216. The Horrors Competition

  

No, I don't mean a competition to see who can do the most horrible things to people.  Nobody tries to be a champion in that league.  I mean a competition to see who can rack up the most horrible things the other fellow has done.  It's the competition that gives us bragging rights in the Human League.  "You're more inhuman than I am."

Of course we mean "your tribe," "your race," "your religion," and, some of us, hope we can take the meaning to "your genes," "your essential nature."

People keep trying to win at this game. In the Balkans five nations are still piling up evidence that worse things were done to them than they ever did.  In Ireland Protestants are still adding up Catholic atrocities and Catholics adding up Protestant atrocities.  There's hardly time to get a count.  Stop to measure a pile in Asia — Muslims against Hindus, Buddhists against Muslims, Sikhs against Hindus — and somebody's sure to come running up with another bundle.  "Hold on!  The latest from Myanmar!  The Buddhists will never match these figures!"

Of course the Buddhists will match them.  Groups embarrassed by current figures just go to the past.  "Yes, we're bad now but seven centuries ago you had a general that makes us all look good.  Look how he slaughtered."

Not that there haven't been undoubted, all-conquering slaughterers.  Admit it, though, and what do you hear?  "Here's one, here's an undeniable case," and up comes another victim dragging his victimizer.  One Holocaust exception opens the gates. 

And not that there haven't been pure non-slaughterers.  Be one of those and you're a sure winner.  I don't think we'll hear from you, though.  You'll be too sweet to play this game. 

With everybody else, though, it's a contest that gets more complicated with every play.  Imagine yourself the scorekeeper.  The Crusades.  "You behead!"  "You crucify."  "Yeah, but you behead more than we crucify."  "We do not."  "Yes you do.  History shows that in 1189 you beheaded this many people." "Whose history?  Yours!"  "Yes but our history is more reliable than yours."  "OK, but even if the numbers are too high we're still ahead.  Crucified people suffer more than beheaded people."

Oi, the scoreboard.  Go from quantity to quality and it's a mess.  Well how about ten points for a crucifixion and three for a beheading, three leaving room for lethal injection, etc., lying ahead.  Sounds good but you just know that as soon as you get it fixed somebody's going to come running in with a disemboweling or a gassing.  And, if you're an old historian, you'll know more: any historian who runs in claiming to have found the last horror is going to be followed by another who has looked at the period more closely.  The closer historians look at any period the more horrors they are going to find.  Sounds to me as if anybody, if they slice it right, can be on top of the leader board.  "You're all more inhuman than I am."

Maybe what we need is a big, loud voice coming in and saying, "You're all inhuman, period.  Yes you too, you weak, you meek, you oppressed.  You just haven't had a chance yet."   The voice of the old-time God would end the game all right.

215. Is gassing people essentially distinct from other ways of killing them?

Back to Plato's "Slice nature at her joints" (that is, "choose words that make essential distinctions"), the problem raised by same-sex marriage (Post #199).  Isn't President Obama missing the joint when he draws a "red line" for Bashar al-Assad between gassing "his own people" (to speak as everybody from the General Secretary of the UN to John McCain speaks) and killing them in any of the dozen or so other ways he has been killing them?  "Shoot, burn, knife, bomb, strangle, torture, drown, club, gut and starve as you will but by God you gas and we're coming after you. "

I suppose any manner of killing that is distinctly more painful than another can justifiably be singled out.  We do that regularly with "torture," which makes a great difference in our willingness to use other words, like "civilized" and "enlightened," and, through our laws and administrative rules, determines whether or not officials are punished and the government embarrassed.  The first experience of poison gas in World War I put gassing in this category, I think.  "You're torturing people to death."

So maybe that's it.  The line President Obama is drawing is a line between civilization and barbarism, and Assad's crossing it will be a movement into barbarism that civilized nations cannot tolerate.  Obama, president of the nation with enough force to influence Assad, will be justified in using it.  He is defending civilization.

