Even in the early days of political philosophy, authors took note of moral psychology—the constraints that human psychology places on the creation of a moral system. When Plato dreamed up his just city in The Republic, he first imagined a city where people lived without luxuries, but his interlocutor protested against this drab city: a theory of justice would have to account for the human psychological need for luxury. The same efforts to match justice to human psychology continue today. Consider, for instance, the famous ‘nudge’ of behavioral economics. Coined by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the nudge is the idea that a policy maker can increase the likelihood of a citizens bringing about a desirable (or just) outcome for a society by incentivizing the choices consistent with that outcome or merely by making the right choices the default ones. Ethicists and political theorists increasingly are taking this kind of strategy seriously: people are predictably just when put in situations that encourage just action—situations that leverage the quirks of human psychology. So, Gornick is right to note that there is a gap between the theory of justice and just action, and the way to fill the gap is to let theory determine the just society and economics and psychology determine how to encourage people to realize that society with their everyday choices.

In the current issue of the Boston Review, Nir Rosen argues that the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan is misguided and likely to fail.  Several respondents have varying analyses of Rosen’s piece: some agree with his conclusion but thinks he misses a few points; others claim that he is too pessimistic. Aziz Hakimi thinks Rosen is right to doubt the success of an American-lead COIN operation in Afghanistan, but claims that Rosen is wrong in marking Karzai’s government as illegitimate—there is hope for politics in Afghanistan, says Hakimi, as long as the central government devolves power to local officials. Hakimi, however, is not clear about what responsibilities the United States has in Afghanistan, if any. This omission clouds the discussion of what the United States should expect to accomplish in Afghanistan.

Hakimi does not discuss what duties the United States has now that it has invaded Afghanistan. He writes,

When the problem is cast in combat terms—Afghanistan as a theater in the “war on terrorism”—the solutions are inevitably military. But the central problem in Afghanistan is political.

It is common to talk about the “problem of Afghanistan” and how to fix the problem. To military commanders on the ground, it is clear that Afghanistan is not a smoothly-functioning state. But it does not follow that the United States must do much at all to ensure security in the country. Nor is it immediately evident, though, that America can consider Afghanistan as a problem only insofar as the country poses a threat to America’s domestic security. Perhaps the United States has now incurred a responsibility to the people of Afghanistan and to other governments in the region: a responsibility to provide the basis of a secure state.

Hakimi’s recommendation is to devolve power from the central government in Afghanistan to local officials. That, not COIN or “a centralized state with a massive military and police presence”, is the key to success in Afghanistan. Michael Cohen concurs on the topic of a big Afghan army: he doubts the possibility of training a “big [Afghan] army with gaudy six figure numbers”, despite claims to the contrary from the American military. Perhaps a large standing army is unrealistic. But if we assume that America’s goal in the United States should be to provide the basis for some security and we accept Hakimi’s recommendation to devolve power, a well-trained police force appears necessary. Establishing a credible, community-focused police force is a crucial ongoing reform in Northern Ireland, for instance, which also suffered from civil strife, instability, and military presence. It may be both a waste of resources for the United States to train a large national army in Afghanistan, but to neglect the importance of a police force seems unwise.

In the second of his two recent contributions to the Boston Review, Nir Rosen describes his experiences following a team of marines in Afghanistan who trained and fought alongside a force of Afghans. For most of the article, Rosen sticks to the facts and avoids drawing many explicit conclusions. However, it is reasonably clear that Rosen is skeptical of the ability of the US to succeed in Afghanistan, and he suggests several views in the article: first, it is misguided to optimistically compare the counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Afghanistan’s to those in Iraq, second, the state of Afghanistan’s police and armed forces is very poor, and third, the military does not fully support COIN. This last suggestion is unfair.

Rosen writes,

Westby was trying to be a good soldier in the COIN spirit. But the fact is that once you get down to the rifle squad, COIN does not make any sense. Soldiers, whose greatest concern is living through their deployments, are being asked to mix Wyatt Earp and Mother Theresa. In public they pay lip service to COIN because that is the way to advance. Less publicly, officers speak of going in to villages and “doing that COIN shit.”

He continues,

The troubles with COIN are institutional. The American military and policy establishments are incapable of doing COIN. They lack the curiosity to understand other cultures and the empathy to understand what motivates people.

