Theory
For a happier world, seek the “greatest good for the greatest number.” — Jeremy Bentham
When I first learned of this philosophy, dubbed “utilitarianism” in the West, I was in tenth grade, about fifteen years old. It seemed to me then, as it does now, as self-evident as the “inalienable”
individual rights that Thomas Jefferson enumerated in our Declaration of Independence.
If “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” are vital for some, why not for everyone? Increasing the sum total of happiness in our nation, or in the world, seemed to me a self-evidently worthy objective.
But the “rights” of the “greatest number” to the “greatest good” can conflict with the rights of individuals, especially if the latter are deemed absolute.
This short article in
Scientific American ably outlines the nature of the conflict and gives several simple examples. The matter can be summarized in a simple hypothetical question, “Should we harvest the organs of one healthy individual, causing his/her death, to save the lives of five sick but curable ones?”
The tension between the collective good and individual “rights” is intrinsic to our biology. We live, die, think, speak and act as individuals. But all the accomplishments that have made us by far the dominant species on our planet have been collective. Individually, we are small and weak. Compared to other animals, we are poorly armed with tooth, claw or venom, and poorly protected with size, strength, weight or shell. And although some of us have achieved pinnacles of knowledge and intelligence, as a species we are “bright” only collectively.
It takes thousands of us to build a commercial aircraft, and thousands more to run an airline. Although Albert Einstein alone conceived his
two theories of relativity (special and general) alone, it took hundreds of experimental and observational scientists and engineers most of a century to demonstrate their probable correctness and utility. (One never “proves” a scientific theory; one only fails to
disprove it.) Even today, it has taken thousands more of us to build, launch and run the James Webb Space Telescope that is still testing Einstein’s theories as it explores expanses of our Universe that we will likely never reach.
So the tension between the “greatest good” for individuals and the “greatest good” for human societies and our species as a whole is intrinsic to our nature. We can never resolve that tension; we can only manage it. As is often so in the law, with conflicting
constitutional values such as the freedom of religion and the prohibition on any religion’s “establishment,” that sort of management is best done case by case, with wisdom and humility, and not in general or in the abstract.
The fact that there is no general, abstract “solution” to the conflict does not “disprove” its importance. Nor does it disprove, in our case, the importance of considering the collective, as the
Scientific American article illogically implies. We are discussing fundamental human values, expressed abstractly and imprecisely in words, not simple variables in an arithmetic equation.
It’s no secret that different nations and societies manage the tension between individual rights and collective good in radically different ways. How they do so determines how successful they are and how long they last. There are two distinct aspects to this question: (1) what are the criteria? and (2) who decides?
The first question is abstract and theoretical: what principles should guide our governments and administration, i.e., our collective self-management? The second question is concrete and practical: who decides how to apply those principles, on a day-to-day and epochal basis? It’s no secret that China and the United States answer these questions in fundamentally different ways.
China’s answer to the first question emphasizes the collective, the “masses.” When conflicts arise between the collective good (as China’s leaders see it) and individual rights, the collective prevails. This approach was apparent in such various projects as: (1) the “total lock-down” or “Zero Covid” response to the Covid pandemic, (2) the damming and flooding of the Yangtze River Valley, displacing hundreds of families from their generational homes and flooding their lands, and (3) the use of what we in the West would call “eminent domain” to displace families and businesses—as many as needed—to build the world’s most advanced network of high-speed railroads, including ultra-modern “mag-lev” versions.
In contrast, the US leans hard toward the rights of individuals. This approach appeared in: (1) the ultimate relaxation of virtually every Covid mandate, including vaccines and lockdowns; (2) the NIMBY delays and blockages of virtually every major cleaner-energy project, from commercial-scale solar arrays and wind farms to liquified-natural-gas export terminals; and (3) the accommodation of private land interests and NIMBY concerns that has caused massive budget overruns and decade-long delays in building a proposed high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco, to such an extent that it may never be fully completed.
In addressing the
second question, the approaches of China and the US are reversed, although they may be, in an odd way, converging. China puts all the power to decide in a small seven-member (once, nine-member) committee called the Central Committee of the Politburo. In practice, a single man, Xi Jinping, dominates this committee. He has assumed the power of a virtual emperor.
