Tag Archives: transactions

Après Moi Le Déluge

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APTOPIX Deep South Weather

From a 19 August 2016 Associated Press article, “Donald Trump to Travel to Flood Stricken Louisiana”.  Dee Vazquez, from left, helps Georgette Centelo and her grandfather Lawrence Roberts after they tried to recover their belongings from a family mobile home in Central, north of Baton Rouge, La., Monday, Aug. 15, 2016. (David Grunfeld/NOLA.com The Times-Picayune via AP)

There are many things at work in Trump’s reckless plan to withdraw from the Paris Agreement: it’s a sop thrown to big coal and voters in destitute coal-mining districts; it signals a retreat from twenty-first century global engagements and plays to the reactionary America First crowd; it’s a petulant thumbing of the nose at President Obama — the list could go on. The point I would make is simply this: the threat to withdraw from Paris demonstrates that the man about to assume the presidency has no understanding of agreements.

When I talk about his lack of understanding I’m not simply saying that this man, who reads from the teleprompter like a struggling fifth grader, doesn’t intellectually grasp what agreements are or how they work. He might well not; but the real issue, I fear, is that he has no inclination to learn. Time and again, the president-elect has shown us and told us that he does not respect agreements or appreciate the power they have. He will break them at will, because cooperative agreements and — perhaps more to the point — cooperation don’t appear to have a place in his moral outlook, his idea of power, or his general view of the world.

He is a purely transactional man. He doesn’t build cooperative agreements; he strikes deals that work to his advantage. This is a point I’ve noted before, when Martin Wolf wrote about Trump’s “transactional approach to partnerships” in the FT before the election. The foreign policy community is especially alert to (and rightly alarmed by) what this approach might mean in terms of existing alliances like NATO. As Ian Bremmer recently put it: “Trump views alliances transactionally, the way he views his businesses & marriages. Values don’t enter the equation.”

The nihilism — I think that might be the right word for what Bremmer is identifying — of the transactional man counts as both a moral deficiency and a political handicap. In the moral sense, others have no standing: there are no second persons; there is no plurality, only a first person singular. He and I have nothing between us, because (I am again quoting Bremmer) “common values don’t matter” and there is no enduring “we.” With no obligations to me, others or any who might come after, he is out to score. And should others refuse his terms, resist or demand recognition, he is likely to compensate for his lack of political prowess in the only way he can: by exerting hard power.

Après moi le déluge is pretty good shorthand for this attitude, especially as it relates to global climate risk.

Postscript: During a press conference this afternoon, President Obama himself offered a more hopeful view. He noted a “tradition” of carrying international agreements “forward across administrations” and stressed what he called “the good news” about Paris: the agreement formalizes practices already embedded in our economy, and we have already demonstrated that it’s possible to grow the economy and meet its goals. Paul Bledsoe took a different tack this morning on the BBC Newshour, when asked if Trump could simply undo Paris: “investments in the United States and around the world are being made by businesses who know that carbon constraints are inevitable.” Trump, he says, is “on the wrong side of history.”

Another Note on the Shortcomings of the Transactional

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I promised myself at the beginning of this long, drawn out election cycle that I was not going to write about the presidential contest. I don’t believe I’m breaking that promise if I quote an article about the presidential race as a quick follow up to my post about Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness.

There, to develop my intuitions about the fundamentally non-transactional character of conversations and other cooperative undertakings, I focused on Nussbaum’s discussion of the shortcomings of transactional forgiveness, and in particular its emphasis on scorekeeping.

Today, I was pleasantly surprised to find Martin Wolf writing about the dangers of a “transactional approach to partnerships” — which would reduce all alliances, agreements and institutions to winner-take-all “deals” — in an excellent piece called “How the West Might Soon Be Lost”:

…the ability of the US to shape the world to its liking will rest increasingly on its influence over the global economic and political systems. Indeed, this is not new. It has been a feature of US hegemony since the 1940s. But this is even more important today. The alliances the US creates, the institutions it supports and the prestige it possesses are truly invaluable assets. All such strategic assets would be in grave peril if Mr Trump were to be president.

