Is vegetarianism and veganism about animal welfare or moral superiority?

Leslie Cannold for the Ethics Centre in The Guardian

‘There is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.’ Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP




The western obsession with rights makes it difficult to see their limitations. We speak about rights as if they were the only moral value with meaning, ignoring other important moral values like responsibilities or duties. In fact, responsibilities are the counterparts to rights – you can’t have one without the other.

Philosopher Carl Cohen writes that, “If animals have any rights, they must have the right not to be killed to advance the interest of others.” Another way of putting this is that those who assert the rights of animals are in effect asserting – first and foremost – a right to life for all animals.

But for an animal to realise its right to life, farmers, hunters and researchers must collectively accept a duty not to kill them. Similarly, citizens, consumers and patients must refuse to eat, wear or use food, clothes and medicine that require an animal to die.

As I’ll be arguing in the IQ2 debate “Animal rights should trump human interests” in Sydney on Tuesday night, the assertion of an animal right to life is non-sensical. It would require us – just as one example – to stop animals from hunting one another, just like we stop humans from killing one another. But more importantly, it is unnecessary to achieve what is required to improve the lot of animals.

Even Peter Singer, one of the intellectual fathers of the animal rights movement, doesn’t believe animals have a right to life. In his seminal text Animal Liberation he says we must refuse to contribute to – and act to stop – the unnecessary suffering of animals.

But he does not contend that animals have a right to life or that they suffer by having their life taken from them.

Instead, what he claims is that intensively farmed animals suffer because of the cruel and tortuous ways they are made to live and are slaughtered. We have a duty to do what we can to stop this by boycotting businesses that treat animals cruelly.

Having done that, we have a choice. We can go without wearing make-up and without eating or wearing animal flesh that required the torture of animals, or we can source and buy cruelty-free cosmetics and eat and wear ethically-farmed and slaughtered animal products.

In other words, while it might have been true that when Animal Liberation was written in the 1970s, the result of a boycott was a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, this is no longer the case. Today, there is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.

Indeed, given clear, cross-cultural evidence that only around 1.5% of people are willing to try or stick with a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle – figures that have not changed over time – the promotion of an ethically carnivorous life is likely to be a far more effective way to reduce the suffering of animals.

To me, this is so obvious that I have to ask why in 2016 animal rights groups continue to advance vegetarian and veganism as the only legitimate way to end animal suffering. A 2014 study funded by Voiceless, found that 70% of Australians agreed that “human beings have an obligation to avoid harming all animals”. This sort of sentiment had led “substantial proportions” to buy “free range” meat and dairy and cruelty-free products. Despite this, the Humane Research Council – authors of the study – advised animal rights advocates that while they ought capitalise on “widespread support for incremental improvements” they must also continue to press people to “abstain from animal products entirely.”

Why not press people who have chosen to make a difference through buying cruelty-free products to buy more of them more often? Or to buy them exclusively? Is it possible that vegetarianism and veganism continues to be promoted as the sole way of meeting our obligations to animals not because it is, but because it makes the promoters feel morally superior?

If it were, it wouldn’t be the first time the eco-left stymied mass behaviour change with unpalatable prescriptions delivered in self-righteous tones.

Analysis has revealed that mass communications around climate change provoked feelings of powerlessness rather than a desire to act in many people. Often the wrong moral note was struck, too. Environmental activist and philosopher Sarah Bachelard wrote at the time, “There can be a tone of self-righteousness ... a kind of shrill moral indignation ... We know that we are on the side of the angels, and in our own way we can fail to do justice to the complex reality of most human action and motivation. We get something out of ‘being right’ ... (and) satisfaction from making those who do not agree with us wrong.”

The truth is that an ethically carnivorous life is possible so long as we ensure the animals we consume have lived and died without unnecessary suffering.

Do animal rights trump human interests? Not if the animal right we are talking about is a right to life, and the human interest at stake is health. But I join with most people in believing we do have an obligation to stop animal cruelty and to fulfill this duty through the choices we make about what we eat, wear and do every day.