Suppose Assad, facing that kind of motivation, wanted to stay on the right side of the civilized-barbaric line but couldn't understand the big difference gassing makes.  Could we deliver our belief that it's distinctly more painful than other ways of killing?  A form of torture?  Not if Assad knows some history.  "More painful than the lingering agony of radiation sickness?" he will ask.  Indeed, nobody who knows the killing history of the civilized nations is going to believe that "gassing" makes an essential distinction.  Too many of those who died by other means have suffered as much, and all are just as dead.

Still, I think, "gassing" slices at a joint. But it's not a joint in nature.  It's a joint in us, formed by our psychological (and in a democracy therefore political) needs.  We need to be good, and we need signs of our goodness, especially after doubtful behavior.  Nothing is so trivial — buttons instead of zippers, worsted instead of lace, beef instead of pork, fish instead of beef — that it can't be a sign.  "I may have lied, cheated, and stolen but at least I didn't cross the line into forbidden food."  The slide into the tribal need is easy.  "We may have bombed and burned and machine-gunned and fragged and napalmed and land-mined but at least we didn't gas."

That not only gives us an easy way of calling ourselves good, it gives us an easy way to call others bad.  "You're bad — or evil, or, as John Kerry said yesterday of Assad, 'morally obscene.' You gas."  All we need is one sign.  The moral world is divided in two.  One line, and we draw it.

214. Our Helplessness in Egypt and Israel, and How to Live with It.

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The Times confirms it more firmly every day.  Our man  Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is doing to Egyptians nearly every vile thing Bashar al-Assad did to Syrians and Saddam Hussein did to Iraqis.  He's done far worse things than Putin has done to Russians.

But is he our man?  Well, if somebody who does your work for you is your man, he's our man.  He's helping to secure the safety of Israel.  That's a job we took on long ago and are never going to give up.

We don't like having him as our man.  We take every opportunity to show that he's not our man.  And that even if he were, we have little influence with him.  If we cut off aid to him and his army others would step in with help and he'd keep doing the same things.  {If you aren't convinced that we're helpless read Steven Simon on Tuesday's (8-13) Op-Ed page.}

But, the good old Times.  One day it gives you a piece that convinces you and the next day it gives you a piece that makes you doubt.  (That's the West, man, that's what makes us different from Middle Eastern countries, and different from Russia.)  So on Wednesday there's Eric Schmitt with a story that will convince you (convinced me, though I was already convinced) that we damn well can control al-Sisi and his army.  All we have to do is cut off his access to parts — parts for airplanes and tanks, all American — and he is out of business.

So we can do what we have been able to do all these years, all the time we've been hand-wringing and deploring and calling for moderation.  We are behaving exactly as we behaved with the settlements.  There our presidents, our secretaries of state, our editorialists, our Congressmen would have had to have been idiots not to see what the unchecked move into the West Bank showed them: that Israel intended to take over the whole thing, all the land comprised by ancient Judea and Samaria, the land that was Israel.  We must have seen it but we did nothing but crab about it.  And Israel did nothing but sing away our crabbiness.

Why?  Why did we never do more than deplore and crab and claim helplessness?  Because the Israelis were members of our tribe.  We're with them in their desire to occupy the West Bank and be safe.  I'm with them, emotionally anyway, as soon as I step across the border.  I remember that experience, coming up from Egypt.  I looked around and my heart said, "Yeah, these are my people." Bonded.

And the more they are threatened the tighter the bond becomes.  It's like what happened to my heart when England was threatened in World War II.  "How can I bear to see that green and pleasant land, that jewel in the sea, that England, overrun by Nazis?"  No, President Roosevelt, do what you can to help her.

You don't need a genius to explain this.  My heart loved the literature it was introduced to in school and Sunday school, Shakespeare, the Bible, the story of the Jews, the story of England.  I was made a solid member of the Judeo-Christian tribe, Anglophone branch.

