a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

You probably have a feeling similar to mine as you get the daily news –in a paper, or online, or on the TV, or through your phone, or however  it is that reportage and images flood in upon you. That is, you are overwhelmed,  your head swims at the sheer volume  of stories, the cascade of events, the clamor of opinion, the strange whirrrr of  history going very, very  fast. It’s hard to think in the rush of it.  And in the rush of emotion, from sadness to elation to fear, as the news  from Japan to Libya to our own towns and cities sweeps in.

This morning, Wednesday the 30^th of March,  after I had read through the International,  National,  Metropolitan,  Editorial  and Business Day sections of  the New York Times and then taken a quick sprint through the  San Francisco Chronicle –I am visiting in San Francisco this week—I  was  in a particularly amazed  and incredulous state.  More than I  am on most days –and that is saying something, as most days are pretty amazing.  I was almost relieved not to be at home in Toronto with the Globe & Mail as my second newspaper,  for I would have had to add to my news  overload the awful situation in which the conservative  Harper government,  having gotten a much deserved repudiation of its budget and an unprecedented vote of no confidence in Parliament,  is headed into a national election. But the conservatives  are not down and out; they are still running strongly against center-left and left opposition parties  that lack  compelling leadership, clear positions, and vision to offer the voters.  I was grateful when I opened my email to find that the Green Party of Canada, to which I belong, had sent me an email reporting how they are marshaling Greens for the election, hoping to send a representative  to the Parliament for the first time,  in the person of our very impressive, thoughtful leader, Elizabeth May, who is a first class debater. But, so far, she has been excluded from the party leader’s public, tax-payer-sponsored debates. In Canada! It’s dreadful.

On one level,  it is the news itself that leaves me and, I imagine, you, too,  stunned.  Certainly, in the past the world has had earthquakes and tsunamis and even  –twice–devastating  nuclear reactor failures followed by contaminations,  but not all at once and giving us, all at once,  yet another gigantic signal that our human way of living in our environment  is dangerous, to us and to our environment.  The reportage since March 11th about the response of the Japanese surviving in the earthquake  zone has been stunning, too –such resilience and fortitude and resourcefulness and community-mindedness.  But, then,  there is this morning’s story about Japanese farmers whose livelihoods are going right down the nuclear disaster drain as they cannot sell the food they have grown because it is, or  it might be, contaminated.  Hungry people will not be fed with the milk being poured into ditches, the spinach being buried. A 64-year-old farmer who had lost his home to the earthquake  committed suicide after the government  imposed a ban on the sale of cabbages in the Fukushima area where he lives and tends a field of 7,500 organically grown cabbages that are ready to harvest.  Imagine his despair…

I read about the daunting technical problems involved in preventing meltdowns in the Fukushima reactors. About the workmen wading in radioactive waste water  that, when it slurped over their protective boots, burned through the skin on their legs.  About how water sprayed down from helicopters before electricity was restored to the reactor compound doused equipment which now does not function properly –so controlling one problem made another.  The ‘law of unintended consequences’ is everywhere  operating, the only sure thing in a situation that has unpredictability written  all over it, and that scares people in every corner of the world.

And then the whole catastrophe  is reported and analyzed in another realm of thought in the Business Section. How the Japanese economy is being affected, how much the country’s rate of growth will suffer in the coming year, how the Japanese stock market has tumbled, how Japanese lawmakers  are  debating  whether  to nationalize the  Tokyo Electric Power Company, or whether to bail out the company if it founders.  Who will assume liability for the consequences of the reactor’s failures and the disruption and the contamination?   What will be the future of nuclear power generation in Japan, which  depends upon it so heavily, and which has to import most of  the fossil fuels it consumes?

What will be the future of nuclear power generation in other parts of the world?  Hearings and briefings are going on in the American Senate.  Much attention is being given to whether American plants are prepared for threats that might come from natural disasters or from terrorists.  Do emergency batteries and generators needed to keep American plants going or prevent meltdowns  have long enough lives?  Could back-up systems be knocked out?  Contamination wells crack?  Less attention is being given to the more fundamental questions about whether  nuclear  power  should ever be deemed safe, in the short and uneventful term, in the event of a disaster,  or in the long term, when questions about how to dispose of radioactive waste come into play. The absence of a far-seeing national energy policy is as glaring as the absence of an environmental  policy.  Legislators are trying to make political judgments with filtered information in a policy vacuum.

The paper this morning is also concerned with ‘big picture’ policy in the international affairs arena. Experts weigh in from every conceivable   angle on the question of whether the Obama Administration has a policy –an “Obama Doctrine”–in relation to Libya, or to the Middle East, or toward   democracy movements in all the various contexts where the  “Arab Spring” is unfolding.  Similarly, the whole gamut of opinion is being run about whether  the President should have consulted with Congress before launching a “war, “ with the runners of that gamut passing those debating whether  an intervention is a “war” or not.  The topic of humanitarian intervention   itself is being debated,  with those waving  aloft  the principle of state sovereignty  opposing those who believe that interventions  should trump sovereignty when war crimes or crimes against humanity are in course.  Serbia is evoked,  Rwanda  is evoked.  The whole question is being posed as a “yes or no” when it should first call forth many more questions: why and how and when and by whom and toward what  end should an intervention take place.  Political judgment is usually very bad when it is thought to be a matter of go this way or go that way. Just two diametrically opposed choices, two roads that diverge in a woods. Judging is a process that goes on before you get to chosing; it frames choices,  maps roads, even builds roads where there were none before.

