The United Sates feels, more and more like a failed state.
I know that is an odd statement for perhaps the richest, more culturally influential, most powerful nation on the planet, but dig a bit deeper and you see the signs all around. We have many more mass shootings, and mass school shootings, than peer nations, for one example. We have higher infant mortality rates than most peer nations as another. But this dysfunction shows up in other, subtler, ways as well, as two recent stories highlight.
The first feels like a comedian’s punchline. The Washington Post has created a chatbot using imitative AI tools to summarize its excellent climate change coverage. When asked about how much energy the chatbot uses to do these summaries, however, it refuses to answer. This, despite the fact that the Washington Post itself has done excellent work on the environmental disaster that is imitative AI. Like I said, it sounds like an easy joke. But is a symptom of a deeper rot.
The Washington Post is supposed to be a serious newspaper, a paper that people turn to for serious news and honest answers about the import questions of the day. The newspaper’s motto is Democracy Dies in Darkness. No modest, shrinking violets, these. But when faced with a choice between truth and money, when faced with a decision between providing the honest answers and protecting a business relationship, they chose to protect the business relationship, to prioritize the alleged savings of the imitative AI chatbot over the very real damage it did to their journalism. It is a decision that no self-respecting person, much less a self-respecting newsperson, should ever make. But people make it, and excuse making it, all the time.
The second example is more serious. A man was convicted of shaking his baby to death nearly a quarter century ago. Since then, the science that led to his conviction has been thoroughly discredited. The case was so weakened that the DA’s office joined the petition to have his conviction overturned. The judge the hearing was assigned to, however, was the same judge that tried the man originally. His refused to let the man go free, in part because no one argued for keeping him in jail. Imagine — a conviction is so flawed that everyone agrees you should go free, but the judge sees that agreement as a reason to keep you in jail. Kafka himself wouldn’t write something so grotesque.
The notion, of course, that the judge who presided over the original mistake was allowed to sit in judgement of his own work is ludicrous. The incentive for the judge to cover up his mistake, especially since he is elected, is overwhelming. But then, we live in a world with Supreme Court justices claim that “forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually innocent.’ ”” What matters is that the courts be protected from having to review their potential mistakes. As long as the form was followed, the results don’t matter.
In all of these cases, we have situations where the needs of the people running the organization are given preference over the needs of the people the organization is meant to serve. Professional ethics and obligations are not so much as given lip service and there is no countervailing power that can force these organizations to behave in an ethical, constituent serving manner. These examples are not as important as infant mortality or mass shootings, but they do highlight how this kind of rot has seeped into almost every aspect of almost every important institution.
Institutions are only useful to the extent that they serve their constituents. If the people in them cannot force the institution to use the power of the institution correctly, either through an appeal to ethics or through an appeal to a countervailing power, then the institutions inevitably fail their constituents. And when that happens to enough institutions, the state upon which rests upon those institutions totters and falls.