Blaming Won’t Resolve Anything

Are we a problem-solving species? Or are we a bunch of blamers and finger-pointers?

The same questions apply to us Americans. If you’d asked it in the postwar era, the answer would have been clear. Then we solved problems.

We proposed and established the UN to help avoid future wars and advance peaceful economic development. We established the Bretton-Woods talks and the postwar economic framework, the GATT, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and (much later) the WTO to smooth international trade and finance and reduce the risk of financial panics and crashes. We created NATO to resist foreign aggression. All these institutions are now under stress, but they kept the peace and encouraged global cooperation for about half a century.

In technology, we invented television, transistors, digital computers, computer chips, lasers, and MRI and CAT-scan machines, to make life easier, bring people closer together, and facilitate communication and dialogue among nations and rival groups. These advances made us look like something resembling a rational species.

But now? Now! When confronted with problems that pale in comparison with World War II or our own Civil War, we degenerate into an orgy of blaming and finger-pointing. Our media—our nation’s eyes and ears—join the orgy of blaming as eagerly as if it were a sex orgy. They report every claim, blame, lie and exaggeration with apparent relish and an eye on ratings.

The worst example is our own national politics. One entire political party—one-half of our traditional political “establishment”— has degenerated into a machine of blame.

The Republican Party blames President Biden for persistent national inflation, which is now easing and anyway was never as bad as it still is abroad. It blames him for crime in our cities, national debt, homelessness, decaying social order, and rampant unlawful immigration—which will get much worse as planetary heating makes parts of the tropics uninhabitable. It even blames him for Russia’s atrocious imperialism in Ukraine, on grounds that: (1) he could have prevented it, (2) he’s not arming Ukraine vigorously enough, or, contradictorily, (3) he’s spending too much money on it that could better be spent at home, or to reduce taxes. (Consistency, apparently, is not the point of blame: the point is on the end of your finger.)

And the GOP is putting much of its visible effort into finding yet more reasons to blame, making investigation after fruitless investigation the primary focus of its work. It obsesses over Hunter Biden’s grifting while the world literally burns.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The entire thrust of the Republicans’ political program is to blame Democrats for all our ills. The only actual programs they espouse are to: (1) cut taxes, mostly on the wealthy, including by emasculating the IRS; (2) lower the national debt by squeezing the IRS, regulators and the poor; and (3) restrict what we teach in our schools and what we read in our libraries (which is itself a form of blame).

In the face of this onslaught of finger-pointing, the Democrats sometimes fall into the same trap. They blame back.

Of course they have more cause to blame, given the spectacularly incompetent approach of our Demagogue President to international order, pandemic preparedness and response, infrastructure, government regulation, our military, and the climate crisis. But that’s not the point. By following the Republicans down into the blaming sewer, the Dems lose perspective, forget their own programs and accomplishments, and abandon the quest for realistic solutions to our many national and global problems.

Our media don’t help. Reporting blame seems to be their conditioned reflex. It’s too hard for modern reporters, apparently, to do the work of analyzing solutions and following up to see whether they work. The best reporters depend on academic researchers to do their jobs; the worst don’t even look for solutions and don’t analyze the ones already in place. Apart from getting George Santos expelled from the House for especially egregious misconduct, they have sparked few actual accomplishments. Mostly, they produce clickbait and obsess about their ratings.

The Greek tragedian Euripedes is suppose to have have said, “Those whom the gods seek to destroy they first make mad. ” But if the USA goes down the sewer of lost democracies next year, which it actually might do, it won’t have been Euripides’ “gods” that will have done the deed. It will have been society’s own eyes and ears. It will have been our Fourth Estate: the one charged with keeping us in touch with reality.

Are there solutions to todays’ intractable problems? Of course there are. The general outlines, albeit maybe not the details, are not hard to see.

Want to stop fossil-fuel vendors from demagoguing and resisting every climate-friendly infrastructure development, from EV charging stations, through new direct-current grids, to wind and solar power? Give them a piece of the action. Give them a way out of their moribund businesses which, except for coal, are going to die out for lack of product in this century. Let them, or require them, to invest in the future of energy, rather than the past, and to reap the financial rewards of doing so. Let their money “talk” truth and reason.

Want to stop the Israelis and Palestinians from committing atrocities on each other, as if they were still biblical tribes “smiting” each other in the Bible? Try something new: let peaceful, secure and powerful neighbors impose order on chaos.

Put international forces into Gaza to clean out weapons, terrorists, explosives and tunnels. Then open the prison doors and let the 2 million go free. Put international observers in the West Bank to stop the nascent trend of mutual pogroms, and to lay down some rational rules for who moves where and how.

Decades ago, the noted Israeli author Amos Oz described how Israelis and Palestinians could come to know peace: “teeth-clenching compromise.” It’s now clear that they need outside help in coming to that compromise; left to their own devices, they will continue the cycle of violence forever.

People from outside can help. I once knew such a man, a Black African from Ghana named Modibo Ocran.

The late Professor Ocran was an illustrious jurist. Eventually he was nominated to the Supreme Court of Ghana in absentia. He commuted to his judging job from his family’s home in Akron, Ohio, where he was my colleague at the University of Akron School of Law.

Before all that, Professor Ocran had done something extraordinary. He had put on a blue UN helmet and spent two years keeping the Bosnians, Croats and Serbs from each others’ throats.

Today the Balkans are still not pretty, but they’re at peace. If an African from Ghana can spend two years and risk his life to bring that peace to the Balkans, perhaps Arab and African neighbors, and maybe even Iran and Syria, can stop the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before it reaches its first century.

Another relevant example is the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, which goes by the name of “The Troubles.” After centuries of enmity and struggle, including many acts of terrorism, our own President Bill Clinton helped the warring parties reach the so-called “Good Friday Agreement,” which has maintained an uneasy peace to this day.

I know these solutions sound glib and general. But the point is you have to start somewhere. Pointing fingers doesn’t move the ball forward. It just makes people angry and obstinate. Anyone who’s lived as a human being, let alone politicians, ought to know this.

Our American political leaders used to know it. At least they once seemed to have an instinct for solutions, not blame. They seemed to have a talent for finding Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.”

We need to get back to those old days of faith in ourselves and “American ingenuity.” We need to involve our brothers and sisters from other lands, other continents, and all ethnic groups. But most of all, we humans need to seek solutions and stop blaming each other, lest our Biblical “smiting” go on forever and drive us to extinction.

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