15. President Obama's Speech.

Television images are so powerful that just a reminder of them can carry an audience. "I refused to wait for images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action," said President Obama and the American people were reminded of screens full of horrors in Bosnia, or Kosovo, or Rwanda, or Darfur. "Oh, thank you for saving us from more evenings like that."

Sympathy has to fill a big part of Obama's political screen. He doesn't want to hear "Why didn't you do something?" at the end of those evenings. On the other hand he doesn't want to hear, evening after evening, "Still doing something? For what?" Or, worse, "Did you have to slaughter?" He can't give the public the Clausewitz answer ("Yes, if I was going to stop slaughter.") Sympathy is the hardest force in the world to manage.

It can also be the most dangerous. Sympathy with brothers across a border has probably produced more wars than any force in history. Make a powerful tribe a minority on the territory of another tribe, introduce discrimination, oppression, maybe some killing, and bang, you've got a war. Think of all the borders badly drawn for ethnicity. Think of Europe, the Balkans. Sympathy can be lethal.

And it can provide an altruistic cover for self-interest. Want a country's gold, or wheat, or oil? Find some brothers who need protection. You're in.

So we've got tribal sympathy and cynical sympathy. That leaves just plain human sympathy. Obama, led by the American public, could (as Gwynne Dyer has argued) be "acting from very selfless and humanitarian motives." We already had the oil through Gadhafi, Dyer points out. We have absolutely no tribal connection to the rebels. We just can't stand seeing human beings treated like that.

Obama probably knows that acting on that kind of sympathy can, over time, make him responsible for more suffering than he faced at the beginning, and leave him looking very foolish. It's a gamble. And he takes that gamble, even adding to his stake, every time he uses one of those sympathy-arousing words — "slaughter," "massacre," "genocide." Whatever his deficiencies in semantic accuracy you can't say he lacks semantic courage.

14. "Mind-boggling" — and "numbing," and "bending," and "blowing."

"Mind-boggling" was first used by New York Times writers in the 1960s, got a boost from Senator Howard Baker when he used it to describe John Dean's testimony during the Watergate hearings in 1973, surged in the 80s and 90s, climbed to around 11 uses a month after the turn of the century, and in the last thirty days, in what looks like another surge, has been used in articles 36 times.

Before 1964 overwhelmed minds were mainly numbed, though after 1966 they could also be bent, and after 1974 blown. No mind between 1851 and the Great Depression apparently registered enough shock to bring forth from Times writers any special terms. "Striking," "extraordinary," "overwhelming," and "astonishing, used without reference to the mind," seemed to serve.

In the New York Review of Books a smaller and more academic readership could see minds boggle in 1972 and numb in 1975. They had been bending since 1968. Over the whole life of the New York Review, from 1963 to the present, minds were blown only four times.

I am grateful for "mind-boggling." It takes me up that notch that, with some things (like John Dean's testimony), I need to go. It's like calling, now, a fundamental shift or change "seismic." I hear there's been "a seismic shift in global politics." I'm right down there with the tectonic plates, feeling the support for everything move around. Talk about fundament! "Boggle" puts my mind in the same situation, with all the scenery shaking.

Is my reaction a sign that those special words will have legs? No, because I'm too worked up by them, so worked up that I'm conscious of how good they are, and, inevitably, of how good the writer is. That does no harm to the words in their early uses but it's definitely harmful later when I start to say, "Oh, another writer being good." Then, when writers can't stop at what deserves to be called "seismic" or "boggling," or take me up notches I shouldn't go to, they cut the legs right off their word. I get sick of it and turn with relief back to the ordinary words.

13. Obama's Words: A Cost Analysis

Start with silence. What does President Obama lose if he says nothing to support the rebels in Libya? Favor with all the rebels in other Arab countries. Something for them to associate with the U.S. backing of dictators. If the rebels represent the wave of the future he falls behind it.

What did he lose with his first firm statement of support, "Muammar Qaddafi must leave" (NYT, 2-26)? His chance to remain completely free of commitment, which in the end could mean another casualty-producing engagement abroad. To avoid losing that chance now he'd have to change his view, in which case he'd be called a "flip-flopper" and lose points to the firm and decisive party.

What did he gain by later changing the wording of his statement, "It's our policy that Qadhafi needs to go" (NYT 3-21)? A chance at a point-saving wiggle. "Needs to" can be represented as wise observation on the head-of-state job. Or simple advice. "What you need to do at this point, Muammar..." Except that he stated it as "policy," which may have lost him as many points with the casualty-fearing party (not to mention the clarity party) as it gained him with the rebels (not to mention the firm-and-decisive party). But he must have seen where "must" was taking him.

