167. What Barack Obama learned from my urologist.

 
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The President must have the same urologist I have.  He believes in watchful waiting.

Let me tell you about "watchful waiting."  It's the greatest treatment ever to rise to the top of the options-list doctors give their patients.  You know, in those waiting-room brochures. 

For prostate malignancies "watchful waiting" used to be well below the aggressive treatments — prostatectomy, radiation therapy, hormone therapy.  My first urologist, as soon as he saw the biopsy results, wanted to do major surgery.  A later one wanted to chemically castrate me.  "We've got to go right at this thing."  That fit the temperament of most of his manly patients.  This is malignant, man.  We don't want to mess around.  "OK Doc, let's roll."

This was so common in my town and in the literature that I began to think urologists all had the same mentor.  Some Edmund Burke.  "All that is needed for the triumph of prostate cancer is for good urologists to do nothing."

Well, my present urologist, the one I share with Barack Obama, didn't follow him.  He advised something pretty close to nothing.  You just keep an eye on the tumor and not until you get a reliable sign that it's going lethal do you act.

What led him to differ from his colleagues then, or what led so many of them to come over to his side since then, I don't know.  Maybe they saw so many people (like my brother) suffering so much from the aggressive treatment that they began to have doubts.  Maybe the experience of a few patients (like me, with seven years of normal life) was so happy that they thought it was a good gamble.  Whatever it was, the order on the list was reversed, no dire consequences followed, and my urologist (Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic) is getting praise from all over the country.

Now I want to praise Obama for the way he, ignoring the manly Republicans, has adopted "watchful waiting" as his approach to malignancies in world affairs.  Where George Bush, with nearly all of Congress behind him, wanted to roll in Iraq, Obama wanted to wait.  Where John McCain wants to roll in the Middle East Obama wants to wait.  To Bush Saddam Hussein was clearly malignant.  To John McCain Bashar al-Assad is clearly malignant. " When you've got a malignancy why mess around?"

Maybe by now the suffering caused by the roll into Iraq is changing some minds.  Maybe Congress and the electorate are ready to join the small, unmanly cohort (the French, those accordion players) who wanted to watch and wait in 2003.  They clearly seem less willing to roll against that evil monster Assad.

I use the word "evil" there because that's the word gung-ho spin-doctors use when they want to move a nation's citizens to roll with their client in international affairs.  It's the word George Bush's doctors used for the Iraqi and Iranian and North Korean malignancies.  It's the word Ronald Reagan's doctors used for the Soviet Union.  It makes watching and waiting much harder.  "This is evil, man."  But it's very effective with a religious electorate.  It makes the malignancy more "theological" — as Bush's speechwriter explained when he inserted it.

"Evil" is just one of those words that Republicans (and some Democrats — mainly out of the need to compete with them for votes) use to tap into American testosterone (see "holy testosterone" in Post #158).  And the users are nearly always vague with respect to specific action.  What do you do to stamp out evil?  What do you do to show you are not "soft on" communism?  that you are not surrendering in the "war on terrorism"?

Well, one thing about my urologist, he was not vague.  And he made sure you knew what he meant. "Watchful waiting" did not mean "gentle acting."  If the threat was lethal there would be no limit to his aggressiveness.  He was ready to cut, plant, and castrate.  All in substantive action.  Nothing symbolic. 

OK, here's where I see President Obama, listening to a physician who didn't just say "malignancy!" but asked right away, "How fast is it growing?  What can it do to change this patient's life, in comparison with the other options?  Is it a lethal threat?"  All are specific and precise questions whose parallels I see in the questions I think Obama is asking about the malignancies his countrymen urge him to treat around the world.

166. Changing the Culture at Penn State

How do you change a culture?  Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, thinks you can do it by hurting people who are part of that culture. 

Was there "a culture of reverence for the football program" at Penn State?  Yes.  The NCAA executive committee's findings (or rather the findings of Louis Freeh, which Emmert and his committee followed) showed that it was "ingrained at all levels of the campus community." 

