DW – Page 2 – David A. Welch

Blaming for dummies

Who is responsible for the downing of MH17, and how can we tell?

Almost as soon as it became apparent that someone shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17, the blame game began. There are, of course, the usual crazy conspiracy theories. Then there is the transparently politically motivated finger-pointing. There are the predictable pundits and armchair experts. Largely lost in the noise are the cautious few who insist that we don’t have all the relevant facts and have to wait and see.

Actually, we don’t have to wait and see. There is plenty of information available on the basis of which to start assigning blame. Most of it, in fact. You just have to know how.

Let’s begin by noting that apportioning responsibility is a special case of determining causality. For any event, we can usually distinguish three different kinds of cause. The proximate cause immediately precedes it. Intermediate causes set the stage for it. Deep causes make the stage-setting possible. Think of an explosive going off: the proximate cause is the completion of the circuit in the detonator; the intermediate cause is the fact that somebody connected the detonator to some explosive material; the deep causes include all of the research and knowledge that went into understanding and designing explosives. You need all three. Without any one, nothing happens.

We don’t bother asking who bears moral responsibility for an explosive going off if no evil comes of it. Nobody points the finger of blame at construction crews who blast rock for a highway. We assign blame when someone did or failed to do something as a matter of choice that resulted in harm. Naturally, we adjust our assessment of blame depending upon whether the act in question violated some well-established rule or norm, whether it was avoidable, whether it was intentional, and whether the evil that followed from it was (or could have been) foreseen.

Now, with respect to the shooting down of MH17, there is little doubt that it was brought down by a sophisticated surface-to-air missile, and whoever pulled the trigger must clearly bear some of the blame. At present we do not know who was involved on the ground, and we may never know. No one wants to own this. But all signs point toward ethnic Russian separatists acting independently or with the support of the Russian military.

How much blame rests with whoever fired the missile? Some, but not all. This was a tragic mistake. No one had any incentive to bring down a passing civilian airliner. Almost certainly the SAM crew thought they were shooting at a military target. They may have thought this because they were insufficiently trained, because they had inadequate information, or because they were not using the equipment properly. But there is no indication that the resulting harm was deliberate. In a court of law, they would be found guilty of manslaughter, but not murder.

More to the point, no one would have been shooting SAMs at anything if Ukraine had not been in the throes of a civil war. We know what happens in war: innocent people get killed. MH17 was one shocking and horrific example, and as far as we know the only one so far involving innocent people from so many far away countries. But whoever set the stage for this tragedy must bear a great deal of the moral responsibility—not only for the loss of these particular lives, but for putting at risk the lives of so many innocent people in Ukraine.

Where else do we look for culpability in addition to those who pulled the trigger? One possibility is to reach all the way back into the deep causes. There is a civil war in eastern Ukraine because Russians and Ukrainians have not gotten along very well for much of their deeply entwined histories. (Outsiders may perhaps be forgiven for thinking that this brings to mind once again what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.”) It would be interesting but for present purposes pointless to ask, “Whose fault is that?” Too much has happened between now and then to draw clear lines of culpability.

In any case, things were actually working fairly well in post-Soviet Ukraine. It may have been corrupt and inefficient, but Ukraine was well on its way to becoming a modern, well-functioning democracy of the kind that could reasonably hope to qualify for admission to the European Union someday. It was making progress on the checklist of requirements, which included respect for human rights, protections for national minorities, and a uniform standard of good governance. It was, in short, headed very much in a direction away from civil war. It’s hardly convincing to blame people who died decades or centuries ago when ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians had already shown that they could get along when left to their own devices.

So we must look to intermediate causes.

Things started to go wrong on November 21 last year when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych reneged on a commitment to sign a trade deal with the EU, opting instead for closer ties with Russia, triggering a wave of anger and frustration that resulted ultimately in the Maidan rebellion, Yanukovych’s ouster, his eventual replacement as president by Petro Poroshenko, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the outbreak of separatist violence in the Donbas region.

Who bears primary responsibility for this sequence of events?

