AN ELEGY FOR COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

Jerry Harkins

With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.

                                                                                                ––Clarence Darrow

 

 

 

Throughout history, the movers and shakers of this world have fiercely opposed labor unions and everything they have tried to do to make life better for working men and women.  In America, anti-unionism has been a dogma of Republican faith ever since Theodore Roosevelt left office.  Democrats were better but not by much until the administration of Teddy’s fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  FDR came to the presidency thinking that decent regulation would make unions unnecessary but he was quickly disabused of this by Senator Robert F. Wagner.  The Wagner Act of 1935 was regarded as labor’s bill of rights and it remained so until the Republicans gained majorities in Congress and passed the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 over President Truman's veto.  Truman called it the Save Labor Act and it set off a long, slow decline in the influence of unions that has persisted to the present day.  

Admittedly, the Republicans had a lot of help from the unions themselves.  Drunk with their new-found powers, some of them became little more than racketeering organizations in open partnership with organized crime.[1]  A few made the transition from the socialism of the 1930’s to the Communism of the 1950’s and some began to treat their members in the same brutal way as the laissez faire plutocrats of the Gilded Age.  Still others engaged in senseless strikes that threatened economic chaos and seriously disrupted the public.  It was catnip to the politicians.  The young Robert F. Kennedy went on Jack Parr’s Tonight Show in 1957 and let loose on the corrupt Teamsters Union, saying, “Unless something is done, this country is not going to be controlled by the people but is going to be controlled by Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa and Tony ‘Ducks’ Corallo.”  It was far from the mark but true enough to feed the anti-union sentiment building in the country.  The movie On the Waterfront finished the job.  It was very largely a true story.  Political institutions responded ideologically, using the issue of corruption as a cudgel to destroy all unions everywhere instead of focusing on the problem at hand.  They were successful.  Union membership declined steadily from 29.6% of the workforce in 1953 to 10.3% in 2019.  Had it not been for the surprising growth of unions representing public workers and professionals, the decline might have been much worse.

The decline of union power has contributed mightily to the host of the problems confronting America today.  Just to mention a few:  the stagnation of the incomes of the working and middle classes, a massive exodus of good jobs to low wage countries, the instability of the job market, the high cost of medical care, gaping income inequality and the poisonous  political divisions that have resulted from all of these.

 The founding fathers of the United States were brilliant and decent men, almost all members of the gentry.  They were well bred, well educated, well married and propertied products of Enlightenment thinking who created a nation of, by and for people like themselves.  Most were self-sufficient farmers of one sort or another.  Their moral and social sensibilities, advanced as they were for their time, were nevertheless blind to some moral standards we see as obvious.  Many bought and sold human beings as slaves.  The laborers who built the Erie Canal were not slaves but were mostly poor Irish immigrants and were thought of as literally “of no account.”  Anyone who was reduced to selling his labor for wages was thought to be inferior which, in most jurisdictions, excluded one from the right to vote.  Eighty-seven years later, Abraham Lincoln declared the second American Revolution when, at Gettysburg, he proclaimed that the phrase “all men are created equal” was to be taken literally.  His vision is still a work in progress.

 The rise of laborers to middle class respectability is a fascinating story of bloody wars, social adaptation and theological controversy.  It began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and was heralded by two events.  In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published his encyclical Rerum Novarum which is largely a defense of capitalism against the socialistic challenges which had been increasing since 1848.  But it also promoted the dignity of labor and laborers and the right of workers to bargain collectively and to earn wages sufficient to provide a healthy and secure family life.  The year before, the Sherman Antitrust Act had set out to curb the power of the large corporations but, almost always, it was enforced only against the emerging labor unions.  It too endorsed the dignity of labor and the right of workers to organize and campaign for higher wages and better working conditions.  This novel idea was reinforced by the enactment of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 which read in part, “… the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce” and provided that labor organizations were exempt from antitrust laws and had the right to carry out their legitimate objectives.  Finally, the Wagner Act guaranteed the right of workers in the private sector to organize unions, engage in collective bargaining and take collective action, including strikes, to promote their objectives.

 The Republican Party fiercely opposed every provision of the Wagner Act and its subsequent amendments and, when in power, it enacted a wide range of anti-union laws and regulations culminating in the devastating Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.  Among its provisions, Taft-Hartley allows states to pass so-called Right to Work laws.  It gave the government the ability to break strikes by declaring 80-day cooling off periods, outlawed organizational picketing, prohibited secondary boycotts, banned strikes by federal workers, restricted political contributions by unions, outlawed pension and welfare funds not jointly controlled by management, authorized employer interference in organizing, denied "economic" strikers the right to vote in representation elections while allowing replacement workers (“scabs”) to do so, allowed management to fire workers for some types of union activity, opened union treasuries to increased scrutiny, and required union officers to sign affidavits that they were not Communists. Most damaging were the Right to Work Law provisions.  Twenty-eight states have enacted such laws, twenty-six “red” states and two “swing” states. 

A large majority of Americans, currently about 65%, approve of unions but the antipathy of politicians has continued to the present day.  In June of 2020, Eugene Scalia,  Secretary of Labor in the Trump Cabinet of Curiosities, tried to issue a bizarre rule prohibiting private employee pension plans from considering the environmental, social and governance records of companies in making investment decisions.  This in spite of experience showing that such factors are important determinants of corporate performance.

Nor have unions fared much better in the courts.  True, the most threatening challenges of  conservatives have not always prevailed.  The Supreme Court has generally followed the precedent it established in 1958 when it unanimously held, “It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the "liberty" assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech” (NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 499).  Still, it has consistently chipped away at union bargaining power.  In 2018, for example, it issued a 5-4 decision overturning its own precedent by declaring that the agency shop violates the first amendment rights of public employees.  (An agency shop is one in which membership in a duly elected union is not required to get or keep a job but non-members are charged fees for the services they receive. Prohibiting such fees, of course, encourages workers not to join unions.)

