31 Juli 2013

Transcript. PinkerSteven. KaplanRobertD. CargenieCouncilForEthicsInternationalAffairs. TheBetterAngelsOfOurNatureWhyViolenceHasDeclined. 27sep2012.

--> A book meaningless of someone, who is imperialist and elitist. The usual arguments ofKaplan and those who serve militarycomplexindustry. I don't fullyunderstand the consequences of their theories.
1.     Rosenthal: Good evening and welcome. I'm JoelRosenthal, president of theCarnegieCouncil. Our program this evening is a conversation with StevenPinker and RobertKaplan, discussing the question, Is the world becoming more peaceful? From time to time, an idea comes up that is so central to theCarnegieCouncil'swork that we stop everything, call the person responsible, and invite him or her to come and talk. This is one of those moments. StevenPinker's book, TheBetterAngelsOfOurNatureWhyViolenceHasDeclined, goes right to the heart of the CarnegieCouncil'smission. AndrewCarnegie founded this Council nearly onehundredyearsago because he believed that violence was indeed in decline. Carnegie had a progressive view ofHistory, famously summed up in his favorite phrase: "All is well, since all grows better." Mankind was improving. Science and Technology were ascendant. In social life, all kinds of barbarous practices were being eclipsed by sweet reason. Practices like Slavery and dueling were being outgrown. Next on the horizon, without a doubt, was the abolition of war. In his NewYeargreeting in1914, on the eve of the great calamity of WorldWarOne, Carnegie wrote, and I quote, "It is the killing of each other that still stamps man the savage. That this practice is not soon to pass away from civilised man is unthinkable, since History proves from age to age, byLaw of his being, he has slowly yet surely been developing from the beast. Hence, we are justified in believing that there is no end to his upward march of perfection." Carnegie thought he could help this march along by building hisPeacePalace atTheHague, lobbying Presidents, PrimeMinisters, Kaisers, Kings, and Czars to sign treaties of arbitration and join a league of nations, and creating educational forums like theCarnegieCouncil to enlighten public audiences. Carnegie's efforts leave us with the obvious painful question: Why did the optimism of1914 fade into the terribleHistory of thetwentiethcentury, giving us worldwar, genocide, ethnic cleansing? We are also left with the question of what to make of Carnegie's original hypothesis. Is it possible to leverage some kind of normative shift, a shift in expected and required standards of behavior, to delegitimise violence and reinforce Moralrestraint? It is selfevident that norms and standards change over time. But what impact does a change in our values and standards have on the pursuit of peace? StevenPinker'swork is at the frontier of knowledge in this area. [Kiss my ass.] It's my honor to introduce him to you tonight. A scholar of brain and CognitiveSciences, Language, and MoralPsychology, Steven has written books with titles such as TheLanguageInstinctHowTheMindWorks, an excerpt of which is wonderfully titledHotheads, and TheBlankSlateTheModernDenialOfHumanNature. We're delighted that Steven has aimed his recent work toward our area of concern, that is, conflict and cooperation, war and peace. I mentioned that from time to time we have these special moments when the Council's mission comes to the center of public debate. I realised that, on several of these occasions, RobertKaplan has been present. This is no coincidence. One such moment was the publication of one of his previous books, WarriorPoliticsWhyLeadershipDemandsAPaganEthos, and another was a conversation we engineered around the publication of RobertWright'sbook, NonzeroTheLogicOfHumanDestiny. RobertKaplan is one of the most thoughtful and accomplished analysts of worldPolitics today. His new book, TheRevengeOfGeographyWhatTheMapTellsUsAboutComingConflictsAndTheBattleAgainstFate, is characteristically philosophical and practical. [Kiss my ass.] I recommend it to you. Our topic this evening is, Is the world becoming more peaceful?, Rather than a debate, pointcounterpoint, we have decided to have a conversation. There are many ways to look at this issue and there are many perspectives to be shared. We'll start off the conversation withSteven, who will introduce the main idea of his thesis. We'll then have a response fromRobert, which will be followed by a rejoinder or two. We'll see how it goes. Then we'll open it up for questions. I'm sure that Mr.Carnegie, rest his soul, would be thrilled to know that this conversation has been renewed. Thank you all for coming, and I'll turn it over toSteve.
2.     Pinker: TheBetterAngelsOfOurNature advances the hypothesis that mostpeople find literallyincredible, that violence has declined over the course of humanHistory, on a variety of scales of time and magnitude. Joel mentioned some of them, the fact that humansacrifice is no longer found in the world, we no longer throw virgins into volcanoes to improve the weather, legal chattelSlavery [This implies that Pinker thinks that there's chattelSlavery legal and illegal], burning heretics at the stake, dueling, debtors's prisons, and rates of homicide have plunged since theMiddleAges. The book works through a number of declines, which I have tried to document with numbers presented in graphs. But the one that I think will be of most interest to the people in this room, and the topic of my conversation withRobertKaplan, is on the fate of war. A little known fact is that war appears to be in decline. It's hard to discern this fact if you get your information from the news, because you never see a reporter in some part of the world saying, Well, here I am, and there's no war here today. Wherever the war is, that's where the journalists fly to. It's certainly not the case that rates of violence and war have fallen to zero. As long as they are not zero, there are always going to be enough of them to fill the evening news. If your sense of the state of the world comes from the events you see on TV or on your computerscreen rather than from the statistics, you can be misled about how many opportunities for war there are that don't actually result in war. Let me back that up by my favorite method ofCommunication, which is visual. We're primates. We're visual animals. So I like to tell the story with just a few pictures. The book itself has more than onehundredgraphs and maps. Let me just present four of them to establish what facts I'm talking about. [Slide] Thefirstgraph comes from a political scientist namedJackLevy. It pertains to the war between great powers. These are the eighthundredspoundgorillas of the day, the largest five to ten States or Empires. This is relevant just because of the statistical distribution of wars. The big wars account for the lion's share of the deaths. "When elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled." I think this is a saying attributed to countless african tribes, probablyapocryphal, but it does establish a statistical point that a few big wars kill a lot more people than lots and lots of little wars. So the great powers are interesting. This graph spans half a millennium, [from]1500to2000, and it plots the percentage of years in every twentyfiveyearperiod in which the great powers were at war with each other. What the graph shows is that a fewhundredyears ago, the great powers were pretty much always at war with each other. That's what great powers did. They fought other great powers. More recently, they have almost never been at war with each other. The last great powerwar, that is, a war with one great power on each side, was concluded almost fiftyyears ago, namely, theKoreanWar. [What the fuck are you talking about?] [Slide] I'm going to now zoom in on the last twentyyears. Thetwentiethcentury has been called the most violent inHistory. For a number of reasons, I think this is quite dubious. [Slide] This slide shows the rate of death from all wars in thetwentiethcentury, not just the greatpowerwars. [Slide] What the graph shows is, this actually extends from1900to2010, there were two unmistakable spikes of horrific bloodletting in thetwentiethcentury, concentrated on the two world wars. But contrary to many predictions that this was just the beginning of an escalating sequence, WorldWarOne, fifteenmillion, WorldWarTwo, fiftymillion, WorldWarThree, which is inevitable; theUnitedStates and theSovietUnion are bound to lock horns. When they do, they will use nuclearweapons. It will makeWorldWarTwo look like ["]peanuts["], but WorldWarThree never happened. In fact, if you look after the spike for WorldWarTwo, you see that the graph ["]wiggles["] a lot, but pretty much hugs the floor, and that the twoworldwars were not a sign of worse things to come, but something closer to a last gasp. [Slide] I'm now going to zoom in on the postwarperiod. You could say, Well, you're kind of grading on a curve if you say that the world hasn't been as bad as it was during WorldWarTwo. That's not a veryimpressive standard. So let's just look from1946to the present. That will be in the next graph. [Slide] This graph is a stackedlayer graph. I'll explain it before the colors start appearing. It runs from1946to2009. The thickness of each wedge that you're going to see represents the rate of death in war on a