Where you stand on that question depends upon where you sit. There are two main narratives. The dominant narrative in Russia is that guilt lies with the “fascists” who overthrew a democratically elected government and the Western powers who allegedly encouraged them. This is a tortured tale. Much of what goes into this story is simply false. Yanukovych was ousted not by fascists but by ordinary people who saw their hopes for a better future being dashed. Western governments were obviously not particularly happy with Yanukovych and were mostly pleased to see the back of him, but it gives them far too much credit to say that they orchestrated any of the relevant events.

The other main answer lays the blame at the feet of Vladimir Putin, first for pressuring Yanukovych to kill the EU deal, then for engineering the secession of Crimea and its annexation to Russia, and finally for arming, supporting, and tacitly encouraging Russian nationalist separatists.

This answer is much more persuasive.

Ukraine would not be aflame today if Putin had not repeatedly and deliberately meddled in its internal affairs; if he had not blatantly violated a core principle of modern European international relations — namely, the inviolability of national borders; and if he had not treated Ukraine like a pawn in some anachronistic great power game. No one has more clearly or more effectively subverted Ukrainian sovereignty and independence, violated basic international norms, and put innocent lives at risk. None of this was necessary. It was all avoidable. Most of it was intentional. While the particular tragedy of MH17 might not have been foreseeable, tragedies of one sort or another were inevitable. No one has more blood on his hands.

Lost in airspace

MH370’s Humbling Reminder about Technology–and its Operators

This piece originally appeared on www.foreignaffairs.com, March 20, 2014

The evolving tale of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 gets stranger by the minute. Most likely it will change yet again by the time you finish reading this. But whatever the ultimate solution to the mystery may be, it is not too early to start asking what it means.

Let’s start with the facts as we think we know them at the moment. First, there was no outward indication that anything untoward was happening aboard MH370 before it went silent. Second, shortly after it went silent it began to deviate dramatically from its preprogrammed flight path—again, with no indication of trouble whatsoever. Third, it managed to cross the Malay Peninsula and head into the Strait of Malacca without attracting any attention or triggering any response before it disappeared from radar. Fourth, according to the British firm Inmarsat, more than seven hours after departing from Kuala Lumpur it was still airborne somewhere in a giant arc stretching from the southeastern Indian Ocean to Kazakhstan.

One clear lesson here, as Jessica Trisko Darden has recently argued, is that the countries of Southeast Asia are incapable of monitoring, let alone controlling, their airspace. Nor are they capable of mounting a swift, coordinated search. They excel, however, at blaming each other.

But there are larger lessons as well—lessons of more than just regional significance.

First, the good news. There is no evidence, and a rapidly dwindling likelihood, that MH370 vanished as a result of malfunction. The hardware appears to have worked flawlessly. There is a reason why modern airliners generally do not fall out of the sky of their own accord: they are marvels of engineering. The odds of being in a fatal commercial flight are 1 in 3.4 million, and fewer than 1 in 4 of those are the result of mechanical failure. The only onboard systems whose performance is in question in this case are the transponder, which enables ground operators to identify the aircraft and provides crucial flight information, and the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which monitors system health and automatically relays faults to maintenance bases. These stopped working within minutes of the crew’s final, perfectly routine radio contact with ground controllers at 01h19 on the morning of March 8. It seems increasingly certain that they were switched off deliberately.

As far as we can tell, all of the ground-based hardware worked as well. Primary radars, secondary radars, and radio communications all worked as designed, and held up their end of the bargain insofar as maintaining contact with MH370 is concerned. We are good at technology, and getting better all the time. The Huffington Post notwithstanding, there is no valid comparison between MH370 and Amelia Earhart. Not only was MH370 operating in a modern well-monitored environment, a modern Boeing 777’s avionics make her vintage Lockheed Electra’s look like child’s play.

Next, the bad news. While the mechanical systems worked well, the human systems failed repeatedly, both at the individual and group levels. If the disappearance of MH370 was deliberate, then someone—crew member or hijacker—was a certifiable sociopath. Malaysian military radar operators failed to notice, misperceived, or wilfully ignored its radar track as it headed westward. Thai radar operators noticed it, but failed to report it because no one asked. Other countries may have failed to notice or report radar tracks as well because of incompetence, flawed procedures, or fear of embarrassment. For days after the plane disappeared there was ample information available indicating that the jet had headed toward the Indian Ocean, but Malaysia and an increasing number of other countries continued to look for it in the Gulf of Thailand. Officials have obviously bungled messaging and communications, and have given scant reason to hope that they haven’t bungled the search and investigation as well.