 

Republicans and the business community have not been the only forces opposed to unions but the combination of political power and money they represent has proven decisive more often than not.  Moreover, wage stagnation since the early 1970’s has made major strikes unsustainable for many workers

 

Clarence Darrow died in 1938 and so did not live to see the labor scandals of the post-war era.  His view that unions have done more for humanity than any other institution is a romantic exaggeration but not, perhaps, by as wide a margin as people think.  Collective bargaining has benefitted all workers, unionized or not, by establishing standards for wages, benefits and conditions of employment.  When unemployment is low and there are shortages of skilled and semi-skilled workers, non-unionized employees benefit from the floor unions are able to negotiate.  When times are hard, unionized workers have more protections than their non-unionized peers and any protection the latter do enjoy are almost always the result of union competition.

 

As the American economy continues to undergo the vast changes wrought by digitalization and the global economy, it is crucial that the interests of workers are represented at the decision-making tables in a meaningful way.  This means robust collective bargaining.  The alternative is to widen the economic and social disparities currently bedeviling our society.  

 

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Note

 

[1] There is no doubt that corruption was widespread in American unions, especially in the 36 years between the end of World War II and the ill-advised and ill-fated strike by the Air Traffic Controllers in 1981.  Much of it involved collusion between elected union leaders and the Mafia which sought and gained control over the management of a handful of union pension funds.  By far, the most reputational damage came about as the result of Jimmy Hoffa’s reign in the Teamsters’ Union.  But three things should be noted about this.  First, Hoffa did an excellent job for his members both financially and otherwise.  They undoubtedly would have been happy to give him the Presidency of the union for life.  Second, whatever else one thinks of him, he was a dedicated and active Republican and a major contributor to the party.  Sentenced to thirteen years in prison, he served five years until the sentence was commuted by President Nixon in 1971.  Third, there have been many labor leaders who were also civic leaders, among them David Dubinsky of the Ladies’ Garment Workers, Walter Reuther of the Automobile Workers, John Sweeney of the Service Employees and Albert Shanker of the United Federation of Teachers.

Subsequent Events

The day after this essay was posted, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO) to protect and enhance collective bargaining.  Most importantly, it would virtually eliminate the Taft-Hartley provision allowing states to enact Right to Work laws.  PRO would be the first union-friendly legislation since 1947 but it has no chance of passage by the Senate where Republicans are certain to block it by threatening a filibuster.  The Republican position was summarized by Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina who said the bill, "...is a radical, backward-looking legislation which will diminish the rights of workers and employers while harming the economy and providing a political gift to labor unions and their special interests."

Two weeks later, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Mayor Marty Walsh of Boston to be Secretary of Labor in President Biden's cabinet.  The vote was a bipartisan 68-29.  This marks the first time in more than 40 years that a former labor leader will head the Labor Department but it probably does not mean that the Republican crusade is over.

On April 9, 2021, Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama voted overwhelmingly against joining a union.  However this is interpreted, their rejection suggests that unions generally have an uphill battle in front of them,

 

 

 

AMERICA IN INTENSIVE CARE

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

 

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when America started into decline.  It may have been in 1973 when the Arab oil embargo signaled the end of post-war prosperity and ushered in a decade of hyperinflation, skyrocketing interest rates, simultaneous stagflation and a bear market that persisted for nine years.  It may have been in 1981 when IBM introduced its first personal computer igniting both the information revolution and the global economy.  The computer created enormous benefits but also exposed millions of workers, especially office workers, to “redundancy.”  Or maybe it happened in 1994 when Newt Gingrich led chanting white-shirted Republicans marching down Pennsylvania Avenue waving copies of their “Contract with America” and presaging the emergence of the Tea Party and the Trump Party.  But make no mistake about it:  flawed as it has always been, the world’s most important and successful experiment with democracy has been on a downward spiral for more than a generation, maybe for two.

 

There have been moments of hope, notably the end of the cold war in 1989 and the resilience of the economy in the face of the existential threat of the Great Recession of 2008.  We have continued to make incremental progress in civil rights, women’s rights and human rights.  More encouraging than any of these, however, was the rejection of Donald Trump and his replacement by Joe Biden in 2020.  Election Day 2020 may have been a decisive hinge of history.

 

Decisive, of course, represents a hopeful interpretation of what happened.  Biden won by a margin of 7,059,840 votes or a hair more than 4.5% of the votes cast.  Not a landslide but not close either.  Hopeful, but also frightening in the sense that a Biden presidency may be our last best hope to save the American dream and the American experiment from disintegration and disaster.  The damage done by Republican mendacity, hypocrisy, self-dealing, obstructionism and just plain stupidity has been monumental.

 

A large majority of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump were the principal victims of America’s decline and the failures of our civic, religious and corporate institutions.  They had legitimate grievances with the status quo and were willing to risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  They nearly did.  Had the coronavirus not happened or had it been managed with a modicum of intelligence, we would now be confronting four more years of unbearable tragedy.  Still, as Winston Churchill said of the victory at El Alamein, the Biden victory “…is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

 

The agenda facing us is daunting and overcoming the pandemic is the easy part.  In spite of the Republican politicians, scientists have produced promising vaccines and treatments.  We may lose some hundreds of thousands more Americans but the end is on the horizon.  We will be better prepared next time and we can hope that no future President will propose injecting ourselves with Clorox to kill the virus.  The residual challenge is to restore the economy and it too may turn out to be less difficult than experts now worry.  Not easy but manageable.  One of the virtues of American capitalism is its resiliency.  And there is a silver cloud if we can turn the pandemic into an opportunity to address longstanding problems in the economy, some of which have been exacerbated by the lockdowns.  Among these are income inequality, the changing demographics of an aging population, increasing pressures on the vital small business sector and structural changes in the labor market brought about by the continuing march of automation and artificial intelligence.[1]  These and many other issues are complex and controversial.  They interact with and affect each other and, more importantly, challenge the foundations of our entire social order and economic framework.