Barack Obama Gives Speech At White House Correspondents' Dinner 2016

Trump says what no other candidate will: the US is no longer exceptional

With his slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, Trump is the first leader of recent times to attack American exceptionalism. In fact, he claims it is the opposite

 

The slogan that changed the trajectory of American political discourse? Only time will tell. Photograph: Matt York/AP


Tom Engelhardt for Tom Dispatch


“Low-energy Jeb”. “Little Marco”. “Lyin’ Ted”. “Crooked Hillary”. Give Donald Trump credit: he has a memorable way with insults. His have a way of etching themselves on the brain. And they’ve garnered media coverage, analysis and commentary almost beyond imagining.

Memorable as they might be however, they won’t be what lasts of Trump’s 2016 election run. That’s surely reserved for a single slogan that will sum up his candidacy when it’s all over (no matter how it ends). He arrived with it on that Trump Tower escalator in the first moments of his campaign, and it now headlines his website, where it’s also emblazoned on an array of products from hats to T-shirts.

President Trump fills world leaders with fear: 'It's gone from funny to really scary'



You already know which line I mean: “Make America Great Again!”

That exclamation point ensures you won’t miss the hyperbolic, Trumpian nature of its promise to return the country to its former glory days. In it lies the essence of his campaign, of what he’s promising his followers and Americans generally – and yet, strangely enough, of all his lines it’s the one most taken for granted, the one that’s been given the least thought and analysis. And that’s a shame, because it represents something new in our American age. The problem, I suspect, is that what first catches the eye is the phrase “make America great” and then, of course, the exclamation point, while the single most important word in the slogan, historically speaking, is barely noted: again.

With that word, Trump crossed a line in American politics that until his escalator moment represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe and of either party, including presidents and potential candidates for that position. He is the first American leader or potential leader of recent times not to feel the need or obligation to insist that the US, the “sole” superpower of Planet Earth, is an “exceptional” nation, an “indispensable” country, or even in an unqualified sense a “great” one. His claim is the opposite: that, at present, America is anything but exceptional, indispensable or great, though he alone could make it “great again”.

In that claim lies a curiosity that, in a court of law, might be considered an admission of guilt. Yes, it says, if one man is allowed to enter the White House in January 2017, this could be a different country, but – and herein lies the originality of the slogan – it is not great now.

Trump, in other words, is the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline. Think about that for a moment. “Make America Great Again!” is indeed an admission, in the form of a boast.

As he tells his audiences repeatedly, America, the formerly great, is today a punching bag for China, Mexico ... well, you know the pitch. You don’t have to agree with him on the specifics. What’s interesting is the overall vision of a country lacking in its former greatness.

Perhaps a little history of American greatness and presidents (as well as presidential candidates) is in order here.

‘City upon a hill’

John F Kennedy simply assumed America was great. Photograph: Paul Schutzer/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Once upon a time, in a distant America, the words “greatest”, “exceptional” and “indispensable” weren’t part of the political vocabulary.

American presidents didn’t bother to claim any of them for this country, largely because American wealth and global preeminence were so indisputable. We’re talking about the 1950s and early 1960s, the post-second world war and pre-Vietnam “golden” years of American power. Despite a certain hysteria about the supposed dangers of domestic communists, few Americans then doubted the singularly unchallengeable power and greatness of the country. It was such a given, in fact, that it was simply too self-evident for presidents to cite, hail or praise.

So if you look, for instance, at the speeches of John F Kennedy, you won’t find them littered with exceptionals, indispensables or their equivalents.

In a pre-inaugural speech he gave in January 1961 on the kind of government he planned to bring to Washington, for instance, he did cite the birth of a “great republic” and quoted Puritan John Winthrop on the desirability of creating a country that would be “a city upon a hill” to the rest of the world, with all of humanity’s eyes upon us.

In his inaugural address (“Ask not what your country can do for you”) he invoked a kind of unspoken greatness, saying: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

It was then common to speak of the US with pride as a “free nation” (as opposed to the “enslaved” ones of the communist bloc) rather than an exceptional one. His only use of “great” was to invoke the US-led and Soviet Union-led blocs as “two great and powerful groups of nations”.

Kennedy could even fall back on a certain modesty in describing the US role in the world (which in those years, from Guatemala to Iran to Cuba, all too often did not carry over into actual policy), saying in one speech: “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient – that we are only 6% of the world’s population – that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind – that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity – and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.” In that same speech, he typically spoke of America as “a great power” – but not “the greatest power”.

If you didn’t grow up in that era, you may not grasp that none of this in any way implied a lack of national self-esteem. Quite the opposite: it implied a deep and abiding confidence in the overwhelming power and presence of this country, a confidence so unshakeable that there was no need to speak of it.