Now for the even worse news: much of this could have been prevented. As Gregg Easterbrook has noted, it is almost inconceivable that almost thirteen years after 9/11 pilots can still turn off transponders. (In those rare circumstances when it might be desirable to turn off a transponder, there is no technical obstacle to requiring a ground-based signal to do it.) There is an eight-year-old technology available—Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B—that provides more detailed and more reliable flight and positioning information, but while MH370 had it, and while amateurs on the ground picked up its signal, air traffic controllers did not. Countries have proven slow to embrace it. In the United States, the FAA does not expect to adopt it before 2020. Continuous-broadcast GPS is another readily-available technology that some airlines use to monitor their fleets, but as Peter Parrish, vice-president of operations for Latitude Technologies has lamented, “For some reason, the major carriers continue to rely exclusively on old technology to track their aircraft when one of our boxes could be tucked into an out-of-the-way spot on the aircraft to report location on a continuous basis, including on an accelerated basis right up to the point of impact in the event of a crash.”

In one sense, this worse news is not surprising. While technology advances by leaps and bounds, improvement in our mental capacity to perceive and analyze the world takes place on an evolutionary timescale. Cognitive, affective, bureaucratic, social, and cultural barriers to learning are ubiquitous. I have spent most of my professional career trying to understand why national leaders—who are almost always very smart people—make so many mistakes, and the answer is that they are human. As former Secretary of State Dean Rusk said to me toward the end of his life, “I’ve met and worked with a good many people whose names are in the history books or in the headlines. I have never met a demigod or a superman. I have only seen relatively ordinary men and women groping to deal with the problems with which they are faced.”

We have come to appreciate in the nuclear age that our rapidly increasing technological sophistication—which has brought to us benefits such as safe, reliable air travel—carries with it also great potential cost, not only in the form of our ability to destroy, but, as my colleague Thomas Homer-Dixon has pointed out, in the form of vulnerable, tightly-connected, inadequately resilient systems. What we have great difficulty appreciating, apparently, is that the human element is often the weakest link in those systems. Academic political science, by and large, has not helped. To the extent that leaders are trained in or advised on international politics at all, they are generally encouraged to assume that their counterparts elsewhere are fully-informed; that they are “rational”; that they value political survival above all else; and that with enough “credible” threats or incentives they can always be “deterred” or “compelled.” They are not encouraged to think of them—or of themselves, for that matter—as ill-informed, confused, emotional, fallible, and perhaps even slightly mad some of the time. Nor are they encouraged to think of the complex departments, ministries, agencies, and militaries over which they have nominal authority as reliably dysfunctional to at least a certain extent one hundred percent of the time.

In a tense, heavily-armed region such as East or Southeast Asia, it would be a good idea for leaders to reflect on the limited capacities of individuals and organizations. The bizarre story of MH370 should make the importance of that painfully clear.

What’s an ADIZ? Why the United States, Japan, and China get it wrong

This post originally appeared in Foreign Affairs on December 9, 2013

China’s recent announcement of an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea has generated a great deal of confusion and alarm, much of which, I suspect, is a function of the fact that an ADIZ is an unfamiliar concept. Few people know what one is, what it is for, and what its implications are—including, apparently, the Chinese government and military.

An ADIZ is a defined area in which unidentified aircraft are liable to be interrogated and, if necessary, intercepted for visual identification prior to entering a country’s sovereign airspace. The United States was the first country to proclaim air defense identification zones (it now has four) shortly after the Korean War. Their primary purpose was to reduce the risk of surprise attack from the Soviet Union. In addition to this particular national security motive, the United States considers them useful today for combating illicit drug flows, decreasing the risk of midair collisions, and minimizing unnecessary search-and-rescue or intercept missions. This last justification is particularly interesting and important. An unintended consequence of an ADIZ is that it reduces uncertainty about when, where, and how aerial interception might take place. Put another way, an ADIZ increases transparency, predictability, and strategic stability. As such, it is a valuable, if inadvertent, confidence and security building measure (CSBM).