In contrast, the US approach, in theory, is to “let the people decide,” not as individuals but in the aggregate as “the electorate.” In theory, they “decide” collectively through their votes for chief executives (the president and state governors). They also decide indirectly, through their votes for representatives in states and federal legislatures.
But theory and reality, aka “practice,” are not the same. In practice, US governance is rapidly decaying into an odd combination of authoritarianism and oligarchy, even while we watch.
There are several signs of these trends. First and foremost is the degeneration of our once professional and neutral media. They have morphed into a vast array of tendentious and propagandistic “news” sources, principally but not exclusively on the Internet. An increasing number of people get most or all of their “news” from biased and incomplete sources. So the average American’s exposure to what is actually happening in the nation and the world may be little more accurate and complete than what the average Chinese gleans from Chinese Communist Party propaganda.
The second major cause for and sign of democratic breakdown is corruption and oligarchy. The amount of money spent to influence voters’ and their representatives’ political decisions has risen exponentially since our Supreme Court opened the floodgates to money in politics in its corrosive
Citizens United decision. That was in 2010.
Today, just to give one example, the recent election of a Democrat to the Supreme Court in Wisconsin, in what was supposed to have been a “nonpartisan” election, was the most expensive of its kind in history. I need not even mention the millions donated to the opposing candidate by Oligarch-in-Chief Elon Musk, nor his
contribution of more than a quarter billion dollars to President Trump’s narrow victory.
The third major cause for and sign of democratic breakdown is electoral division and discord. As the nation’s voters’ news sources have sorted them into “silos,” based on their political party and news sources, they have become more divided and rancorous. In consequence, so have their legislatures, both state and federal. “The people” and their representatives are largely unable to act, at least on matters of signal importance like planetary heating. So they leave crucial decisions to the executive branch and/or private actors.
The final major cause for democratic breakdown is explicit and deliberate. A massive phalanx of elite, wealthy and powerful individuals is intent on making the Executive Branch of our government not just the first among equals, but (in Orwell’s words) “more equal than others.” This phalanx includes the aforementioned oligarchs and the following organizations: the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the Koch Network (the Koch Brothers’ creation).
All of these trends weaken and immobilize the primary instruments of democracy, our legislatures. In practice, they transfer power to chief executives, especially presidents. The results of these trends can be found in Congress’ failure formally to “declare” (as the Constitution requires)
any of our last three major wars, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, without a national consensus to endure the cost, hardship and suffering of war, all three ended in abject losses or (in the case of Iraq) a continuing stalemate with Islamic terrorists. Other reflections of legislative paralysis can be found in Congress’ inability to pass simple budgets, leading to repetitive government shutdowns and (in some) nearly to national default.
So it’s fair to say that the US, in practice if still not in theory, is drifting toward a Chinese style of operating, as the chief executive—our president—makes the most important decisions, especially on matters economic, or oligarchs do so on his behalf. (Picture Elon Musk with his chainsaw, or an exasperated Volodymyr Zelensky, as he jousts verbally in the Oval Office and watches American support for the defense of his country collapse.) So much for decision-making “by the people,” a
clear plurality of whom still favor continuing or increasing our support for Ukraine.
But what about the
first question? In our conflict of philosophies,
in whose interests are decisions made, the collective’s or individuals’? Here there remains a notable and perhaps growing gap between the US and China.
In the US, our philosophical emphasis has always been on the rights of individuals, not the collective. Virtually all out explicitly constitutional rights are rights of individuals: rights to free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, execution and deprivation of property (collectively known as “due process”). The collective has no special rights enumerated as such, no matter how badly its interests may be impaired, especially in the long term. There is, for example, no basis in our Constitution, other than an indirect reference to eminent domain, for letting the rights of the collective—the “greatest good for the greatest number”—prevail over the rights of any individual. Unfortunately, Jeremy Bentham first published his now-famous phrase in 1776, the very year of our national independence.
Our general failure to acknowledge and address the needs of the collective is most obvious and harmful in the economic sphere. There, of necessity, all progress is collective, although individuals may make extraordinary contributions. In essence, our current mode of economic governance gives owners and managers of private businesses
carte blanche to determine, in the aggregate, the direction, emphasis and even the vital details of our national economy. The only “masses” that count in our system is the bosses. Isn’t that the definition of an aristocracy?
