To hinder what‘s senseless and insensible to trend, we need strong globalized social sanctioning

Sir, Gillian Tett asks: “Can sensible ever ‘trend’?”, “The battle for political sense and sensibility”, November 15.

In these days of information overload, when no one has time to digest what they hear, read and see, and only have time to file it in black or white, or right or wrong cabinets, that is indeed an extremely important question.

Unfortunately, for the time being, it has to be answered with an “on its own, without assistance No!”

With respect to justice I have for long argued that more than fighting for justice, which places us on the route to something infinite, where we never really know where we find ourselves, it is much more effective to fight against the injustices, which are easier to define.

In the same vein, instead of trying for sense or sensibility to trend, let us at least start by making sure that what’s senseless and insensible cannot trend.

As a minimum it behooves the world to find credible instruments that can shame out some of the complete senseless and insensible falsehoods that, floating around on the web, causes real idiots to believe they have confirmed grounds to believe in their idiocies, and give them instruments to advance these, and so create legions of fools.

Is that easy, or even possible? That is an irrelevant question, it has to be tried.

Would that be censorship? No, much more like social sanctioning… on a global scale.

Our teenagers’ vampires might end up sucking our baby-boomer blood

Sir, Ms Gillian Tett commenting on the books current young read, like those with vampires, writes: “teenagers now face a world where boundaries are blurred… lines between childhood and adulthood, good and evil, friend and for, male or female are no longer clear cut”, “Teenage books with added bite” August 10.

That it is indeed scary stuff. Not so much because of boundaries being blurred, but for the fact that since humans cannot travel through life without some kind of boundaries, we are not really clear about what the new boundaries might look like… perhaps books on vampires going after baby-boomers’ blood will hit the charts soon?

But when we on the opposite side of the paper also find Christopher Caldwell having us pray not to fall in hands of a justice which allows “guilty rich people buying their way out of convictions and innocent rich people being shaken down by zealous prosecutors”, something for which we clearly must share somehow some blame for… we also know that such sucking our baby-boomer blood would not be totally undeserved, “Ecclestone’s cash tarnishes the court that sets him free”.

Perfection is indeed the enemy of the good

Sir, Samuel Brittan in “We do not prosper by income or happiness alone” September 4 writes about Amartya Sen book “The idea of justice” in which the author proposes, among other, the “the piecemeal removal of specific injustices in the absence of an ideal society." That is absolutely right. 

In my book “Voice an Noise”, 2006, where I described some of my experiences as an Executive Director at the World Bank I held that, at sixty years of age, that institution “should perhaps be renewing its vows in order to move up from “knowledge” into wisdom and instead of trying to advance impossible agenda like justice and social responsibility might do better settling for fights much easier to monitor, such as one  against injustices and social irresponsibility. 

Also in El Universal, Caracas Venezuela, 2004 in “McPrisons” I wrote: “Justice is something very difficult to understand with precision, since it is situated along a continuum that becomes finite only when it reaches Divine Justice. 

On the other hand, injustices are much easier to identify and, in our countries, prisons themselves represent one of the greatest injustices. In terms of the use of scarce resources, as an economist I am convinced that programs of Judicial Reforms would be better served by improving prisons than by investing in Supreme Court buildings.”