foreign policy magazine

I was still a student at Macalester when I met an economics student from Kenya who made a very compelling case for the US to help Africa by rapidly scaling back the "help" it was offering to Africa. The concept is well explained in the aptly-named "Haiti Doesn't Need Your T-Shirt" article.

It kills me when I hear Americans say that the first US government programs that should be cut are foreign aid (the budget for which they almost over estimate by many orders of magnitude). The reality is that the US foreign assistance budget primarily exists to benefit Americans. American banks, farmers, arms manufacturers, etc. We take stuff we cannot use but still want to produce (often because of the strong lobbying arm of a related interest group) and ship it off to other countries, often at the expense of destroying their economies.

Want to be a farmer in Africa or manufacture clothes? Good luck! You'll be competing against shitty free stuff from the U.S. And it is very hard to compete with free.

You know how to know if energy is priced too cheaply? When we use it just because we can, not for any particular reason. It is why so many don't bother turning off lights when not in a room... is it really worth getting up and walking across the room to save a penny in a month? Probably not. Of course, over time, it adds up to nickels, dimes, and eventually even tens of dollars over the course of the month. But it just isn't much.

I enjoyed this very short article by a great thinker (from Canadia, no less), Vaclav Smil:

Energy use is merely a means to many rewarding ends: economic security, education, health. The United States consumes nearly twice as much energy per capita as the richest countries of the European Union, which raises the question: What has it gotten in return? Are Americans twice as rich as the French? Are they twice as educated as the Germans? Do they live twice as long as the Swedes? Are they twice as happy as the Danes or twice as safe as the Dutch? The obvious answer for all of the above is no; indeed, many of America's quality-of-life indicators -- including infant mortality, longevity, and educational achievement -- do not even rank among the world's top 10!

I've been fascinated by demographic trends for a number of years -- inevitable change that happens sufficiently slowly that most seem not to notice. I'm entertained by the doomsday claims -- the Earth can't possibly support 4 billion people! Errr... 6 billion... errr 7 billion.

Earth can handle more people. Interesting, the ones doing the most damage are the few who put all the carbon in the air over the past 200 years, not those masses just starting to catch up now. At any rate, those concerned about the growing population should be less concerned because growth rates have been dropping for some time.

Such is life in the city... literally. As populations become more urbanized and women are educated, birth rates plummet. This is not a knock on women -- when they have an education, they are better able to make smart choices as opposed to being used as brood mares by dominating men (the ones who wrote most of the religious texts that perpetuate that arrangement).

But what happens when couples start having only one child? It destroys the family, something I never put together until I read The World Will be More Crowded -- With Old People by Phillip Longman in Foreign Policy -- the Sept/Oct 2011 issue.

Another related megatrend is the rapid change in the size, structure, and nature of the family. In many countries, such as Germany, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, the one-child family is now becoming the norm. This trend creates a society in which not only do most people have no siblings, but also no aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, or nephews. Many will lack children of their own as well. Today about one in five people in advanced Western countries, including the United States, remains childless. Huge portions of the world's population will thus have no biological relatives except their parents.

Fantastic article in Foreign Policy - "Why is it so hard to find a Suicide Bomber These Days?"

I have been making this point in arguments for years. To those who argue that all Muslims support terrorists or want to kill us (due to our freedom, no doubt), I have asked why there are so few terrorist attacks then. With over a billion Muslims, one would think we would see more than the occasional attempt (often blundered).

The reality is that just as most Christians really don't want to lift a finger to do anything Jesus actually encouraged them to do, most Muslims don't believe the scary passages in the Qu'ran that give license to kill the infidels. Everyone reads what they want to read and ignores the inconvenient parts (though for many, the inconvenient parts are the ones encouraging peace, love, and hippy stuff).

At any rate, Kurzman's article is first rate and fun to read. A sample where he offers five answers to the question posed by the title:

The first and most obvious answer is that most Muslims oppose terrorist violence. According to surveys by Gallup and the Pew Global Attitudes Project, support for attacks on civilians is a minority position in almost every Muslim community. (By way of comparison, a 2006 survey found that 24 percent of Americans consider attacks on civilians to be justified.) But even if only 10 percent of the world's billion Muslims supported terrorism, we would still expect to see far more terrorist activity than we do.

Foreign Policy magazine has a special end of year issue chronicling the top 2009 global thinkers - someof whom did not necessarily have "good" ideas (says me). Nonetheless, I was intrigued by a short feature on Sayyid Imam al-Sharif:

How the prison writings of Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, one of al Qaeda's founders now labeled a turn coat, are doing more to expose the terrorist group's hypocrisy than anyone else.

This dude is now in prison in Egypt - after first writing books justifying al-Qaeda's butcherous activities, he suddenly decided it might not be in the best interests of God to kill everyone with which they disagree:

He claims he came to realize that the haphazard use of violence by Islamist groups causes more harm than good with respect to Islamic law, an idea he had been pondering since he left terrorism in the early 1990s.

So long as al-Qaeda keeps killing other Muslims, I think we can expect support for them to continue plummeting amongst those who used to support them as a check against the power of the West.

Foreign Policy magazine has a regular feature where an expert on a subject refutes common wisdom on a given subject - it is called "Think Again." In the Nov/Dec 2009 issue, Karen Armstrong discusses religion in "Think Again: God." Well worth reading - I find her to be one of the most insightful people on matters of faith and religion.

Her points really hit home for me in the discussion of whether God breeds violence and intolerance. She writes:

But "religious" wars, no matter how modern the tools, always begin as political ones. This happened in Europe during the 17th century, and it has happened today in the Middle East, where the Palestinian national movement has evolved from a leftist-secular to an increasingly Islamically articulated nationalism.

This is my view as well - religion does not cause people to become intolerant. Rather, when times are tough (when the economy falters or diseases break out), people become intolerant of each other. This happens irregardless of religion but often expresses itself via the religion because it is a convenient dividing line. In the case that religion is not a convenient dividing line, ethnicity, skin color, or cultural differences (damn long haired, hippies, for example) become the dividing line between warring parties.

Belief in God provides a justification for intolerance, but mostly does not cause the intolerance itself. As someone who continues to believe human behavior is more shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary selection than by logic and recent developments in human history (changes to how we organize society since the industrial revolution, for instance), I believe it was an evolutionary advantage for people to become intolerant when resources were scarce.

There are times when all Muslims feel united - as when they watch the a Palestinian home being bulldozed by the Israelis because a member of the family was suspected (or proven) to be a terrorist. Then there are times when the Sunnis and Shia are united amongst themselves in hatred of the other. Then there are times when a city composed of Shia and Sunnis are united in their fear and hatred of the political leader - Saddam Hussein, for instance.

Thinking back over our own history, religion often fails to explain how groups will react to each other. During the Jim Crow era, black Christians were prohibited from worshiping in the same church as the whites. Religious dogma provided justifications for that. Now, religious dogma tends not to be used to justify racial discrimination.

Belief in God and religious teachings are used both to encourage and discourage intolerance and hatred, which is to say that religion is a tool that some use to further their political ends. Humans will continue to search for meaning and some will hijack that search in order to further their own power -- not always cynically, but often. In the absence of religion, people will still war over perceived cultural or ethnic differences.

What I find fascinating is that there seem to be as many religions as their are people. How many Christians are there in the world? Depends on who you count as "Christian." Different people have different criteria for whether one is a true Christian and I suspect that if pressed, most people could find ways of disqualifying everyone outside of their church and 3/4 of those in it as not being true Christians. Everything is a continuum and context defines where we locate ourselves along the continuum and how far we can see in both directions.