If you want a pop cultural equivalent for this, consider America’s movie heroes of that time, actors such as John Wayne and Gary Cooper, whose westerns and, in the case of Wayne, war movies were iconic. What’s striking when you look back at them from the present moment is this: while neither of those actors was anything but an imposing figure, they were also remarkably ordinary looking. They were in no way over-muscled, nor were they over-armed in the modern fashion. It was only in the years after the Vietnam war, when the country had absorbed what felt like a grim defeat, been wracked by oppositional movements, riots and assassinations, when a general sense of loss had swept over the polity, that the over-muscled hero, the exceptional killing machine, made the scene. (Think:Rambo.)

Consider this then if you want a definition of decline: when you have to state openly (and repeatedly) what previously had been too obvious to say, you’re heading, as the opinion polls always like to phrase it, in the wrong direction; in other words, once you have to say it, especially in an overemphatic way, you no longer have it.

The Reagan reboot

What better way to attest to America’s greatness than its military might? Photograph: Scott Stewart/AP

That note of defensiveness first crept into the American political lexicon with the unlikeliest of politicians: Ronald Reagan, the man who seemed like the least defensive, most genial guy on the planet. On this subject at least, think of him as Trumpian before the advent of the Donald, or at least as the man who (thanks to his ad writers) invented the political use of the word “again”. It was, after all, employed in 1984 in the seminal ad of his political run for a second term in office. While that bucolic-looking TV commercial was titled “Prouder, Stronger, Better”, its first line ever so memorably went: “It’s morning again in America.” (“Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”)

Think of this as part of a post-Vietnam Reagan reboot, a time when the US in Rambo-esque fashion was quite literally muscling up and over-arming in a major way. Reagan presided over “the biggest peacetime defense build-up in history” against what, referencing Star Wars, he called an “evil empire” – the Soviet Union. In those years he also worked to rid the country of what was then termed “the Vietnam syndrome” in part by rebranding that war a “noble cause”.

In a time when loss and decline were much on American minds, he dismissed them both, even as he set the country on a path toward the present moment of 1% dysfunction in a country that no longer invests fully in its own infrastructure, whose wages are stagnant, whose poor are a growth industry, whose wealth now flows eternally upward in a political environment awash in the money of the ultra-wealthy, and whose over-armed military continues to pursue a path of endless failure in the greater Middle East.

Reagan, who spoke directly about American declinist thinking in his time – “Let’s reject the nonsense that America is doomed to decline” – was hardly shy about his superlatives when it came to this country. He didn’t hesitate to re-channel classic American rhetoric, ranging from Winthop’s “shining city upon a hill” (perhaps cribbed from Kennedy) in his farewell address to Lincoln-esque (“the last best hope of man on Earth”) invocations such as “here in the heartland of America lives the hope of the world” or “in a world wracked by hatred, economic crisis and political tension, America remains mankind’s best hope”.

And yet in the 1980s there were still limits to what needed to be said about America. Surveying the planet, you didn’t yet have to refer to us as the “greatest” country of all or as the planet’s sole truly “exceptional” country. Think of such repeated superlatives of our own moment as defensive markers on the declinist slope. The now commonplace adjective “indispensable” as a stand-in for American greatness globally, for instance, didn’t even arrive until Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, began using it in 1996.

It only became an indispensable part of the rhetorical arsenal of American politicians, from Barack Obama on down, a decade into the 21st century, when the country’s eerie dispensability (unless you were a junkie for failed states and regional chaos) became ever more apparent.

As for the US being the planet’s “exceptional” nation, a phrase that now seems indelibly part of the American grain and that no president or presidential candidate avoids, it’s surprising how late it entered the lexicon.

As John Gans Jr wrote in the Atlantic in 2011: “Obama has talked more about American exceptionalism than Presidents Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W Bush combined: a search on UC Santa Barbara’s exhaustive presidential records library finds that no president from 1981 to today uttered the phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ except Obama.”

Barack Obama: the only president to use the term ‘American exceptionalism’, according to research. Photograph: Rex Features

As US News’s Robert Schlesinger has also noted, “American exceptionalism” is not a traditional part of the presidential vocabulary. According to his search of public records, Obama is the only president in 82 years to use the term.