per capita basis in each of four categories of war. [Slide] Here we see the rate of death from colonial wars, where anEmpire tries to hang on to a colony that tries to become independent. As you can see, it tapers off to nothing as the europeanEmpires eventually relinquish their colonies. [Slide] These wedges correspond to interStatewars. That's a war with a Government on each side. It's a spiky progression. There are big spikes corresponding more or less to theKoreanWar, theVietnamWar, and IranIraqWar, with one little blip closer to the present for mostly theDemocraticRepublicOfTheCongo. But the trend is unmistakable. There are these horrible spikes, but the overall trend is downward. We haven't had a bad one for quite some time. [Slide] Here we have the civilwars. There was a burst of civilwar starting in the 1960s, in terms of the sheer number of wars. But civilwars tend to kill fewer people than interStatewars, and so, even superimposed on the other totals, it does not mask a downward trend. [Slide] These are internationalised civilwars. [contradicton?] This is kind of a hybrid where some thirdpower ["]butts into["] a civilwar, generally on the side of theGovernment. The height of the entire stack represents the human toll from these wars. The postwarpicture, then, overall is one that is uneven, but unmistakablydownward, and, if you look at the right tail of the graph corresponding to thetwentyfirstcentury, the decade we just lived through, it's a fairlythin laminate of layers hugging the floor. So Carnegie was a little premature, he's ahead of his time, but in a veryreal sense, what he predicted might be coming to pass, namely, wars are becoming fewer and lesslethal. [Slide] What about genocide? It's often said that war is a misleading indicator of human violence, because more people were killed in thetwentiethcentury by genocide than war. Those statistics aren't completelyclear. It depends on how you count [define?] genocide, how you count [define?] war, and so on. [Slide] In this graph, I have plotted from two different datasetsestimates of the trajectory of death by genocide in thetwentiethcentury. It would be verycallous, not to say incredible, to say that there is anything particularly good about this graph. But, in a sense, there is, in that it was often said that we were entering a new age of genocide in the 1990s and the 2000s, but statistically that is veryfar from the case. There was an absolutely sickening burst of genocides concentrated in the 1940s and, to a lesser extent, in the1950s, but once again the trajectory is unmistakably downward. Genocides, both in absolute and in relative terms, are a fraction of what they used to be. You can see a tiny little ["]spike["] there forRwanda. [Implying that the genocide inRwanda was trivial compared to thetotalnumber. The classic argument of a comissar.] The fact that it's small should not minimise the horrific humancosts. Nonetheless, it's a big world, and even a genocide of that magnitude means that the worldwidegenocidetrend is waydown from what it was in the middle decades of thetwentiethcentury. What went right? In the book, I test a number of hypotheses. I don't think that human nature has changed. I believe that there is a human nature. I believe that it is flawed in many ways. We harbor many ugly, nasty impulses that can lead to human conflict, like dominance, honor, revenge, Sadism, Greed, I run through them all. However, I think that the humanbrain is a complex system, it has lots of parts, and, together with these nasty impulses, there are mental faculties that can be mobilised to combat our inner demons, namely, "the better angels of our nature," which gave the title to my book and which I stole fromAbrahamLincoln. History depends not on humannature being denied or eliminated, but just by the balance between these different parts of humannature. That's how I can be both a realist, indeed, almost a cynic, when it comes to the humanspecies, but something of an optimist when it comes toHumanAffairs. So what went right? I go through a number of hypotheses. Democratisation had something to do with it. There's good evidence that pairs of democracies tend not to fight each other. Liberalisation of economic policies and Globalisation, Freetrade. Countries that trade a lot are statisticallylesslikely to fight a war. [Fucking disgusting.] The rise of international institutions. Countries that both belong to an international/intergovernmental organisation are less likely to fight each other. The increased costs of war, the fact that WorldWarTwo proved that wars do an awful lot of damage to both sides that nullifies mostanticipated gains. But I think there's another factor that combines with the world's experience as to how destructive a war could be. I'm sitting next to this repeated slogan, EthicsMatterEthicsMatterEthicsMatter. I think Ethics matter, not in the sense of, obviously, they do by definition, just in a normative sense, but I think humans are moralistic animals. That doesn't necessarily mean that our morals lead us to do the right thing. Quite the contrary, I think theworstatrocities in humanHistory were inspired by moralistic [moralist, noun, a person who teaches or promotesMorality] [Moral]causes, but just that the nature of humanMoralisation has changed. Namely, there is a shift, both within countries and in international relations, from a morality based on national grandeur, the supremacy of a race, a nation, a religion, a class toward a morehumanisticEthics, where the flourishing of individual men, women, and children is elevated as closer to a cardinal virtue. [Selfcontradiction.] The reason that I think the carnage ofWorldWarTwo led to a change in sensibilities, but contrary to the predictions from the earlytwentiethcentury that the invention of smokeless gunpowder or dynamite or chemical weapons would make war obsolete, that didn't happen, because destructive technologies only give people second thoughts when they are combined with an ethic that says human life is precious. I think it's that combination rather than just the destructiveTechnology by itself that's necessary to reorient nations away from war. The change in norms has resulted in the fact that, certainly among rich, developed, and western nations, and increasingly trickling down to other parts of the world, war is moreandmoreremoved from the set of live options, the kind of thing that you would even contemplate as a way of resolving disputes. I think that has led to fewerwars being initiated and the wars being terminated more quickly.
3.     Kaplan: Steve, that was great. In fact, his book is evenricher than he lets it on to be, I can say, having read it and reviewed it positively, before I was even invited to do this. In theearlytwentiethcentury, there was a british writer, NormanAngell, who wrote a book, TheGreatIllusion. It was along the Carnegie["]angle["] about how war should be obsolete because it did not comport with human selfinterest. It was a brilliantly argued book. Anyone who knows my work knows that I'm not a pacifist. But if I was going to be one, I would be one like NormanAngell, because he writes so brilliantly. I first heard ofNormanAngell'sbook because I had heard about twentypeople at dinnerparties, separately, denounce it, saying how it was all wrong. Whenever I hear a book denounced, rather than believe it, I read it. What I found was that this was a brilliantly argued book that, if humannature was just a little bit better than it was and if things had gone slightly differently in thetwentiethcentury, he would not have been humiliated the way he was. And, by the way, he didn't deserve to be humiliated, because he never wrote that there would be no more wars. He just said, Here are the reasons why there should not be. The word should is often in the book. Steve has written probably thebestbook since NormanAngell on this subject. And I hope it's not misunderstood. What I would like to do is elaborate on it and challenge Steve, in a way. The first thing I would like to say is, what were the reasons for this long peace, since1946? Steve gives a lot of reasons. Some he didn't state, massEducation, feminisation of culture, just the rise of nationStates, because nationStates monopolise the use of violence. That's why Hobbes was actually a liberal, idealistic philosopher for his time, because he believed that his Leviathan could actually lead to peace and humanprogress. A lot of reasons. One reason Steve doesn't go into, I would argue, is ForeignPolicyRealism. If you were to ask me, What was themostMoral initiative taken in the last few decades inForeignPolicy? many of you would probably say RichardHolbrooke inBosnia. And that would be a good answer. I'll give you a better answer, RichardNixon inChina. Nixon'smotives were very["]Realpolitik["], not particularly uplifting. [Usual Rhetoric of an imperialist] But what Nixon did was, he said to the chinese, "You don't have to worry aboutTaiwan. We don't believe in ["]theFiction["] that Taiwan is independent. You don't have to worry about theSoviets, because we're teamed up with you now against theSoviets. You don't have to worry about the japanese, whose Economy was just starting to boom then. We'll take care of the japanese. That's our responsibility. And he gave them a whole bunch of other assurances. What did that do? For thefirsttime