush of the other gang. It was to take place that afternoon after school in the playground. After he had stopped shaking and had a chance to digest the information, his first thought was that this would be a win-win. He would have the good fortune to have a ringside seat at the humiliation of one or the other group, both his nemeses. His second thought was that this would be little consolation for the additional torture he would surely be subjected to by the losers, as they attempted to compensate up for their humiliation. His third, and most productive thought was that there might yet be a way to turn this bit of foreknowledge to his personal advantage. So he approached the leader of the gang due to be ambushed and revealed the details of where and when this was scheduled to happen. This was greeted with skepticism, but no immediate knuckle rubbing. He then sought out the leader of the aggressor gang with the news that somehow their proposed victims had managed to become aware of the proposed attack, and planned to be not only on the alert but in possession of an array of defensive weaponry including baseball bats and even (according to rumor) brass knuckles. Again the news he was received skeptically, but again there was no immediate physical mistreatment. And at the appointed hour at the designated place he was pleased to watch from the distant sidelines as the opposing forces strutted about at a respectful distance from each other, without offering to actually engage. The leaders of each gang managed to thank Arnold dismissively afterward, telling him offhandedly to “keep his eyes open” and report any future plans he might become aware of, and there was an unannounced moratorium on arm twistings and finger bending. Arnold decided then and there on his career.

He had also discovered a basic truth about leaders : their power can only be exercised within a framework of generally accepted rules. Those rules must exist by general consent. A smart leader knows that for the balance of power to be maintained there must be an accepted power structure. He must tolerate some form of opposition. Elimination of all opposition would be as fatal as defeat, for it would eliminate a large portion of the audience before which he can strut and therefore the (manageable) tension that permits him to strut as everyone’s protector. Strutting is after all the basic goal of any power struggle, strutting before one’s own troops as well as before the enemy. The old (pre-coup) order must therefore to some extent be preserved, though with roles carefully reversed. And the new leader must be careful not to go too far, into unknown territory where results become unpredictable. Advance knowledge of the other side’s deadlines and redlines is therefore invaluable. The bluff necessary to attract and keep one’s followers must not be allowed to ignore the danger of overreach. If everyone is aware of everyone else’s plans, the situation is at its most stable. Judgments can be made most safely when your opponent’s redlines are clearly known. This lesson has since Los Alamos been reinforced by the existence of Armageddon waiting in the silos, ready to respond to any nervous or itchy or deranged trigger finger.

So Arnold, in my spoof, went on to found a company called AXX (Arnold’s Double Cross) whose services could be engaged by anyone from a neighborhood storekeeper worried about being put out of business by a price war with an incoming chain to a World Power worried about just how far its provocations will be tolerated before escalation took over. An AXX client, in exchange for divulging his own plans would get matching information about his adversary. Both sides — both clients — would be aware that Arnold was playing a double game and as a result the world became a safer place.

Now, thirty years later, I am beginning to wonder whether my “spoof” was such a spoof after all. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and unbelievably powerful computers and cleverer and cleverer hackers and decryptors and more motivated whistle-blowers are beginning to put Arnold’s belief to a real-world test. International aggression requires a lot of planning. Strategies must be coordinated ahead of time and many groups must be clued in so they will be ready to act when the signal is given. Successful action requires reliable communication, and such communication today requires that communication be both secure and quick, and this means one must use electronic signals. These, in their travels, whether through wires or optic cables or free-range in cyberspace, are today increasingly interceptable and decryptable, and the interceptors and the decryptors have so far easily maintained their technological lead over the defenders of privacy. This seems to be irreversible, and, were AXX to have been a real company, it would have been a fatal blow. The service that my fictitious Arnold offered for a fee is now more and more available to anyone with some computer smarts and some relatively cheap equipment. The only difference is that while Arnold guaranteed equal disclosure to both sides, in today’s spy world the extent of the sharing is uncertain. This very uncertainty though, in the light of the finality created at Los Alamos, may simply serve to reinforce the power of the idea.

Arnold is now retired He is living on a piece of land as near as he could find to the exact center of the United States, as far removed from any large city and any missile silos as possible, watching the oceans and the winds rise and tending his garden and hoping for the best. He sends his regards.

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