There are no international agreements governing any aspect of an ADIZ. States are neither explicitly authorized to establish them, nor explicitly prohibited from doing so. In no way are they legally obliged to comply with another country’s ADIZ requirements, but they often do because they reduce risks. Air defense identification zones commonly extend hundreds of miles into what is universally acknowledged to be international airspace, even by the countries that maintain them. Accordingly, they neither signal nor confer any sovereign rights whatsoever. If they did, no one would respect them. They are about security and safety, not politics or law.

Why did China establish its East China Sea ADIZ?

It is clear that reducing the risk of surprise attack cannot have been part of China’s calculus, because there was no serious risk of this to begin with. Tensions in the region may be high just at the moment, but this is not your grandfather’s Cold War. If there is one thing everyone agrees on, it is that no one wants a major shot to the heart of the global economy. The danger of surprise attack is only acute when at least one party to a conflict considers war inevitable and thinks that getting in the first blow confers a decisive military advantage. To the extent that China’s ADIZ has deepened regional fears about China’s long-term intentions, it has actually increased this risk.

The East China Sea is not a significant drug smuggling route, so this cannot have been an important consideration. Given the multiple and overlapping maritime jurisdiction claims, there is no shortage of willing search-and-rescue providers. Reducing the necessity for these was clearly moot, too. Not surprisingly, neither motive figured in the Ministry of National Defense statement on the establishing of the zone.

What about reducing the risk of midair collisions? As we learned from the 1981 EP-3 incident, this is indeed an issue in the region—but it is not a risk that can be reduced by a Chinese ADIZ. On this point it is worth distinguishing commercial from military flights. Commercial air traffic in the East China Sea is already under good regulation; anyone on the planet with an Internet connection can monitor it in real time. There is no problem here in need of a fix. Military flights are a different matter. Here the risk of midair collision is primarily a function of conflicting understandings of overflight rights. The United States insists that all countries’ militaries have a right to fly in international airspace, and allows this even in its own air defense identification zones, subject to observation. China, in contrast—with a small number of other like-minded countries, such as Brazil—insists that coastal states have the right to regulate at least some military operations in the airspace over their exclusive economic zones. This difference of opinion led directly to the EP-3 incident. Since proclaiming an ADIZ merely puts pressure on China to increase interceptions, it actually increases this risk as well.

Does China’s ADIZ increase transparency, predictability, and strategic stability? Quite the reverse. China’s move has generated nervousness and confusion among airlines, and led immediately to ostentatious displays of noncompliance on the part of the U.S., Japanese, and South Korean militaries. In view of the fact that China’s ADIZ overlaps with Japan’s, there is now a very real possibility of conflicting instructions to aircraft and simultaneous interceptions. What happens when Japanese controllers order an unidentified aircraft to land in Japan while Chinese controllers order it to land in China? Which of two countries’ scrambled fighter planes should it follow? What happens if a Chinese fighter pilot takes exception to the bogey obeying Japanese rather than Chinese instructions or vice versa?

From a security and safety perspective, China’s announcement makes things worse, not better. All of this, surely, was predictable in advance.

So why did China announce its ADIZ?

The common wisdom—no less wise for being common—is that Beijing believed that an East China Sea ADIZ would buttress its position vis-à-vis Japan over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Chinese leaders may have believed this for one of two reasons: (1) either they believed that an ADIZ signals or confers sovereign rights; or (2) they believed that declaring an ADIZ covering the disputed islands would give them political leverage. The former is demonstrably wrong, and if this is what they believed, they should immediately fire their international lawyers. The latter belief would only be justified if Washington and Tokyo could be cowed. This has proven demonstrably wrong, too, and if this is what they had in mind, they should fire their political analysts.

It is evident that China miscalculated. But China is not the only country that is worse off as a result. East Asia has suddenly become a more dangerous place. What is to be done?