in decades, since the highQingDynasty at the turn of thenineteenthcentury, China felt secure on the outside and could devote itself to internal development. That set the context forDengXiaoping'sliberalisation. DengXiaoping'sliberalisation not only lifted hundreds of thousands of chinese out of stark poverty to approaching the middle class, but, because China became the largest trading partner of almost everywhere else in eastAsia, it also lifted millions of Vietnamese, Malaysians, and others, Filipinos, into a much higher standard of living, so that literally billions of people saw their material lives and their safety improve dramatically because of this initiative. Another reason, Why was the peace so long? Because you had realists like DwightEisenhower and others. You know, one thing about Eisenhower that people forget is that it was under him that all the hydrogen bombs were built. Why did he build it? Because he didn't want to fight a real war on land inEurope. He wanted something so terrible, but also so cheap, because nuclearweapons were cheap compared to preparing for actual conventional warfare. So the cold warriors, rather than be parodied in Dr.Strangelove, actually kept the peace in many ways. So this is a good story. Steve writes in the book that one of the problems is that realists believe in this HobbesianPathology ofAnarchy. That's not actually what they write. If you read StephenWalt, KennethWaltz, JohnMearsheimer, SamHuntington, other realists, they defineAnarchy in a veryspecific, verynarrow sense. It just means there's nobody in the world who is the nightwatchman, who guards over other nations. Anarchy does not mean violence. It doesn't mean necessarily Iraq in2006and2007. It just means there's no higher order other than the nationStates themselves. Let's bring this all down to earth and see what the real prospects are for a more peaceful world. Let me bring this discussion down to one part of the world. I don't want to use theMiddleEast, because, in a way, that's too easy. We know the horrors of theMiddleEast. I want to use eastAsia. The reason is that eastAsia has undergone an economic boom for decades. It has had massEducation, women's rights, the feminisation of culture. Almost everything that Steve writes about you can see in eastAsia, fromJapan toAustralia. What's the result? One of the greatest armsraces inHistory now, even though theNewYorkTimes and others are not really covering it verywell. Japan is coming out of its quasipacifistic shell to become a real military power. Nationalism is on the rise inJapan. The japaneseNavy is four times the size of theBritishRoyalNavy and much more deployable, with niche capabilities and submarines and special operations forces. China, since the mid1990s, has built a great navy and air force. Everyone, the vietnamese, the chinese, the malaysians, they all have a ["]shop'tilyoudroppolicy["] on the acquisition of submarines, both nuclear and the latest quiet diesel electric. The australians, with a population about the size ofCanada, are putting an extra twentybillionsUSD just into fourth and fifth generation fighterjets and new submarines. There is a vast armsrace going on in eastAsia. The chinese are going to have more submarines deployed in the water than theUnitedStates in about ten or fifteenyears. What is driving this? Several things which are relevant to Steve'sbook. If you were to ask me, as a journalist on the ground, What is the biggest underrated force out there in the world today? I would say Nationalism. Nationalism is de passé in theWest. Europe is supposedly in a postnational era. America, if you use the word, Nationalism, you're thinking of some TeaPartyRepublican somewhere. But Nationalism is alive and well throughout theIndoPacific, from India eastward all the way up toJapan, and a veryvirulentNationalism, which is the direct result of the economic development and the massEducation and all of that that has been going on. It's really stark. You see it in public demonstrations. When the chinese tell me inBeijing that they would love to compromise on the territorial claims they are making in theEastSea and theSouthChinaSea, they tell me, "We can't," because the nationalist ["]genie["] is out of the bottle and the party is afraid. The party is afraid to compromise, so it can't. So, Nationalism is not dead. It may have passed its peak in theWest, but it's rising at a great trajectory in a part of the world that is not minor, but, in fact, the geographical heart of the globalEconomy and of global demography, too, if you callAsia everything fromIndia eastward up toJapan. And what are people fighting over? Not even islands, but rocks that are under the sea during high tide. Yes, these rocks may have oil and natural gas around them, but it's a contest for status, for king of the hill. That's what I see it is about when I talk to people there. And I would like Steve to comment on that in a little while. The contest for status is still verymuch alive in thehumanpsyche. Remember, we're talking about eastAsia. We're not talking about a poor part of the world, where there are tribes fighting or this or that. We're talking about people who have bullettrains, who go to work in suits and ties, and who totallysupport biggerandbigger defensebudgets. You would say, But this disprovesSteve'sthesis. I would say, Not necessarily, because Steve is not saying that we're not going to have military expenditures. He's just saying the actual outbreak of war may be less because of decisions that people will make. They will walk back from the brink and all of that. We don't know that yet. All I can say is that we have taken the stability of eastAsia, theIndoPacific for granted. We have reduced it to an economic story for toomany decades, and it's emerging into something much larger than that. Another unfortunate trend out on the horizon is something that Yalemanagementprofessor PaulBracken writes about. Paul is coming out with a new book in vovember calledTheSecondNuclearAge, how the second nuclearage will be different than the first nuclearage. The first nuclearage involved essentially two conservative bureaucracies, theUnitedStates and Moscow. TheRussians were themostconservative, because they had all survivedStalin. They learned to surviveStalin by saying nothing and having no opinions. That's what theSovietpolitburo was about essentially. Two stodgy bureaucracies that were the opposite of emotional, who gave up their nucleartheory to the most bloodless academics and gametheorists and all of that. So there was no emotion. You didn't have mobs in the streets inWashington or Moscow baying for american or russian blood throughout theColdWar. TheColdWar was cold. Nothing happened. It did happen, terrible wars in Vietnam and Ethiopia and elsewhere, but they were at the margins, so to speak. But one of the things Bracken writes about is that the second nuclearage is going to be very["]hot["]. It's not going to be cold. It's going to be accompanied by mobs baying for blood because of the new countries that are acquiring nuclearweapons. It's going to involve countries likeIran that won't put their nuclearweapons in silos inNorthDakota or something away from population centers. They will put them right next to schools and hospitals and in the middle of big cities, so that, if you take them out, you are going to kill large numbers of civilians as well. The iranians are veryrational. It's not true that they are irrational. But their rationality is different. It's just different. We have had this long peace that, I would argue, the people that deserve the most credit for are the realists, the GeorgeShultze, JamesBaker, HenryKissinger, and others, who were vilified in their time. But looking back now from the era where we are now and looking at where theRepublicanParty is now and where it was then, I think we can really appreciate them. But it's unclear that this long peace will survive because of some of the things I brought up. I could go into centralAsia and how I think that's going to unravel in an evenmore tumultuous way than theMiddleEast has. One last thing about theMiddleEast that is verytroubling. You had relative peace in theMiddleEast, outside of veryformal interstate warfare between Israel and some Arab countries, between Iran and Iraq, because most of theMiddleEast was run by authoritarians, and authoritarians had strong institutions, strong bureaucracies through which they could govern, and on which theUnitedStates could exert influence, as the Soviets did as well. But the Soviets were not a war-making influence. They also wanted stability, if you recall. But now, with the collapse or weakening of authoritarian regimes, it has revealed an utter institutional void. So there are veryweak institutions in places like Libya, Syria, Yemen, et cetera. That provides a vacuum in which various forms of jihadism and other forms of radical, violencepronegroups can operate. So theMiddleEast is going to be more and more tumultuous. CentralAsia is about to burst onto the headlines, I believe. And I can go around the world as well. I'll stop here. Again, none of this disproves Steve'sthesis, which is about the relative decline of violence, not the absolute decline. Again, all this posturing and submarine buying in eastAsia may lead to just tension for decades to come or years to come. I don't know.