One abstract expression of this fact is the fundamental tenet of so-called “liberal” economics, namely, that “free trade and free markets make everybody better off.” I’ve debunked this unscientific but durable superstition in several essays (
here,
here and
here). I won’t repeat the logic here, except to make two points. First, no similarly broad hypothesis can
ever have anything to do with science because its breadth (implying, “always and ever”) can never be fully tested by observation and experiment. Second, the transfer of 60,000 American factories to China in search of lower labor costs most definitely
did NOT make American factory workers better off. They lost their jobs, their dignified work and their lives, as many turned to opioids for solace.
A second singularly American canard is our elite’s reflexive antipathy to so-called “industrial policy.
” What falls into this damned category, in America’s “conservative” lexicon, is
any attempt by government, or other collective action, to organize industrial and commercial activity beyond the scale of individual private businesses, even for the betterment of society as a whole.
It goes without saying that this is the precise opposite of China’s approach to industrial development and organization. This week the
New York Times, for example, headlined a story, “
China Has an Army of Robots on Its Side in the Tariff War.” It reveals that China’s
government is investing massive amounts of money in developing industrial robots and means to control and manage them with artificial intelligence. And it’s providing the results of that development, apparently for free, to private and public Chinese firms for use in producing more stuff, at higher quality, with fewer workers and therefore at lower cost.
In other words, the Chinese
government is using public money to figure out how to make private businesses more competitive and effective. And it’s giving them money to adopt and exploit the results of its investment and work. All this is reminiscent of what we
used to do. For example, after WWII we made selected results of the Manhattan Project, the greatest scientific and technological crash project in human history, available to create the nuclear power industry. Yet many of our so-called “conservatives” today would nix this world-changing technology transfer as verboten “industrial policy.”
Robotics and automation are not the only areas of human endeavor ripe for government assistance. Farming may be also. Picking crops may be a bit harder than tilling fields and planting seed, at least without damaging delicate fruits and vegetables. But
all these tasks are susceptible to automation.
Elon Musk seems to think he can program a car to drive itself in snow, rain, mud, sleet, darkness, blinding sun and the unexpected presence of pedestrians, kids on bicycles, inattentive human drivers, and missing, defective, or broken traffic lights, barriers and signs. Isn’t it far easier to program a combine to follow the contours of a hill or plow in a straight line, in good weather? And if China first perfects automated farming, leaving the age-old toil of planting and picking to machines, whose society will be the first to free its citizens from that mindless toil, leaving them well fed and able to spend their days thinking, writing, reading, or enjoying sports, music or the arts? ours or China’s?
Over five years ago, a source as passionately devoted to “free markets” as the English newsmagazine
The Economist speculated on how modern digital computers might make commercial/economic/industrial policy planning possible. [For a quick summary, click
here and search for “central”.] The editors even wondered whether Stalin’s and Mao’s attempts at central control of their nations’ limited markets might have been more successful if the central planning had been done by modern digital computers programmed by experts, rather than political commissars tutored only in abstract ideology.
The situation is similar to the development of modern microbiology after the discovery of DNA. Human DNA has three
billion base pairs. That number is far too large for us human beings even to count, let alone to remember in genetic sequences of four (A, G, C or T) nucleotides. But, with our “mental prostheses” of digital computers, we have been able to decode our own genomes and those of numerous animal and plant species. And we have begun to use that knowledge to tame cancer and to create our own “programmable to order” mRNA vaccines for every new variant of known and unknown plagues.
Isn’t it high time to apply a similar sort of rational, numerical analysis and planning to regional, continental and even global economics? Isn’t that precisely what the Federal Reserve and other nations’ central banks has done for decades, albeit managing only a tiny aspect of a single nation’s complete economy, namely, so-called “monetary policy”? The alternative is the spastic, sporadic and completely disorganized approach that our president in now taking to an artificial (and previously declining) aspect of the global economy: tariffs.
