Diálogos Transatlánticos, part II

“Tarde, pero seguro” is something I like to tell myself whenever I put off doing something for a long amount of time. No particular reason for waiting so long, just laziness. Anyways, in my first Diálogos Transatlánticos post I talked about the exchange between Felipe González and Álvaro Uribe. One thing I had forgotten to mention was that Uribe was accompanied by his own cheerleading squad: former Colombian presidents Andrés Pastrana and Ernesto Samper. But enough of the tangent…

Ernesto Zedillo didn’t really say much during the panel, but he did make a point about 2005 being remembered as the year that multilateralism failed miserably. He mentioned specifically the WTO Conference in Hong Kong and how the U.S., Japan, and Europe still refuse to lower their massive farm subsidies.

Henry Kissinger was at a clear linguistic disadvantage against his fellow panelists. At one point he acknowledged this by saying that they were speaking with such strength and eloquence that they were overriding the translators. That and the fact that he was interrupted three times by random protesters in the hall calling him a war criminal and a murderer stacked the odds against him, but he still came up with some good insights. When asked by the moderator,Baltasar Garzón, what his thoughts were on U.S. foreign policy, he started by saying that until World War II there had been no international strategy implemented by the U.S. Every strategy after that has been a temporary measure. It is only recently that the government has had to come up with a continuous foreign policy.

He also made the point that foreign policy has been formed around the idea of the nation-state. The U.S. still conducts foreign policy as a nation-state, but a “historical” evolution in foreign policy from nation-state interests to multilateralism has happened in Europe. Europe is trying to conduct its foreign policy in a multilateral way, thinking of everyone’s interests instead of just a single country.

Kissinger also made some comparisons on the foreign policy styles of China and the Middle East. He equated China’s style to Europe in the 19th century, as balances in power between nation-states. He then proceeded to equate foreign policy in the Middle East to Europe in the 17th century, characterized by religious warfare. This got a sort of matter-of-fact reaction from the crowd.

When asked about how the status of Latin America, Kissinger basically defended the U.S. in saying that there are some mismanagements in Latin America that must be dealt by its people. He said it was senseless to blame everything on the U.S. That produced mixed reactions in the audience. At that point it was clear a lot of people in the audience were thinking “Well, not all, but a substantial amount can definitely be blamed on the American government.”

The panel ended in a mildly humurous tone. Kissinger joked about how it must have been gutwrenching for Garzón to invite him to the panel (they’re not exactly on good terms. Click here for more details). Zedillo praised Garzón’s “poder de convocatoria”, summoning power, in being able to get so many important people to speak at NYU during his time here. It all ended quite nicely.

Reflections of a drunkard

About only half of the day has passed and I’m already semi-drunk on coquito I brought from home. With that disclaimer in hand, I’m going to talk about a few things on my mind.

First of all, I’ve seriously gotten into Franz Ferdinand lately. I’m even listening to it now. The song currently playing on my computer, This fire, is devoid of any meaningful lyrics, but it’s fucking catchy as hell. It’s a good song to get you pumped up for a night out on the town. The other song I like a lot is Auf Achse. The lyrics remind me of what I’d posted before about Abel Sánchez, the novel by Unamuno. The lyrics probably describe best what Joaquín was thinking when he realized he would never be able to get with Helena. There are other passages I want to post about, but I’ll have to do that some other day.

Carla was just here. She helped me with finishing the bottle of coquito. Carla, if you read this any time soon, I just want to say you shouldn’t give up on your blog. You just started this week. It takes a little getting used to when trying to find the time to write, and some stuff may seem like shit when you post it, but that doesn’t mean anything. Just write about ANYTHING. I don’t have any grand illusions that what I post here is good. My posts are probably shit for the majority of the blog reading world. But I write ’cause it entertains me. And if it entertains someone else, that’s good. If not, hell, they can go read something else on the internet.

On to the next topic.

English. Seriously, I don’t like this language much. It’s a bitch to be specific in, most morphology has disappeared in it, tenses are conjugated almost the same, as opposed to Spanish and Italian which have distinct forms for person and number.

Now that I’m started on languages, I’d like to talk a little bit about Spanish. I don’t have any complaints against the actual language, only against the organization that tries to control it, La Real Academia Española. It’s not a specific complaint what I have. I just want them to release the iron grip they have on the language. Lately they’ve loosened that grip by accepting a lot of really bad sounding anglicisms into the language, but I’d like to see more. I’m now going to exercise my mental power in making a hypothetical situation here. The component needed for my hypothetical to get started is, well, extreme national pride.

The reclaiming of an ancestral language is a great way to assert the individuality of a nation or ethnic group. Obviously this situation would be slightly different. Instead of being a reclaiming of an ancestral language, it would be a reclaiming of the current language from outside control. Nationalists would make the claim that an outside organization shouldn’t have control of the language they speak. In turn, they would advocate for the immediate pullout from La Real Academia. This would be followed by the establishment of a Language Academy by the linguists and philologists among the ranks of the nationalists.

This is all extremely wishful thinking. Right now Spanish is the second most commonly learned second language in the world, after English. We hold great linguistic power, so to give that up would seem like a bad strategy, very counterintuitive. And it is. I make no assumption as to actually have a good reason to have this splintering of Latin American Spanish dialects into languages of their own. The only reason I have is my own fancy and wishful thinking. I would like to see this happen because I think it would be very interesting to watch.

Of course, this presents a paradox in my thinking. I’m strongly against any sort of strong nationalistic feelings because I see them as irrational. Would I be consistent in supporting nationalistic feelings if they could be used as means to my goals? Right now I can’t find any good reason to do something like that, so I guess I’m going to have to think more about that.

There’s no morality without God

I’ve heard the above line many times. It always raises a red flag in my mind because it’s a very disingenuous statement.

Some people seem to think that if some kind of god didn’t exist then we would have moral nihilism. But that is a ridiculous position to have as much as it is untenable. It had already been discredited in ancient times by Plato, in the Euthypro if I remember correctly.

The refutation is very simple: if the authority of the posited god over all moral standards is based only on his will, then he/she/it may decide at any moment that any act is moral, no matter how heinous. There’s good example in the bible of how immoral by today’s standards a particular conception of a god can be. In Genesis 22:1-2, God tells Abraham to kill his only son Isaac (portrayed here in lego, courtesy of The Brick Testament) as a sacrifice to him.

By today’s standards, killing one’s own child has to be hands down one of the most heinous acts one could commit. If morality depended on the whims of a god, things like that could indeed be considered moral. You would also have a kind of moral relativism since you can’t discount the fact that a god may change his mind.

Obviously someone would say that God would not allow such a possibility. If morality is not attached to the whims of a god, then it has to be something outside of it. There must be some way for this god to decide what is moral and what is not, some sort of objective system that can be used. If the god can make a decision using this system, there’s no reason to think that this system couldn’t be used by humans as well.

It also needs to be taken into account that if morality is the mere whim of a god then we would basically be taking orders from that god with no other justification than “this is what I say, so you must do it / not do it.” Most people would agree that there’s no moral value in merely taking orders.

Ethics and morality are well in the reach of the human mind. A god is not needed for us to be moral.