4.     Pinker: Thanks for the generous words and all of those verythoughtprovoking comments. Let me see if I can work through some reactions to them. I do talk a bit about the academic theory calledRealism. It's kind of a tendentious title, selfgranted. One could actually debate how realistic Realism is. Not being a scholar in internationalrelations, but being a socialscientist who is quite familiar with statistical number crunching, I tried to base my arguments not so much on plausible scenarios, which I had no way of evaluating or weighing in on, but on the studies that try to make testable predictions from different theories and to identify what the contributors are to war and peace. One of the problems is that socalledRealism has predictions that are all over the map, literally and figuratively. One realist theory says you get peace when you have a single hegemon. That's what is really stable, because they can kind of bully everyone else. They can be a quasiLeviathan. Another one says, No, no, no, you get peace when you have a balance of power. [Imperism and Elitism] You need two. That way, each one keeps the other one deterred. Another one says multipolar, that's the best. So it's not real clear what socalledRealism actually predicts. It seems to me that there are a lot of developments surrounding the long peace and what I call the new peace, that is, the spread of the long peace to the rest of the world since the fall of theSovietEmpire, that don't obviously fit any realist narrative, including the one that appeals to nucleardeterrence. For example, the fact that nonnuclearStates, latinAmericanStates, for example, Germany and Italy or Italy and Spain, have not fought each other, even though I think it would be farfetched to think that, if they started a war, theUnitedStates would nuke either of them in punishment. The fact that you have had a lot of nonnuclearStates defying nuclearones, Argentina trying to take back theFalklands, defyingBritain, a nuclearpower, SaddamHussein ["]thumbing his nose["] at theUnitedStates repeatedly, Sadat invading IsraelheldSinai, and the fact that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of relationship between military expenditures and probability of actually getting into a war, eastAsia might be a perfect example. For thelasttwentyfiveyears, I don't think there have been any shooting wars in eastAsia, I guess northKorea and southKorea, with the sinking of that ship twoyearsago that did kill fortyodd southkorean sailors. But it has actually been a prettystable part of the world if you actually tally up people killed in warfare. China, contrary to all predictions that rising great powers always pick on their neighbors, hasn't been in a shooting war since 1987, a better trackrecord than some countries we happen to belong to. TheUnitedStates has been in a number of shooting wars. The political scientist, JamesPayne,  wrote a fairly obscure but I think veryinsightful book calledWhyNationsArm that tried to correlate different measures of being on a war footing with actual likelihood of getting involved in a war and found that expenditures on military hardware had a veryloose relationship. What did have a stronger relationship was number of men in uniform. The decision as to whether to close down a shipyard is driven almost entirely byPolitics. Because of the paradoxes ofDemocracy, those with the strongest local interest push policy. Those that pay the bill diffusely just don't notice. So you can have a ramping up of the defensebudget because each military contractor, eachState with a defenseplant is in favor, the taxpayers in general. There isn't one constituency that opposes it. But if it's your son who is being drafted and sent in harm's way, then there is much more of a brake on nations' likelihood of picking fights and getting into trouble. Worldwide, even though military expenditures have not been going down, percentage of the population in uniform has been going down. In terms of prognosis for the future, rather than just playing out scenarios in your imagination, which I think is a veryfallible method of prognostication, I have a whole list of predictions of wars deemed to be inevitable that never happened. And here I'm going to speak as a psychologist. Recalling anecdotes, visualising scenarios is extraordinarily unreliable. It's a reflection of the imaginer's own psychology. It's a reflection of how vivid events are, how many inches of column space they get, how big a bang they make. But it doesn't take into account factors that really do predict war and peace. Two different studies that look at probability of great power war based on predictors that have had a ["]successful["] track record in the past, like democratisation, trade, membership in international organisations, relative power, and so on, one byBruceRussett and JohnOneal, showing that the probability of a war involving a great power has never been lower, and another study from thePeaceResearchInstituteOslo that looks at the world as a whole rather than just the great powers, showing that if you look at all the different factors that statistically correlate with war versus peace in the past, they predict that the chance of war worldwide will continue to get lowerandlower over the next few decades. I tend to put more stock in that kind of analysis than just, Well, I can imagine suchandsuch happening, which I consider to be, and I think the historical record shows to be, pretty worthless.
5.     Kaplan: Let me pick up on two of your points, Steve. One of the reasons why there are fewerandfewer people in uniform is because the nature of war is changing. The modernisation of forces means you have smaller conscript militaries, but with higher quality, smaller militaries of volunteers that are muchbetter trained. When theWarsawPact collapsed and NATO absorbed every country from Poland to Romania intoNATO, thefirstthing NATO said was, We want you to fight better, to be better killers. In order to do that, we're going to make your military smaller. We don't want you to have onethousand jets, old, vintage jets. We'd rather you have threehundredhighTech., fourth generation fighters. We don't want conscript armies that are good for just building roads and bringing in the crops. We want special operations forces. So the nature of war itself is becoming more professionalised in a highTech.age, where soldiers and marines and sailors and airmen need to know so much more. They need to be better trained with different equipment. Therefore, because training is longer, the way to get a military that will actually fight and engage in a war is to make it smaller. The best example of that is the chineseAirForce. The chineseAirForce has come down from many thousands of planes to just about twothousands. But guess what? They are all fourth and fifth generation fighter jets. So you have fewer pilots, but the pilots that there are, are more lethal. So I would say just counting numbers doesn't show an understanding of how war itself is changing. The other thing is democratisation. Here's the problem with democratisation. Democracies are less likely to go to war. But to get from an authoritarian system to a stable democracy could take years or decades, and you can have all manner of instability in between. What are most likely to get into a war are weak democrats who are paranoid, always looking over their shoulder. The best example of that is Turkey and Cyprus in1974. Turkey invadedCyprus, a brutal invasion and occupation by democrats. The country was recently democratic. It was a minorityGovernment out to prove its patriotic bona fides, which, had the military been in power, it wouldn't have had to do. But a weak minorityGovernment stumbled into war. What I see everywhere, from TunisiatoPalestine, is weaklyinstitutionalisedGovernments that are unable to control their own borders, unable to control extremists inside them. For instance, China, let me get back toChina. We have had it lucky withChina the last few decades. We really have. We have had stodgy, collegial authoritarians who had no charisma, who purged anyone who did have charisma, making practical decisions that they telegraphed ahead of time to-Washington and -Tokyo and other places, and we had peace inAsia. Now it gets rough, because China will go through political change. It has to, because when yourEconomy develops that fast over thirtyyears, your society becomes more complex. As it becomes more complex, as SamHuntington wrote brilliantly in his1968book, PoliticalOrderInChangingSocieties, a morecomplex society requires political reform and evolution. But it's never pretty. It's often never peaceful. Yet China is embarking on that road, and so China is going to be less predictable in the years to come, more nationalistic. As the party loses total authoritarian control, the military is going to be more autonomous. One of the reasons why the chinese may not have been fighting a war since1987 or so, but they have certainly been threatening all their neighbors, more in the last tenyears than they have had in the previous fourdecades, they are doing it because the military is more out of control, because we are starting to see already the breakup of a oneman authoritarian system.
6.     Pinker: A few things. I agree that there has been, obviously, a verygreat shift in the composition of national forces and the mechanisation, computerisation of fighting, of the skill required of men and women in uniform. But part of that is itself a reflection of the fact that modern societies have much less tolerance for casualties than they used to and for diversion of human capital into the military sector, which is partly why so much investment has been put into robot warfare, drone warfare. The fact that armies have been moving in that direction is itself a reflection of the increased value placed on human life. We still haven't reached the point where wars can be conducted just with robots, drones. Boots on the ground were the major factor that made the difference in the Iraqsurge. It's one of the major differences in why we are not going all out into Syria,why theLibyanWar was fought the way it was, without American boots on the ground. You could imagine, even with a higherTech.armedforces, that a country could still draft a lot of its college graduates and postgraduates and have them do all of that high-tech work. The fact that the armed forces have gotten more selective means that there are fewer unskilled people, but it doesn't explain why nations don't just make up the difference by having moreandmoreengineers, Ph.Ds, increasing the ranks of the people who are designing and manning this equipment. Also it's muchless of a factor in countries other than theUnitedStates and Israel and Britain. InIsrael, of course, there's still a large percentage of the population in uniform, even with one of the world's highestTech.armedforces. In terms of the democratisation, again there's a danger in recalling examples without looking at the phenomenon worldwide and statistically. What you said about Turkey is certainly true. There are cases in which newly democratic states get their countries into trouble. But, of course, there are manymanycountries that became democratic and were pretty wobbly in their early years that didn't get into wars, latinAmerica, SouthKorea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, a lot of the countries of Eastern Europe. [He doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.] My understanding is that statistically, this again depending on data from BruceRussett and JohnOneal, there is a little bit of a blip of an increased chance of getting into a war, compared with other democracies, for brand-new democracies. That is, the democratic peace, that two democracies don't fight each other, is attenuated for new democracies, for the first couple of years. But then they join the rest of the democratic world in having an extremely low probability of getting into a fight with other democracies.
