OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, JUNE 5, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
The axis of selfishness
NASA/John Sonntag
A crack in an Antarctic ice shelf has grown by several miles over the
past week. We all share the atmosphere and its man-made problems.
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
Trump’s decision L
on climate control
is full of hot air
outh Florida and low-lying island nations will be the first
to face existential climate-change disasters, it’s often said.
The Lower Columbia River and adjacent coastlines also
are at risk in important ways. We already are starting to pay a
steep price for mankind’s thoughtless pollution of our planet’s
thin film of atmosphere.
Saying he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh,
not Paris,” President Donald Trump last week spurned the Paris
climate agreement. He hitched his wagon and ours to a nostalgic
vision of smokestack America, abandoning not only the nation’s
vulnerable coastlines and fisheries, but also a host of U.S. indus-
tries tied to clean energy. The new, alternative energy sector is
quite alive in Oregon and Washington state.
With this decision, it will be the U.S., Syria and Nicaragua
on one side, and the world’s 189 other nations on the other. This
isn’t putting America first. It’s grouping us with a failed dicta-
torship and a country historically in turmoil. Embarrassing. And
Nicaragua doesn’t back the agreement because it views it as too
weak. On matters of environmental science, no country is a dis-
creet entity — we all share the atmosphere and its man-made
problems.
These problems have a lot to do with our country’s voracious
appetite for dirty energy in the past century and a half. We built
our industries and consumer economy with carbon-based fossil
fuels that took the planet’s natural processes eons to lock away
underground. Although China now surpasses us as a polluter, our
own behavior did much to get everyone into this mess. Instead
of disadvantaging the U.S. “to the exclusive benefit of other
countries” as Trump alleges, the climate accord provides a path-
way for us to gradually throttle back greenhouse emissions while
giving us moral leverage to insist other nations do the same.
Symbolism counts. We’re the annoying neighbor with a
stinky, long-smoldering burn barrel, telling others they should
put theirs out before we will. The president last week dangled
the possibility he might negotiate a more advantageous climate
deal. It took years of tough talking to achieve the Paris accords.
It is pure poppycock and chicanery to suggest that we can some-
how bully our way to a new agreement that will achieve mean-
ingful goals at less cost to us.
We can put off paying our share of the bill for climate action,
but the planet will keep counting up the interest in the form of
carbon dioxide, methane and their byproducts in the atmosphere
and oceans. Our neglect of Paris goals could add as much as
another 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year into the air.
Seawater is intruding far up Hawaii beaches. Observers
see ominous cracks expanding across Antarctica’s vast coastal
shelves, which keep fearsome ice sheets out of the ocean. Here
on the north Pacific, great reservoirs of warm seawater encour-
age toxin algal blooms and make rivers too hot for fish. No sin-
gle clue is definitive proof that global warming is already wal-
loping us. Together they form a disturbing pattern.
Our CIA, the Pentagon and corporations from Weyerhaeuser
to Coca-Cola have long studied the implications of climate
change. Political instability, disruptions of supply chains, ref-
ugee crises and illegal immigration are all consequences of a
whacked-out, whipped-up climate. The Paris accord is a small
price to pay to stay ahead of these calamities.
Fully withdrawing from the Paris agreement will take until
the next presidential election, when the American people will
have another chance to decide who best to lead us as we navi-
gate the dangers ahead.
In the meantime, individual states in the U.S. Climate
Alliance must continue forging a sane path, investing in the
lucrative clean-energy industry and curbing greenhouse gas
emissions. Oregon should formally join this group. Not only will
we reap economic benefits, we will demonstrate to the world
that the U.S. is still about a lot more than Trump’s risky brand of
hot air.
S
ast week, two of Donald
Trump’s top advisers, H.R.
McMaster and Gary Cohn,
wrote the following passage in
The Wall Street
Journal: “The
president embarked
on his first foreign
trip with a clear-
eyed outlook that
the world is not a
‘global community’ but an arena
where nations, nongovernmental
actors and businesses engage and
compete for advantage.”
That sentence is the epitome
of the Trump project. It asserts
that selfishness is the sole driver
of human affairs. It grows out of a
worldview that life is a competitive
struggle for gain. It implies that
cooperative communities are
hypocritical covers for the selfish
jockeying underneath.