 

The success of the so-called American Dream is based largely on the commitment of successive waves of immigrants to a better future for their children and grandchildren.  This, however, becomes less tenable when economic pressures constrict the prospects of every age cohort.  At present, the young are burdened with the decline of traditional career-establishing employment opportunities and, for many, crushing debt from college loans.  The middle aged often share the same educational debts while simultaneously having to assist their parents.  The elderly are faced with the high cost of medical care and inadequate retirement savings.[2]  Since 1970, the total U.S. annual expenditures for health care increased from about $70 billion to about $3.6 trillion.  In 2019, only about half of all families had any retirement savings and they had an average of $255,130, mostly in real estate, and a median of only $65,000.

 

Solving these problems will require major social adjustments not the least of which is decreasing the average age of retirement in order to create better employment opportunities for younger generations, especially those in what should be the family-forming years.  At the moment, workers are postponing retirement as long as possible because they rightly fear a reduction in income. Meanwhile, the government is trying to increase the retirement age by manipulating the Social Security eligibility age.  The idea is to “save” Social Security from bankruptcy resulting from the aging population demographics.  This is a real problem but it is subsidiary to the broader economic squeeze affecting every age cohort.  To solve that, the retirement age should be reduced to no more than 55 years and, perhaps, 50.  This would require creating programs to train workers for retirement careers outside the mainstream job market.  It might also necessitate requiring workers to maintain a retirement financial plan similar to the health insurance mandate of Obamacare that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012.[3]  Finally, it might require employers to contribute to such a plan.  As controversial as all this is, the fact remains that the American workforce is going to decline in the coming decades regardless of what policies the government adopts or fails to adopt.  Meanwhile, the population will continue to increase.  The Biden team is correct in projecting a growth in the number of family-friendly[4] jobs if we pursue such things as alternative energy and infrastructure repair but these will be more than offset by overall declines brought about by automation.

 

The important point to deal with is that all these problems are highly complex.  There are no easy solutions that derive from any ideology and no methodology that will not involve trial and error.  In other words, the problems are not amenable to politics as currently practiced and there is no appetite for making significant changes.  For example, one of the first principles of democratic governance is the idea of the equal value of every vote and every voter.  If we truly believe in equality, then our Electoral College is a patently undemocratic institution.  Five times the presidential candidate with the most votes lost the election.[5]  It would take a constitutional amendment to institute majority rule which would require the approval of three-fourths of the states.  But 31 states, more than 60%, benefit from the current system.

 

It is likely that Plato had just such “paradoxes” in mind when he proposed that the ideal state should be governed by a “philosopher-king.”  Plato was writing about a man (women could not vote in Athens) who was literally a “lover of knowledge” who lived simply and promoted justice.[6]  But when you think of great political leaders, there are probably no philosophers on your list.  Rather you think of such as the Roman Emperor Charlemagne, the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the American President Abraham Lincoln and the Lakota Sioux war leader Crazy Horse.[7]  But the challenges such men faced tended to be readily definable and the solutions, while difficult, were also both limited and obvious.  Such is not the case in America today.

 

Before we can successfully address any of the major problems we face today, it will be necessary to effectuate a prodigious shift in in the public attitudes that have given rise to ideological conflict.  We need to restore an American social contract that is shared by a large majority of citizens, including a consensus that extremism must not be allowed to cripple government.  Unlike almost all other nations, America is not united by a common ethnicity or religion or history.  Rather, from the beginning, its people have demonstrated a unique commitment to the future, a belief that life could and would be better for one’s children and grandchildren.  Until recently, this was true enough for enough families to serve as the motive force of the boast engraved on every dollar bill, Novus Ordo Seclorum, the new order of the ages.  America was indeed perceived as the Land of Opportunity by many Americans and others.  Today, that perception is rare and, without it, we are little more than a mob.

 

We cannot rehabilitate a nation in which millions of people are convinced that the recent election was stolen from Donald Trump, millions reject the covid vaccine, millions are certain that people of color are inferior, immigrants are criminals and poor people are welfare cheats.  At their root, these are all symptoms of a loss of faith and empathy which are, in turn, among the least common denominators of civility. If there is a silver lining to the current pandemic, it is the lesson that each of us relies on all of us.  Advancing this idea until it becomes the paramount feature of our social contract is the sine qua non to solving the challenges confronting us and to restoring the promise of America.

 

 

 

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[1] A good example of these pressures is the dilemma brought about by the need of restaurants to offer delivery service during the pandemic.  Restaurants are low margin businesses and most cannot afford to build their own delivery services.  Enter a new, high tech industry that delivers for many such restaurants using gig workers but charges the restaurants up to 30% of each check.  The high end establishments that can afford this cannot risk the deterioration of their meals during transportation through rain, snow, sleet and city traffic.  For others, the promise is a slower death.

 

[2] Since 1970, the total U.S. expenditures for health care have increased from about $70 billion to about $3.6 trillion.  In 2018, they accounted for about 15% of the average household budget.

 

[3] National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519.  This was a 5-4 decision and is currently being reconsidered by the court.  Most observers believe the law will survive although the mandate might not.

 

[4] “Family-friendly jobs” is a term of art encapsulating the belief that workers are entitled to certain rights including safe working conditions, freedom of assembly and compensation sufficient to provide a decent standard of living for themselves and their families.  It was enunciated as a moral right in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1890 and as a legal principle by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.  It is a cornerstone of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

 

[5]  In each case, the loser was the democratic candidate, most recently Al gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

 

[6] In the history of philosophy, there have been many who might meet Plato’s criteria but none that come easily to mind who would also make good rulers.  As Winston Churchill said, “…democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.  Of course, he also said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

 

[7] It may be disconcerting to note that all four of these leaders were skilled military strategists but the truth is that all of them were also profoundly spiritual souls, highly cultured, progressive, innovative and charismatic.