The word market has this in common with the stock market: events often determine point-loss. The Libyan revolution could fail. There could be a string of failures. The wave he strained to catch could turn out to be a wavelet. Or, maybe worse, a wave not of pro-democratic forces but of pro-my-tribe forces. Going long on "policy" and "must" could lose him a bundle.

You can't end there, though, smart analysts. You have to go back to the cost of silence. Picture a world watching people suffer agonies they know President Obama, more than any leader in the world, had the power to prevent. Though with some the sympathy they feel might be tribal (my blood, my kind of people, my democracy-lovers), and therefore suspect as, historically, a leading motive for military aggression, with many it will be just human sympathy — as it was among watchers of Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, and Darfur. Whichever, Obama (or his advisers) have to factor it in. And, unlike us analysts, do it bang, in the moment of choosing a word. Only the most inhuman analyst could fail to sympathize.

12. Word-Watch: The Libyan Intervention (2)

"It's our policy that Gadhafi has to go." "Policy" doesn't work in that sentence. "Belief" works. "Opinion" works. "Policy" works only if you're declaring a plan or course of action.

That's judging by a lexical standard. If you judge by a rhetorical, or political, standard, it works. If a President prefaces a crisis statement with "Let me be perfectly clear" (as nearly every American president since Nixon speaking about, and presumably to, a potential enemy has done), sets his jaw, and speaks strong words ("has to" is strong; "policy," as a statement of aim is strong) then his statement, whatever its lexical shortcomings, is going to do some work on a lot of people.

The times determine what work is needed. Our failure in two quagmire wars has been attributed to lack of a clear, firm statement of aims by the President taking us into them. That hangs over Obama's head, along with the vocabularies used to take us in.

At the moment, since "regime change" (Iraq) has joined "surgical strike" and "evil" on the contaminated list, Obama can't finish his sentence with the lexically appropriate conclusion to "It's our policy": "to remove dictators like Gadhafi from office." He must leave his country out of the moving, the quagmire direction. ("No, no," he had Admiral Mullen reassure us, "we are not targeting Gadhafi.") You can see why Obama (or his writers) like "has to"; it has the firmness of necessity while leaving agency up in the air. Who knows who the remover will be?

Obama's problem, like that of every president considering the use of military force, is to find good words ("protecting civilians," "meeting the humanitarian threat") broad enough to cover the bad things he has to do at the moment (kill people, the end military force is driven to) to gain a good thing in the future (people not being killed). It's the old ethical problem of a good end requiring bad means, and the old political problem of the public not being able to see, or bear, the means to the good end they really want, and will vote you out of office if they don't get.

11. Word-Watch: The Libyan Intervention

Was ever a president in a more ticklish semantic situation? American and allied planes have just wiped out a Gadhafi column heading for Benghazi. If ever a military action deserved the name "surgical strike" this one did. It was precise, limited, clean, and expertly done. Yet the Obama administration couldn't call it a "surgical strike" because that was Lyndon Johnson's expression for the first actions that sucked us into Viet Nam. Use of it would provoke the here-we-go-again response.

The same is probably true of "evil." Obama can't use it because it was George W. Bush's high-suction word for the "axis" Iraq was said to be part of. No careful speechwriter wants to remind the left and middle of the right's play (with a "more theological" word than "hatred") for evangelical support. So there goes that one, no matter what awful thing Gadhafi does.

The expression "protecting civilians," used to describe the aim of the whole operation (Odyssey Dawn), comes with none of that earlier baggage but already it's causing trouble. It covered what, according to the Associated Press, we were doing in that strike, "preventing Moammar Gadhafi's forces from inflicting more violence on civilians — particularly in and around the rebel stronghold of Benghazi." Trying to picture civilians who weren't rebels and rebels who weren't civilians and locate them all with respect to the stronghold was too much even for the straight-faced NBC reporter.

You can find a word a casualty-wary public will accept but it's so hard to keep from stretching it. The other aim of Odyssey Dawn was to "degrade the Libyan military's ability to contest a no-fly zone." For the Benghazi strike you had to stretch the acceptable "no-fly" to "no-drive." If you didn't you had something like "tanks caught taxiing toward rebel stronghold." You could tell by the reporter's face that this line wouldn't hold for long, at least among the verbally sophisticated.

Does the reaction of the sophisticated, the reporters and the pundits and the professors, matter much? It's the voting masses (meaning only those so busy making a living they don't have time for careful examination) who in the end determine military action. If suffering humanity is to be relieved, and these words work on those masses to relieve it, what case do we have for a sophisticated view?

10. Removed

9. "Making war on his own people."