And yet in recent years it has become a commonplace of Republicans and Democrats alike. As the country has become politically shakier, the rhetoric about its greatness has only escalated in an American version of “the lady doth protest too much”. Such descriptors have become the political equivalent of litmus tests: you couldn’t be president or much of anything else without eternally testifying to your unwavering belief in American greatness.

This, of course, is the line that Trump crossed in a curiously unnoticed fashion in this election campaign. He did so by initially upping the rhetorical ante, adding that exclamation point (which even Reagan avoided). Yet in the process of being more patriotically correct than thou, he somehow also waded straight into American decline so bluntly that his own audience could hardly miss it – even if his critics did.

Think of it as an irony, if you wish, but in promoting his own rise the ultimate American narcissist has also openly promoted a version of decline to striking numbers of Americans. For his followers, a major political figure has quit with the defensive BS and started saying it the way it is.

Of course, don’t furl the flag or shut down those offshore accounts or start writing the complete history of American decline quite yet. After all, the US still looms “lone” on an ever more chaotic planet. Its wealth remains stunning, its economic clout something to behold, its tycoons the envy of the world, and its military beyond compare when it comes to how much and how destructive, even if not how successful. Still, make no mistake about it – Trump is a harbinger, however bizarre, of a new American century in which this country will indeed no longer be “the greatest” or, for all but a shrinking crew, exceptional.

Mark your calendars: 2016 is the year the US first went public as a declinist power, and for that you can thank Donald (or rather Donald!) Trump.

The magic of Leicester City goes well beyond football

Ed Smith in The Guardian

The Premier League has become a case study in capitalism – which is why this underdog team’s success matters

 

Leicester’s manager Claudio Ranieri celebrates with players at the end of the Premier League game with Swansea City on 24 April. Photograph: Rui Vieira/AP

Saturday 30 April 2016 09.00 BST


Great sport strikes an optimal compromise between excellence and surprise. The pure randomness of throwing dice is never going to draw a crowd. But if the “best” team wins every time, and there is no room for luck and uncertainty, then the drama becomes both boring and depressing. We turn to sport for inspiration and reassurance as well as virtuosity.

Football is inherently good at surprise – one reason it’s the world’s favourite sport. Because the value of an individual goal is so huge (even a run in baseball isn’t as important) luck and unpredictability are hardwired. A shot hitting the post, a single refereeing decision, a goal against the run of play: these allow football to sustain justified faith among underdogs, both on the pitch and in the stands. On any given Saturday, the favourite is less likely to win at football than in any other sport.

The problem, however, is that over the course of a long season, this unpredictability disappears. The same teams keep winning. The rich ones. That’s why the success of Leicester City, who could win the Premier League title this weekend, has breathed fresh life into football.

One telling tribute has come from a segment of principled Arsenal followers. I know several who transferred their allegiance to Leicester, even when their own team still had a shot at the title. Madness? Perhaps. But their logic was in the spirit of Arsenal’s manager, Arsène Wenger. The phrase “financial doping” – the idea that sporting success that has been bought by a super-rich owner is at best semi-legitimate – was first attributed to Wenger in 2005. Leicester stand 17th in the league in terms of wage spending, first by points ranking. By Wenger’s own logic, a Leicester triumph would be more virtuous than victory for his Arsenal.

Not everyone has joined the party. Successes such as Leicester’s, gift-wrapped for screenwriters, inevitably inspire a rationalist backlash. “Debunking” the Leicester miracle has now become a popular intellectual counter-rhythm, as though the romantic bandwagon needs to be kept in check.

The revisionists have proposed that Leicester’s success is about systems, not romance. Leicester have invested in marginal gains, ranging from a pioneering scouting system to rotational fouling, aimed at reducing yellow cards. This savviness, however, doesn’t undermine the story at all: doubtless David had a very elastic sling when he felled Goliath. Besides, we do not have to turn Leicester into saints to marvel at their success.

The Premier League has an especially bad track record at producing improbable title winners. In its 23 seasons, it has coughed up only five champions – with the four giants of Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City sharing 22 titles, and a single triumph for Blackburn Rovers (even that victory was powered by an injection of cash).