 

 

 

BY THE NUMBERS

 

Jerry Harkins

 

On March 21, 1927, Werner Heisenberg published an early version of a paper with the unpromising title “On the Perceptual Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics.”  Seven months later, the basic idea expressed in that paper was the subject of an intense discussion among 29 of the world’s most brilliant physicists who ultimately agreed that what came to be known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle stood to revolutionize theoretical physics.  It did much more.

The Uncertainty Principle holds that the precise position and momentum of a subatomic particle can never be known simultaneously.  Any attempt to measure them both at a single moment is subject to an error of at least Planck’s Constant, h, divided by 2pi.  This is an infinitesimal number.[1]  But in the world of the subatomic particles of which the universe is made, it is very significant.  Moreover, it became a philosophical issue well beyond the realm of theoretical physics.  Artists and academics in many disciplines came to think that it implied that at the core of reality there is an important, inherent and invincible element of ignorance.[2]  Coupled with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, it profoundly shaped our understanding of reality in a way that was not flattering.

Throughout our history, ignorance and its alter ego, curiosity, have inspired both fear and attraction like the moth and the flame.  But Uncertainty raised the ante.  In essence it claimed that ignorance is, ultimately, at the heart of all knowledge.  It is King Solomon’s vanity of vanities, Plato’s Cave, Sartre’s nothingness, Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and E.E. Cummings’ “no of all nothing” written large.  It seems to alienate us from our history and culture and from every human construct of art, science, philosophy and religion.  If you can never know anything for sure, reality may be only a dream of which we are merely an illusory part.  As King Solomon laments:

 I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind.  I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Uncertainty bothered Einstein[3] who challenged it at the Fifth Solvay Physics Conference with one of his famous “thought experiments.”  At one point he went to the blackboard to correct what he thought was an error in Heisenberg’s equations but he wound up devising a mathematical proof of the theory which carried the day.[4]  Perhaps without realizing it, he also highlighted  the fact that Uncertainty and quantum mechanics itself were not so much laws of physics as they were of mathematics.  Subsequent history has witnessed a similar phenomenon in every branch of physics and in several of the social sciences such as anthropology and psychology.  Economics and finance have been dominated by mathematical modeling for many decades.  Practitioners of both hard and soft sciences have been drawn to mathematical analysis, some for its supposed precision and others for its ability to deal with imprecision.  This represents the flowering of a discussion that goes back to the debates of the ancient Arabic philosophers who invented (or discovered) many of the foundational methods of mathematical analysis.

A good example of these debates was the trial of Galileo Galilei for heresy by the Holy Inquisition in 1633.  Like most stories from history, this one is usually oversimplified as  merely a contest between science and religion.  More importantly, it hinged on what the principals thought about the nature of mathematics.  Galileo believed that mathematics is more than a tool useful for describing nature but is actually the ultimate reality or at least as close as we can come to that.  It can be thought of as the Platonic pure idea behind all other pure ideas.  His chief Inquisitor, Cardinal (later Saint) Robert Bellarmine, took an almost opposite position.  To him, mathematics was a human artifact, a tool useful for measuring certain aspects of things but always with the caveat that the Bible was the repository of all truth as revealed by the creator of all truth.  The Bible, of course, seemed to teach that the sun revolves around the earth.  To the modern reader, this may seem primitive but, in 1633, most people still relied on the common sense observation of the sun “rising” in the east and “setting” in the west.  Bellarmine knew that Galileo might prove to be right and worried about how theology would cope with the consequences. 

The great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss referred to mathematics as "the Queen of the Sciences” by which I think he meant that science could not exist without mathematics.  Gauss was also one of the Enlightenment thinkers who laid the groundwork for modern probability theory and statistical analysis which, of necessity, became the principal mathematical tool for quantum theory.  If the Uncertainty Principle is correct, then the best we can do is describe the probability that that an event is occurring, has occurred or will occur or, in other words, to assert or predict reality.  So, in a sense, probability is reality.  To the poor benighted creatures who are restricted exclusiveley to the world of their senses, this proposition is absurd.  An apple released from its tree will fall down with a probability of +1.  It will not ever fall up.  Moreover, if it is subject only to gravity, its acceleration will accelerate by 32 feet with each succeeding second so that at the end of the second second it will have travelled 96 feet.  In exactly the same way, so will a cannon ball and so will a feather.  Of course, all these objects will be subject to more than gravity, for example, to air resistance which will affect them differently. 

Now you will be forgiven if you think the law of acceleration is every bit as weird as the notion that two particles can communicate with and affect each other instantly (that is, infinitely faster than the speed of light) even if they are at opposite ends of the universe.  But you can verify acceleration while the kinetic behavior of particles cannot be seen or heard but must be inferred from indirect evidence.  You can’t see a Higgs boson.  Sir Peter Higgs couldn’t either but he was able to detect the trail it left.  That trail had been predicted mathematically.  So the boson itself is “real” only at two removes, the trail and, ultimately the mathematics that predicted the trail. 

In the not-too-distant past, physics was a branch of metaphysics but it has now evolved almost entirely into a branch of mathematics which is why the default photograph (or cartoon) of a physicist shows him or her standing by a blackboard filled with abstruse formulas.  It has also extended its compass to include phenomena that lie outside both the sensory universe and realm of traditional logic and even conventional language.  It traffics in theories that are incomprehensible to non-specialists because ordinary language is not suitable for describing them.  Mathematics works because it is the language of abstraction.  Like language, every kind of math is a system for combining symbols.  But while the word “porridge” symbolizes a nutritious dish, you cannot eat the word.  Of course, you can’t eat a scientific theory either but, increasingly, you can’t even conceptualize it unless you understand its language.  Once more, you are left with the brilliant but infuriating insight of Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message.”