So the NCAA kept the football team out of bowl games for four years, reduced the number of scholarships that could be granted its players, turned 111 of its victories into losses, and fined the school 60 million dollars.  That hurts the students, the alumni, the fans, the players, the coaches, and, thinking of that 60 million, the professors, the librarians, the administrators, and anybody who has a stake in Penn State's reputation in any enterprise that requires money.  All of them.

This action has been subject to some very sharp criticism.  Gary Alan Fine, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, has compared the changing of wins to losses in the record book to the rewriting of history by the communists in Orwell's 1984.  Twenty-nine past chairs of the Penn State Faculty Senate have objected that the Freeh statement about the culture is plain false: not one of them had ever "been asked to change grades for athletes or approve of phantom courses or majors."

Those are big issues but next to culture-change they're small.  Culture-change is beginning to look like the great challenge of the 21st century.  Isn't it what we're trying to do in the Middle East?  Isn't it what Thomas Friedman and so many other editorialists wanted us to do in Iraq?  Now here's Emmert, having a go at Penn State.

And as an old culture-changer — that is, as a teacher, a supplier the arts and sciences to the undersupplied — I have to say that he has the wrong end of the stick.  You don't change culture by hurting people.  Hurting is what you do to change behavior.  You know, the way armies and police forces do.  To change culture you talk, point, sing, dance, and hold up for admiration — the way artists and profs do. 

We profs mainly talk and point.  And we have no doubt we can change a culture.  We do it all the time.  Small-town culture, fundamentalist religious culture, xenophobic Midwest culture, redneck Appalachian culture, he-man culture, more cultures than you can shake a stick at, they all send their products into our classrooms.  There's a lot of resistance there sometimes, but we're eager to, we've got to, overcome it.  Change the fundamentalist culture and you can teach evolution, change the he-man culture and you can teach poetry.  We get right at it (it's slow work) and after a while we have what we need, students assimilated into the academic culture. 

"If you're saying that that is what Emmert ought to be doing I think you have missed something.  He may be a prof but he has taken a policeman's job.  He presides over an organization that's supposed to check for violation of rules and punish violators — that is, hurt them.  That's what he's doing." 

In which case I think you've exposed the real problem here: confusion.  Emmert is trying to use his police powers to do a prof's (or a priest's, or a parent's) job.  Doesn't he see that powers, starting with the big ones named in our Constitution, should be separate?  that Americans are surprised and offended when they are not?  Look at that report he relies on.  Freeh finds "a striking lack of empathy" for the victims.  What's a judge doing talking about empathy?  That's child-psychologist talk.  Parent talk.  "I'll handle the feelings," says the mother. "You law people just tell me what he did."

That's being offended.  Here's being surprised.  The infractions committee of Emmert's own organization didn't take up the Penn State case.  The reason?  According to some former members, "because it involved a cover-up of criminal activity rather than a violation of traditional NCAA bylaws."  It wasn't in their domain.  But (surprise!) there was Emmert, imposing penalties.

By now I think we all have a pretty good idea of the division of labor.  Architects design, builders build, realtors sell.  In America that gets an early boost in our schooling, when we learn about the organization of our government.  We each play our part and avoid playing somebody else's part and we get the benefits of an ordered society.

"Ah," says my friend, "but underneath this division we are all human beings, and that's what Emmert and Freeh, when they look at what was done to those children, can't resist being.  You want to keep them in their compartments, rational and cold.  I prefer having them out as caring, feeling human beings.  I join Emmert and Freeh."

I do too.  In my heart.  What heart can resist the call to do something, to protect childhood innocence and goodness from adult evil?  But my mind holds me back.  It consults adult experience and says, "Calculate the risks."  Here the evil is a culture and what's done to it is a hurtful act against individuals, justified by the fact of evil.  But "evil," like the on-the-spot word, "bad," is not a fact word; it's a judgment word, and subjective.  Use it to justify a hurtful action and there's no place to stop.  If you're not hurting ghetto-dwellers and Roma and Inuit and anybody else whose culture you judge to be "bad" you're helpless before those who do.