The league’s first two decades were dominated by successive duopolies (Manchester United and Arsenal, then Manchester United and Chelsea), so much so that England’s top tier was less like a sports league and more like the Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Once, while I was giving a speech about competitive equipoise in sport, I read out the successive winners of the Premier League: one, then the other, then the first one again, then the other one. It became so repetitive that it felt only marginally different from saying “Oxford, Cambridge, Cambridge, Oxford.” So while improbable things certainly do happen, they have proved remarkably reluctant to happen inside English football.

The idea of an establishment, or at least the dominance of entrenched interests, has become the prevailing theme of our times. It is a slippery concept and often mishandled, but sport has done little to undercut the gloomy narrative of the top 1% greedily carving up the booty. There is an 89% correlation between wage spending and league position, as Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski identified. Put differently: financial doping works.

A connected point is the burgeoning influence of possessing a glamorous sporting history. It is reputation that drives the club’s brand, magnifying its financial clout. Super-clubs such as the New York Yankees or Manchester United support Thomas Piketty’s theory of capital: they are able to exploit past successes to ensure they keep a grip on present advantages. The sale of Yankees baseball caps is remarkably resilient, even when the team is having a bad season – which inevitably reduces the probability of bad seasons happening. Owning history in sport is like owning London property: you’re pretty much made.

Sport’s embrace of ultra-professionalism has created new ways for money to express an advantage. In the late 1970s Brian Clough’s tactical and psychological skills made Nottingham Forest champions of Europe. Since then, rich teams have benefited from the new layers of professionalism – physiotherapy, prehab and all the rest – making it harder for the enlightened maverick to stand out.

Elite football, in fact, could almost be a case study in late capitalism. The game as now played (loosely analogous with absolute standards of living) has undeniably improved at dizzying speed. In terms of skill, speed and attacking flair, is it easy to forget how much the game has evolved. The greatest leap forward was the proliferation of the yellow card, which gave the attacker the advantage, not the thug in long spikes. A leading commentator told me that when he watches archives of 1970s football, he estimates that half the players would today be sent off for violent fouls.

Yet while the game itself dazzles, the top flight has become an increasingly closed shop. One former footballer, now a leading figure in the sports industry, confided recently: “Each season, I am 1% more in awe of what happens on the pitch. And 1% more disgusted by the industry behind it.” Football has delivered magnificently as a spectacle, but failed at sport’s version of social mobility. Until now, that is.

And that’s why Leicester’s success matters beyond the game itself. Sport has never been a level playing field, but it does rely on an essential splash of surprise. There is room for some dynastic continuity, but not a rigid caste system. And every now and then in life, just as in football, an outsider has to steal the show.

What actually is antisemitism?

Leftist antisemitism tends not to be about treacherous genes, but the treacherous heart. It links Judaism to Zionism, Zionism to imperialism, and imperialism to global control.


Eric Heinz in The Independent


Simmering tension within the British Labour Party over claims of antisemitism has boiled over. First MP Naz Shah was suspended; now theparty’s former London mayor, Ken Livingstone has joined her. It’s an ideal moment to consider what antisemitism actually is.

Many probably – perhaps secretly – gave up puzzling over antisemitism long ago. They’ve moved on to some other issue, like battery hens, where the oppressors are shamefaced and the victims can’t speak.

The first step towards conquering antisemitism fatigue is to admit that you have the problem. I need to do it every day. Perhaps Shah and Livingstone, and a few others, might do so too. Allow me, if I may, to return to a few basics for deciphering our perennial “Jewish problem”.

Semitic cultures and languages, largely traceable to the Middle East, include both Arabs and Jews. Unsurprisingly, people often bristle at the very phrase “antisemitic”: how dare the Jews act as if they’re the only Semites, let alone accuse Arabs of antisemitism?

Indeed, how dare the Jews even pose as victims of racism, detracting attention from victims of “real” racism? After all, the average European Jew often physically and socially resembles the average indigenous European. So problems with Jews are simply “white on white”.

For more than a millennium a term such as “anti-Jewish” would have made more sense than “antisemitism”. Some Jewish writers still believe it better captures the earlier source of the hostilities, which were often justified in theological terms. The term “antisemitic” kicks in with the Enlightenment, through the rise of race theory and the concomitant racialisation of Jews.

Heart of the matter

By the 19th century, rapidly growing upheavals wrought by market forces propelled the association of Jews with finance and behind-the-scenes control. Of course, Jews had over centuries turned to finance in part due to their rigorous exclusion from other economic activity, and, far more importantly, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority lived in poverty.