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Notes

 

[1] Planck’s Constant is 6.62607015 X 10-34 joule seconds.  A joule second is the energy of one watt over a period of one second.  Pi, of course, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  It is an irrational number commonly given as 3.14 or 22/7.

 

[2] The influence of Uncertainty on a wide range of artists is discussed in two earlier essays.  “The Gentle Joys of Maybe” and “The Gnostic Glow” which can be accessed respectively at my blog, Jerry’s Follies. 

 

[3] Einstein was strongly committed to the idea that all knowledge is knowable.  The quotation attributed to him to the effect that God does not play dice with the universe is probably apocryphal but he did say, “Raffiniert is der Herr Gott, aber Boshaft ist er nicht”  (“God is subtle but not malicious”).  

 

[4] As a statistician, I am hugely attracted to the Uncertainty Principle but, lurking in the back of my mind is the heretical suspicion that it may not be true.  I believe I could devise a thought experiment in which a particle at rest is energized in a collider.  The collision would simultaneously activate a double switch that instantly measures both the mass and the momentum of the target particle at the moment it moves.  Of course, the clinker in this fantasy is hidden in the word “instantly.”  But “almost instantly” would at least reduce the error so that it might ultimately be less than Planck’s Constant.  As the instruments got closer and closer to instant, the error might become negligible.  (Another problem with my fantasy is the notion of a particle at rest which may be a state antithetical to the particle’s nature.  True, Hans Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for their creation of a “magnetic trap” which held an electron still for ten months but there is no evidence the electron enjoyed being held.)

 

PUTIN IN RETIREMENT

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

Praskoveevka, Russia, October 7, 2040.  As the afternoon sun warmed the stunning scenery of this Black Sea town, I sat down for a one-on-one interview with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the recently retired President of the Russian Federation.  My Russian is good as is his English but we agreed to use a translator to help with the idiomatic parts.  After forty-one years at its helm and still vigorous at 84, he has begun work on his memoirs which he plans to publish posthumously.

 

JPH:  Happy Birthday, Mr. President.  I trust you are enjoying retirement in good health.

 

VVP:  Yes, yes.  Of course.  It is naturally an adjustment and there are times when life seems a bit too bland but that is to be expected.

 

JPH:  This is the first interview you have given since your retirement.  Why did you choose to talk to an American reporter?

 

VVP:  My compatriots are not as interested in my reflections at this moment as are the foreign media.  They have other things to worry about.  Also I think it may have something to do with our attitude toward history.

 

JPH:  How do Russians regard history?  And how does that differ from the Americans?

 

VVP:  We understand the importance of history differently.  To us, history is a relatively small collection of mostly unimportant facts and a great deal of mythology.  Perhaps not so much myth as reconsideration.  Not so obsessed with the way things happened as the way they should have happened.  History, then, can serve as the foundation of our communal life, our social contract.  For Americans, I think, law, not history, fills that role.

 

JPH:  It has been said that what people believe happened is of more practical importance than what may have actually happened.

 

VVP:  Which is true.  Americans believe in what they call the rule of law.  But the interpretation of law must change as society changes.  The American Constitution never claimed that separate is not equal.  Some of your judges have admitted as much while at the same time saying that segregation is not unconstitutional.  But most know that segregation has outlived its usefulness and is simply no longer tenable.

 

JPH:  Let me turn to what I hope is an easier question.  Looking back, what do you consider your most important achievements and what are your regrets, if any.

 

VVP:  Two achievements come to mind and they are related.  One, I restored the political and cultural genius of Russia and, two, I brought about an historical improvement in its economic system.  Our country had suffered from generations of leadership that was too weak or too brutal or too ideological, often all three at the same time.  In addition, I achieved a workable balance between traditional Russian culture, especially its religious aspect, and the imperatives of this technological age.  This was not so much my achievement as the outcome of a process initiated by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

and Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.  I only nurtured it and helped realize their vision.  Are there any regrets?  Yes, naturally.  But I do not dwell on them.  I and all Russians know from birth that serenity is to be found in vodka.  But as long as I was part of the government, I felt I must not drink.  A great sacrifice for my country.

 

JPH:  Some people were surprised when you also encouraged the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Have you always been a religious person?

 

VVP:  No, I am not personally very religious.  But I have always known that Orthodoxy is the foundation of Russian culture.  Lenin erred when he set out to destroy it.  Like many others inside and outside Russia, he misinterpreted Marx.  Russians feel their religion as consolation in a harsh climate.

 

JPH:  Lenin erred?  The Father of Communism?  Or have you parted ways with Communism?

 

VVP:  No, not at all.  But even Communists are fallible and Lenin made errors.  With regard to religion, he mis-understood Marx.  Like many others, he remembered only one phrase of his famous statement on religion.  “Religion is the opiate of the people.”  In fact, these words are part of a remarkable and insightful paragraph that ends with the observation, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

 

JPH:  Why did Marxist Communism fail?”

 

VVP:  Communism did not fail.  Communists failed.  Especially Stalin.   As Khrushchev said, the essence of Stalinism was the cult of the personality.  In his Secret Speech he was very clear about it.  “It is impermissible” he said, “ and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god.”  The Russian preference for strong government was carried to a terrible extreme.

 

JPH:  In your farewell address, you said that you had hoped to achieve a more fruitful partnership with the United States.  You also said this was unfinished business.  What stood in the way?

 

VVP:  Several factors.  We and the Americans have much in common but we also differ in ways that make us incomprehensible to each other.  They look at us and see only a dictatorship.  We look at them and see chaos.  To us, they are unpredictable.  We are a moral people.  They are moralistic.  Also hedonistic.  I envy their successes but when I tried to experiment with their so-called free market capitalism, it failed in Russia because our oligarchs became as corrupt as theirs.

JPH:  Yet you were friendly with and supportive of more than a few of those oligarchs.

