Moral progress

For the last couple of days I've been thinking a lot about moral progress and what that would mean and implications and so on.

In order to think about this it's necessary to have an idea of morality and because of the inclusion of 'progress' in these questions I think it would make the most sense for it to be a universal idea of morality. Without a universal idea it would be difficult to place entities anywhere on a scale or continuum of morality which would preclude any meaningful discussion of progress. First proving rigorously that a universal morality is truly necessary and second determining the components of that morality is more than I'm ready to tackle today. Let's just assume there is a universal morality and I know what it is so that we can talk about the more trivial things I'm interested in talking about today. There, that was easy enough.

I'll take our country as my subject so that I can avoid using the word 'society.' On the one hand it's clear that moral progress has been made in the US. We no longer allow slavery and all people are allowed to vote are two examples. Measures of such a circumstances and their development could be labeled practical morality because they would be measures of the morality actually practiced. Pure morality, in contrast to practical morality, would be what actually is morally right. Under such a scheme practical morality is nothing more than the extent to which morality is accurately applied. For example, pure morality would say that slavery is wrong and practical morality would say the same thing once it had developed to that point concerning the question of slavery, but not before.

The interesting thing about this is that practical morality is nothing more than common practices which is deadeningly vague but would include such things as laws and public opinion about what is right and wrong. At any point in time there would be people who would be morally less developed or more developed on particular moral questions than these common practices.

Pure morality would be something completely eternal and universal. That sounds nice and simple, but it means there is no such thing as progress in pure morality. We're still turning over the same moral philosophy over centuries because moral enlightenment is inherently limited.

German blog

I alert my German-speaking readers to my new blog about American politics entitled "Die Aufdeckung Amerikas."

For the English speakers who don't know what the title means, I encourage you to learn German; it's a nice language.

Hey, it's better than being a month late

Allegedly Mom's birthday is in July.

Happy Birthday, Mom

Today is my mom's birthday. I wouldn't be here without her. Thanks, Mom and I'm looking forward to seeing you in just over a month now.




Some flowers for the occasion.

Tom's Question 2

After thinking about Nick Berg's execution for almost two months and Paul Johnson's for around two weeks I still don't have anything constructive to add. I can neither more accurately describe the disgust felt at seeing the beheadings nor offer better insights into how to combat such terrorism nor better explain the psychology of the terrorists than has already been done in other media.

European Election Party

Elections were held on Sunday the 13th of June across Europe for the European Parliament. My English student is a lobbyist and had invited me to go to a party thrown by the Heinz Schwarzkopf Foundation which concerns itself with promoting understanding among young adults in the different European countries.

The ambassadors to Germany from Croatia and Ireland were there as well as a handful of German Members of Parliament and European Parliament. The most high-profile guest and nevertheless also the most interesting was Gesine Schwan who was the governing party's candidate for President. She lost the election a few weeks ago to Horst Koehler, the former head of the IMF. She had some interesting things to say about Turkey's bid to join the EU, but unfortunately I can't remember the chain of argument. It was difficult for me to understand because everyone around was loudly carrying on conversations amongst themselves and not paying much attention to her speaking.

This inattention is ironic becuase the party and its speakers were supposed to be in part addressing the question of why there was so much voter apathy in the European Parliament elections (German participation was about 40%) and all the while the people were just carrying on amongst themselves and waiting for the soccer game to come on the big screen tv's set up for that purpose (the European soccer championship is underway). Doctor, heal thyself.

Spinning addendum

After reading through my entry on the stoic French response to their alleged terror threat (I told you blogging was narcissistic.), I realized I didn't mention one of the most basic possible motivations to downplaying the threat. It's in their interests to downplay the threat for financial reasons. The threat of terrorist attacks can do a great deal of economic damage. Consider why P. Bush so inspiringly urged everyone to go shopping for America after 9-11. What P. Bush did clumsily and directly the French attempted indirectly by just telling people there was no threat, subtext-carry on with your normal lives. For more anecdotal evidence look no further than the present situation in Saudi Arabia following the last weeks and months of brutality there.