Gadhafi the monster, like his fellow monster Saddam Hussein, is "making war on his own people." That's bad. But if you're putting down a rebellion who else are you going to make war on? There's nobody else. That's who Abraham Lincoln made war on. The angels Satan talked into trying to take over Heaven were God's own people. They're all in the same category.

So if you're making a list of things to hold against Muammar Gadhafi you shouldn't put this on it?

Not if you want your items to have the most force. Call a bad guy a name that applies equally to good guys and you haven't hit him very hard. It's a missed punch that exposes you. You're a slap puncher.

How should Gadhafi be punched?

With words that refer to his particular faults. So that a reader or listener can go down your list and say, "Yeah, he really did this and it's really bad." Executing without trial, denying of civil rights, policing secretly — a dictator is going to present you with a ton of bad stuff. Hit him with it, right in the kidneys. Why throw fluff?

But if a reader or listener doesn't know it's fluff, and can't tell a slap puncher from a solid puncher, it doesn't matter. The writer scores. Not every reader is going to go down the list examining items the way you picture readers doing. The payoff is in the crowd, not in the ring.

I stand corrected. I shouldn't question slaps without asking who the writer's or speaker's audience is and what he wants them to do. If he wants them to back a war on the dictator, and they're not examiners, he just slaps away. If they're examiners he zeroes in.

And if he needs a coalition?

I guess he throws in enough slaps to gain more from the first group than he loses from the second. Tough calculation, though, because it's hard to know how successful the teachers of examination have been.

8. "Discrimination," Rational and Irrational.

Can I rationally discriminate against green people?

No, friend, because your word "against" shows that you are singling them out just because they are green, and not for any purpose. That's not rational, that's sentimental, done for emotional satisfaction. Hitler's killing of the Jews was, in that sense, sentimental. If he'd been rational he'd have preserved them, since their loss weakened, on the whole, his war effort. Some of them might have helped him build an atom bomb.

So if I single green people out for a purpose, like reducing the chances of explosion on my airplane, I discriminate rationally.

Yes. And what has caused you to worry about this is the ambiguity in the word "discriminate." It means both "distinguish" and "distinguish with prejudice." While the former uses reason vitally, the latter abandons it. You judge before you have relevant knowledge. That's prejudgment, or prejudice.

So if I have studied previous explosions on airplanes and know that a high percentage have been caused by green people, and have studied their faith and know that there are stronger justifications of martyrdom in it than in other faiths, and find that this bears on their behavior, my discrimination is rational. I can then, after I have done everything I can within time and money constraints to avoid offense, support airport profiling, something I have not supported in the actions that gave it a bad name, policemen stopping drivers just because they were black people.

Absolutely. It's rational to distinguish a religion from others and connect the behavior of its adherents (though of course not all of its adherents) to the teachings in it. Only an irrational person would say that there's no connection between teachings and behavior.

So it will be rational for me to do the same thing I did with green people when I look at blue people.

It would be irrational not to.

Very well, I see that a man nominated to be an adviser to our President is blue. I examine the blue religion and see that a central belief in it, one that distinguishes it from other religions, is that a higher power, God, gave its adherents the land some of them are now contesting for. I know that claims to be backed in a contest by a higher power make such contests very hard to adjudicate and dangerous to friends who may be appealed to for support. I look at the evidence and calculate the probabilities of danger to myself and my country — just as I did with the green person in the airport — and decide to ask my congressman to back the other nominee. That meets all the standards of rationality, doesn't it?

I'd hesitate to say so until I knew how thoroughly you looked at the evidence. You may have concluded too quickly that the nominee shares his fellow blues' belief in the gift of land. In that case I'd have to call your request to your congressman irrational. You judged to soon. The word for that is "prejudice."

How close does a look at evidence have to be before it ceases to be irrational and becomes rational? How thoroughly did I look at the green person? With us mortals, rationality consists in calculating probability on the basis of what you can learn in the time given you. With so much at stake I don't need to find more than a very slight probability that the blue will be swayed, but all I have, really, are labels: "Academic," "Liberal," "Scholar," and the like. The only one that distinguishes him from the other nominee is "Unbelieving Blue." I check the evidence and find very little difference between believing blues and unbelieving blues in support of settlements on the land. I let that label sway me. Is that a "prejudice"?

No, it's not, it's a "judice." Rational. But if those unbelieving blues quit supporting the believers then your judgment-tipping evidence changes. If your judgment doesn't change with it then it's no longer rational. But remember, "rational" doesn't mean "good" or "wise." Those words apply to the choice of ends. "Rational" applies only to the choice of means to ends. You can be called good, and even wise, while you do something irrational.

7. "Absurd." Deep Trouble.