How different from punishing people for their behavior.  Before you can do that you have meet all kinds of conditions, set up, usually by governments, for their protection.  Definition of the crime, rules of evidence, guarantees of process.  You can probably find most of these conditions in the books that both Freeh and Emmert have, up to this point, had to follow.  Punish them for their culture, though, and where are the books you follow?

So there's the first risk, making yourself the tolerator, if not the companion, of bigots and kooks, high-handed culture-punishers.  The second risk is that you'll make an intolerable mess.  If you sweep aside all distinctions between assigned jobs what happens to our ordered society?  What happens to order itself, to reason?  Reason says, "Keep things straight."  Humane feelings say, "Make things good."  Follow the latter at the expense of the former and you're going to wind with everything crooked, a mess.

"So, do you say to Mark Emmert. 'Do nothing'?  'Look at an attack on innocence and goodness and do nothing'?  You, my friend, are concerned about risk, and say that punishment for bad culture risks the loss of reason.  I say that failure to punish risks the triumph of evil.  Edmund Burke said, 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.'"

Yes I do say to Emmert, "Do nothing" — though I'd put it as, "Mind your own business."  Looking at Iraq, and now Syria, I have to say that.  And I'd like to add this to Burke: "All that is necessary to make a mess (in international affairs called a 'quagmire') is for good people, every time they see evil, to think they have to do something."

165. Phone-sex comedy

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In Stephen Holden's review of For a Good Time, . . . Call, a "fizzy, potty-mouthed comedy" about two nice girls who do phone sex for fun and profit, he says that "the fantasies in which they collaborate with their male clients have little to do with who they really are" (NYT 9-1-12).

I have to stop at "who they really are."  Maybe some people know who other people really are, maybe they know who they themselves really are, and maybe, as a consequence, they're able to talk so confidently.  "Oh sure, there's the fantasizing us and the real us.  There's no connection."  So fizz on.  But other people will be troubled by the assumption of knowledge here, and want to take the director, Jamie Travis, into the seminar room — knowing well what they will hear when they come out: "Lighten up!  Lighten up!"

Then there are those who, right in the middle of a seminar, can't keep from fantasizing: "Suppose I were as smart as those people in New York and knew who everybody really was?  Suppose self-knowledge were a snap?  Suppose I knew for sure that 'adopting a pornographic mind-set' had no consequences in my real life?"

There in my fantasy is my good Episcopalian mother giving those young ladies a talking-to:  "What do you think the Collect for Purity is about?  'Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts.'  You must know hearts have thoughts.  Those are the things you're selling your customers.  So what do you think 'cleanse' means?  You shouldn't use words unless you know what they mean."

"And as for you, Stephen Holden, you with your 'prostitution without despoliation, without guilt.'  Guilt.  What would you want your daughter to feel after she did something like that?  Joy?  Shared over the Christmas dinner table?  Joy to the world."

Now there's Scott Fitzgerald in my fantasy, bringing more words to think about.  "I spoiled this city for myself."  Everybody thinks about 'spoiled' ('despoliation,' above) and sees that he spoiled Paris because he spoiled something in himself.  "The way Milton's Adam spoiled the Garden for himself," a seminarist breaks in.  "Did something to his responding mechanism."

And, can it be, there's the mythic Ernest Hemingway, speaking as a counselor.  "You lose it if you talk about it."  Lose what, telephone talker?

"Lose Love's Elysium," breaks in Thomas Carew, "the paradise of sensual delight.  Where shepherds initiated shepherdesses, on beds of asphodel."

"Lose discovery," adds John Donne, "lose the ability to say, and hear, what hands say, hands roving 'before, behind, between, above, below': 'O, my America, my Newfoundland.'