This brings up an interesting point relating to the U.S. situation. AG Ashcroft has issued so many warnings that thankfully have not been realized that the financial markets barely blink when he issues one now. It's more difficult in the absence of a measuring mechanism equivalent to the stock market to determine whether these warnings have effected a greater level of fear among the general public depressing consumer spending. The Admin seems to be increasing the frequency and harshening the tone of their warnings for an attack this summer. I would be surprised if this didn't have some kind of negative effect on travel this summer (also depressing travel will be the gas prices). The economy related to summer travel is nothing to sneeze at.

The irony is that if the summer threats are being overstated for political gain, one can't help but wonder and hope at the same time, this could hurt the Bush campaign in the Fall. If consumer fear significantly depresses consumer spending in the summer the Kerry campaign will jump on it saying that the recovery is already over and we're headed back to the poorhouse because of Bush economic policies. The numbers for the summer will probably start to be estimated and compiled around election time. In contrast to AG Ashcroft's warnings, the markets will react to such news.

What's that? It's a nightmare.

Nightmare- A female spirit or monster supposed to settle on and produce a feeling of suffocation in a sleeping person or animal. Oxford English Dictionary

Berlin, O Berlin

This is an article from a weekly newsletter I get which this week happens to be about Berlin. It both has some good description of Berlin including many of the reasons I like it as well as being quite flattering for anyone living here by choice.

The Birds of Berlin

www.economicprincipals.com



BERLIN -- “Berlin, more than almost any other great city, is a city of
birds.” So wrote Otto Friedrich in “Before the Deluge,” the luminous portrait
of Berlin in the 1920s that he published in1972.

“One hears not only sparrows chirping in the midst of traffic on the
Kürfurstendamm but wood thrushes singing in the Glienicker Park. One sees
species one never expects to find in cities – magpies and nightingales and a
black-feathered, yellow-beaked diving grebe known as a ‘water-chicken.’ Even at
the Hilton Hotel, the traveling businessman wakes to the sound of peacocks
screeching in the night.”

To which it only need be added, thirty years later, now that pollution in the
former East Germany has been dramatically reduced, several varieties of herons
are once again abundant around the city’s many lakes as well.

Yet Berlin real estate today is among the greatest bargains in the world. The
city is economically moribund. It lacks a single direct fl;ight to any city in
the United States.

Probably no major city is less dense, at least on an appropriate measure.
Draw a circle around the city twenty five miles in diameter. Something like a
quarter of greater Berlin’s total area is is comprised of great swathes of
forest. Add to that the preservation of the countryside beyond, thanks fifty
years of slow East German growth (West Berlin was an island deep inside the
communist East) and you’ve got a greenbelt a hundred miles wide. Pass through
Potsdam in the south or Gatow in the west (the old British sector) and you are
in the country.

Berlin is “a new city,” said Mark Twain when he moved here with his family in
1891 to write a book, “The newest I have ever seen. Chicago would seem
venerable beside it.” (He moved back to America three years later.) Like the
Windy City, Berlin grew rapidly during the second-half of the 19th century from
a relatively small city to a great metropolis – after its Prussian kings
permitted Otto von Bismarck unify Germany and turn them, however briefly, into
emperors. (Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated in the closing days of World War I and a
republic was proclaimed.)

And like the Chicago, Berlin owes its prominence to water. Located at the
juncture of the Spree and Havel Rivers, far to the east of the industrial
valleys of the Ruhr and the Rhine, and well over a hundred miles from the
nearest Baltic port, it was nevertheless an improbable exporter of heavy
industrial goods to the rest of Germany and the world, for a hundred years.
Virtually all of that business is gone now.

Twain continued, “... The next feature that strikes one is the spaciousness,
the roominess of the city. There is no other city, in any country, whose streets
are so generally wide.... Only parts of Chicago are stately and beautiful,
whereas all of Berlin is stately and substantial, and it is not only in parts
but uniformly beautiful.”