VVP:  Of course.  To paint every member of a class with the same brush is ideology and foolish.  I am not an ideologue and not a fool no matter what my wife might think on occasion.

 

JPH:  You took significant risks with your interference in American elections.  Why did you prefer Trump even after his disastrous first term?

 

VVP:  To ask that question is to answer it.  What leader in my position would not have preferred a buffoon as the leader of his principal competitor?

 

JPH:  Buffoon?

 

VVP:  Do you doubt it?  Trump was a man of no intelligence, no character, no sense of statecraft.  Given to ruling by childish temper tantrums.  He was easy to intimidate, to dominate in a meeting because he never prepared.  He didn’t read.  I thought maybe he couldn’t.  My life was much easier than it would have been under Mrs. Clinton or it had been under Mr. Obama.

JPH:  What about his successor?

VVP:  Mr. Biden.  Personally, of course, he was a charming man.  Personable, polite, honest.  Politically, he was very smart and very tough.  He inherited a difficult challenge from Trump the buffoon.  Of course, he understood our strengths and weaknesses much better than Trump and was, therefore, harder to deal with.  Harder but always pleasant.

 

JPH:  You have spoken of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev who also played the buffoon, did he not?

 

VVP:  “Played” is exactly the right word.  With him, it was an act.  He was actually a very shrewd leader.  At least when he was sober.  When he got dressed in the morning, he donned that personality.  I was told by those who knew Eisenhower that he also liked to play a role.  In his case, it was of an average or slightly below average peasant.  You have an expression for this, I think.  Joe Sixpack.  Eisenhower was trying to hide the fact that he was a genius.  I myself have been accused of acting the part of a macho hero.  My wife thinks this is very funny.  But Trump, bah!  He really was a fool.  The vaunted American democracy was not immune to making stupid choices.

 

JPH:  Perhaps, but Trump was a serious danger to world peace.

 

VVP:  Yes, certainly.  But he was a bully and ultimately bullies are always cowards.  Trump avoided military service due to the agony of bone spurs.  Poor baby.  I guess his family could not afford to have a doctor remove them.  If he threatened to use his nuclear football, I was reasonably certain that there would have been a putsch in the White House.  Or maybe even in your Congress.  Although I have my doubts about the functionality of all legislative bodies.  Perhaps your military would have stepped in.  Our intelligence services took that possibility seriously.  I less so.  Like journalists, intelligence agencies have a vested interest in seeing the world in vivid colors.  I speak from personal experience.

 

JPH:  What attracted you to a career in the secret police?

 

VVP:  In the police, you mean.  “Secret” should go without saying.  Every police force has many secrets, some more than others.  But I really don’t know why I chose intelligence work.  My father, of course, spent some time in domestic intelligence.  Neither of us had a sterling record.  You know, I was never a committed Communist, any more than Trump seemed to be a committed Republican.

 

JPH:  Was Communism, then, a failure that you recognized early in life?

 

VVP:  Obviously, it was a failure as a practical matter.  Everyone knew that.  Each five year plan yielded worse results than the one before it.  More importantly, it failed as an ideology.  I think all ideologies are doomed to failure because they have an aversion to uncomfortable facts.  Capitalism is a repulsive idea.  Democracy is better as an idea but is vulnerable to human weakness.  I am happy when people call me a technocrat but not if they mean I am soulless.  I think of myself as soulful, what the Germans would call seelenvoll, fully human.  Vladimir Vladimirovich, the soulful technocrat!

JPH:  You say it failed as a practical matter.  Did it succeed in any other way?

VVP:  It would be difficult to succeed in any way if it failed in practical matters like feeding people.  Still, it is an attractive idea.  "To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities."  It is humane whereas capitalism is "red in tooth and claw."  However, humanism should never include show trials, starvation and mass executions.  No ideology is immune from contradictions.  You cannot eat theory.

 

JPH:  Yet there are many who think of you as a leader who was willing to –– ah, I guess the polite word is “sanction” –– his opponents.

 

VVP:  Yes.  In the sense that I was the Russian leader, everything that happened on my watch was my responsibility.  I was reading recently about the English King Henry II who had a similar reputation after several of his men assassinated a troublesome archbishop.  It took centuries for him to weather the responsibility for that and to gain recognition as England’s greatest King.  So there is hope for me yet.  We had a similar situation in 1918.  When the Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas and his family, the deed was actually done by a squad under Sverdlov.  Was he responsible?  He had orders from Yurosky who may have had orders from Lenin.  You see, we really don’t know or care about the historical reality.  Our history is better for the myths surrounding the deed as it is also in the almost mythical case of Rasputin.

 

JPH:  So much for history.  You have led an interesting and important life and will be remembered by future historians.  Do you think about how they will treat you?

 

VVP:  I suppose they are why I want to write my memoirs which the historians at least will have to read.  But really it will not mean much.  The era I represent –– say the era that began with the first world war –– has been a punishing one for humans.  Times of great confusion refuting any idea that history has an orderly narrative like a novel.  How will future scholars interpret my role in it?  I certainly do not envy them the task.

 

JPH:  Thank you, Mr. President.

 

 

 

 

 

 

GOD AND THE ATOM REVISITED

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

 

The world recently observed the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first (and so far only) use of the atomic bomb which was dropped by American forces on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki three days later.  Both cities were virtually obliterated and it is estimated that between 129,000 and 226,000 Japanese civilians – men too old to be drafted, women and children – and approximately 20,000 soldiers were killed. The horror and the agony did not come as surprises.  When the bomb had been tested three weeks earlier, the chief scientist on the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, murmured the words of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

 

Almost immediately, the bomb triggered a global debate about the morality of its use.  A year later, John Hersey published “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker.  It is the story of that morning as recorded in the memories of six survivors interviewed less than a year after the event.  It is remarkably free of overt moralizing but it quickly became one of the most influential books of its century, shaping attitudes toward war and peace all over the world.  In a way, this was strange.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not, by any means, the most horrific events of World War II.  They were eclipsed by the Holocaust and roughly equivalent in both casualties and destruction to the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo.  In pure brutality, they ranked with the Japanese “Rape of Nanking” and the German slaughter of the citizens of Lidice.  But in both Japanese cities, the horror was compounded because it was the result of a single bomb that wreaked all the death and destruction.  Some victims disappeared entirely from the face of the earth, literally leaving only their shadows.  For many, there had been no escape, no time even to realize that escape was needed.  For those left behind, whether in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, New York, Paris or Cairo, there was only the certainty that the world had changed in an instant.  It was now a more dangerous, more frightening place in which to live.  The new world was replete with questions including moral ones.

