National interests vs. ethics

For the last two or three millennia - at least - humans have been on a quest for human rights, a quest with an inevitability that comes out of its moral rightness.

Despite that, there has been bitter resistance to this quest for decency, resistance based on inconvenience, habit (dressed up as tradition and the like, in many cases) / laziness, monetary costs, and so on.

The resistance based on (often presumed, rather than actual, and often inaccurate as current financial and non-financial costs are ignored) monetary costs has often come from governments (especially during the transition from monarchies to democracy, but subsequently notably in the USA under conservative governments), and has often been claimed to be on behalf of business.

Well, for a couple of decades now, business has recognised the importance and value of ethics, and has been making ethical ways of doing business a key part of their existence - although conservative politicians have not recognised that yet, or are too bemused or stunned by the change to accede to it.

So, for more than two millennia, the universality and essentialness of human rights, dignity and ethics have been becoming more widely accepted and incorporated into the natural way of living, including doing business.

The exception is the concept of "national interest", which still seems to be so largely focused on short term issues, particularly financial - despite the increasing understanding that problems overseas can influence one's home nation (refugees from West Asia being the currently most obvious example, but refugees from Viêt Nám were the example from the 1970s that I grew up with). There was a while where humanitarian interventions were considered (e.g., during the latter stages of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia), but resistance has quashed that to a disturbing extent - resistance based on "don't want to be bothered" disguised as concerns over cost (and even worse, misrepresented as concern for others rights - which is actually a flat out lie, just as "privacy" is used as a lie to cover inaction on human rights in some businesses).

I consider it inevitable that the trend towards greater integration consciously of ethics into all that we do will filter through to, and ultimately radically transform - despite self-centred, selfish and small-minded conservative die-hards - the concept of national interest.

The creation, existence, and work of the United Nations is, despite its imperfections and problems, testament to that trend. 

In the past, national interest has often been interpreted in the context of war and trade: it is now going to be increasingly interpreted through the lens of the climate crisis. To some extent, that has already commenced, but in government circles it still tends to be viewed from a monetary point of view - e.g., costs of preparing vs. costs of recovery after events, costs of transforming agriculture vs. costs of preventing further climate change (actually, that last one is just a wish of mine: I don't think government has realised that is going to be an issue yet, although the problems over the Murray-Darling may lead to some realisation of that in my nation), and so on.

Few, if any, governments have yet properly realised, comprehended, and come to terms with the fact that the ways of governing will go down the same ethical paths as business (New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern is a welcome exception to that concern), and thus the climate crisis needs to be looked at not only in terms of environment and costs, but also from a point of view of ethics: both are as fundamental rallying cries as freedom and democracy.

Which governments will become trendsetters on this - which really means, which set of voters will recognise that their "enlightened self-interest" includes being ethical overseas, as well as at home?

I suggest that attitudes to climate crisis refugees is a useful indicator of how governments are progressing on this, but their actions with regard to humanitarian intervention are also a useful indicator.


Note: this has been inspire partly by starting to read George Kennan's "American Diplomacy" (Pub. University of Chicago press, 2012 [first ed. pub. 1951], ISBN 978-0226431482; Amazon).