It is unrealistic to expect China to walk its ADIZ back unilaterally. This would represent a major loss of face both for the PLA and for the regime, and would immediately be interpreted by a mobilized nationalist public as an intolerable humiliation. But so also would further ostentatious displays of noncompliance and strident statements that inadvertently reinforce Chinese misconceptions about the legal implications of an ADIZ. By taking a hard line, China’s adversaries put Beijing in an even bigger bind.

Sometimes when someone does something embarrassing in public, the smart thing to do is to pretend not to notice. Admittedly, this is now somewhat difficult; Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul have already reacted. But they can stop talking about it, and they can quietly arrange with Beijing rules of the road that let it save face with its own people and yet effectively return to the status quo ante operationally. China is on record having established an East China Sea ADIZ; the United States and its allies are on record having rejected it. Let the conversation end there. At the end of the day—as far as sovereignty is concerned—it is all much ado about nothing anyway.

Obama’s bad reasons for bombing Syria

Barring a spectacular miscalculation of the kind that thwarted British Prime Minister David Cameron the other day, it’s looking almost inevitable that U.S. President Barack Obama will unleash a minor barrage in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people. In doing so, he will be seeking to accomplish five specific goals. He will achieve only one. In the process, he will make a very bad situation worse.

Why does Obama want to attack Syria, and why is he largely doomed to fail? In no particular order, his reasons are as follows:

The first is to uphold U.S. credibility. While no doubt heartfelt, this bespeaks an appalling ignorance both of human psychology and of how little goodwill the United States now enjoys around the world, particularly in the Middle East. Credibility is in the eye of the beholder; it is not in the eye of the beheld. Washington cannot control the reputational implications people will draw from U.S. military action. True, if you say you will do something often enough and never actually do it, people will eventually stop believing your threats; but if you do something when you said you would do it, they will not necessarily conclude that you always keep your word, particularly when they already firmly believe that you do not. Far more likely, people will conclude that Obama is an idiot for doing something stupid just because he said he would (and bear in mind that when he first drew a “red line,” he never actually specified what he would do); that he has as little respect for international law and the UN Security Council as his predecessor did; that he has even less concern for international legal fig leaves in the form of “coalitions of the willing”; and/or that he has some insidious ulterior motive, most likely having to do with Israel, U.S. corporate interests, the Democratic Party’s prospects in the next election, or the country of his birth—wherever that is.

The second reason is to defend the norm against the use of chemical weapons. This norm needs no defence; it reflects a widespread and growing revulsion, which Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people has, in fact, buttressed dramatically. Bombing Syria is not going to make Assad and his ilk suddenly internalize this revulsion.

The third is to deter Assad (and others) from using chemical weapons again. Assad has demonstrated that he will do whatever he thinks necessary to stay in power. Largely symbolic military strikes have no chance of changing that. We do not know which other despicable leaders out there are capable of using chemical weapons against their own citizens, but you can be sure that if they thought they faced a choice between gassing their own people and going down, Obama’s strikes against Syria are not going to weigh in the balance.

The fourth is to punish. The United States is not talking about the kind of military action that would really hurt Assad. At this point, the only thing that Assad would even notice is something that would cost him either his job or his life. He is already living in a war zone. Pinprick U.S. attacks will not alter that.

The fifth is to feel good. This one will work. I have no doubt that the president, Secretary of State John Kerry, and various other American officials, legislators, and citizens are rightly morally appalled by Assad’s actions, and that their sense of justice demands some kind of action in response. Doing nothing is almost impossible psychologically. Even if strikes accomplish nothing else, at least they will be able to say that they did something, and will sleep better at night.

Until they realize that they have made a bad situation worse.

Why will it be worse? It does not take long to see that nearly-unilateral U.S. military action has essentially no upside and a great deal of downside. Among the two who have made this case most cogently are Harvard political Scientist Stephen Walt in a recent pithy if unsentimental piece in the New York Times, and the writers at The Onion, whose satirical op-ed purportedly by Assad himself is by far the best account of the box Obama is in that I have yet seen.

If military action had a reasonable chance of actually accomplishing something constructive, I would be all in favour; but it does not. It will neither deter nor punish Assad; it will succeed only in killing more Syrians (very likely more innocent Syrian civilians than guilty Syrian officials); it will not buttress U.S. credibility where it matters, or the norm against the use of chemical weapons; it will inflame anti-American sentiment in the Middle East; it will further alienate Russia and China; and it will deal yet another blow to the idea of a rule- and procedure-governed international order.