 

A friend of mine built an elaborate bomb shelter for his family on their 13-acre home in rural  Connecticut.  After much thought, he installed a doorbell and a welcome mat concluding that hospitality in a disaster was more important than survival.  Built for seven, he estimated it might accommodate twenty more.  He spent the next ten years worrying about what he would do when the twenty-first neighbor rang his bell.  

 

All of a sudden, everybody was a moral philosopher.  The influential Ban the Bomb movement grew up in the United States and elsewhere.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 as, in the words of its founders, “…an emergency action, created by scientists who saw an immediate need for a public reckoning in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  One mission was to urge fellow scientists to help shape national and international policy. A second mission was to help the public understand what the bombings meant for humanity.”  The debate has continued down to the present day but, from the beginning, it has been bootless and largely irrelevant as far as the use of the bomb in World War II is concerned. 

 

Moral philosophy can be defined as the study of the rationale for societal standards of moral conduct and the definition and application of those standards to contemporary issues.  Its practitioners sometimes make it sound dense, as though most of its conclusions were not obvious.  But it is important because it deals with the mechanisms that make human community possible.  It is difficult because those conclusions are always changing, evolving to accommodate new situations and new understandings.  And it is contentious because it runs counter to the individualistic disposition that has come to characterize modern thinking.

 

The basic question is this:  was President Truman’s decision to employ the two bombs a moral one? Which is to say, did it meet contemporary standards of what is permissible in waging a just war?  The broader question of whether or not there is such a thing as a just war need not be addressed in this context.  It is sufficient to recall the observation attributed to Ernest Hemingway that one should “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”  War may be, as Carl von Clausewitz said,  “…the continuation of politics by other means” and in some cases – the American Civil War and World War II come to mind –  it may be necessary, but it is hard to imagine any war being properly described as just.  At a minimum, every war inevitably does great harm to innocent bystanders and is therefore unjust.  General Sherman had it exactly right on one occasion when he told a class of cadets, “I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes.  I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their faces looking up at the skies.  I tell you, war is Hell!”

 

The rationale for deciding to drop the bomb was based on the belief that the only alternative for ending the war would have been to invade the Japanese home islands at a cost estimated to be between 500,000 and 1,000,000 American lives and many more Japanese lives.  This was a conclusion based on the “fanaticism” of the Japanese.  The allies had had good evidence of this in the fight-to-the-death spirit which they witnessed during the island-hopping campaigns of 1943 and 1944.  They had suffered greatly from the suicidal kamikaze attacks on their warships.  Of the 3,912 young men trained as kamikaze pilots, at least 3,800 died in combat.  Similar suicidal attacks were made by specially designed torpedo boats and by the banzai charges of ground forces.  By western standards, these experiences were conclusive evidence of fanaticism.  So the question becomes whether or not there really was no alternative to the bomb.

 

The most common suggestion, both before and after the bomb had been used, was to have demonstrated its awesome power by exploding one over some unoccupied area on or near the Japanese homeland.  But there was little belief that such a strategy would alter the determination of the Japanese government to prevail or die trying and there was the practical problem that there was enough plutonium to make only one more bomb in the short term and not nearly enough uranium for many months.

 

The only realistic alternative, it seemed, was to “starve out” Japan by interdicting its supply lines.  But, if successful, would starvation have been preferable to fire bombing and atomic bombing of civilians?  In theory, it would have been because it would have been gradual and would have given the enemy an opportunity to stop the suffering at any point.  In practice, however, the American Navy had already done an effective job in cutting Japan’s crucial supply lines and much of its manufacturing capability as well but without diminishing its defensive capability significantly.  This was not surprising.  The history of warfare is replete with various kinds of blockade strategies, most of which had bleak records of success.

 

A variation of the blockade approach was to do nothing new, to continue pretty much  attacking military and industrial targets, “waiting out” the endurance of a suffering enemy.  There was some evidence that some Japanese factions were already exploring ways to end the conflict honorably, that is with as many conditions attached as could be negotiated with an enemy tired of the war.  After the fall of Germany, discrete approaches had been made to the Soviet Union to act as an intermediary in seeking such a settlement with the Allies.  American policy wanted the Russians to open another front against the Japanese in Manchuria but did not want Russia to have any influence in the post-war Japanese government.  Its entry as an intermediary would have been seen as a threat to both these objectives.  Meanwhile, the Americans and British had made it clear, first at Casablanca in 1943, that there would be no settlement without “unconditional surrender” which, in effect ruled out any negotiated settlement such as happened with disastrous results in World War I.  When the Germans had balked at this, Eisenhower gave them a 54-hour ultimatum to which they acceded.  A similar demand was made to Japan at the Potsdam Conference on July 26, 1945, eleven days before Hiroshima.  They, too, balked.  As late as August 10, four days after Nagasaki, the Japanese government said it would accept the Potsdam demands but added, “the understanding that said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.”  The Japanese capitulated after another four days.  In the event, the Emperor was allowed to stay on his throne after renouncing his divinity and accepting a symbolic but face-saving role.

