Aeon: Vice dressed as virtue

On the face of it, cruelty and morality are opposites. Just as morality stands as a check or constraint on our cruel impulses, so these impulses propel us away from morality. On closer examination, however, the relationship between them is more complex and much messier. One way of appreciating this is to consider our retributive propensities and dispositions, which certainly encourage causing pain and suffering to those we find objectionable or threatening. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to consider the relationship between morality and cruelty entirely in terms of our largescale social and legal institutions and practices, such as prisons, and the forms of punishment associated with them. For one thing, these institutions and practices might or might not be cruel in terms of the definition provided. Beyond this, we shouldn’t overlook or ignore the way in which morality is frequently misused at a much more personal or everyday level, one that need not involve our legal institutions and practices at all. The particular form of cruelty that I am concerned with is a mode of moralism. [...]

The particular motivations behind vain moralism largely account for the cluster of vices associated with it. This includes hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, pomposity, pretension and conformism. These vices are all evidence that vain moralism is at work. Cruel moralism involves a very different set of motivations and a different cluster of vices. Although vain moralisers might adopt cruel attitudes and practices if they serve their (vain and shallow) ends, there is no satisfaction or pleasure taken in the suffering and humiliation of others for its own sake. With cruel moralism, things are different. What gives cruel moralisers satisfaction is not enhancing their moral standing in the eyes of others but rather the suffering and humiliation of others as a means to achieve power and domination over them. Achieving this confirms the moralisers’ sense of superiority over others and provides further validation for their ideals and values. It is self-validation – not validation to others – that cruel moralisers care about and seek to confirm. Imposing suffering and humiliation on the guilty and morally flawed provides this validation, and this becomes a deep source of motivation in their own ethical conduct and responses. In the hands of the cruel moraliser, morality lends itself to misrepresentation and misuse, and is liable to become cruel and sadistic. [...]

One reason for not relying entirely on examples of this kind is that it’s a mistake to think that cruel moralism operates only at the level of largescale or world-historical events. On the contrary, cruel moralism typically manifests itself in countless minor everyday interpersonal exchanges that pass largely unnoticed by all but those directly involved. They are, nevertheless, cruel and morally damaging. Another, more important reason for avoiding examples of the sort mentioned above is that they confuse and conflate a number of distinct issues. In the cases cited, the principles, values and ideology of the moralisers (ie, the Church, the Party, the state, etc) are all highly questionable. Beyond that, the process and procedure by which ‘guilt’ is determined is no less suspect and flawed. We are, in almost all these cases, left with the thought that the accused is entirely innocent from any relevant ethical point of view (they might, indeed, be ethical, admirable and brave figures who are simply subject to groundless persecution). In these circumstances, the victims of moral cruelty know that neither those who condemn them, nor what they are being condemned for, have the slightest moral standing or credibility – however cruel they might still be. [...]

This disposition to moral idealism and utopian goals is itself closely allied with a Manichean world view that divides the moral community into the good and the evil, the innocent and the guilty, victims and oppressors, exploited and exploiters, friends and enemies, saints and sinners, and so on. This becomes another dynamic for cruel moralism. Moral practitioners who live in a world that is ethically polarised in this way are especially vulnerable to the satisfactions of cruel moralism. A world governed by such simple and crude moral divisions and polarities is one where it becomes easy to lose all sympathetic feeling and affinity for those who fall on the wrong side of the divide. Whatever restraints and moderation might be encouraged by kinder motivations will be lost, and the pleasures of watching the wicked suffer will be amplified. In many religions, this becomes part of an ‘inspiring’ picture of our moral future – a form of moral sickness that has worked its way deeply into those political ideologies that developed out of them (including ideologies that claim to have repudiated their own religious sources and origins).

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Unherd: How populism went mainstream in Denmark

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the DPP were consistent in their attitudes: they never advocated for the use of violence as a political tool, and argued for the extension of equal rights to all citizens. So long as people lived up to the provisions of the citizenship laws of the country, they did not advocate for discrimination along racial or confessional lines. But they were early in raising the central question that was going to keep returning to Danish (as in all European) politics during the 2000s: how much immigration is enough? [...]