It is frustrating, to be sure, that the international community is unwilling to act. But life occasionally presents us with situations that have no good options, only bad ones.

It would be a tragic irony indeed if America’s noble impulse to act in the face of atrocity merely resulted in further atrocity, or made more likely the unprecedented capture of a chemically-armed state by Islamist extremist zealots, as Russia and China so obviously fear.

It is already a tragic irony that the best possible response—symbolically significant as well as normatively and legally progressive—is unavailable to President Obama because of his country’s antediluvian antipathy to the International Criminal Court: namely, indictments and bounties for the capture and delivery of Assad and his chemical-happy cronies to The Hague.

The case against the case against empathy

Twitter is a poor medium for debating complicated subjects, so my “Possibly the dumbest thing I’ve read ever” comment on Paul Bloom’s recent New Yorker piece, “The Baby in the Well: The Case Against Empathy,” understandably contributed little to the advancement of understanding. I’m still learning the pros and cons of Twitter. But alea iacta est, so in response to reply tweets such as “Did you read the article, or just the title?” (thank you for that), here are the issues I have with it.

To begin, Bloom conflates at least four distinct psychological phenomena and calls them all “empathy.” Admittedly, both dictionaries and common usage aren’t good at keeping these distinct, largely because English is a living language and dictionary definitions eventually follow common usage. But our job as scholars is to clear up confusion, not promote it. Here are the four phenomena, with my preferred labels for each:

Empathy. This is the capacity to see the world from another’s perspective. It is merely to understand, not to agree with. Reagan and Gorbachev managed empathy, in the sense that they both came to understand that the other feared nuclear war more than anything else, but neither made a convert of the other.
Sympathy. This adds to cognitive understanding both cognitive and emotional agreement: you both understand and share. Reagan and Thatcher did not merely empathize with each other; they sympathized.
Compassion. This is feeling sorry for someone in a way that tugs at your heartstrings and makes you want to help. You may not understand how that person sees the world, and even if you do you may not share the perspective and the feeling; but you are a nice person who wants to relieve what you believe (probably correctly most of the time) to be someone else’s suffering. The idiot who offered to shoulder a convict’s burden on the Via Dolorosa in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian was moved by compassion, and clearly didn’t know enough about the convict to anticipate being stuck with his cross.
Pity. This is compassion’s evil twin, because it adds a self-esteem booster in the form of “thank God I’m not like that.”

Now, these distinctions are important, because empathy as I have defined it is almost never a bad thing. Empathy won’t cure all the world’s ills, and from time to time it will just help you understand more clearly that there are no feel-good ways out of a jam (Churchill understood earlier than most that the only way to defeat Hitler was to thump him). But you are only ever better off not empathizing in trivial kinds of cases—for example, when someone secretly thinks you look fat. Sympathy, compassion, and pity, on the other hand, can get us into really big trouble some of the time. Not all of the time; some of the time.

How much of the time? Anecdotes about ill-defined “empathy” resulting in outcomes that someone else would not have chosen don’t establish general points—they merely illustrate challenges. Bloom’s piece is strong on anecdotes, but makes them sound like general points. He admiringly quotes Thomas Schelling, who writes: “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.” Probably true, but hospitals in general are much better funded than six-year-old girls with brown hair. Or take Newtown. Compassion is surely part of the reason why “in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, [Newtown] was inundated with so much charity that it became a burden.” This is a classic example of unintended consequences, or a function of what Schelling called micromotives and macrobehavior—the solution to which is to coordinate and plan, not to diss compassion.

Bloom tilts at windmills and lets innuendo convey the message that empathy is bad and reason is good. There is just enough hedging in the piece to supply plausible deniability on this charge, but we all know how catchy journalism really works. Little qualifications on the side don’t affect most readers’ takeaway.

At the end of the day, nobody really disagrees with the statement that “Moral judgment entails more than putting oneself in another’s shoes.” But you can’t make rational judgments on the basis of misunderstandings. Our various mental faculties coevolved as they did precisely because they were adaptive together. We need both empathy and reason. No one illustrates the point better than Tom Schelling, whose hyper-rational approach to solving problems helped lead to the unnecessary deaths of 58,000 Americans and some 3 million Vietnamese. A little empathy would have prevented that.