Who’s going to succeed better in the new, computerized, automated world to come? a nation that relies on the aging brain of a visibly declining single narcissist with a Messiah complex? or a nation that arranges its economy, including electric cars and solar and wind energy, with the aid of experts, computers and artificial intelligence—all for the greater good? If you think the latter, then expect China to own the twenty-first century as much or more than the US owned the twentieth.
Practice
So far, what I’ve written is theory. It’s all a bit abstract. But the underlying abstract philosophies of government, deeply held by both rival nations, have immense practical consequences.
Planetary Heating. Whether you call it “planetary heating” (as I do), “global warming” (which I consider a euphemism), or “climate change” (which obscures its anthropogenic origin), what’s happening to our global climate and weather is no accident or unfortunate twist of fate. It’s something we did and are doing to ourselves, as a species. And it’s perceptibly accelerating, in part due to a
little-studied scientific/engineering phenomenon called “positive feedback.”
You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in science to see the acceleration. All you have to do is to have lived at least a couple of decades and have a good memory, unclouded by all the media “noise” and disinformation on the subject. And you must have the common sense, or enough trust in science, to understand that extremes of bizarre
cold weather are
also caused by general (“on the average”) heating and destabilizing of our planet’s climate as a whole. The “
Great Texas Freeze of 2021” and last year’s freak snow in New Orleans are examples.
Not only is planetary heating accelerating. It’s the greatest self-inflicted wound in our species’ recorded history. (The only things that come close are nuclear proliferation, overpopulation/overcrowding, and the pervasive pollution of our planet’s ecosphere and our bodies with plastic micro- and nano-particles.) How and how quickly we manage it seriously will determine our species’ immediate and long-term futures, as well as those of all other species on our small planet.
In the face of this unprecedented and possibly catastrophic self-induced change, what is China doing? It’s become the leading producer of solar panels—the cheapest, most maintenance-free and least intrusive source of renewable energy. It’s going full bore in extracting its unusually high reserves of rare-earth elements for that purpose. And it’s working hard to replace its massive phalanx of coal-fired power plants with solar and natural gas, a less greenhouse-polluting fuel.
In contrast, what is our own nation now doing? Our Maximum Leader
calls planetary heating a “hoax.” He emphasizes
increased production and use of fossil fuels, the primary causes of planetary heating.
His reasons are self-evident. First, he wants to continue to dominate declining fossil-fuel markets globally. In so doing, he seeks to “discipline” and restrain the petro states, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, and (if it ever gets back on its feet) Venezuela. Second, he wants to curry favor with the powerful fossil-fuel industrialists and oligarchs, who see the writing on the wall and want to use politics (and their corrupt influence over it) to maintain their industrial and commercial dominance, and therefore the burning of fossil fuels, as long as possible.
But most nations on Earth have no dog in the fight among the US and other petro states, nor in the last- ditch battle of our own nation’s oil and gas barons to maintain an obsolete and dying technology. As other nations suffer from heat waves, floods, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes and other consequences of planetary heating, they will lose trust in and respect for our nation. Once lost, that trust may be gone forever, and with it our claim to global leadership.
Industrial and Economic Leadership. The simple if sorry fact is that fossil fuels and the machines that burn them for energy—generically called “internal combustion engines” or “ICEs”—are nearly all technologically obsolete. The fuels’ location and extraction are expensive, disruptive and polluting. Their transport over vast intercontinental distances increases the pollution and planetary-heating effect. And the machines (aka “electric motors” or “actuators”) that turn “
green” electricity into mechanical energy
are far simpler, cheaper, less prone to breakdown, more vibration- and trouble-free, and far easier to maintain than ICEs. The only uses for which we do not
now have better alternatives than ICEs are long-haul truck and train transport, air travel, and long-haul big ships. And the need for long-haul big ships would dip considerably if we stopped having to transport oil, gas and coal over intercontinental distances for refining and/or use.
So “green” and even “more green” electricity (for example, from natural gas rather than coal, or safer nuclear-fission and/or brand new nuclear-fusion plants) are the obvious future of our species, should we be lucky enough to survive. Burning fossil fuels is the past.