The essay explains why the
Trump people are suspicious of any
cooperative global arrangement, like
NATO and the various trade agree-
ments. It helps explain why Trump
pulled out of the Paris global-warm-
ing accord. This essay explains why
Trump gravitates toward leaders like
Vladimir Putin, the Saudi princes
and various global strongmen: They
share his core worldview that life is
nakedly a selfish struggle for money
and dominance.
It explains why people in the
Trump White House are so savage
to one another. Far from being a
band of brothers, their world is a
vicious arena where staffers com-
pete for advantage.
In the essay, McMaster and
Cohn make explicit the great act of
moral decoupling woven through
this presidency. In this worldview,
morality has nothing to do with any-
thing. Altruism, trust, cooperation
and virtue are unaffordable luxuries
in the struggle of all against all.
Everything is about self-interest.
We’ve seen this philosophy
before, of course. Powerful, selfish
people have always adopted this
dirty-minded realism to justify their
own selfishness. The problem is that
this philosophy is based on an error
about human beings and it leads to
self-destructive behavior in all cases.
The error is that it misunder-
stands what drives human action. Of
course people are driven by selfish
motivations — for individual status,
wealth and power. But they are also
motivated by another set of drives
— for solidarity, love and moral
fulfillment — that are equally and
sometimes more powerful.
People are wired to cooperate.
Far from being a flimsy thing, the
desire for cooperation is the primary
human evolutionary advantage we
have over the other animals.
People have a moral sense. They
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in March.
have a set of universal intuitions
that help establish harmony between
peoples. From their first moments,
children are wired to feel each
other’s pain. You don’t have to teach
a child about what fairness is; they
already know. There’s no society on
Earth where people are admired for
running away in battle or for lying
to their friends.
People have moral emotions.
They feel rage at injustice, disgust
toward greed, reverence for excel-
lence, awe before the sacred and
elevation in the face of goodness.
Powerful,
selfish people
have always
adopted this
dirty-minded
realism
to justify
their own
selfishness.
People yearn for righteousness.
They want to feel meaning and
purpose in their lives, that their lives
are oriented toward the good.
People are attracted by goodness
and repelled by selfishness. New
York University social psychologist
Jonathan Haidt has studied the
surges of elevation we feel when we
see somebody performing a selfless
action. Haidt describes the time a
guy spontaneously leapt out of a
car to help an old lady shovel snow
from her driveway.
One of his friends, who wit-
nessed this small act, later wrote:
“I felt like jumping out of the car
and hugging this guy. I felt like
singing and running, or skipping
and laughing. Just being active. I
felt like saying nice things about
people. Writing a beautiful poem or
love song. Playing in the snow like
a child. Telling everybody about his
deed.”
Good leaders like Lincoln,
Churchill, Roosevelt and Reagan
understand the selfish elements that
drive human behavior, but they
have another foot in the realm of
the moral motivations. They seek
to inspire faithfulness by showing
good character. They try to motivate
action by pointing toward great
ideals.
Realist leaders like Trump,
McMaster and Cohn seek to dismiss
this whole moral realm. By behav-
ing with naked selfishness toward
others, they poison the common
realm and they force others to
behave with naked selfishness
toward them.
By treating the world simply as
an arena for competitive advantage,
Trump, McMaster and Cohn sever
relationships, destroy reciprocity,
erode trust and eviscerate the sense
of sympathy, friendship and loyalty
that all nations need when times get
tough.
By looking at nothing but
immediate material interest, Trump,
McMaster and Cohn turn America
into a nation that affronts everybody
else’s moral emotions. They make
our country seem disgusting in the
eyes of the world.
George Marshall was no ide-
alistic patsy. He understood that
America extends its power when it
offers a cooperative hand and vol-
unteers for common service toward
a great ideal. Realists reverse that
formula. They assume strife and
so arouse a volley of strife against
themselves.
I wish H.R. McMaster was a
better student of Thucydides. He’d
know that the Athenians adopted
the same amoral tone he embraces:
“The strong do what they can and
the weak suffer what they must.”
The Athenians ended up making
endless enemies and destroying
their own empire.
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