Yes, but nobody can speak confidently of the relation between thinking and doing — which, if you are what you do, is a relation between thinking and being.  Think one way, be another?  "Never," says Jesus.  "Think your brother a fool and you're a murderer."

"Think me anything you want," says the sergeant.  "As long as you don't do anything about it, like speak out loud, you're an OK soldier."

From a distance it looks like a wash.  But up close, really close, in introspection, the sergeant seems to have the edge.  Most of us believe that we can, inside, call somebody hateful names and still love them, still be good soldiers, still be loving people.  Think hate, be loving.  Think smut, be nice.

Think violence, be gentle.  Think ease, be industrious.  Think rebellion, be cooperative.  Think self, be team.

Does it work the other way?  Think Kike, not be anti-Semitic?  Think Buck, not be bigoted?  Not so well, I think.

The clincher for the free fantasists seems to be the novelist.  In order to render them he (or she} thinks as his characters think, to the point of horror.  The more intimately he shares the process, the horror, the better the novel.  He finishes and is the same jolly person.

"OK, so there you have it.  The customer is paying for a living part in a novel.  His live opposite plays her part, puts down the phone, and is the same nice girl."

So where does that leave Fitzgerald's word "spoil" and Hemingway's word "lose"?  Are they just play words?  No connection with real life, real people?  If those words are just play words, then an awful lot of thoughtful people have been awfully wrong for fifty years.

"And, as you certainly will point out next, the Book of Common Prayer, with its 'cleanse,' has been wrong for four hundred.  Bishop Cranmer is just another novelist."

I would go on to that, but it takes us too deep.  Jesus becomes another novelist, as does God, writing the Bible.  We talk about that and we're in over our heads in no time, explaining how there can be truth in fiction.  That's for the seminar.  Here I'll settle for what I think we can all agree on: that Jamie Travis's girls are playing parts in a very bad novel. 

"I certainly agree. Good novelists (or playwrights) recognize, as Fitzgerald and Hemingway do, that there's something inside us that can be 'spoiled' or 'lost.'  Bad novelists write as if there's no referent for those novelists' words, nothing deeper for their happy surface action to connect to."

164. Still "killing his own people."

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If I hear "killing his own people" one more time I'm going to scream.  Who else, if you're an embattled ruler, are you going to kill?  That's what all embattled rulers do.  That's battle.  Civil war.  Find a civil war in which somebody isn't killing his own people.  In the latest New Yorker piece on Syria (8-27-12) Assad has "bombed his own cities."  Should he have bombed somebody else's cities?  Should Muammar Gadhafi have killed somebody else's people?  The fact is, Gadhafi was killing people who took up arms against him.  Were they still his people?  They didn't want to be.  Who were his people?

"OK, but whoever they were, did he have to kill them?"

Of course.  They forced him to.  Citizens who won't stop short in their defiance of the government ("Give me liberty or give me death!") force the government to kill them.  It's either that or turn the government over to them.  How well the Chinese government knew that at the time of Tiananmen Square.

"So Gadhafi's actions are justified?  As would be Bashar al-Assad's and Saddam Hussein's?"

In what those autocrats share with all rulers, yes, though I'd use the words "logical" and "understandable."    They are exercising the "monopoly on violence" granted every government by a horde of philosophers and acknowledged by our own president (see YouTube clip www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3r0akZgvIA).   The grant comes easily once you feel the pain of the alternative, unrestrained private violence.  "Will you unleash private contractors, like Blackwater, in Iraq?", that was the question President Obama had to face.  It's the same question rulers needing to control warlords face, "Will you leash them?", where "leash" requires killing and the answer, by the law of forced response (above), has to be "Yes."  Behind everything granted to Obama by fixed institutions and long custom, what he is saying to Blackwater is what Mao Zedong said to the warlords he took sovereignty from: If you kill I'll kill you. 