As so-called “non-aligned” nations, including the “global South,” see the drift of US policy, and as their populations continue to suffer droughts, other weather disasters, crop failures and other discontents of planetary heating, which foreign nation will they see as a leader? the US, with its policies of beating the petro-states at their own air-fouling and planet-heating game, and playing favorites with the oligarchs of obsolete and climate-destroying technologies? Or China, with its policies of using its own vast population, and its unmatched reserves of rare-earth minerals, to help itself and the world enter the age of clean electricity in earnest?
Broken Alliances. Alliances and “friendships” among nations are nearly always products of pragmatism. Hence the old saw, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”
Prime examples include the odd alliance between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II. Both sought to “correct” their inability to enjoy the spoils of Europe’s imperial age, and both claimed, in different ways, to comprise the “master race.” If their “Axis” had won the war, they would inevitably have come to blows themselves.
Another example is the odd alliance between the US and Saudi Arabia. The alliance persists principally because the US and its allies still needs oil, the Saudis have the largest reserves of it, and, if the two nations worked together, they could use their economic leverage to control much of the world’s economy and commerce.
But just as there is more to human friendship among individuals than
quid pro quo and mutual gain, there is a “softer edge”—a philosophical and cultural one—to national alliances. For the last century, the US has exploited and enjoyed its philosophical and cultural affinity with much of Europe, based on Enlightenment values, free markets, and individual human freedom. After helping Europe (and China!) win the most terrible war in human history, the US has sought to spread those values to Asia also, for example, in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.
The extent to which this help and tutelage was and is self-interested can be debated. But there can be little doubt that, where it has taken hold, it has helped foreign societies flourish. Even in Mexico, South and Central America, our nation’s approach has morphed, over decades, from tolerating and even installing despicable
dictaduras, in our own short-term economic interests, to fostering or at least tolerating productive democracies, rights for indigenous peoples and a general sense of equality among people and nations.
But now, with a single presidential election, all that is gone. There is no longer any abstract governing philosophy of our international relations besides our own advantage, if not dominance, and our own short-term economic interests. Transactionalism is all.
If a foreign nation has nothing substantial to give us, it falls off our radar, even off our map. So we have done with Ukraine, Europe more broadly, Japan, South America, and South Korea. If you don’t have something to give us, or sell us at a bargain, you and your nation mean nothing to us. We now openly covet the open space and relative immunity from planetary heating of Canada and Greenland, and we seek to rename the Gulf of Mexico to aggrandize ourselves, without corresponding achievement.
This is not all. These vast changes in philosophy and policy all have occurred in less than six months, since last year’s presidential election. To add to that whiplash effect, there appears to be little or no chance of substantive change in the short or medium term. The bare
possibility of change appears to lie in moldering the whim of a single, solitary narcissist with a Messiah complex and a fragile but all-consuming ego. (The great Ukrainian leader and national hero Volodymyr Zelensky learned that to his horror, while in the Oval Office.)
Trust and respect are like milk. They spoil easily if left unattended. The vast changes in our international outlook as a nation, only briefly summarized above, will cause a global realignment of nations much like that which preceded World War II, perhaps with similar consequences. One thing is certain: the international trust and respect that our nation has lost in mere months will not likely or easily be regained in the years and decades ahead.
China, too, acts in its own self-interest, as do all nations. But China’s relations with foreign nations have, for most of a millennium, centered around commerce and trade, not conquest or military domination. Some of China’s trade terms, especially with developing nations, may be a bit lopsided, or even harsh. But the world would be astonished, and rightly so, to hear Xi or any other Chinese leader threaten to take another nation’s land or resources involuntarily and by force, as our Dear Leader has done with Canada and Denmark (re Greenland) recently.
So whence Global Leadership? What nation will fill the gap? That’s hard to say now. Maybe Europe will step up to the plate. But Europe has its own deep-seated problems, including assimilating near-totalitarian states like Hungary (and maybe soon Turkey) and keeping the Russian Bear at bay, likely without US support.
Meanwhile, China continues plodding on,
in its pragmatic and self-centered but mostly diplomatic and civilized way. For millennia, China has considered itself the center of human civilization. Its very name, in Chinese characters, means “Central Kingdom.” (Some translate them as “Middle Kingdom,” but I think that translation lacks sense and misses the point.)