7.     BillBruce: I lived in southeastAsia for tenyears, inSingapore, in the1960s. I know a lot about it. A lot of the things that you seemed to imply, Bob, about China, China has already accomplished. Through the chinese people living in-Indonesia and -Malaysia, they run theCommerce there. What they might gain through a war or attacking them, they already have anyway. The second point. A lot of people, especially you in your writing, treat southeastAsia as sort of a new thing. And it really isn't. In 1880, the commercial activity in Singapore, import, entrepôt, whatever, was thirtyfivepercent of thePortOfNewYork. A lot has been going on out there for years. China did not nee Nixon to do anything for them. They were shipping huge quantities of products all through, you couldn't go into a store in Singapore without buying canned goods made in China. You could go down to the Horn of Africa and see them inZanzibar, all the ports. You could go into Amsterdam and places like that and see chinese goods. I think it has evolved much more slowly than your writings indicate. I don't have the fears about things happening.
8.     Kaplan: I totally disagree. First, if you looked at China in1972, with everyone wearing Maosuits, what they were exporting was lowquality goods, relatively lowquality goods.
9.     Questioner: We bought them.
10. Kaplan: The fact that we bought them didn't mean that they were. You cannot compareChina in theearly1970s with2010. It's a totally remade, different society, with the same cultural verities that have come through and have flowered and blossomed, but theEconomy, you didn't find tens of thousands of american businessmen inChina in 1965. You didn't find tens of thousands of european businessmen or tens of thousands of american students inChina in the early 1960s duringMao'sGreatCulturalRevolution. [Fucking disgusting.] It's a totally remade society. The 1979 new economicMechanism byDengXiaoping was a real break in that country. Yes, there has always been an entrepôt inSingapore. I wrote about itsHistory. But the strides economically that Asia has made, in the mid1960s, Singapore ranked on the level of some of the poorest african countries.
11. Question: Mr.Pinker, at some point you mentioned that human beings are Moralistic animals and that the nature of the human moralisation has changed. Could you please explain a little bit more about how that happened and how what we call Morality is related to things like historical circumstance and the world around us? Is Morality something like a result of that?
12. Pinker: I think humans have always been Moralistic animals. And that's a big problem. I write in the book that the world has far toomuchMorality. If you were to add up all of the individual homicides that the perpetrators believed at the time were Morallyjustifiable, to exact revenge, to punish a transgressor, if you looked at the casualty of religious wars, of utopian ideologies, like Communism and Nazism, they would vastly outnumber the deaths from just raw Amoral predation. But I do think that the basis for our Moralisation has been changing, particularly since theEnlightenment. It has become morehumanistic in the sense of valuing the life and flourishing of individuals as opposed to abstractions, like Religions, classes, nations, races, enforcing orthodoxies, enforcing deference to authority, enforcing Moralpurity, all of which go into the humanMoralsense. I take it that your question is, Okay, but why did those happen? I think that's one of themostinteresting questions in worldHistory. I have some speculations, but nothing like the kind of statistical analysis that could strengthen the case for cause and effect. I suspect that the rise of literacy, ofEducation, of massCommunication, Journalism all played a role. The lives of other people became more immediate to us. We buy fiction, memoir, History, Journalism. We enter the minds of other people, which makes it harder to demonise them and encourages more universalism. We travel more. We are more cosmopolitan and rub shoulders with people unlike ourselves. Because of the rise of mass media, war has become less romanticised. It was said that the Vietnam War was the first war brought into people's living rooms in real time. In earlier wars, the Government successfully censored war photography while the war was in progress, and so people's sense of war came from romantic poets who glorified it, often never having participated in it. People have more of a sense that war is hell and they have a morearticulatedMoralPhilosophy. Could you really justify the purity of the race or the glory of the tribe or the nation if you were forced to argue with someone unlike yourself, as people moreandmore are forced to do? It's hard to argue in the face ofReality and in the face of people coming from different backgrounds that my nation is superior to yours just because I belong to it and you don't. And that pressure of intellectualisation, cosmopolitanism, exchange of ideas, enriching of experiences, I think, over long periods of time, pushes the conventional wisdom aboutMorality more in a humanistic direction.
13. Kaplan: Steve, that's all great, but here's the problem. The problem is that a lot of people don't read seriousFiction. They don't read serious nonFiction. A lot of the people that I encounter, not just uneducated people in various countries, but people like people in the armed forces, last night I spoke at theMarineClub inSanFrancisco, and it's a totally different environment and atmosphere. Let me take Poland for an example. Poland is dramatically increasing its military budget because they don't trust the russians. You talk about european defensebudgets going down. That's a generalisation. It's not a real truth. The defensebudgets in the countries closer toRussia are, in fact, increasing. Again, we're talking about more highTech.militaries, where the stronger the military, the fewer men you have in uniform, and you depend on cyberwarfare, all kinds of things which are being developed. So even inEurope, which we have reduced to being just a financialdebt story, but where GeoPolitics are alive and well, because the russians are flush with cash and are buying up all kinds of infrastructure now in central and easternEurope, Nationalism is alive and well, and a lot of people just don't think this way. A lot of people do. I'm just saying not everyone does.
14. Pinker: And I don't think it has to be greatLiterature. I think it can be soapoperas and middlebrowLiterature. [Argument worthless] But just to be concrete about what I had in mind, in this country during the SecondWarWorld, the japanese were considered subhuman. My mother, who lived through it, told me that the germans were an enemy, the japanese were just a contemptible race in the eyes of theWest. It probably had something to do with some of the tactics in the way the war was fought, the firebombing ofTokyo, the nuclearstrikes. According to oneopinionpoll, fifteenpercent of the american population, when asked what should be done toJapan after an allied victory, offered the solution of extermination. In our own country, we rounded [incarcerated] up onehundredthousand japaneseamerican citizens. I think that's lesslikely now. The numbers certainlysuggest that, and opinion polls, even in the more militant parts of, at least, the richer countries. The kind of demonisation that would have been possible, that was possible, sixty or seventyyears ago, probably, even inWorldWarOne, you had the english thinking of the germans as huns and as raciallyaggressive, those don't stand up to the kind of scrutiny that even middlebrow awareness nowadays, I'm sure, in theMarines, you would never find those kinds of contemptuous actions.
15. Kaplan: No, you don't among theMarines, because theMarines are great people who are veryenlightened. I mean that veryseriously.
16. Pinker: I have a passage in the book on theEthicalMarineWarriorProgram, which tries to inculcate humanistic values inMarines by having them empathise with the people that they serve among. It's this ["]touchyfeelything["] in our ["]leathernecks["], which is, I think, a sign of the times.
17. Question: Not to pick on Mr.Kaplan, but you mentioned a new book, TheSecondNuclearAge, regarding the hot war, and you specifically notedIran, if they acquired a nuclearbomb. How does that compare to, say, the two conservative bureaucracies, one of which, theUnitedStates, actually dropped a bomb?
18. Kaplan: PaulBracken goes into this. One of the things he says about thesecondnuclearage is that countries, fromIndia toPakistan toIran, want to acquire nuclearweapons for the same reasons theUnitedStates and the Soviets did. The primary use of nuclearweapons during theColdWar was not to drop them. It was to use them for influence and intimidation and for actual statecraft, actually preventing hot wars on the ground. Now, in some of these cases this is what Iran and Pakistan and India want. They use nuclearweapons as part and parcel of their diplomacy the same way the U.S. and the Soviets did for decades during theColdWar. But in addition to that, there's a new factor. The new factor is that, whereas the U.S. and the Soviets were separated by thousands of miles of Arcticice and you had no emotional dislike between Americans and Russians during theColdWar to a verysignificant degree, the emotional dislike or insecurity between Indians and Pakistanis, whose high population centers are only twohundredsmiles apart, between theIndusRiverValley and theGangesRiverValley, is something else. Then you have a country like Iran, which, as I said earlier, I don't believe is irrational, but it's a different kind of rationality. And, if you factor into an Iran with six or twelve tactical nuclearweapons, imagine how much more fraught crises in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah would become. Again, this does not negate Steve'spoint. This may even prevent war. KennethWaltz wrote a piece inForeignAffairs saying, if Iran had nuclearweapons, it would actually stabilise things. I don't agree with that, but it was just an interesting argument to read. It took you ["]places["] where you hadn't been before.