Consider two of Rosen’s suggestions: first, for COIN to be successful, soldiers must believe in its merit, and, second, it is a point of fact that the soldiers in Afghanistan do not. Neither, however, is fully true. If COIN is to work in Afghanistan, no doubt foot soldiers, military strategists, and administrative officials must collectively believe that it has some chance of success. If everyone believes that it is damned, then it is reasonable to assume that a joint lack of commitment to COIN will ensure its failure. Does COIN require a soldier’s approval over-and-above following orders? Approval cannot hurt: foot soldiers who are convinced that they can successfully train an Afghan army will probably be better trainers. Their fully convinced state of mind, however, is not necessary to get the job done.

What are the actual attitudes of those soldiers after all? Is it merely true, as Rosen claims, that, “in public they pay lip service to COIN because that is the way to advance”? I find it a stretch to believe that if soldiers embrace COIN they do so for purely Machiavellian reasons. It is, after all, possible for a soldier to be cynical about COIN—and the politicians who promote it—and still be committed to the basic principles of COIN. One military blogger has concluded, for instance, that Obama’s recent decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan was the “right strategy” while maintaining that his optimistic speech sent the “wrong message”.   Another journalist claims that the military is still fairly unschooled in COIN, but that the “stigma” is changing.  In short, a person can express cynicism in all sorts of ways, and some cynicism about COIN on the part of soldiers doesn’t entail that they reject the entire project.

Morozov’s admonishment of Lih’s philosophical failings may be only a foil for his own failure to grasp the unique nature of Wikipedia. In his article The Charms of Wikipedia published in the New York Review of Books, Nicholson Baker captures the idiosyncrasies of Wikipedia and describes how it is precisely these idiosyncrasies that make the site such a dynamic and vital resource. Proving that one man’s flaws are another man’s charms, Baker explains that on Wikipedia “any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product.” This is not to say that Wikipedia’s founders did not aim to create an accurate source, they did. And while the information on Wikipedia is far from perfect, it is not so far from perfect to justify critics’ complaints (in her article on Wikipedia in the New Yorker, Stacy Schiff cites a Nature survey that found that Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Encyclopedia Britannica’s). Yet to focus too heavily on the question of Wikipedia’s accuracy distracts from the real beauty of Wikipedia, its cultural import. While Morozov may bemoan the insufficiency of the entry on nouvelle vague-director Claude Chabrol compared to that ofTransformers-director Michael Bay, he can’t deny the fact that most people in this country would probably rather watch a film starring Megan fox than Jean-Paul Belmondo. Yet with 13 million articles, Wikipedia is also a repository for people’s diverse and obscure interests. The cite could never be as extensive or as relevant as it is if it were bound to the same restrictive methodologies as more traditional encyclopedias. By preferencing online sources rather than library tomes, Wikipedia both reflects and perpetuates the fact the internet has spawned a generative, fundamentally populist form of knowledge-creation, one that is presently our greatest epistemological tool. To lament this fact as Morozov does is to be sorely out of touch with the contemporary society that Wikipedia reflects with both its methodology and its flaws.

Brewster Kahle recently announced at the Boston Bookfair that his organization, the Internet Archive, was collaborating with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation to provide the Internet Archive’s collection of 1.6 million e-books to users of the OLPC laptop at no cost. On May 15^th, 2008 the director of the OLPC announced that the organization would no longer only be using a distribution of the open-source operating system, Linux, but would instead be shipping some versions of the OLPC laptop with Windows as well. The decision prompted controversy within the organization, which had previously been committed to open-source software—that is, software whose code is available for public inspection, and which can be shared, altered, and re-distributed. Richard Stallman argued in the Boston Review’s 2008 Winter edition, that the inclusion of Windows constituted a violation of the organization’s commitment to open-source software.

The issue of open-source software’s role in OLPC returned with the news that the Internet Archive has plans to make its e-books available to OLPC users. The Internet Archive is reformatting all of its public domain books to the Epub format, an open-source e-book format that allows laptops to rescale e-books to fit the screen of the device. Students using the OLPC laptop will no doubt benefit from these free books. They will benefit, however, simply because the collaboration puts free books on their computer screens—not because they read those books with open source software. Some open-source activists adhere to the misguided view that the poor of the world deserve computers with only open-source software or that software companies seeking to profit from the poor are unethical. Elements of this attitude appear in Stallman’s article. There is nothing wrong with trying to profit from the poor as long as that act of profit does not constitute pure exploitation. Moreover, the poor deserve the right to choose a for-profit scheme if they wish, and book distribution companies like Amazon may justifiably promote their proprietary, for-profit e-book architectures in the developing world. The ethics of exploitation aside, pieces of for-profit software that run smoothly may be more valuable to people in the developing world than free, open-source software that does not. We should, therefore, celebrate this collaboration as a step in the direction of expanded access to texts, not as a victory in the open-source movement.