1942 when Albert Camus called the universe absurd, meaning unreasonable. His call made no sense. People and arguments can be unreasonable, but there's no way the universe can be unreasonable. It just is.

The harm appeared when people who accepted Camus' statement started to make deductions from it. "If the universe is absurd then it's foolish to approach it rationally. Logic is useless." Logic, though, could have shown them (if their dismissal hadn't already deprived them of it) that by what they had said there was only one possible universe in which a rational approach was foolish: a universe where everything was equally absurd. In other universes, including those most packed with absurdities, you'd have to discriminate among them, and only reason could do that. You'd be wise to use it.

With some people, though, the harm was fixed as soon as the deduction about logic was made. They were deprived of the instrument by which they could test their belief. Their absurdism was self-validating, hedged against any threat.

Seeing a mind abused by a mistake in philosophy is always a caution to us, but when the abused mind inhabits a classroom we teachers feel downright alarm. Here the abuse reduces our ability to lead students through the logical consequences of a belief, an ability vital to the Socratic teacher. The existentialist-abused minds of the sixties and seventies threatened to take away his calling.

If that threat had materialized we'd have to rank misuse of "absurd" among the most harmful in history. It didn't materialize, though. It couldn't. The value of logic was too evident in the daily world. Very few things could be gained there without probable inference and an implicit if-then chain of reasoning.

So how could those abused minds keep going back to existentialism for more abuse? Was the barrier to logical testing so high they couldn't see over it? Or were the signals from the word "absurd" just so strong they overpowered any impulse to examine its meaning?

I'm inclined to think it was the latter. Though all words from a philosophy signal "deep," "absurd" signaled "Parisian deep." Consider the era. As Tony Judt points out in trying to explain the world's tolerance of Sartre's long support of Stalinism, every signal from Paris in those early postwar years got a boost from its place of origin. Romantic, sophisticated, daring, classy. See that in a lover and sure you'll put up with some abuse.

The affair did come to an end, though. The New York Times and The New York Review in the last thirty years either ignore absurdism or condescend to it, as they do to existentialism. Does this mean that misuse of "absurd" did no long-term harm?

It's very hard to know, but I see it in the minds of those who were students in the later postwar years, the ones who took logic and even mathematics to be a social construction, or took logic to be a male, European construction, rather than a codification of reasoning standards.

I suppose there are always going to be students coming out of humanities classes needing to be told that, no, logic is not humanly warm and creative, it only tests what the warm, creative imagination has come up with in the way of propositions. And I'm sure there are always going to be retired professors like me unhappy with what their replacements are teaching. And I'm sure they'll be quick to connect it with the evils they fought in their own time. What I'm most sure of, though, is that the human mind won't quit making connections, and that mine keeps making this one between what I heard from students in the nineties and what their teachers heard in the sixties.

I'm obliged to ask if it could have been different? If Camus had started things off with proper expressions might there have been in the eighties and nineties a greater respect for logic? What expressions could he have used?

Not "irrational universe." That has the same defect as "absurd universe." Not "meaningless universe." That would have gotten him tangled in the old ambiguity, "meaning" as "significance" and "meaning" as "purpose." Though he did occasionally use both words, neither is an advance on "absurd." No, the appropriate expression, the expression that would fit everything else he was saying, and would make sense to us, is "indifferent universe." There's no sign in the universe of care for human beings.

Why didn't he say "indifferent universe"? Was it that that expression was just the one a Darwin-shocked Christian would use? Camus was an atheist, advanced to the point of anti-Christian scorn, conversing in circles where that scorn was common. He couldn't use the word that was correct, right, maybe even perfect, without sending a signal he didn't want to send, and looking like somebody he didn't want to look like: a Christian unable to recover from his Darwin-shock.

There's a lesson here about personal signals. Give more than two or three and, unless you are not the mess most of us are, some of them are going to contradict others. I think the signals in the following passage contradict the signal Camus sends with "absurd":

I want everything explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart.... The world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could say just once: "This is clear," all would be saved.

Camus can't lament the absence of a single meaning in the world without being seen to lament, along with everybody else who talks this way, the absence of God, the one being who gives a single meaning to the universe and a purpose to man. He's signaling Darwin-shock. And th at signals an immature atheist. Mature atheists have gotten over their shock, and speak more matter-of-factly.

Note: It will not be apparent now but Camus's (or his translator’s) use of the word "absurd" was a misuse that should have been apparent then.  Dictionaries at the time carried only "unreasonable" and its synonyms. Only later was the secondary meaning, "manifesting the view that there is no order or value in human life or in the universe," added — as we see now in Internet dictionaries.  More testimony to the power of Camus and the existentialists.

 

-->