19. Question: MichaelLapid. [phonetic] I don't get a lot of comfort from knowing that there are so many countries arming so quickly. How do we adjudicate between these? How would international institutions settle issues between them and try to deal with the miscalculations that are inherent with so many centers of different weapons?
20. Kaplan: Let me use theSouthChinaSea as an example. There's something called theLawOfTheSeatreaty, which theUnitedStates did not sign, but which it obeys, which China has signed, but which it doesn't obey. TheLawOfTheSeatreaty really should be called the LawOfTheLandtreaty, because it's based on where your coastline is and then it projects your territoriality outward twohundredsmiles or whatever it may be. According to the legalities of it, China has no claim in many of the places that it's claiming. China says, InternationalLaw be damned. We have historical claims that go back before theLawOfTheSea treaty. When you actually look at all the claims, they are incredibly fraught, incredibly complex. Nobody I have spoken to thinks they will be resolved by legal means or arbitration means. The best that can be hoped for, and again, this doesn't contradict Steve, is a military balance of power that prevents war. As China's navy and air force get larger and larger proportionately to the navies and air forces of Vietnam, the Philippines, and other countries, all those countries, especially Vietnam, are now calling on theUnitedStates to have more warships and planes in the region. The vietnamese are redredgingCamRanhBay so that American warships will visit more often. And so it goes. The filipinos are inviting back the americans toSubicBay and ClarkAirfield so that american warships and planes will visit. In other words, the solution to keeping the peace, to keeping the long peace, seems to be more military deployments.
21. Pinker: I'm not sure that that's true. You could make the argument both ways, that the balance of power keeps the peace, but there are these statistical studies byRussettAndOneal that show that an asymmetry of power keeps the peace because theweakerparty doesn't want to mess with thestrongerone. [Imperialist] If the outcome is a foregone conclusion, it's in the interests of both parties to back down. So you could run the argument both ways. A lot of the changes, like the ones that I've shown on the graphs, such as after the fall of theSovietEmpire, weren't clearly related to an even balance of power with neither side probing the other. One of the powers just vanished. But it didn't lead to an increase in war. It led to a decrease.
22. Kaplan: There is an australian strategist, HughWhite, who has just written a book about the challenge of China's rising military might. He makes the point, similar to yours, that the problem in coming years and decades is notChina. It's America, because America will find it hard to adjust, to adapt to having another great military power in the region. White says, "As australians, we had it easy for threedecades or so. We had the rise ofChina, which made us all rich, and yet we had american protection, which made us all safe." But this period that he dates back to Nixon'svisit, he said, is now ending. What's happening is, rather than a unipolar military environment in theFarEast, it is becoming more of a multipolar or bipolar one, with America and China. He's almost calling forAmerica to back down somewhat, to allowChina to become the hegemon of the region. So there's an argument in your favor. However, here's the problem. TheUnitedStates has treatyallies inJapan, in southKorea, and the philippines that won't allowAmerica to do that. And it has a new rising ally, Vietnam, which is essentiallysaying, Don't you dare do that. We need you to balance against China. So it may be that you're right, whether it's asymmetrical or not, what will keep the peace. But again, remember what we're really discussing here. We're not discussing the abolition of military force. We're just discussing how to apply it and in what proportion.
23. Rosenthal: Along those lines, I have a question. We're all living through the traffic associated with theGeneralAssembly here at theUnitedNations. Steven, when I was looking at your graph, I was thinking about1945to1948, the establishment of theUnitedNations, but also theUniversalDeclarationOfHumanRight. I would be curious to hear from both of you, just in terms of the establishment of some sort of international Moral norm or standard, whether we think of it as Law or just some standard, in terms of accountability, whether, for political leaders and for military leaders. Does that play at all into your story? If so, could you elaborate a little bit?
24. Pinker: Yes. TheUnitedNations has a mixed role. Obviously, the soapboxorations in front of theGeneralAssembly are just kind of theater to comedy. Those are irrelevant. The peacekeeping forces, though there have been some conspicuous disasters, on average, do much more good than harm. A number of studies have measured that. If you put [the]UnitedNations or other peacekeeping forces between warring parties, the war is much more likely to stop and it's much less likely to reignite. So theUnitedNations is not exactly an internationalLeviathan, but that role as international quasipoliceman, even if inconsistently deployed, does some good. The third thing, though, that also matters is a norm that basically member states of theUnitedNations are immortal. They don't go out of existence. Unlike centuries ofHistory in which States just ["]gobbled each other up["], Poland gets ["]wiped off the map["] repeatedly, no UnitedNations memberState has been eliminated through conquest. In fact, it's extremelyrare even for any territory to have changed hands by conquest since the establishment of theUN. And the exceptions almost prove the rule. [Exceptions improve the rule. DumbAss.] IraqinvadedKuwait. It took short work for an international coalition to push them back. So a new norm seems to have emerged that the boundaries ratified by theUnitedNations, no matter how illogical, drawn by drunken colonial administrators, you don't mess with them. It has probably done moregood than harm, though it has undoubtedly done a lot of harm, as Robert has written about. But, still, the idea that you can't just say, We have a lot of members of our ethnic group behind our border, so we're going to take that chunk of territory. By all Moral reckoning, it ought to be part of our country, that hasn't happened. That, I think, the sanctity of international borders and the immortality ofStates, as a kind of norm, not something that's Ethicallynecessarilyjustifiable, but just that we don't do that anymore, you don't mess with them. It's not thinkable, has probably been a stabilising force. [This reveals who he is.]
25. Kaplan: Let me just say that that's true, but what's also true is that States have collapsed internally, and that has led to significant degrees of violence. You have had Somaliacollapse, Haiti, the formerYugoslavia. TheSovietUnion collapsed, violently inTajikistan and inNagornoKarabakh and other places in theCaucasus, but generally nonviolently, in the BalticStates. So you have this sort of inverse problem here. A State is inviolable, but theUN can't keep it from collapsing internally. But to answer your question, Is there a MoralEthic?, I would say, this is something I write in my recent book, TheRevengeOfGeography, just because you're a Democracy and you hold elections and you believe in the global good, in advancing global civil society, does not mean that your use of military force will necessarily have a Moral result. It could have a negligible result. It could have an Immoral result. It could have a lot of results. Therefore, even Democracies, especially Democracies, have to be especially wary of getting involved militarily around the world. Remember, to get approval from a Democracy to go to war, you have to emotionalise the masses to a certain degree to get them behind it. And that can lead to miscalculation. This is something that HansMorgenthau goes into in great detail in his book, PoliticsAmongNations, and why I feel he is the mostMoral of the realistic writers, because he deals with these questions. This is a hard question. Even though you're a Democracy, even though you save the world from naziGermany, from fascistJapan, you still may have the best of intentions, but if you blunder, you can have the worst of Moralresults.
26. Pinker: Iraq and Vietnam are two good examples. I think it's certainly true that theIraqWar would not have happened had it not been forNineEleven [SeptemberElevenAttack]. Even though there was no causal connection, there was enough ["]spillover["] emotion that more of the population mobilised behind it than would have otherwise.
27. Kaplan: Yes. And Vietnam, people forget theHistory. When we entered intoVietnam, it was for Moralreasons, we told ourselves. The northvietnamese communists, as ruthless a bunch of people as anyone can imagine, had killed tens of thousands of their own people before the firstUSregular groundtroops arrived. So there was a Moralreason to do this, so we told ourselves.
28. Rosenthal: I think with that, I'm going to adjourn the session with a mixture of Moralism and Realism, appropriate for us. I want to thank Steven and Robert and all of you for participating.
29. Pinker: Thank you.
30. Kaplan: Thank you.

30 Juli 2013

Twitter. DavidEhrlich. Notjustmovies. HongSangSoo.

27 Juil
if i ever have a daughter, i'm going to name her Hong Sang-Susan.
