Leaving the Human Race
My wife Benita is so upset by Trump’s reelection that she’s talking, as she did eight years ago, about emigrating to Canada or Europe. She says she doesn’t know these people she’s been living with in this country. How can they elect such a man?
Such a move would be very disruptive to our lives. Benita is a modern-dance choreographer and needs her company of five dancers to do her work. Moving to a new city would effectively end her career, since she wouldn’t have the resources to start a new dance company. I’m a lawyer, licensed to practice law only in California, and would have to give up this profession if I moved abroad. I’m too old to get re-licensed in France, or even in Vermont.
What does the election tell us about the USA?
The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, for the second time, shocks me. After seeing what he tried to do in his previous presidency, and after his convictions for sexual assault and business fraud, how could anyone think this man is fit to be President? And yet he won the election. What does this say about my fellow Americans?
For me, Trump voters are like cosmological dark matter. I can tell they’re there by the effects they have on the universe around them, but I never see them. None of the folks I deal with daily voted for Trump, as far as I know, though I have a few acquaintances who did.
Oligarchs like Elon Musk are taking prominent roles in politics. This brings us closer to Russia’s political system, as does the Republican attempt to block opposition votes with gerrymandering, ID requirements, restrictions on mail-in ballots, and other maneuvers. They’re working towards a system where their party is permanently in charge, as in Russia and China. The mini-riot in the Capital on January 6, 2021, violently protesting Trump’s election loss, is another indicator of this intention, like Trump’s own hints that he may not leave the Presidency at the end of his second term. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision incorporated into constitutional law the right of corporations to spend money supporting candidates; most of this corporate money goes to Republicans. If they can change the system enough, voting will have a pre-determined outcome and won’t matter much, as in China and Russia.
The Republican Party has always been the party of the rich, who want low taxes and minimal regulation of their businesses. I was surprised in this election by the support the Republicans received from the other end of the economic spectrum, especially from young men without a college degree. Those voters apparently feel disgruntled, disaffected, and ignored; they want to shake things up and stick it to the system. I think they’re voting against their own economic interests, because the Republicans will increase economic inequality by cutting taxes on the rich and making the rest of us to pick up the slack.
Another Republican constituency is the Christian right, who openly advocate making the US a Christian country. They want to ban abortion and facilitate the teaching of Christian doctrines in public schools. According to a recent CNN article, “the idea is widespread that Trump’s victory demonstrates a divine mandate that resonates with the framework that they have been using to explain and promote Trump dating back to 2016. He is somehow God’s anointed one. He is God’s chosen leader for this particularly fraught, historical political moment.”
Religion should not play such a prominent role in public affairs. The French political concept of laïcité, enshrined at the beginning of the French Constitution, operates as a much stronger wall between church and state than the weak provisions of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The French have a strong cultural norm of keeping religion out of the public sphere, something we should adopt in this country.
The main reason Benita wants to leave the US is that she doesn’t want to live in a country where the majority of the people support Donald Trump and his values. I would be more comfortable living among Europeans than Americans. I especially dislike the large role that Christianity plays in this country.
Should you vote for your own self-interest or the good of the country?
My personal (non-Christian) ethics tells me that I should choose political leaders who will benefit this country and the world at large instead of leaders who will benefit me personally. The notion of sacrifice for the common good seems to have diminished quite a bit in the last eighty years. During World War II, meat, gasoline, butter, and sugar were rationed for the war effort. Young men were drafted into the army. The government forced industries to switch to producing goods needed for the war. The war was important enough that everyone was expected to pitch in and sacrifice.
My sense is that self-sacrifice for the common good has all but disappeared in the US. Economic issues were important in the election, and the vast majority of Trump voters--at both ends of the economic spectrum--seem to have voted for their own interests, or at least what they thought were their interests.
Those who purport to vote in the interest of the public at large have a duty to be sufficiently well informed, but I fear that much of the electorate doesn’t take this duty seriously.
Climate Change
Climate change was not an important issue in the election, which astounds me. We should be making the same sorts of sacrifices now to deal with climate change that we made for World War II. The climate crisis is much more important than the geopolitical issues in that war. Global warming is an economic issue, one of the most important, but it doesn’t manifest that way. As I write this, Los Angeles is experiencing the worst Santa Ana winds of the last thirty years, resulting in wildfires throughout the region. The intensity of those winds was boosted by the extra energy global warming has put into Earth’s climate system. The winds themselves will do a lot of damage, as will the wildfires caused or increased by those winds. The cost of climate change is mostly the extra damage caused by storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, and heat waves. Economic analyses show that the cost of converting our energy systems to use renewable energy instead of fossil fuels will be less than the climate damages that such a conversion will abate. But we’d have to spend now to avoid damages over a long period in the future. Polls show that most voters are not willing to take the economic hit, even though it’s in their long-term economic self-interest. So we kick the can down the road. Because of our evolutionary background, humans tend to be focused on the short term.
Global warming is also an ethical problem where the interests of others—specifically future generations—are at stake. By failing to take meaningful action we are condemning future generations to live in a physical world that will be less suitable for human life than the world we’re used to. In a thousand years, Earthlings will point to this time as the turning point that ushered in a big change for the worse in Earth’s climate.
Can I leave the human race?
Consider what the Holocaust tells us about German people. There have been many occasions in history, mostly in war, when one country has killed more people than the number that died in the Holocaust. But the Holocaust revealed new depths of human evil that hadn’t been seen before, a deliberate targeting for destruction of an ethnic group, aided by technology and great organizational skill. The matter-of-factness of such a large program with such an evil intent, carried out by a country with humane values and a high level of education and civilization, was new and shocking.
The Holocaust revealed aspects of human nature that are not specific to Germany. Conditions might have been ripe there to bring out these evils, but the potential is lurking in all of us. The same is true of Trump’s election. The short-term thinking, selfishness, contempt for government, and superstitious (religious) thinking of my fellow Americans appall me. But those characteristics are enabled by the nature of humanity, and are not specific to the US. My book, Earthling, analyzes the ways in which humans’ evolutionary psychology is not suitable for our modern age. We can’t get away from these characteristics by leaving the country because they are universal, always present, and brought to the surface by certain types of events.
There’s no viable solution this psychological problem, except to try, in one’s own life, to adopt a moral outlook that negates some of these inherited characteristics . We can be less selfish, more open to considering the needs of people who are different from us. We can think longer-term.
Leaving the country as a dramatic gesture might feel good. But I doubt that it would have any practical effect. People will not want to move abroad in response to Trump’s election in large enough numbers to make the news. And who’s really listening, anyway? Trump supporters—apparently the majority—will just say “good riddance.”
But I can understand moving to a cooler climate in response to global heating. Tucson, where I grew up, is unlivable now during the summer. The neighborhood in Los Angeles where I live had several months of above-100-degree temperatures last summer, enough to make me want to move further north, or closer to the ocean, to get more moderate summer temperatures.
And I live in California, which is large enough to be its own country. It would have the fifth largest economy in the world if it were a country. We have saner environmental (and other) laws than the rest of the country. But, due to our strange electoral system, my vote as a Californian in the presidential election had much less effect than my vote would have in a so-called “swing state.” We Californians will do our best to fight Trump’s excesses and wrong-headed policies.
So we’ll probably stay put. There’s a lot I can do here to fight for better political values and for the environment. Sometimes I wish I could leave the human race, but until the ETs land on the White House lawn humankind is the only game in town.