David Schulman notes in the aforementioned BR article, “[Nawi] will not be the first imprisoned for defending the defenseless.” Today we salute not only our veterans but peace activists who work to make suffering and war unnecessary. Read more about the current state of Israel’s peace movement in “Peace Out” by Helena Cobban, from the July/August 2009 issue of Boston Review.

Meanwhile, Obama’s meeting on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reached no firm conclusion. Speaking to the UN, Obama insisted that peace negotiations should resume without preconditions–thereby sidestepping the Palestinian demand for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank. Obama impatiently pushes ahead, but might do well to consult another piece from the BR archive (one of my favorites): Joseph Levine’s History Matters, in which he dissects the historical claims and current status of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Contrary to the U.S.’s current easing up on Netanyahu, Levine asserts:

As the occupier and principal aggressor, Israel must demonstrate good faith by taking significant actions to meet Palestinian demands. If Israel does not enact such measures, then the world community, especially the United States and the United Nations—the external parties chiefly responsible for the terrible situation in the first place—must employ sanctions to ensure Israeli compliance.

Strong words, but I encourage you to read the rest of Levine’s argument and reflect as we wait for negotiations to commence.

While we reflect on the unprecedented tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, we are–all of us–responsible for our country’s defense, and for insuring that our systems of defense are enacted in the best way possible. With each anniversary, allow our remembrance to move us from mourning into action, strengthening our participatory democracy in honor of the egalitarian process utilized by the citizens of United 93.

For another in-depth look at defense and democracy, check out Elaine Scarry’s Who Defended the Country?, edited by our own Joshua Cohen and published by Beacon Press in 2003.

Schroeder has decided that the best way to stay optimistic about the poetry business is

to regard it as a big game

and has set up a preliminary scoring system so that poets can keep track of “who’s winning.”

Apparently, winning the Discovery/Boston Review prize is worth 50 points!

That score puts us on par with The National Poetry Series, with getting a book published by a major university press or respected independent press, with inclusion in a Norton anthology or Best American Poetry, with having a poem published in The New Yorker, and with getting tenure as a professor in a top-tier program.

Thanks for the love, Steve. Good luck in the po-biz.

P.S. If you’re interested in getting those 50 points for yourself, make sure to late a look at the guidelines for the Discovery/Boston Review poetry contest – the deadline is January 15, 2010. Also, definitely check out last year’s winning poems:

• Briget Lowe’s “The Wild Boy of Aveyron Stands Up During a Dinner Arranged by the Doctor”
• Jynne Dilling Martin’s “Repercussions of the Current Import/Export Ratio”
• Jeffrey Schultz’s “J. Steals from the Rich and Uses the Money to Get Drunk Again”
• Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo’s “Bright Burial”

An estimated 2.8 million employees will get a raise on Friday, as the federal minimum wage rises from $6.55 an hour to $7.25. Another 1.6 million whose hourly pay hovers around $7.25 are also expected to get a boost as employers adjust their pay scales to the new minimum. The raise is badly needed. It is also wholly inadequate.

In honor of this much needed but totally insufficient increase in pay to much of low-wage America, here is a collection of past Boston Review articles that look at wages and inequality in the United States.

• Inequality Matters: Nancy Birdsall on globalization’s failure to “lift all boats.” (March/April 2007)




• American Sweatshops: Jennifer Freeman on organizing American workers in a global economy (Summer 2005)




• The American Jobs Machine: Erik Olin Wright and Rachel Dwyer take a close look at those left behind in the Clinton-era “jobs boom.” (December 2000/January 2001)




• For a Living Wage: Arnie Graf and Jonathan Lange examine the political reasons behind the decline in real wages (Summer 1997)




• Solving the New Inequality: Richard Freeman kicks off a New Democracy forum on economic disparities in the U.S., with responses by Frances Fox Piven, Heidi Hartmann, Paul Krugmann, Michael Piore, James Tobin, James Heckman, and Ernesto Cortes, and a reply to the responses from Freeman (December/January 1996-1997)