206. The Good-Evil Scale vs. the Cost-Benefit Scale

  

Last week The Economist called Syria's Assad regime "loathsome."  This week it's "vile."  That is so unhelpful.  The vileness of the Assad regime has nothing whatever to do with the interests of the United States. 

Get yourself on the verbal scale that has "gentle, kind, nice, good, noble" at one end and "rotten, evil, unrighteous, loathsome, vile" at the other and you can only do dumb things, dumb where dumbness hurts, down where people shoot guns.

In the late nineties Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili was an enlightened, democracy-favoring, corruption-discouraging advocate of human rights — by Western standards about as gentle, kind, nice, honest, and noble as an old Russian could get — but our admiration for his goodness could have committed us to war with Russia.  Trouble here is very close.  Say we show our admiration by backing Georgia's admission to NATO, as George W. Bush wanted to do.  Georgia joins NATO.  We have to go to war when NATO members go to war.  Georgia goes to war with Russia. And there we are, having to decide whether to renounce our treaty obligation or start shooting guns.  (We could still get into a dumbhead pickle like this.)

Saddam Hussein was vile.  His people needed the goodness of freedom and democracy.  We didn't take time to find out (as nearly all the rest of the realistic world was urging) if he was really a threat to our security.  No, good people bring goodness to people, so we, through war, would bring our two best things, freedom and democracy, to the Iraqi people.  One of the dumbest moves, in real terms (like "cost" and "benefit"), a people ever made. 

Of course we have people in government, smart people, who can calculate cost and benefit and risk, but we are a democracy, and those calculations do no good if the media people get the voting people worked up using words like "vile" and "loathsome."  People who live their lives on the good-evil scale are easily worked up.

The cost-benefit scale runs from "prohibitive" to "priceless."  In early WWII loss of an aircraft carrier was "prohibitive."  No operation was worth it.  In the American Revolution loss of any number of spies was acceptable.  Freedom was "priceless." 

Moving from the good-evil scale to the cost-benefit scale can be very helpful.  If you think that something is bad and aren't sure how bad, the smart people who measure on the cost-benefit scale can tell you.  Say you think killing people is bad.  One killer, or way of killing, kills 10,000 people. The other killer, or way of killing, kills 70,000 people.  "The latter," the smart number-crunchers tell you, "is greater than the former by a factor of 3.5."  You know just how worked up to be.

What's hard is making risk calculations.  I can imagine that with Syria that calculation is driving the smart people crazy.  What are the chances that a moderate rebel faction (the only kind the voting people will support) will win out over other factions and then (with what degree of support?) win out over Bashar al-Assad  (with what degree of support from Russia?)? 

Answer that and they still have to project possible cost.  What a nightmare history turns that into!  How many deaths resulted from the secessions the West encouraged in the Balkans ("Self-determination!  Freedom! They must have diplomatic recognition!")?  Who could have guessed the eventual cost in Iraq?

You can imagine what it would be like, if you're a smart person, to have a media person, or the people he has worked up, butting in saying, "Oh, but this killer was vile, and that way of killing is loathsome." 

I don't want to say that the buttinskies are wrong.  They could just be saying there's something here not measurable in numbers, something priceless.  But I do want to say that before they break in on the smart people's calculations, or demand that they (I'm obviously thinking of Obama people) take action, they ought to break in on their own vocabulary: "What do I mean by 'vile'?  Something absolute, or something that admits comparisons?"  Until they do that I don't they ought to, I don't think they can, enter into conversation with the careful calculators at all.  And I don't think they ought to work people up without getting into such a conversation.