 
You gettin' a cab to take you home, David? 
 
so sad that i'm currently sitting at my desk in my underwear packing my apartment. 
 
Is "packing my apartment" what they call it these days? 
 
if i were drinking any harder right now, i'd be *in* a Hong Sang-soo movie.

29 Juli 2013

Essay. Globalisation of mentalhealth. RossWhite.


There are huge inequalities in the availability of resources to support mentalhealthneeds across the globe. It is estimated that greater than ninetypercent of global mentalhealth resources are located in highincomecountries (WHO, 2005). This is all the more alarming when we consider that around eightypercent of the world’s population live in low- and middle-incomecountries (LMIC: Saxena et al., 2006). In countries inAfrica, latin America, and south/southeastAsia under twopercent (and often less than onepercent) of expenditure on health tends to go to services for psychiatric conditions (compared to over tenpercent in theUSA) (Kleinman, 2009). And there is a gathering mentalhealth storm: it is projected that by2030, depression will be the second biggest cause of disease burden across the globe (Mathers & Loncar, 2006), second only toHIV/AIDS.
  When four out of five people inLMIC who need services for mental, neurological and/or substance-use disorders do not receive them (WHO, 2008), we have a clear "treatmentgap", the difference between the levels of mentalhealthservices required by LMICpopulations and what is actually available on the ground. Prominent clinicians and academics, as well as international organisations such as theWorldHealthOrganization (WHO, 2008, 2010), have called for the "scaling up" of services for mentalhealth inLMIC. "Scaling up" involves increasing the number of people receiving services, increasing the range of services offered, ensuring these services are evidence-based, using models of service delivery that have been found to be effective in a similar contexts, and sustaining these services through effective policy, implementation and financing (Eaton et al., 2011). Yet in light of the limited resources available to support mentalhealth, it is pertinent to ask whether it makes sense to try to export systems of service delivery that have been developed in highcountries toLMIC. Will this venture be sustainable in the longer term? More importantly, will these systems actually deliver added value for the increase in budgetary expenditure that will be required?
  The seductive allure of biologicalPsychiatry
  In highcountries, mentalhealth services tend to gravitate aroundPsychiatry, the branch ofMedicine that is concerned with the study and treatment of mentaillness, emotional disturbance, and abnormal behaviour. BiologicalPsychiatry is an approach toPsychiatry that aims to understand mentalillness in terms of the biological function of the nervoussystem.
  The rise of biologicalPsychiatry promised great things. Biological explanations of mentalillness permeated the public consciousness, and the hunt was on to discover the magical compounds that could redress the chemical imbalances that were purported to cause mentaillness. Various different medications have been developed and the marketed. In the past fortyyears, the sales of psychotropic medications have increased dramatically. Yet despite the exponential rise in sales of these medications, the evidence for biological causes for mentaillnesses such as depression and schizophrenia remain fairly weak (Nestler et al., 2002; Stahl, 2000). The continued absence of definitive evidence to support biological processes that are causal in mentaillness has led to the suggestion that biologicalPsychiatry is ‘a practice in search of a science’ (Wyatt & Midkiff, 2006). Despite these concerns, biologicalPsychiatry continues to exert a strong influence on the delivery of mentalhealthservices in highincomecountries such as theUK and America [US].
  The seductive allure of the rationale underlying biologicalPsychiatry is plain to see. If mentaillnesses were to have universal biological causes, then standard treatments could be readily applied across the world irrespective of local differences and associated cultural differences. If evidencebased practices lead to positive outcomes in highincomecountries, then similar positive outcomes will be observed in LMIC. Right?
  This is where the picture gets a bit more complicated. Before we can answer this question, we need to be clear on what we mean by: (1) ‘evidencebased practices’ and (2) ‘positive outcomes’. What is considered to be ‘evidencebased practice’ can serve powerful economic and political interests (Kirmayer & Minas, 2000). In 2007, US citizens alone spent twentyfivebillionspounds on antidepressants and antipsychotics (Whitaker, 2010). All this in spite of the fact that claims about drugeffectiveness are at times overstated, and that pharmaceutical companies have been found to employ questionable research methodologies (Glenmullen, 2002; Valenstein, 1998; Whitaker, 2010). Professor DavidHealy (Psychiatrist, University of Cardiff) has stated that a ‘large number of clinical trials done are not reported if the results don’t suit the companies’ sponsoring (the) study’ (tinyurl.com/dxlh55w). The evidencebase is heavily skewed towards research conducted in highincomecountries. Since producing hard evidence depends on the costly standards of psychiatric epidemiology and randomised clinical trials, it can be difficult for clinicians or researchers inLMIC to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge (Kirmayer, 2006). The lack of mentalhealth related research being conducted inLMIC countries is evident in the finding that over ninetypercent of papers published in a threeyear period in sixleading psychiatric journals came from euroamerican countries (Patel & Sumathipala, 2001). An inductive, ["]bottomup approach["] to research emphasising the importance of local conceptualisations of mentalhealth difficulties and focusing on local priorities in different LMIC is required.
  Even if the research capacity inLMIC can be increased, difficulties remain. The issue of what constitutes ‘positive outcomes’ in relation to mentaillness has plagued clinical practice and research for manyyears. There is currently no accepted consensus on what constitutes positive outcome for individuals with mentaillness. Traditionally, Psychiatry has been concerned with eradicating symptoms of
mentaillness. However, it is important to appreciate that clinical symptoms do not improve in parallel with social or functional aspects of service users’s presentation (Liberman et al., 2002). Functional outcome relates to variables such as cognitive impairment, residential independence, vocational outcomes, and/or social functions (Harvey & Bellack, 2009). In this sense, using symptomatic remission as an indicator of recovery can yield better rates of good outcome than using indicators of functional recovery (Robinson et al., 2005).
  Another important consideration relating to outcome in mentalillness relates to the extent to which particular outcomes are culturally sensitive and inclusive (Vaillant, 2012). Marked disparities have been highlighted between ethnicminoritygroups and whitepeople in outcome, serviceusage and servicesatisfaction (Sashidharan, 2001). The lack of culturally inclusive understandings of positive outcome in mentalillness is compounded by the underrepresentation of black- and minority-ethnicgroups in mentalhealthrelatedresearch. This has led to some concluding that there is a lack of adequate evidence supporting the use of ‘evidencebased’ psychological therapies with individuals from black- and minority-ethnicpopulations (Hall, 2001). Considering these issues, it seems that ["]the jury["] is in no position to deliver a ["]verdict["] on whether ‘evidencebased’ practices for mentaillness developed in highincomecountries deliver positive outcomes inLMIC.
  Diagnosis and culture
  Despite the question marks that remain about the causes of mentaillness, the veracity of the evidence base, what constitutes good outcome, and how inclusive mentalhealth services are to cultural diversity within the population, the Psychiatryheavyperspective has a powerful say in how mentalhealth difficulties are understood inLMIC. Dissenting voices have questioned the wisdom of this approach. One particular source of dissention relates to the process of psychiatric diagnosis. The international classification systems for diagnosing mentaillnesses (such as depression and schizophrenia) have been criticised for making unwarranted assumptions that these diagnostic categories have the same meaning when carried over to a new cultural context (Kleinman, 1977, 1987). This issue has potentially been obscured by the fact that the panels that finalise these diagnostic categories have been criticised for being unrepresentative of the global population. Of the 47 psychiatrists who contributed to the initial draft of themostrecent WorldHealthOrganization diagnosticsystem (ICD-10: WHO, 1992), only two were fromAfrica, and none of the fourteenfieldtrialcentres were located in subSaharanAfrica. Inevitably this led to the omission of conditions that had been described for many years inAfrica (Patel & Winston, 1994), such as ‘brain fag syndrome’. (This was initially a term used almost exclusively in westAfrica, generally manifesting as vague somatic symptoms, depression and difficulty concentrating, often in male students.)