Incredibly, not even the devastation of the Second World War changed that
aspect of the city very much. Berlin is still beautiful, as much as can be any
city that is located on an extensive plain. With its enormous central park,
leafy, sprawling neighborhoods and superb public transportation system, Berlin
is thoroughly liveable, like the New York City of fifty years ago or the Toronto
of today. Much of the Prussian splendor in its center survived or has been
restored.

East Germany was absorbed into West Germany in 1990. The capital was
returned to Berlin from Bonn in 1999. Since then, the Federal government has
poured money into the city. indeed, there is hardly a major architect in the
world who hasn’t built in Berlin. The city has three universities, three opera
companies and dozens of museums – none of them profitable, strictly speaking .
The old Prussian summer capital of Potsdam, another tax sink, is only half an
hour away by train.

Berlin, in short, is a city of vast amenity, on a par with London, Paris,
Rome and New York So far, low rents, high culture and the romance of Wim
Wenders’ 1987 classic Wings of Desire have produced mostly the bright kids the
locals call “rucksackers.” And it is fashionable to despair of the city’s
ability to ever again produce enough revenue to support itself. Comparisons to
Washington D.C. and Brussels abound.

But if Jane Jacobs if right, Berlin possesses exactly those attributes that
eventually will lead to its regeneration. Indeed, it is something of a test of
her conviction that diversity plus history breeds growth. Berlin is a a city
where smart people want to live. They will find ways to live here. And while it
is always dangerous to predict the flow of technology – last week I looked an
extensive 1965 comparison of the space program to the rail system – I have been
struck by the work of one of the laboratories I had come to Berlin to see, the
Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt U.

Berlin, like Boston, is moving into brain science. One of the promising
avenues of approach here turns out to have to do, curiously enough, with
birdsong. Hardly a week passes, therefore, without a talk by one researcher or
another on the “nonlinear dynamics perspective” on birdsong or “Spectra and
Waiting-Time Distributions in Firing Resonant and Non-Resonant Neurons.” Last
month Richard Hanloser of MIT was here to discuss “The generation of neural
sequences in a songbird.”

“Little is known about the biophysical and circuit mechanisms underlying the
generation and learning of complex motor sequences,” Hahnloser noted. But thanks
to recently-developed microscale devices for monitoring the activity of single
neurons in the brains of singing birds, “we are beginning to understand the
circuits that generate complex vocal sequences.” Where does it lead? Who knows?
But at least some part of Berlin once again is at the forefront of a
rapidly-advancing science, as it was in physics and quantum mechanics a hundred
years ago.

True, Berlin has many obstacles to overcome, before the city again begins to
throb with life and real estate values recover. Chief among barriers to these is
what Mark Twain described in 1881 as “The Awful German Language.” But then that
barrier to entry can also turn out to be advantage.

Plenty of smart people may be willing to learn German in order live in a city
with three opera companies where the loudest noise often is the chirping of the
birds. This is the country that invented the research university, industrial
research and development, not to mention the Protestant ethic and much of the
Welfare State. It would be would be foolish to count it out.


David Warsh

Spinning clockwise and rotating counterclockwise

I noticed this article and while the point is just a small one (it won't take me a month to think about it) I want to make it nonetheless.

Here is the article:
France Doesn't Believe Paris Was Militants' Target

Compare this with the warning of Ashcroft a couple weeks ago that terrorists were 90% ready to commit an attack. Here's the point: Ashcroft is pushing the credibility of the threat while the opposite is happening in France.

According to Ashcroft the information prompting the new warning wasn't new which begs a few questions. If it wasn't new information why issue a new warning with such dire statements as terrorists are 90% ready for an attack? How in hell can you say that terrorists are 90% ready for an attack? Do you know this? Is this new information? Why give precise numbers when your information seems to be far from precise? How long does it take to prepare the remaining 10% of the terrorist attack? Most of these questions are just nonsensical prompted by the nonsensical inconsistencies and illogicalities of the warning which in total lead me to think, whether right or wrong, that he is trying to oversell the threat.

Here is an AP article from a couple days after the warning entitled Terrorism warning justified, officials say. It includes the following passage,

Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse reiterated Thursday that his agency has not seen any change in the "steady stream of threat reporting."