Toronto’s waterfront is altogether wonderful. Really. Honest.

This post originally appeared in The Globe and Mail on March 7, 2007

Let me preface this by saying that I am not on the Porter Airlines payroll. I have never even met Robert Deluce. If I did, though, I would give him a hug.

Last week I had a late night event in Toronto and an early morning meeting the next day in Montreal. I live in the glass and concrete jungle down by the lake, right next to SkyDome (I refuse to call it the Rogers Centre), so I thought I would try the new Island airport service to Dorval (I refuse to call it Trudeau Airport). I felt a bit uneasy about this, since I read the newspapers and am well aware that Robert Deluce and the Toronto Port Authority are supposed to have horns.

I rolled out of bed at 5:15, was out the door by 5:50, and walked—walked, mind you—to the terminal at the foot of Bathurst Street by 6:10. Something was wrong. There were no crowds to fight, no lineups to endure, cheerful X-ray screeners, and first-rate coffee in real mugs in the passenger lounge.

As I strolled to the brand-spanking-new Porter Airlines Bombardier Q400, I watched the soft warm glow of the morning sun bathe the Toronto skyline in gentle vermilion hues. I settled in my tastefully upholstered leather seat and exchanged smiles with the winsome flight attendant. I was barely halfway through the first story in my morning Globe when the engines started; two minutes later we were at the end of the runway. Fifteen seconds later we were aloft, climbing past the sunlit downtown core.

It was then that I realized what a wonderful waterfront we have.

Now, I understand that this is heresy. Toronto is supposed to have the sorriest, least well planned, most embarrassing waterfront in the developed world. Porter Airlines was supposed to be a step in precisely the wrong direction, poisoning the lakeshore with noise, pollution, congestion, and people who don’t vote NDP. It was supposed to thwart a nature-friendly, people-centered renaissance. It was supposed to ruin our chances of catching up with Chicago.

Well, I don’t want a lakeshore like Chicago’s. I like ours. I like almost everything about it: the massive landfill dump known as Leslie Street Spit, a birder’s accidental paradise; the Redpath Sugar refinery, an increasingly rare link to our gritty industrial past; Harbourfront and the Queen’s Quay Terminal, vibrant in summer and calming in winter; the bizarre community of hippies and yuppies on Ward’s Island. I even like the Gardiner Expressway, which shouts “Welcome to Toronto” from the top and “Wash Me, Please” from below.

Our lakeshore has character. Chicago’s is plastic. Sure, it has a lot of attractions, most of which are very nice in and of themselves. We have a lot of attractions, too. They just aren’t all clustered in one place. Chicago’s lakeshore is touristy, expensive, and soulless. You have to be rich to live anywhere near it. Real people live near ours.

It occurred to me, as we rose to meet the pastel clouds, that all this opposition to the Island airport was nonsense. Porter Airlines has been operating for five months and I have only ever noticed their planes twice. I never hear them. There is no real opportunity cost to the airport; we have plenty of green space on the Islands already. If I have to fly in and out of Toronto anyway, I would far rather walk to the airport and board a fuel-efficient Canadian-built plane than spend extra time, money, and carbon credits going all the way to Pearson (I no longer call it Malton) only to deal with crowds, surly security guards, a 30-minute taxi from terminal to runway, and the extra blood pressure that goes with it all.

Nor would it make any positive difference if we tore down the Gardiner. It isn’t really an obstacle to anything, being above ground, and we would miss it the minute it was gone. Sure, there are a few eyesores near the lake, and large areas that are badly used, but our waterfront is diverse and dynamic. It is a patchwork quilt. A mixed bag. A delightful jumble of styles and moods. It is, in short, a metaphor for Toronto. It is us.

And it is improving, bit by bit, thanks to no one’s master plan, but thanks in large part to people with ideas, even initially unpopular ones. People such as Robert Deluce, the guy who got me to downtown Montreal by 8:40 am. I doubt Mayor Miller could be persuaded to give Mr. Deluce the keys to the city or put his name on a bridge to the Island airport. But at the very least, on behalf of us all, he should give him a hug.