 

It is impossible to say with certainty that the bomb ended the war, that the war could not have been ended by more humane means or even that more humane means were available.  But, on the ground at the time, a decision had to be made.  Foresight was dim at best and the stakes were immense.  The challenge confronting President Truman was stark: to weigh the moral value of the lives of a large number of Japanese civilians against a much larger but still uncertain number of American and Japanese combatants.  He listened carefully to a wide range of opinions and options, made his decision and slept well for the rest of his life.

 

Not so for some others.  Among the disaffected were many of the key members of the scientific group that developed the bomb including Oppenheimer himself.  Prominent among the religious dissenters was the Oxford educated British classicist, translator, satirist and poet Monsignor Ronald Knox, the author of God and the Atom which was published only months after the war came to an end.  I first read the book as a high school sophomore and developed a dislike for the author, his writing and his logic all of which struck me as pretentious.  I pictured him as an English snob, a member of the petit aristocracy.  He had an intimidating arsenal of obscure words and antiquated references which made it difficult to decide exactly where he came down on any part of the subject he was writing about.  Especially annoying to me was his habit of spending a few paragraphs telling the reader he had no qualifications in science, philosophy, psychology, sociology and a host of other things and then pontificating about them at length.  He seemed to think his ignorance gave him special license to sneer at those who had expertise which he regarded as narrow-minded.  

 

Reading the book again many decades later, I realize that my judgment was harsh and perhaps a bit defensive.  I now think Knox realized he was inadequate to the task he had taken on and was writing around the question of morality instead of writing on it.  He felt strongly about it but was reluctant to share his emotions.  So, for example, he devotes considerable attention to drawing a distinction between right and wrong on the one hand and good and bad on the other.  He is right that there are differences.  In fact, they are so obvious that the attentive reader must be wondering if he is going to conclude the bombing was right but evil or wrong but good.  Fortunately, his logic is not quite that warped and his prose is not as clear.  Sixty-two pages into a book of 142 pages, the author makes his case as clearly as he can:

 

Theologically speaking, my thesis is that it would have been a more perfect thing not to bomb Hiroshima.  Or, if I must needs talk the language of common life, let me dig up a phrase from an almost forgotten, but not altogether unregretted past, and say that bombing Hiroshima was not cricket.

 

Now, personally, I am appalled by the description of a city’s ruination as being “not cricket.”  Nor do I sympathize with Knox’s being forced to descend to the language of common life.  But his real problem is his logic.  He offers biblical support for his position that restraint would have been “more perfect” (he meant more nearly perfect) by recalling that King David twice had the life of his predecessor and sworn enemy, King Saul, in his hands but, in spite of his good reason for vengeance, spared him.  Knox says, “But we shall all agree that he did a better thing.”  It seems he thinks vengeance would have been a moral action, good but not better or best.  I think he had forgotten Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:19,  “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.”  Instead Knox says : 

 

And, granted that we had a right to destroy Hiroshima, I say we would have done a better thing if we had emptied that fatal cargo, in the first instance at any rate, by way of demonstration, upon some untenanted mountainside.

 

This is slipshod logic.  To begin with, it is hard to imagine what he meant by a “right” to destroy Hiroshima.  More importantly, his biblical exegesis is pure fiction.  David does not spare Saul on either occasion out of a desire to be better but rather because, unlike Knox, he remembered the same injunction Paul was referring to which appears first in Deuteronomy 32:35.  As he tells his companion, Abishai, (1 Samuel 26:9) “Do no violence to him.  For who can reach out his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?”  

 

Monsignor Knox applies his garbled version of the David story to Hiroshima by way of implying that President Truman might have done better by refraining from the use of the bomb except as a non-lethal demonstration.  The President, however, was aware of the fanatical nature of the Japanese militarists and had reason to believe that a mere demonstration would not impress them.  In fact, he dropped the bomb specifically because he was worried that such a minimalist action would only encourage them to fight on resulting in massive American casualties.  In a sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were demonstrations.  They were meant to persuade the militarists that Japan could and would be annihilated unless they accepted the terms issued at Potsdam.  And they worked, not that the end justified the means.

 

But the real failure of Knox’s analysis is his underlying assumption that every act must be subject to some universal test of morality that America had failed in Japan.  There is a vast literature on this and related questions but, ultimately, it is not so that morality can or must always be served.  For one thing, throughout history, most wars have been fought by nations that believed their cause was just.  Perhaps the case for a necessary war is best buttressed by looking to conflicts that should have been fought but were not. 

 

In his memoirs, President Bill Clinton wrote of his decision not to intervene militarily in the Rwandan genocide of 1994:

 

Within one hundred days, 800,000 people in a country of only 8 million would be murdered…With a few thousand troops and help from our allies, even making allowances for the time it would have taken to deploy them, we could have saved lives.  The failure to try to stop Rwanda’s tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.[1]

 

Addressing Congress, he spoke of the lesson he had taken from that tragedy, saying, “Genocide is no country’s internal affair.”  This is a very different calculus from the more common idea of a universal “natural law” as decreed by most moral philosophers and applied in the case of Hiroshima by Monsignor Knox.  “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” are spoken of in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence but there is no evidence that any such thing exists.  It is true that some activities are widely condemned and others are widely admired but there are no universal absolutes that admit of no exceptions.  The idea of a social contract is a prerequisite to living in community but it is a weak force, a fragile agent of peace and comity.  It requires enforcement by legal process including military or police force.  This, I believe, is exactly what President Clinton meant by his comment about genocide.

 

The atomic bomb was neither moral nor immoral.  It was tragic.  It was horrible.  But it was necessary in the sense that it promised to bring an end to the war more quickly and with less loss of life than any feasible alternative.  It was just in the sense that ending the war also put an end to Japanese colonialism and, indirectly, to the colonialism of the European Allies.  It extended the value of self-determination.  And it was productive in the sense that it brought about the understanding that nations must now seek to eliminate total war.  These ends may not have justified the means but the means enabled the ends which were certainly desirable.

 

---

Note

 

[1] My Life, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, p. 593.