Most Americans seem to miss two important facts about China. First, since its postwar reformation as “The People’s Republic of China” in 1949, it has not engaged in, let alone started, a single foreign war, except to support its close-by “buffer” states, now North Korea and Vietnam. In contrast, we have fought four major wars, all far from our borders: Vietnam, Gulf I, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Only one of them (Gulf I) was a clear victory, under Colin Powell’s able and restrained leadership.
Second, although right-wing American politicians love to demagogue China as a “Communist” nation, it is “Communist” in name only. As of 2023,
its “Communist Party” comprised nearly 100 million people, a greater “population” than Germany’s and more than 7% of China’s.
The Party operates on principles that, if not precisely like those of China’s ancient Mandarins, are far from the disorder and local subservience of Russia’s Soviet commissars. In fact and in practice, if not in name, modern China’s economic system is our species’ most perfect example of authoritarian state capitalism. It has little to do with Karl Marx, besides lip service in honor of relatively recent history, and nothing whatever to do with mindless and inept Soviet central-command economy under Stalin.
Will China make war to “regain” Taiwan? That’s what everyone fears. But I doubt it. In my view, China’s immense buildup of military forces, including its nuclear arsenal, is simply a deterrent. Chinese leadership is far too smart to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by letting Taiwan’s globe-leading semiconductor factories (and other industries) be damaged or destroyed in military action.
I also think that Xi was smart in setting a deadline of 2027 for bringing Taiwan into the Mainland’s fold. That deadline gives our vain president every incentive to do for Taiwan what he has done for Ukraine, leaving Taiwan to China’s tender mercies, preferably without a massive invasion, blockade, and/or bloodshed.
Conclusion
I write all this without pleasure, but with some pain. I’m a loyal American, with no greater loyalty to any other state or cause, let alone any religion. I love my country, and I would love to see it restore its former pragmatism, respect for expertise, and
peaceful global leadership. And I also hope that Taiwan’s doughty people could remain free.
But that is practically impossible with our current national leadership, even if a few spectacular incompetents like Hegeth, Kennedy and Patel are let go. We are witnessing the Fall of Rome at “Warp Speed,” with the attributes of Rome’s mad Emperors Nero, Caligula and Commodus all rolled into one supreme leader. His worst impulses, at this point, are restrained, only when possible, by the courts and public protest.
At moments like this, what I crave most is the survival of our species with the least horror and suffering from planetary heating, the vast global migrations that it will cause, future pandemics, the pollution of our biosphere and brains with microplastics, and possible wartime use of nuclear weapons. At the moment, those horrors seem to me far more real and likely than any bizarre and ahistorical attempt by China to dominate the world. China has always considered itself the center of civilization, with no need to conquer others. (Its treatment of Tibet, the Uighurs/Xinjiang and Taiwan reflects its historical view that they are all part of China. Compare our treatment of the Apache, Blackfoot, Comanche and Navajo and other indigenous tribes too numerous to mention.)
At the end of the day, we Americans must recognize that our version of the Enlightenment was incomplete. It was too heavy on individual rights, and too light on the “greatest good for the greatest number.” In protecting the interests of individuals and neglecting those of the “masses,” it facilitated the rise of our oligarchs and their monopolies and the poverty and desperation of millions.
We Americans must also recognize historical fact. The population-weighted incidence of democracy in human history
is only 3.2 percent. The only big democratic empires in human history were Rome’s, the Brits’ and ours, which lasted, respectively, a few centuries, 810 years (so far), and (so far) 250 years. And the Brits have achieved their feat of extreme longevity by giving up their empire and lapsing into a placid but relatively impoverished senescence, isolated by Brexit. So the odds of history seem to favor major democratic empires having relatively short life spans, after which they into decay, tyranny, or oligarchy, as clever and wealthy demagogues capture ordinary citizens’ attention with propaganda, misinformation, jobs, and money.
Therefore we have much to learn from China, whose Empire, administered by relatively independent Mandarins, lasted millennia. And China still has some things to learn from us, even in our present state of decline. All our species, worldwide, would do well to regard each other with the humility and caring for everyone’s life and happiness that characterized the late Pope Francis. May his exemplary life and notable death (on the day after Easter!) inspire us to change our ways.
Permalink to this post