Let them eat what they want

This post originally appeared in The Globe and Mail on July 7, 2003

Last month, as a side trip to an academic conference, I toured Monsanto’s massive research facility outside St. Louis, Missouri, where scientists develop and test genetically-modified crops. The science is truly impressive. And the people at Monsanto are proud of their accomplishments. The fellow who conducted our tour—a researcher himself—could not contain his enthusiasm for YieldGard^® Corn Borer, Bollgard^® Cotton, and Roundup Ready^® Corn and Soybeans, which promise higher yields, reduced pesticide requirements, and cleaner ground water. He was a true believer.

At the end of a flashy PowerPoint show, he took our questions. His enthusiasm turned to defensiveness and frustration when he discovered that we were social scientists. What did he think of the European ban on biotech foods? What about safety concerns? What about downstream unintended consequences? Exasperated, he insisted that Monsanto’s GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) were the most intensively tested crops ever; that they had been proven 100% safe; and that the European ban had no scientific basis. It was trade protection, pure and simple, designed to keep foreign agricultural products out of the European market.

“How can you prove something is 100% safe?” I asked, not meaning to be rude, but genuinely curious. “Didn’t we think DDT and Thalidomide were safe, until we discovered by surprise that they weren’t?”

“Well, okay,” he said; “99.999 percent safe.”

That was quite an admission on his part, and I admired him for it. A true scientist never claims more than he or she can justify. Years and years of testing in the lab and in the field, he meant to say, had given us no reason to fear GMOs. If there were something to fear, odds are it would have turned up by now.

He’s probably right. The longer we go without discovering that GMOs have serious negative consequences, the more confidence we can have that they do not. We can never be 100 percent confident, but for my part, I would happily eat Roundup Ready^® Corn and wear clothing spun from Bollgard^® Cotton. I judge the risks these products pose to my personal health and safety minuscule compared to the risks I run every day by driving, or even just breathing, in Toronto. But what if I were more risk averse? Or what if I objected, on aesthetic or spiritual grounds, to monkeying around with genes? In either case, I would certainly be unhappy about being forced to consume GMOs because I had no way of knowing whether the products I bought were bio-engineered or not.

The political issue is coming to a head. Canada, the United States, and Australia have all challenged the European ban on GMOs as a scientifically unjustified restraint on trade. Hoping to avoid an unfavourable ruling from the World Trade Organization, the European Parliament voted this week to lift the ban, but will require strict labelling and tracking of GM crops, and will allow the 15 EU countries to set their own rules for preventing seeds from fields planted with GMOs from drifting. The Bush administration has already signalled its dissatisfaction, and seems certain to challenge these measures, too. Ottawa will shortly have to decide whether to do so as well.

It would be politically and economically tempting for Canada to challenge Europe’s new measures. The Bush administration cares strongly about this issue, and U.S.-Canadian relations are still suffering from the Iraq debacle. Canadian agricultural exports to Europe would certainly be higher without labelling and tracking requirements. But there is an ethical issue here, and it is clear: Europeans should be allowed to make their own judgments about what they consume, and Canada should not stand in the way.

EU polls show that 70 percent of Europeans do not want to eat genetically-modified food, and 94 percent want to be able to choose. Labelling and tracking requirements reflect the democratic will of Europe. Europeans may overestimate the risks; they may appreciate how small the risks seem at present but simply prefer not to run them; or they may have some principled objection to genetic modification. Whatever the ground of their reluctance, they have a right to be reluctant. We have no right to tell them that they do not.

Toward the end of our tour, my guide and I broke away from the group and had a long and interesting conversation about culture and science. “The Europeans think we just want to make money,” he said. “Of course we want to make money. But we also want to make the world a better place. Science is the way to do that, and throughout our history, Americans have always embraced it. Europeans are more skeptical.” A sweeping claim, I thought, but probably true enough—and a tacit admission that Europe’s opposition to GMOs is not merely protectionism after all. What I really wanted to ask him was whether he thought one country had a right to impose its attitude toward science on others. But I held my tongue.