After Russia’s anticipated invaders stormed into Ukraine, a widely-viewed lecture by a Yale historian flushed forward a new point previously not apparent to many.
LESSON 5: Remember Professional Ethics — YouTube
China’s upper ranks are full of capitalists who value business and competition. But they’re not for democracy. Their mainland leaders are quite against it.
Many in the west, apparently, unknowingly, conflated capitalism with democracy. This “mistake” accelerated, Yale historian Timothy Snyder theorized, in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall, which symbolized the fall of communism itself.
Say what?
Here is a transcript of Snyder’s lecture “Remember Professional Ethics” where Snyder says lawyers, judges, other professions outside of business learn ethics as part of their training:
Lesson number five of On Tyranny is “Remember Professional Ethics”. I’m going to read the lesson then offer a few reflections.
“When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important.
It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.”
The first thing I want to say is that you know, as in all the other cases I’m only reading the lesson here. I’m not giving the historical examples that back it up. But for this lesson in particular I think it’s probably worth stressing that these are not theoretical examples. It’s literally true that, for example, in the case of Nazi Germany, the concentration camps needed and relied upon willing businessmen. It is literally the case that show trials, as for example in the Soviet Union, required [unethical] judges and prosecutors and other legal professionals.
And these extreme cases of how things, from our point of view, might go wrong, are instructive. Because they tell us that professional groups are a very important part of … let’s call it “civil society”.
So in in every attempt to consolidate power, what you find is that power is going to try to limit the number of opponents.
It’s going to try to simplify the regime itself. It’s going to try to, it’s going to try to make sure there are a few strong institutions between it and people. And it’s going to try to leave people as individuated as isolated as alienated as possible.
A.J.’s note: Snyder’s use of “individuated” surprises me. In this light, it turns out “individuation” is a sweet-spot word. Too little individuation among citizens means you have fascism. Too much individuation among citizens means alienation, in which every citizen routes all thoughts and actions through a Big Brother-like authority figure.
This is why this thing called “civil society” is so important. Because “civil society” is that set of organizations which allows people to connect among themselves based upon the things that they do or think or believe.
The question of whether: lawyers or judges or military officers are just people with titles and uniforms. Or whether they have some kind of, let’s call it “guild loyalty”.
They have some set of values which is not just a watered-down version of whatever the regime is telling them, is a crucial question for the future of any
democracy. And of our democracy.We certainly saw that during the course of the last few years. It mattered a great deal whether lawyers would go along with lawsuits which they understood to be farcical and false, having to do with Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
It mattered just as much that the highest ranking officers of our armed forces were not willing to go along with a coup attempt in the summer of 2020.
So much has happened that it’s easy to forget even things which seemed totally shocking at the time.
But even though they were superseded by still more shocking events and another coup attempt, the summer of 2020 was a moment we should remember. Because it’s a moment when the leaders of our military made it clear that they weren’t going along. Why? On the basis of some set of ethics, which is not the same thing as what the leader tells you at a given moment.
It goes without saying that we could also have had a coup d’etat which was
successful in late 2020, early 2021, had the military been willing to go
along. Or had other institutions been willing to go along.That the institutions themselves didn’t rescue us — they never do —
one of the things which kept the United States recognizably a democracy during that period was the decisions that people made on the basis of codes of ethics which have to do with their professions. And in those weeks that could be the military, it could also have been lawyers.Let me now look just for a moment into … into the future.
Do … businessmen … have professional ethics, in this, in the sense that I’m talking about? I’m not going to answer this question. I’m I’m … I’m asking it.
It seems to me be historically open question. If I look back to the past, I can … I can note a couple phenomena which are very much of interest.
Number one: in the important paradigmatic unforgettable example of regime change which is the rise of Nazi Germany, businesses played a certain very important part. It was not that all the businessmen were Nazis by, by no means.
It was that big business was opposed to labor unions. And opposed to democracy, and thought that the world would be easier to handle without labor unions and democracy, right? That is part of Hitler’s rise to power.
A second thing which is worth knowing about history, more recent history, the history of the last few decades, has to do with coup attempts.
Coup attempts will, are much more likely to succeed if important businessmen are on the side of the people who are [behind] the coup attempts. The United States in 2020 and 2021 is a recent example of the opposite: that coup attempts are more likely to fail when business leaders are against them.
So what business ethics means in politics is a question I’m only opening I’m not trying to answer it. I’m pointing out, though, that there is there is there’s
clear causal force in what business leaders decide to do. And where there’s
causal force there’s also responsibility.If in the past the success or failure of coup attempts, or indeed the … the survival or the failure of democracy, has depended upon the choices of business leaders, I think we can confidently expect that it will in the future as well.
In the U.S. in 2021, and years to come, this is particularly relevant to the example, to the issue of voting.
A key issue in the United States now is whether we will have the principle of one-person-one-vote, or not.
That issue will be talked around, it will be approached indirectly, people will
talk about fraud, or their talk about uncertainty, or they’ll talk about that their constituents have concerns.But what is happening is the disenfranchisement of a very large number of Americans and the attempt to establish the principle through overwhelming practice and repetition that we are not really a country where one-person-one-vote prevails.
Business has a lot to say about that. Whether — so to put the matter you know as clear as I can — whether a business ethic develops in the 21st century which says “we prefer to inhabit a country where one person one vote is real and not just a declaration”. Whether or not business leaders can stick to that position, can adopt it, and can stick to it, I think will have a great deal to do with what happens in the years to come.
So the original lesson is remember professional ethics. And in the lesson I talked about judges and, and … and lawyers and civil servants. But at the very end I also mentioned businessmen.
And I think in the years to come, um what businessmen, businesswomen
business leaders business people choose to do whether there’s a business ethic which has something to do with a political system with a normative affirmation of just the basic idea that everybody has the right to vote, that could well turn out to be decisive in American politics.So, remember professional ethics. Thank you. [Music]
That’s interesting. The people in my life closest to Silicon Valley’s inner circle don’t seem to be aware of this slide out of democracy, but they’re contemptuous of people who waste time consuming journalism. It sounds radical, what Snyder’s saying.
But maybe democracy isn’t necessary anymore. Does technology render it obsolete?