And in the wake of that incident, Denmark got a dose of international attention of a kind it was unused to. As a result, the country’s politicians — and the country itself — were startled into a discussion centred not just on questions of free speech but of integration. Polls showed almost full opposition among the country’s Muslim population to the portrayal of Mohammed. In wider Danish society there was a split but it was fairly even, one Gallup poll showed 48% against the publication and 43% in favour. [...]

So in January 2016, the Danes passed legislation stating that any arrivals who had travelled through multiple safe European countries in order to reach Denmark should expect to help pay for themselves in the country, and not simply expect to rely on the Danish taxpayer. The law was passed with the support of all the main parties, including the Social Democrats. [...]

Throughout this period, the Danish People’s Party did increasingly well in the polls. Their success peaked at the 2015 election in which they became the second largest party in the Folketing, the Danish Parliament, winning 37 of 179 seats. Unlike in neighbouring Sweden, the party had never been excommunicated from politics, in the way that the Sweden Democrats have been. Indeed, within three elections of the party’s founding, it was providing support to the government. [...]

Earlier this month the Danish government released an 800-page report from the Ministry of Justice which concluded that while the Danish public are strongly committed to freedom of speech, immigrant communities have far less of an attachment to the principle. The report found that among immigrants and descendants of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Pakistan, 76% thought that it should be illegal to criticise Islam. Just 18% of the Danish population as a whole thought the same thing — and in response to these findings, Tesfaye announced that immigrants who didn’t respect Danish values should leave the country.

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OCCRP: What Lockdown? World’s Cocaine Traffickers Sniff at Movement Restrictions

But OCCRP reporters have found that the world’s cocaine industry — which produces close to 2,000 metric tons a year and makes tens of billions of dollars — has adapted better than many other legitimate businesses. The industry has benefited from huge stores of drugs warehoused before the pandemic and its wide variety of smuggling methods. Street prices around Europe have risen by up to 30 percent, but it is not clear how much of this is due to distribution problems, and how much to drug gangs taking advantage of homebound customers. [...]

As many countries begin partially reopening their economies, traffickers may now be in a position to become more powerful than ever. With economies in distress and many businesses facing ruin, cash-rich narcos may be able to cheaply buy their way into an even bigger share of the legitimate economy. [...]

Exports to the world’s other biggest cocaine market, Europe, have suffered even less disruption. Unlike exports to the United States, cocaine bound for Europe is typically moved in legal air and sea cargoes, especially fast-moving fresh goods such as flowers and fruit. The latter, as food, has continued to move unimpeded during the pandemic, helping feed Europe’s 9.1 billion euro-a-year cocaine habit. [...]

Perhaps as a response to increased seizures, the street price of cocaine has risen by 20 to 30 percent during the lockdown period from mid-February until the end of April compared to the same period last year, according to Sciuto of the DCSA. Six months, criminal groups in Europe paid 25,000 to 27,000 euros for a kilogram of cocaine; they now fork out 35,000 to 37,000 euros, he said, adding that Spanish police have noticed the same trend.

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Aeon: The fruits of anger

The philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford is an advocate of anger’s merits. Her work makes the case for anger by drawing extensively on fields ranging from political science and sociology to feminist epistemology. Among the many arguments in her seminal article, ‘The Aptness of Anger’ (2018), she notes that anger can be productive epistemically – that is, in the production, shaping and organising of our knowledge and understanding. It better enables victims to make sense of their oppression by heightening their emotions and allowing them to focus on specific features of their victimisation. Victims of injustice or circumstance are often told by their oppressors to blame themselves; consider, for instance, the black single mother blamed for ‘choosing’ to become a ‘welfare queen’, or those languishing in caged homes in Hong Kong, who are told that their socioeconomic circumstances are their own fault. Gaslighting and dismissal of their lived experiences are part and parcel of everyday life for the voiceless. Anger supplies those who are wronged or slighted with the resilience to say: ‘No! It is not my fault.’ It clarifies the injustice that befalls them, enabling individuals to make sense of their situations by access to their authentic feelings. [...]

The philosopher Maxime Lepoutre at Nuffield College in Oxford argues that anger – as expressed through speech or nonverbal cues – can direct attention to the most morally pressing features of particular situations. For instance, victims of domestic abuse, through spontaneous anger, articulate publicly the extent of violation and pain they experience at the hands of their abusers. Thunberg’s angry speech reminds us of the extent to which we are actively, presently complicit in the persistence of climate change. Communicative anger helps us understand what is at stake, and what is most important to those with whom we are speaking.

