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."