"I see.  It's what Roman emperors said to all the nations they took dominion over. "

Yes.  You can't have an empire if the parts war with each other.  So you enforce peace and the bigger the empire the more peace you have.  Do it long enough and your period gets a good name, like Pax Romana.  Most peace, least killing.  Because everybody knows that if they kill they'll get killed.

"Kill.  Kill.  Why are you always talking about killing?  There are so many other ways to get control and have peace.  And so much more talk about them, so much diplomacy, so much done by negotiation and compromise.  You don't hear anybody saying, 'Back off or I'll kill you.'"

No, that's ugly talk.  We prefer nice talk.  "Back off or I'll send a peacekeeping force."  That's OK as long as we don't take nice for real.  We did that in Lebanon and got our nice peacekeeping force blown sky high by the ugly realists.  Might not have happened if we'd had somebody saying, "This force, to get peace, will kill and get killed.  Fix on that word 'kill.' The reality.  Kill, kill, kill."

"The Middle East autocrats certainly don't need any instruction in that."

No, because they have been so thoroughly taught by their past.  To win a contest for power you have to kill, kill, kill.  That's the lesson of our past, too — up to a certain point.

"Up to what point?"

The point where rulers had to take into account the feelings of large numbers of their people.  Rulers of democracies.  People who had been affected by Enlightened ideals, Christian revivals, Romantic illusions, who knows.  In any case, humane feelings.  Something that kept a ruler from saying "kill, kill, kill" in front of his people.  Probably have to fix that point of ruler-influence sometime in the 18th century.  About the same time, I'd say, that people started to have guilty feelings about slavery.

"Interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with the expression 'killing his own people'?"

Well, maybe not much, and certainly not very directly, but it does have a connection.  If you think you are different from those who play the old power game, if you think you are more humane, more enlightened, more Christian, you have lost your grip on reality — the grip your own larger history could have given you.  The only difference between you and the Middle Eastern (or Asian or Balkan) ruler you face across the table is that you play the power game more guiltily.

"Guilt?  Where do you see that?"

In the reproach game, the natural sequel to the humanitarian game.  "That candidate showed little feeling for those poor victims."  "This leader tolerated torturers."  "That nation looked on as thousands died." "He kills his own people.  We Americans don't do that." 

No, we don't have to any more.  We won our Civil War a long time ago.

163. Shall we give up on the word "judgmental"?

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For a while "judgmental" looked like a niche word that we needed and could use.  Coined, apparently by psychologists, in 1905-10 and brought into popular use in the middle of the century, it identified a kind of personality that "censorious" and "hypercritical" just didn't seem to cover.  We all knew people who seemed unable to sit with other people for more than an hour without saying, after they had left, something about their deficiencies.  They were often the same people who, after observing another culture, said something about its inferiority.   "Judgmental" just came in there and speared them.

But "judgmental" can also be used to identify a kind of error.  Driving through the left side of an underpass, for example.  That's an error in judgment, and, if you wanted to distinguish it, say, from an "accidental" error you could call it "judgmental."  You could make the same call to distinguish a problem as one for judges rather than for legislators.  You wouldn't want to do that often but, since it's suggested by the root, it's always possible and it rides in the back of your mind.

I don't know how big a problem that is, but it is a problem.  The root "judgment" names something we all have to have in order to survive.  We praise "mature judgment," as exhibited by sea captains conning a cruise ship, and deplore "immature judgment," as exhibited by teenagers at the wheel of a hot rod.  We read that the part of the brain that handles judgment, the prefrontal cortex, is "one of the last regions of the brain to reach maturation," exactly what our teenagers have not reached.  When they're out in the car there's nothing we're pulling for more than judgment, and the more quickly developed the better.

So I want my teenager to judge, and I judge that making him capable of judging is what nature and I very much want, and I judge that getting what we want is better for everybody than not getting what we want, and that not judging is never an option, but my teenager and I, in making all these judgments, can never say we're judgmental.  "Judgmental" is bad.