The biggest contrast between the US and China is that the former has so many powerful allies. Even Vladimir Putin is not a reliable ally for China. America’s allies support the US largely because they trust it. That trust is based on its perceived commitment to predictable, values-based behaviour. Its alliances have not been problem-free, far from it. But they have worked. Mr Trump’s cherished unpredictability and transactional approach to partnerships would damage the alliances irreparably.

A vital feature of the US-led global order has been the role of multilateral institutions, such as the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. In binding itself by the rules of an open economic system, the US has encouraged others to do the same. The result has been extraordinary growth in prosperity: between 1950 and 2015, average global real output per head rose sixfold. Mr Trump does not understand this system. The results of repudiation could be calamitous for all.

How Things Are Between Us

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Time now to say something about the tendency, nearly everywhere apparent, to reduce human relationships to transactions, as promised in an earlier post. The topic is vast and I won’t pretend to give it comprehensive treatment in this short post. Instead I’ll just outline some of the problems I have with this tendency, and try to work my way back to some of the thinking and reading I’ve been doing about ordinary first-person plural activities, like conversations, taking a walk together, and so on.

I’m going to pass quickly over what seems to me the most obvious point about this transactional way of thinking about human relationships: namely, that it’s crass to recast human relationships as mere exchanges of goods or information or words. I can easily conceive of situations in which a transactional approach might become abusive, destructive or reach sociopathic proportions; and examples (like this ugly item from today’s news) wouldn’t be very hard to find. But I think crass is the word I’m looking for at the moment, especially if we’re talking about the everyday activities of relatively decent people. “Crass” denotes coarseness and a lack of intelligence and refinement. It’s bad manners, we might say, as long as we remember that manners are more than etiquette, but a respect for how things are between us.

In a commercial transaction the seller can be indiscriminate: usually it doesn’t matter who the buyer is, as long as the seller’s price is met. (Of course there are special cases even here: the Christian baker who will not sell a decorated wedding cake to the same sex couple; the Soup Nazi — “No soup for you!”; and so on.) In relationships, on the other hand, we regularly discriminate and sort out our feelings toward people. Attitudes matter. We are friends, lovers, enemies. I like or dislike you, or I am bothered by what you said. It’s easy to spend time with this person; but that one gets my goat within the first few minutes. She is my mentor with whom I enjoy having lunch at the Greek restaurant on Wednesdays; here comes the tedious colleague with whom I despise talking. All these attitudes are fluid and subject to change, but the point is that in relationships we are always discriminating, reacting and adjusting. Relationships involve moral judgments and ground us in moral community.

Transactions tend to be finite; once the price is negotiated and paid in exchange for goods, the transaction is over. (I recognize that there are transactions that trigger other transactions and so on, but even so the extension of that scaffolding does not necessarily amount to a full-fledged relationship.) Relationships are not events but enduring states; and while some relationships may involve negotiations of price (e.g., we talk about relationships with longstanding clients or customers), those negotiations have as it were been imported into the relationship or continue within it, and they can be destructive of it.

Relationships properly speaking involve much more — above all, a sense of “us,” and all that the first-person plural brings with it: mutual recognition and mutual authority, a whole range of changing attitudes, evaluations of beliefs and actions in light of recognized norms, as well as all sorts of promises and obligations, claims and grievances.

In a word: relationships involve care.

Obviously, but care for whom? This, for me, is the essence of the matter. Most of us would probably be quick to say that a relationship involves care for another or someone other than oneself, for a second person or persons. But all the attitudes we have toward others and the actions we undertake on behalf of second persons demonstrate, at a minimum, that we care not just for the other but also for how things are between us. And that is probably the more important point here, or at least the point I would like to stress: that in a relationship we are jointly committed to how things are between us. We are not only a first and second person who have each made an individual or personal commitment, but a first-person plural, a “we.”