"We do not have any new intelligence or specific information about al-Qaida planning an attack," he said.

Sort of makes one wonder.

At the opposite end you have the French Interior Ministry denying that Paris was a terrorist target saying, "One cannot draw from this information any indication about the preparation of a possible attack in Paris." The information in question is that

The warrant, used to detain Ahmed and the other suspect in Milan, quotes members of the group as saying they planned a rehearsal of an attack in Paris using mobile phone technology. The Milan prosecutor's office said the method was similar to that used in the Madrid bombings.

The political motivations for the Bush administration to err on the side of warning and/or to use warnings as political tools have been thoroughly discussed, but why would the French be interested in making their public believe they are not targets? A Frenchman might say that it, like the opposition to the Iraq war because of the lack of sufficient evidence of WMD, shows the French (even European) levelheadedness and reliance on facts before reaching conclusions. These are admirable qualities but I'm too cynical to believe that there aren't political motives behind it. I think it has to do with the French conception of terrorism's motives and goals.

The attacks in Madrid made sense to Europeans in the same way that attacks against the UK, Italy, or Poland would make sense to them. Such attacks are comprehensible in the light of these countries' support for the war in Iraq. If an attack was perpetrated against France I think the French and other Europeans would be confused. They might ask, But what did France do to deserve this? The answer is that terrorism is not a mechanism for awarding desserts. Terrorism is a crime and, like many crimes, does not seek to give people something they deserve, but rather something they don't deserve. It is also a mistake to think that the terrorists behind 9/11 and 3/11 are only interested in destroying the US and its war allies or in removing troops from Iraq per se. I think it's safe to say that their targets are wider and include all of the West with relatively little direct relation to which countries are involved in this latest intervention in the Middle East.

So, now to my cynical interpretation of the French statements. The political reason for denying a threat against Paris is not complicated. Chirac gained from opposing the Iraq war. If Paris, despite that opposition which seemed in part aimed at keeping France off the terrorists' hit list, is in the sights of terrorists then the opposition will have lost some of its raison d'etre and Chirac will lose what he gained from it.

The attitudes of both governments are dishonest. Both could have objectionable impacts in the long term. The French attitude could breed a sense that they truly are not targets (I don't think their government right now honestly believes that Paris is not a target.) which could lead to an otherwise avertable attack not being prevented because of the illusion of security. In the instances where it is using the warnings as political tools (which isn't every time, but neither do I think it's rare) it will succeed eventually in creating enough fear that they (or more likely their successors) will be able to govern without having to field questions, without accountability and without opposition.

Sick

I'm sick. My wastebasket is full of kleenexes which are all full of snot. My sheets are still damp after six hours of drying from my sweaty, fevered sleep. The whites of my eyes look like spiderwebs of bloody veins and I've drank gallons of orange juice, green tea, lemon tea, and tea with honey over the last couple of days.

But I'm going to miss being sick. I only rarely get sick and it's actually nice to have an excuse to lay in bed reading and falling asleep again all day, especially when it's raining outside like it was today. Plus, thinking during the flu with a fever(or a bad cold, I'm not sure what I have) is comletely different than thinking normally. I don't seem to come very far with any one thought, but they seem to race around especially quickly when I have a fever.

School is going pretty well. I gave a presentation in German in one of my classes last Friday and it went fairly well. Between my two political finance-related classes and the one I had last semester I feel like I'm finally getting a handle on the basic ideas of this interesting area.

Christi Himmelfahrt or Why I like the German language

May 20th was the Day of Christ's Ascension and the German translation demonstrates one of the reasons I have come to appreciate German. The translation is "Christi Himmelfahrt." Christi, of course, just means Christ's (following the Latin form of the possessive). But the word Himmelfahrt is more interesting.

It's made up of two words: Himmel, meaning heaven, and Fahrt, meaning trip or journey. Both of these words are used in everyday speech which is in contrast to the English ascension. This everydayness of the words where English words for abstract ideas often seem distanced and academic is in a nutshell what I wanted to say and suffices for now.