It's a small problem, OK, but you don't have it with "censorious" and "hypercritical."  You're not pulling against the root.  And I think that unless you get that root out you are going to get stuck.  Dictionary people (who, I know, have a hard time getting their eyes off of roots) say that "judgmental" means "inclined to make judgments, especially moral or personal ones" (AHD).  That's you as soon as you say "driving through the left side of a blind underpass is a sign, son, of a human deficiency" — even if you don't go on to say, "That's bad, and you are bad."

It's bad to make moral and personal judgments!  How could anybody ever come up with an idea that weird?  Did they not notice where they were when their science teacher told them not to make "value judgments"?  Did they not see how limited that imperative was?  What did they do as soon as they turned away from their controlled experiment?

The real pinch comes in making social judgments.  You see a culture — a fraternity culture, a ghetto culture — that discourages achievement in school and you say, "That culture is deficient in preparing individuals to be successful in this society."  (See Post #77, "My culture's better than yours.")  A child who, sold on that culture, fails to get an education is, career-wise, driving through the left side of an underpass, and you can have the same conversation with him.  Yet there's that dumb word, popping up to put you down.

And it will pop up again, every time you try to distinguish strong and weak, well-equipped and ill-equipped, liberating and constricting, rich and meager in a culture.  You're down, brother.

That's what "judgmental" mainly does, put people down.  Sure, some people need to be put down.  You can't let bigots and racists take over the whole bar.   But you've got to be careful.  If you swing a word like "judgmental" you could knock over a lot of your friends, and maybe take a hit yourself.  It might be safer to put it back in the closet.

162. Looking On

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By now we ought to be accustomed to "standing there looking on" while an atrocity is committed.  We stood and looked at Rwanda and Darfur and the Congo, as earlier we had looked at Biafra and Bangladesh.  I see, by Googling "atrocities 'while the world looks on'," that we have also recently looked on at atrocities in Lebanon, Algeria, Mali, the Kachin State in Burma, and the Congo again.  We looked on for a while in the Balkans.

We did not look on in Somalia (warlords stopping food shipments) or Iraq (Saddam Hussein gassing his own people).  We stopped looking on in Bosnia and needed only a glance in Kosovo.

We ought also be accustomed to reproach.  We got it in nearly all those cases.  Some was ignorant (what could anybody expect the U.S. to do in Bangladesh?), some came from too great a distance (the Kachin State in Burma), and some came from people with no constituency in the U. S. (the Tuareg in Mali — not at all like the Christians in Darfur).

Some cases taught us to re-evaluate reproach.  We couldn't stand being reproached for looking on in Somalia then we couldn't stand looking at our getting in.  We couldn't stand looking on as Saddam Hussein gassed his own people then we couldn't stand looking at what his own people, left to themselves, did to their own hospitals, schools, museums, and each other.

Now we are looking on as Bashar al-Assad commits more and more "atrocities against his people."   We can hear the reproaches coming.  And we know our government is ready to do things that will head them off.  In May General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "that military options are being crafted" (Fox News, 5-28-12) and in July White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that further atrocities in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad's forces should eliminate any doubt that a coordinated international response was necessary at the United Nations (Reuters).

What will the response be?  A calibrated, quagmire-avoiding response worked in Libya but can it work here?  If it doesn't, where are we?  That's hard to say but we know there's a good chance that we'd be looking at Syrian civilians, left to themselves, doing terrible things to each other.  Already the breakdown of authority in Syria is looking like the breakdown in Iraq — theft, kidnappings, inactive police stations, general lawlessness (NYT 8-10-12).

OK, but that's in our imaginations, struggling to construct the future.  These pictures are right in front of us, there, the broken bodies of five-year-olds.  Our hearts cry for action.

Yes, and so did our grandparents' hearts when the British showed us Belgian babies with their hands cut off by Germans, and so did our parents' hearts when the Kuwaitis told us how Iraqi soldiers were taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die.  The world is full of heart-users.  If you don't believe it look at that Iraqi story.  It was told by a poor Kuwaiti "eye witness" who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, acting on the advice of a hired American public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton.

