Fantastic Voyage
by Sarwar A. Kashmeri
Is it possible that globalization has brought about a convergence in moral and ethical behavior?
The deeper I got into Michael Ignatieff’s thought-provoking new book, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World, the more I was reminded of the opening verse of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “General Summary”:
We are very slightly changed
From the semi-apes who ranged
India’s prehistoric clay;
He that drew the longest bow
Ran his brother down, you know,
As we run men down to-day.
Ignatieff’s book attempts to answer the question: How far has the world’s human rights index actually moved on? How far have we, today, in truth, moved on from the dark vision of Rudyard Kipling, that arch-Victorian of a century and a half ago? Have we progressed since the heady days of 1948 when the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights was constructed and endorsed by most of the world’s states? And where there has been progress, what forces have driven the change? Or, as Ignatieff puts the question in his book, “Is globalization drawing us together morally? Beneath all our differences, what virtues, principles, and rules of conduct are we coming to share?”
Indeed, is it possible that globalization has brought about a convergence in moral and ethical behavior?
Through a grant from the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Ignatieff was able to seek answers to these questions by engaging in dialogues with citizens of some of the world’s most diverse and ethnically and racially charged cities and societies. This book pulls together the results of these “global ethical dialogues.”
In his quest to unearth answers to the pressing questions, Ignatieff and his team of researchers traveled across the globe — to Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, and Queens, New York, and to Bosnia, South Africa, Myanmar, and Fukushima, Japan.
“Over time, traditional operating systems lose their purchase with city dwellers because the traditional codes cannot keep up with the highly individualized choices of urban life.”
— Michael Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues
What they discovered is that rather than the broad, global concept of universal human rights, it is the ordinary virtues of trust, tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and resilience practiced at the individual level — of family, neighborhood, job, and school — that make the difference between a peaceful society and the world full of semi-apes that Kipling wrote about. And, just as importantly, they found that there are prerequisites for these ordinary virtues to get traction: “jobs that don’t discriminate, employers who pay what they owe, landlords who keep their places up, police who don’t pick on the undocumented, courts who rule fairly.”
But it is the subtext unearthed by the researchers that makes the book so interesting. In Jackson Heights, Queens, for example, one of the most diverse areas on earth, living together — that is, diversity — “goes hand in hand with the actual practice of living apart.” In fact, “Only Asians and whites seem to share educational opportunity together.” Ignatieff continues: “While Americans … endorse the normative commitment to equality, when it comes to making intimate choices, they stick with their own.” Such observations lead him to wonder if Americans are “engaging in a complicated act of self-deception. They pretend to live together, but in reality they only live side by side.”
Drawing an analogy from the world of computers, he speaks of the ordinary virtues and their enabling prerequisites as comprising the warp and weft of a moral operating system. “Like computer code, such a system is a set of shared procedures or routines that enable millions of people, from different races, origins, and social backgrounds, to live together.”
The building blocks for moral order in a divided world lie right in front of us, in open view — the ordinary virtues and the institutions that enable them.
It is this moral operating system that generates collaboration among strangers who do not share a common origin, Ignatieff writes. When the operating system runs smoothly it allows diverse communities such as Jackson Heights to run smoothly, but when it crashes, it creates mayhem, as happened during the Watts riots of 1965, which devastated South-Central Los Angeles.
I found the analogy of operating systems even more effective when Ignatieff observes that people arrive in a multicultural city with “the moral operating systems they inherited from their cultures and countries of origin.” And, “Over time, traditional operating systems lose their purchase with city dwellers because the traditional codes cannot keep up with the highly individualized choices of urban life.” And finally, “As with our computers, we personalize our operating systems so that they allow us to share with others and serve our personal identities and needs.”
In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, however, honest law enforcement, a key precondition for enabling ordinary virtues, does not exist, and the moral operating system is unable to run smoothly. Here “ordinary virtues don’t stand a chance of sustaining moral order … unless the police turn honest.”
In Bosnia, the author finds that a kind of alt-moral operating system took over following the ethnically murderous Balkan wars of the 1990s. It is as though the citizens of, say, the once peaceful Jackson Heights had entered a dangerous subroutine in the moral operating system — and neighbors and friends suddenly started killing each other. Ordinary virtues had ceased to exist; only time, the author concludes, will correct the code and create the prerequisite institutions to enable the virtues to flourish again.
As the book moves to its conclusion, Ignatieff tries to deal with the world of realpolitik using the framework of the moral operating system set up earlier. But now the analogy works but laboriously. The author’s contempt for Myanmar’s un-sainted leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prize winner and darling of the West, is evident, since to maintain power she now puts up with the ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims. I wish the author had explored whether she really has a choice. Would it be better to have the generals in charge? How might the moral operating system be modified to take account of the reality in Myanmar? (I must profess disappointment that Ignatieff insists on calling the country Burma, its old colonial name, even though it was officially renamed Myanmar in 1989.)
In the Fukushima chapter the book moves into more questionable territory when it criticizes the well-established fields of risk management and country risk analysis. The value of actuaries, systems modelers, and analysts is also called into question. These specialists are vital to the construction of, for starters, airplanes and nuclear power plants. For example, they determine how strong an airplane structure must be to protect the plane’s passengers and yet still be capable of getting off the ground. Or, while providing society with the benefits of nuclear power, these professionals simultaneously plan — with reason and caution — against the unthinkable happening (such as the nuclear accident at Fukushima). So I found troubling sentences like this: “The unimaginable is a constructed reality, one that becomes so because risk professionals, insurance companies, bankers, regulators, and governments lay down a deep structure of reassuring expectations that deny the unimaginable is even possible.”
“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt, addressing the United Nations in 1958
These are minor flaws in a book that has done us a real service by reminding everyone that the building blocks for moral order in a divided world lie right in front of us, in open view — the ordinary virtues and the institutions that enable them. This is a practical and useful message that each one of us can put to use to help move this complex world in a saner direction.
For the moment, forget the onward rush of globalization, ignore the wonders of high-speed communications, and set aside the millions of pious words that have emanated from the world’s diplomats. In the closing section of The Ordinary Virtues, Ignatieff and his team remind the reader that it is Eleanor Roosevelt, speaking at the tenth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1958, who pulls together the strings of the global research undertaken by the “ordinary virtues” team. Addressing the United Nations, Mrs. Roosevelt rhetorically asked
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.… Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.
“The Ordinary Virtues” pierces the false narrative that ratification of human rights declarations by itself measures progress toward more civilized behavior.
Alas, by this test, the world has a long way to go before life will become easier for many of its “ordinary” human beings. Today, so many countries — including Hungary, India, and Russia, countries that just a handful of years ago were being held up as success stories using Mrs. Roosevelt’s criteria — have regressed and made it harder for their ordinary citizens to leverage the ordinary virtues that make ordinary living possible. We can only hope that the current political climate does not see the U.S. pushed onto that regressive list.
The Ordinary Virtues pierces the false narrative that ratification of human rights declarations by itself measures progress toward more civilized behavior. The book underscores the unchanging, irreplaceable nature of ordinary virtues in anchoring civilized behavior, and shines a spotlight on the critical responsibility of states in creating institutions that make the practice of ordinary virtues … well, ordinary. In so doing, Ignatieff has done ordinary people around the world an extraordinary service.
Michael Ignatieff | The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World | Harvard University Press | 263 pp. | 2017 | 978–0–674–97627–6 | More about this book
Sarwar A. Kashmeri is host of Carnegie Corporation of New York’s “China in Focus” Diffusion podcasts. He is an adjunct professor of political science at Norwich University and a fellow of the Foreign Policy Association.