Leftist antisemitism tends not to be about treacherous genes, but the treacherous heart. It links Judaism to Zionism, Zionism to imperialism, and imperialism to global control. Of course, many Jews have long pioneered leftist and anti-imperialist politics. When they criticise Israel with fervour, they all too easily become the voice of authenticity, the pure hearts.

Resentment is also commonly expressed at the particular association of the Holocaust with Jews. The death camps, after all, claimed other victims, such as communists, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, and Christian clergy. Millions of people were slaughtered by Nazi forces throughout Europe.

Of course, anyone who seriously follows Holocaust remembrance knows that Jews have never claimed to be the only victims, and recall others in their commemorations. Nor, contrary to ubiquitous opinion, do Jews “use” the Holocaust to justify their presence in Israel or that state’s controversial military and security measures. To reduce the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict to such a simplistic formula is an act of epic reductionism.

Still, the distinctness of a particularly Jewish Holocaust runs far deeper.

Nazi doctrine of course vilified many humans they deemed to fall short of some fantasy Aryan ideal. Other groups were at times portrayed as useless or defective, but Jews were singled out as the signal enemy of all humanity – ironically, the hidden force behind both imperial capitalism and Soviet Bolshevism.

That image of Jews not merely as less-than-human but as the opposite of human, merely racialised, hence modernised, the age-old equating of Judaism with Satan. Even secular Europeans continue to believe de-contextualised appropriations of the maxims “eye for an eye” or “chosen people”. These are turned into opposites of what they originally meant: that Jews ought not to seek justice out of proportion to any wrongdoing done to them, and that God bestows not particular privileges but rather particular duties upon Jews.

Hate crimes

So yes, others were unquestionably brutalised in the Holocaust. But when the citizens of Vienna chose to force a group to its knees to clean the streets it was not any of those other groups. It was Jews. When shop windows were systematically painted in a boycott campaign and then later destroyed, they belonged to Jews. When towns boasted their compliance with Aryanisation, they erected signs advertising themselves “Free of Jews” (Judenrein).

Hitler, in countless speeches and writings rehearsed gripes against any number of groups, but when he dug to the “root” of all those problems he found not them, but Jews. When Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer adopted front-page slogans about Germans’ misfortune, the group causing it was none of those others, but Jews. When a German film about treating cancer included an “educational” animation, it displayed SS-men exterminating not members of any other group, but a tight cluster of grotesequely caricatured Jews.

No apologies

Anyone who denies the outright racialisation of Jews, and antisemitism as full-blown racism, perpetrated not only by Nazis but throughout Europe over centuries, reveals a frightful ignorance about the histories, meanings, and consequences of racism.

When invective like “Nazi” or “apartheid” is then hurled at Jews, often with breathtakingly myopic readings of colonial and post-colonial histories – and yes, even when dissident Jews dramatise their views with such language, however well-meaning may be their intentions – then don’t be surprised that it comes across as antisemitism. Because it is.

When we read daily reports revealing massive new waves of antisemitism by educated and influential people, tidied up with “apologies” (quite frankly, open and candid admissions about what they really do think would serve us all far better than the endless train of “Oops, I didn’t really mean it” fudges), then don’t be surprised that it comes across as antisemitism. Because it is.

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Rs. 29,000Cr Coal Scam: Who are the Real Culprits?

An Economist's Guide to Debating Bhakts

A cheat-sheet for an intellectual argument with the Right. Warning—it's not pithy or witty enough for social media

SHAILESH CHITNIS in Outlook India

 

June 2004, deep in the heart of George Bush's presidency, the Onion, a satirical magazine, ran a story on how America's liberals were suffering from outrage fatigue. The article explained that liberals were overwhelmed with stories of abuses of civil liberties, unchecked military aggression and policies that ran roughshod over the environment. Most liberals were just exhausted from protesting and had decided to take a break. They couldn't sustain their anger anymore. 

Like any good satire, it was funny because it was close to the truth.

India's liberals probably feel the same today. From the mundane to the sublime, every facet of our society is now a cultural battleground. Each week is a new fight, from the meat we eat to the size of our nationalism. The prevalence of social media has only served to amplify differences and harden opinions. If you can't say it in a witty sentence that neatly fits in a Tweet or a Facebook post, it's probably not worth saying.