  ICD10 does at least acknowledge that there are exceptions to the apparent universality of psychiatric diagnoses by including what are called culturespecific disorders. One such example is koro, a form of genital retraction anxiety which presents in parts ofAsia. Prior toICD10, symptompresentations such as koro tended to be subsumed into existing diagnoses such as delusional disorder (Crozier, 2011). But the inclusion of culturespecific disorders only serves to perpetuate a skewed view of the impact of culture on mentalhealth; ‘cultural’ explanations seem to be reserved for nonWestern patients/populations that show koro(-like) syndromes, and not for diagnoses that are more prevalent in highincomecountries (e.g. anorexianervosa). Indeed, it has been suggested that many psychiatric conditions described in these diagnostic manuals (such as anorexianervosa, chronicfatiguesyndrome) might actually be largely culturebound to euroamerican populations (Kleinman, 2000; Lopez & Guernaccia, 2000). Because people living in "western" countries tend to see the world through a cultural lens that has been tinted by psychiatric conceptualisations of mentaillness, they are blind to how specific to "western" countries these conceptualisations actually are.
  TransculturalPsychiatry
  Culture has been defined as "a set of institutional settings, formal and informal practices, explicit and tacit rules, ways of making sense and presenting one’s experience in forms that will influence others" (Kirmayer, 2006, p.133). Interest in the potential interplay between culture and mentaillness first arose in colonialtimes as psychiatrists and anthropologists surveyed the phenomenology and prevalence of mentaillnesses in newly colonised parts of the world. This led to the development of a new discipline called transculturalPsychiatry, a branch ofPsychiatry that is concerned with the cultural and ethnic context of mentaillness.
  In its early incarnation, transculturalPsychiatry was blighted by the racist attitudes that prevailed at that time about the notion of naive "native" minds. However, over time, this began to change as people began to understand that Psychiatry was itself a cultural construct. In1977, ArthurKleinman proposed a "new crossculturalPsychiatry" that promised a revitalised tradition that gave due respect to cultural difference and did not export psychiatric theories that were themselves culturebound. Transcultural (or crosscultural)Psychiatry is now understood to be concerned with the ways in which a medicalsymptom, diagnosis or practice reflects social, cultural, and Moral concerns (Kirmayer, 2006).
  Tensions exist in transculturalPsychiatry. Clinicians, who are motivated to produce good outcomes for serviceusers, may work from the premise that there is crosscultural portability of psychiatric or psychological theory and practice. Although well intended, this approach can be met with disapproval from socialscientists who are focused on advancing medicalAnthropology as a scholarly discipline. However, it is becoming clear that in this era of rapid globalisation, mentalhealthpractitioners, social scientists and anthropologists need to come together and engage in constructive dialogue aimed at developing crosscultural understanding about how best to meet the mentalhealth needs of people across the globe.
  The need for interdisciplinary working in promoting improved understanding about the interplay between culture and mentaillness has been demonstrated by a growing body of evidence indicating that exporting Western conceptualisations of mentalhealth difficulties intoLMIC can have a detrimental impact on local populations. EthanWatters’s book CrazyLikeUs cites examples from different parts of the world (including China, Japan, Peru, SriLanka, and Tanzania) where the introduction of psychiatric conceptualisations of mentaillness has potentially changed how distress is manifested, or introduced barriers to recovery (e.g. the emergence of expressed emotion in the families of individuals with psychosis inTanzania). Watters (2010) cites the work ofGaithriFernando who has written extensively about the aftermath of the tsunami that struckSriLanka in2006. Fernando claims that "western" conceptualisations of trauma and the diagnostic criteria forPTSD were not appropriate for a srilankan context. Fernando found that srilankan people were much more likely to report physical symptoms following distressing events. This was attributed to the observation that the notion of a mindbodydisconnect is less pronounced inSriLanka. Sri lankans were also more likely to see the negative consequences of the tsunami in terms of the impact it had on social relationships. Because sri lankan people tended not to report problematic reactions relating to internal emotional states (e.g. fear or anxiety), the rates ofPTSD following the tsunami were considerably lower than had been anticipated. Fernando concluded that western techniques for conceptualising, assessing and treating the distress that people were experiencing were inadequate.
  Watters also explores the way in which understanding about depression has changed inJapan over thelasttwentyyears. This sobering tale allowsWatters to explore how the interplay between cultural factors and notions of mentaillness can be manipulated for financial gain. In the1960s, HubertTellenbach had introduced the notion of a personality type called TypusMelancholicus. This idea heavily influenced psychiatric thinking in Japan. Typus melancholicus had substantial congruence with a respected personality type inJapan; "those who were serious, diligent and thoughtful and expressed great concern for the welfare of others dotdotdot prone to feeling overwhelming sadness when cultural upheaval disordered their lives and threatened the welfare of others" (Watters, 2010; p.228). Although at the end of thetwentiethcentury there had been a psychiatric term in the japaneseLanguage for depression (utsubyô), this tended to relate to a rare and very debilitating condition. Prior to2000, there had been no real market for prescribing antidepressant medications in Japan. However, shifting public perception about TypusMelancholicus closer toward the western conceptualisation of depression would have huge implications for antidepressant prescribing inJapan. Watters (2010) claims that GlaxoSmithKline’s enthusiasm to build a market for its new antidepressantmedication inJapan dovetailed conveniently with a GlaxoSmithKline sponsored "international consensus group" of experts on culturalPsychiatry discussing crosscultural variations in depression (Ballenger et al., 2001) concluding that depression was vastly underestimated inJapan. Depression is now conceptualised inJapan as affecting individuals (particularly men) who are too hardworking and have overinternalised the japaneseEthic of productivity and corporateloyalty. In the last few years, the market for antidepressants in Japan has grown exponentially. An important consequence of this "aggressive pharmaceuticalisation", is that psychological and social treatments for depression are being ditched (Kitanaka, 2011).
  Globalisation of mentalhealth
  There is a growing willingness to explore ways of addressing inequalities in the provision made for mentaillness across the globe, but translating this willingness into effective action is fraught with potential danger. We must guard against assumptions that indigenous concepts of mentalhealth difficulties inLMIC and strategies used in these contexts to deal with it are based on ignorance (Summerfield, 2008). Despite the apparent sophistication of-Laws, -policies, -services and -treatments for mentaillness in highincomecountries, outcomes for individuals with mentalhealth problems may not actually be any better than inLMIC. Research has failed to conclusively show that outcome for complex mentaillnesses (such as psychosis) in highincomecountries are superior to outcomes inLMIC (where populations may not had access to medicationbased treatments) (Alem et al., 2009; Cohen et al., 2008; Hopper et al., 2007). The lack of academic and political engagement with alternative nonwestern perspectives means that "western" narratives about "mentaillness" continue to dominate over local understanding (Timimi, 2010), yet we in highincomecountries have much to learn about mentalhealthprovision, particularly in relation to promoting inclusion of black- and ethnic-minoritymembers of the population.
  To conclude, I would like to come back to the title. Rather than the globalisation of mentalillness, perhaps what we should be aiming for is the globalisation of mentalhealth. This is an immensely more inclusive aspiration. By promoting global mentalhealth, there is the potential for clinicians, academics, service users and policy makers from across the world to work together with a shared purpose. By exchanging knowledge, LMIC can benefit from hard lessons learned in highincomecountries, and highincomecountries can look afresh at how mentalhealth difficulties are understood and treated. It will be important for clinicians and academics working in highincomecountries to critically reflect on their own practice and question the accepted wisdom about mentalhealthprovision.
  To assist with this knowledge exchange, a new MSCGlobalMentalHealthprogramme has been launched at theUniversityOfGlasgow. Global mentalhealth has been defined as the "area of study, research and practice that places a priority on improving mentalhealth and achieving equity in mentalhealth for all people worldwide" (Patel & Prince, 2010). The programme seeks to develop leaders in mentalhealth who can design, implement and evaluate sustainable services, policies and treatments to promote mentalhealth in culturally appropriate ways across the globe. Global mentalhealth is an emergent area of study. Momentum is building. Although the challenges are both numerous and complex, the prize is a worthy one. The cost of not acting can be counted in the everincreasing number of people whose lives are being affected by mentalhealthproblems across the globe. [Compromise cowardic at thelastparagraph.]