Anger can motivate people, too. Malcolm X’s anger found voice in his call for violent self-defence and active resistance towards both the institutionally racist police force and the tacitly racist American middle class. His advocacy epitomised a willingness to subvert established legal structures and social norms in advancement of African American interest. Anger mixed with symbolic or psychological violence – as opposed to the non-violent, non-confrontational methodology for which Martin Luther King became known – was the driving force behind those who found King’s methods too conciliatory and inefficacious. Regardless of how one assesses the moral legitimacy of Malcolm X’s methods, his radical activism reshaped public discourse, rendering King’s advocacy not only more palatable, but even honourable in the eyes of the fundamentally shaken American public. As Srinivasan notes: ‘It is historically naive, after all, to think that white America would have been willing to embrace King’s vision of a unified, post-racial nation, if not for the threat of Malcolm X’s angry defiance.’ [...]

Anger is an overriding emotion – it is, by its vindictive and impulsive nature, uncontrollable and blinding. It wages war against cool and steady consideration of all reasons in decisionmaking, by amplifying disproportionately our thirst for what we take to be justice. At its worst, anger is what propels terrorist ideology and mass violence, committed by psychopathic individuals to exact revenge and attain justice under their ideological conceptions. More mundanely, anger causes us to shut out dissent and take pleasure in inflicting pain upon others – it transforms others’ suffering into something we take to be right and warranted. We can be easily skewed by our biases and pre-existing views to project our anger on to the wrong individuals, thereby undermining our ability to act upon our considered judgments.

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Politico: German conservatives’ eurobond awakening

Countries would not be allowed to use the money in the fund to repay existing obligations, which in Italy’s case totals about €2.5 trillion. The bonds sold to seed the fund would be issued in the name of the EU. That means individual members would only be responsible for repaying their own share (to be determined by the European Commission) and not liable for others’ portions.

At least in theory. It’s hard to imagine that Germany (even if it’s not legally bound) would allow the EU to default on the bonds if Italy or Spain couldn’t pay what they owed. The fallout would be too damaging. Such concerns are just one reason German conservatives rejected similar plans in the past. [...]

Unlike the euro crisis, which triggered dramatic turbulence in financial markets but left German industry unscathed, the corona pandemic threatens Germany’s own economic stability. The nations in the eye of the euro crisis storm, such as Portugal and Greece, were not key German trading partners. The countries in focus now — especially Italy — are a different story. [...]

The far-right Alternative for Germany might have had more luck mounting a counterattack if it weren’t consumed by a civil war over some leaders' ties to neo-Nazi elements.

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The Washington Post: Where would U.S. democracy head in a second Trump term? Hungary and Poland show the answer.

Former Obama administration deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes clearly had this sentiment in mind last week when he tweeted, “If you want to know where Trump wants to take America in a second term, look at Russia, Hungary and Poland.” While comparing the United States’ potential future to Russia’s mafia-state was a stretch, Rhodes’s references to Hungary and Poland were not. [...]

Freedom House removed Hungary from its list of democracies last week, calling the country’s decline “the most precipitous ever tracked” by one of its flagship reports. Freedom House now labels the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban a “hybrid regime,” meaning that it marries some elements of democracy with those of an autocracy.

Under Orban, Hungary maintains some democratic traits; for example, it holds elections, albeit ones in which Orban’s government provides his party significant advantages. Yet Orban and his ruling coterie have neutered a once-vibrant media, politicized the administration of justice and promoted the interests of regime insiders such as the prime minister’s son-in-law, all while scapegoating migrants and asylum seekers. Orban recently dropped any semblance of adherence to democratic rule and used the fight against covid-19 to have Hungary’s parliament grant him indefinite rule by decree. [...]

There’s a reason all this may sound familiar. As multiple political scientists, intelligence officials and historians have documented, governments that turn away from democracy and the rule of law increasingly follow a consistent pattern. Summarized as a slow roll of subversion, elected autocrats chip away at democracy’s foundations in the courts, media and civil service with the grudging (or sometimes energetic) support of their political allies. As Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, “Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.” Yet that erosion is real, and the United States is experiencing it, too.

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