I've frequently thought of engaging with people who are ardent BJP supporters. But the thought of defending against charges of being a Congress agent or a closet Pakistan supporter (the horror!) makes me keep my opinions to myself.

But what if there was a genuine discussion? What if you were able to get more than 140 characters across? Here's an attempt at imagining an intellectual argument to four assertions frequently trotted out by the right.

(BS = Bhakt says)

[BS]: India needs a strong, authoritarian leader to develop faster. Look at what Singapore and China has achieved.

The idea that a benevolent autocrat can transform a chaotic country into a disciplined economic engine is very seductive. Unfortunately it has no basis in fact. Data shows that autocracy is a gamble, the country could be governed by a Lee Kuan Yew or a Mugabe.

The economist William Easterly has shown that the chances for the latter scenario are much higher. He measured countries that had experienced big growth success and failure over a forty year period. Easterly found that the probability of sustained high growth under an autocracy are only 10 per cent, it's more likely that the country implodes or experiences sluggish growth. Democracy doesn't yield spectacular gains either, but it does limit the chances of total failures. Human fallibility assures that more centralised societies will have more volatile performances.

Given our history with leaders who experienced total power, we are better-off taking our chances in an imperfect democracy than a perfect autocracy.

[BS]: The minorities (i.e. Muslims) have been coddled for too long

This is an easy claim to refute. Successive government and independent agencies have found that the socio-economic indicators of Muslims are the lowest among all groups, only marginally better than SC/STs. The poverty rate among urban Muslims is 38 per cent compared to national average of 23 per cent. Only 24 per cent of Muslims complete high school, against a national average of 43 per cent.

It's not just human development indicators. A recent study found that even though Muslims constitute 13 per cent of the population, only 2.6 per
cent are senior executives at BSE 500 companies. And in the last 2 years, Muslims got only 2 per cent of the priority loans from public sector banks. What the statistics mask is that the dismal state of Muslims in India isn't a recent phenomenon. It reflects a steady decline since the country's independence relative to all other groups.

In light of these numbers, it's entirely fair to ask why aren't the country's Muslims angrier?

[BS]: Why can't they just respect the wishes of the majority?

This argument rests on the utilitarian idea of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. If a certain policy brings happiness to 80 per cent of the population, but leaves the rest 20 per cent worse-off, surely the society as a whole is better off. But this view isn't compatible with protecting everyone's rights.

The philosopher John Rawls proposed a fairer way to decide on justice and rights. He suggested that before deciding any rules, members of a society stand behind a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil no one knows their class, gender, race, wealth, religion or any other detail that gives them a hint of their place in society. The laws that this group decides will, by its very nature, be just and equal. Since no one knows their position in society once the veil is lifted, they'd want to make sure they were protected.

Rawls' veil is a thought experiment of course, but it does seek to illustrate the fallacy of using majority to determine rights.

[BS]: Reform takes time; it'll take time to see the results

On this issue, the Bhakt has a point. The pass-through benefits from structural reforms take time. India's growth rate surged in the 80s, with the loosening of a few regulations. But the big reforms of the 90s didn't lead to a corresponding burst of growth in that decade.

The economist, Arvind Virmani, has found a J-shaped growth curve. Following structural reforms, growth initially falls and then begins to rise. In the 90s, the removal of import restrictions and currency volatility were a shock to the protected industries, resulting in lower productivity. As firms learned to cope and then benefit from the new technologies, output improved dramatically from the 2000s.

But as we complete two years of the Modi government, we have yet to witness any meaningful reforms — no GST bill, no significant disinvestment of PSUs and no major labour market reforms. We aren't at the bottom of any J-curve, nor should we expect a growth spurt a few years later.

[You ask] While on the economy, it's a good idea to pose the paradox of BJPs economic ideology. Narendra Modi is a self-professed free-marketer, who believes in less government. Free markets are open; open to capital, open to ideas. And yet, the RSS continues to espouse the glories of Swadeshi economics that seeks Indian solutions to Indian problems. How can Mr. Modi reconcile such opposing views?
Now observe how the BJP defenders try to square their love of the "Gujarat model" with their fealty to the RSS.

If you have made it this far without being called sickular, AAP-tard or any such pejorative, stop and congratulate your Bhakt. You are speaking with a right-wing supporter who is respectful and is confident in their views. A rare species. May their tribe grow.

Next, pinch yourself to interrupt your musings. A discussion like this can only happen in your imagination.