All right, so you know that and the next atrocity you see or hear about you say, "OK which PR outfit is managing this one?  Which group is behind it?"  After a while your first question is a cui bono:  "Who stands to gain from the pounding of my heart?"

That's where you could end, in action-stopping cynicism, until you ask, "Who stood to gain from the heart-pounding over Hitler's first atrocities?  A lot of near-sighted, imperialist victors of World War I who produced that stupid, vindictive Versailles Treaty we'd have to force Hitler to abide by.  Act in their interest?  Not on your life."  And there you are, unleashing Hitler on Europe.

So you can't always hold off just because somebody bad is going to profit.  Sometimes you're facing an atrocity-generator you have to stop early, if you're going to stop it at all.  Decide to look on then and somebody is sure to remind you of the Big Looking On of the twentieth century, 1933-1939.  Reproach, reproach.

It's all so terribly uncertain.  Even your right to use the word "atrocity" is in doubt.  There's an 18-year-old soldier, drafted to fight in a war he didn't believe in, bleeding to death before our eyes.  But we can't call what we're seeing an "atrocity."  He's wearing a uniform and his body is 13 years older than the bodies that just moved us to tears.  So what do you call him?  What do you call war?

161. How to Call Somebody "Inhumane"

Since the most compelling lamentations in our literature are over "man's inhumanity to man" (Robert Burns} it wouldn't be surprising if "inhumane" were one of the words you might be most tempted to apply to the person you want to cut down in a race for Congress.  It's been done.

But "inhumane" is a word you have to be careful with.  It may not apply, and it could turn around and bite you.

Say you're watching a program about a food shortage in an African country.  Pictures of babies starving.  Then you find out that your Congressman has voted against further food shipments.  You call him "inhumane."  And that's just what his opponent is calling him.

Ah, but then you find out that free food in a country can lower prices enough to drive that country's farmers out of business, and that a shortage of farmers will magnify the shortage of food in following years, and that there's a good chance that many babies will starve as a result. 

Are you going to call your Congressman "inhumane" now?  It will depend, and should only depend, on the chances and his reaction to them.  If the experts tell him (and all of us) that there's only a 2% chance that the free food will lower prices enough to drive enough farmers out of business to significantly affect the babies, and he still votes against the food, I think you can confidently call him "inhumane."  You'll have most us with you.  If, on the other hand, the experts (on whom we're all dependent here) report a 98% chance, it will be the other way round and his opponent (and you) will be "inhumane."

Your confidence will properly vary with the reported probabilities.  5% chance of a harmful effect?  Yes, only a few change their minds.  10%?  Still safe. 20%  Well, doubtful. 30%?  Nah, can't risk it.  "This is long-term harm we're talking about."  It will be the same at the other end.

And it will clearly be the same in other areas where probability estimates can make an apparently inhumane position change places with an apparently humane one.  If Daniel Patrick Moynihan acted on his "Report" (1965) that welfare was creating a "dependency culture" and voted for bills that reduce coverage he'd be in the position of our Congressman.  If Western nations acted on Jack Delf's suggestion that they are creating "aid-dependent" nations in the Balkans (Post #136) they'd be in that position. 

In every case we are looking at the probabilities of harm acceptable to the person or persons we want to call a bad name.  We've learned not to look at their reaction to television pictures of starving children, or of single mothers taking advantage of food stamps, or of foreigners lined up at a dock.  Or at our own reactions to those pictures.  That's distracting.  We admit that there is always going to be some danger, some dependency — some undeserving poor helped, some profligate nations bailed out, some money wasted — but we don't let a few cases change our standards of word-use.

Also the same, finally, is the risk to ourselves.  Our word-use reveals our own standards.  Go too far up the range with "humane" and you'll be the one cut down.  "Jeez, he thinks a 4% chance of a mistaken handout justifies a guy keeping his hand in his pocket."