Many of the opinions reported in the Times are obviously driven by the American domestic battle,  which is far, far from Libya and far, far from involving any judgment. Vociferous Republicans are critical of Obama no matter what he does in order to keep hammering home the point that it is crucial to defeat him and his “big government,” “socialist” ideas in 2012. Many Democrats form their opinions on almost any topic on the basis of the idea that all Republicans are extremists, dangerous to the nation’s health, servants of powerful money-wielders.  Right as they may be up to a point, their defensiveness makes it hard for them to go forward, to think what  to do rather than what to protect themselves and Obama from. In these quarters, right and left, there is no political judgment.  Just short-term maneuvering

The quality of the national debates on all these topics is so uneven –sometimes excellent,  sometimes just appallingly stupid and uninformed by either information or good judgment—that  it is hard to appreciate  that the debates  even exist, that there is a vast conversation on important issues going on. Similarly, it is hard to appreciate that we are being shown in our newspaper s and on the news something really remarkable:  public debate  among the leaders of states of the most diverse sorts about what  to do, in concert,  about the situation in Libya. There, on the front page of the Times, is a photo of Hillary Clinton, with David Cameron to her right (certainly not to her left) at a London meeting of the NATO allies now constituting  “the coalition” to enforce a “no-fly” zone over Libya. The allies are debating whether to arm the Libyan rebels, or to put coalition “boots on the ground” (this is the new euphemism  that obscures any line between  intervention,  invasion and occupation).  The debaters are genuinely trying to debate and not just to affirm that  America should lead them and supply the bulk of the forces and money for their military operation.  Obama –to his everlasting credit–has been very clear that America would not and should not act unilaterally; that multilateral  actions are the goal; that the allies have to act as a coalition of equals and draw into the coalition as many states as possible.

The UN resolution giving the coalition a legal basis to act militarily was also a product of public debate,  as was the surprising Arab League statement  that  proved so influential in legitimating the coalition’s military action.  Since the end of the Cold War, I do not think there has been discussion among state leaders on any issue that has been as public, as democratic,  and as self-conscious about the need for multilateralism and continuous discussion and debate  as this one.   It is enough to make one believe that the era of American domination of international  forums is passing, which would be a giant step forward for humankind. The “single superpower” era might even be giving way to a more functional United Nations. One superceding the United Nations created in the two superpowers   Cold War era, where debate was so hobbled, and superceding the United Nations disparaged so strongly since the 1980s by the single superpower  in its commitment to its own sovereignty and supremacy at any cost.

If this is so, it highlights how important it is, in this moment of possibly becoming a nation among equals, of participating in international debates that are framed by aspiration to be democratic,  forAmerica to become a nation with an impressive level of domestic debate.

In our history, it has always taken an upsurge of citizen participation  to raise the level of national debate, to push leaders to be more  than instruments of interests and to behave like the citizens they are.  Will such an upsurge be union led?  Citizen involvement  summons up the ingredients of good political judgment, the first of which is ability to seek information widely and hear all sides of a question with respect and empathy for points of view not your own. That is, to deliberate,  to assess ideas, possibilities, but also people and their motives and characters.  To deliberate thoroughly and cautiously.

A second ingredient is to search for principles –not to begin with  rules cast in stone or etched in tablets.  To proceed like a judge doing case law –looking at a case and then finding the law that illuminates it or stating that such a law does not exist because the case is a novelty or full of novelties,  so the needed law or guidance  must be formulated. Absolutes and categorical  imperatives don’t really have a place in good political judgment or in the court of public opinion.  But crucial  principles, like good rules of thumb, can be arrived at: for example,  that those who support dictators end up being dictated to by the dictators.

A third ingredient is ability to do two mental operations at once: see a ‘big picture’ (and not one framed with some simple causal explanation of what is in the picture); and not loose sight of the particular event or phenomenon that is before your eyes—or your emotions, which you need to work with,  not suppress as though you could be a judgment machine, or as though judgment were the same thing as calculation.   A fourth would be an ability to be humble about the future, to respect its unpredictability  and to be as cautious about the consequences –foreseeable and unforeseeable—of your judgments as you can without becoming paralyzed.  It was a great step forward for democracy when the ancient Greek statesman Solon suggested that any law or resolution should be preceded by a preamble that traced the thinking process that had brought it about and explained what the law was meant  to accomplish. (Would that this step were more celebrated!)  Some modern states require legislators to add to any law an estimation of what its consequences will be and what will be done in the event of unforseen consequences. Like an “environmental impact” statement ; or an “impact upon equality” statement.  That is, they try to build a judgment process into a legislative process, to keep a deliberative process going after it has reached a result. To make sure the thinking and judging do not stop.  The essence of a good political judgment, it seems to me,  is that it is framed to keep the judges revisiting their result, reopening the question as things change and new information becomes available. This is not wimpy or flip-floppy; it is wise.