Fine if I hadn't gone to college.  There I was made a member of the worldwide human tribe, which was not a tribe.  It was above tribes, all tribes.  Its claims took precedence over tribal claims.  "Think your brother has claims on you because he's a tribe member?  No, he has claims on you because he's a human being.  His rights are human rights.  They come first."  So I became an heir of the enlightened revolutions of the eighteenth century, and, in the immediate case, can stand as an example of what the West is selling, or trying to sell, in the Middle East.

See what the child's heart is now doing to this educated adult?  It's making him into the biggest hypocrite in the world.  "Come on all you benighted Middle Easterners, come on undeveloped countries, come on Vladimir Putin, join the tribe of the West, adopt constitutional government, follow the rule of law, transfer power through elections, give freedom to the press, and most of all, respect human rights, as my country does.  Except when it conflicts with Israel's needs."

My advice to that educated adult?  Learn to live with it.  This is one place where tribalism has to trump universalism — no, where tribalism is sure to trump universalism.  Whether you like it or not.  When the chips are down you and your fellows are not going to be able to bear seeing Israel go down the tube.  And, as you've learned from Hitler's rise, you've got to resist any motion toward the tube. 

As for your shame on the world stage, bear it.  But bear it gracefully, as gracefully as you can.  Go easy on talk of vile regimes and evil axes.  Evidence-based observers can too easily give you the knife.  "You're no better than they are."

When it comes to guilt, the internal part of shame, don't be too hard on yourself.  A little more education will show you (if you haven't learned already) how necessary occasional hypocrisy is to good outcomes.   And to good people.  Certain kinds of good (like much of the good churches do) would never get done if they weren't done hypocritically.

Furthermore, one or two lapses into tribalism don't ruin you as an advocate for universalism.  You can still be an example.  Just draw the line.  "In this case we simply have to go tribal.  Fair warning.  We can't help it.  But don't think we're giving up on the rule of law, and democracy and human rights and all the rest of the Enlightenment.  It's where humanity needs to go, and will go."

The hard part is going to be avoiding trampling on that inheritance not for needs but for benefit and privilege.  No defense of tribal self-interest is easier than to say, "That humane and enlightened action is the first step to our tribal ruin."  Any Israeli statement to that effect will require close examination.  Especially if it's a step toward reconciliation and compromise.

213. The villain of the Iraq piece: a theologian.

  

Where did George W. Bush get his confidence as he took his country into war in Iraq?  From a fighting World War II family?  From a carrier-pilot father?  From the Yale fraternity culture?  Or just from Texas, the state where high-testosterone, low-reflection politicians seem to rise from the soil?

No, none of those.  He got it from a professor of social and political ethics at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.  Her obituary in yesterday's New York Times (Jean Bethke Elshtain, 8-16-13) tells us how: through a conference at the White House after the 9-11 attacks, one of several Bush called with "a handful of scholars and religious leaders" to discuss his response to the attacks.

We can guess at what she told him by what she has argued in her publications.  In 1993 she argued against the separation of religion and politics: "Separation of church and state is one thing.  Separation of religion and politics is something else altogether."  Earlier, relying on St. Augustine, she had argued that "while Christians could not justify killing to protect themselves, they could engage in war to protect the lives of others."  That would be "a Just War."

Opinions of those who know her and her work give us another clue.  "Underpinning all her work," colleagues said, "were bedrock convictions derived from her Christian faith."  These include "the existence of an absolute good and evil, the imperative of ethical behavior and the responsibility of all people for the welfare of the vulnerable."

That makes a pretty good fit with the advice Bush was getting from the neoconservatives in the Defense Department and the Wheaton College (Chicago area, fundamentalist) people on his staff, including the one who, by one report, advised him to change "axis of hate" to "axis of evil" because it was "more theological."

What we want from Bush and his staff is a little better look at history, the look realistic statesmen take, the look once-burned generals take, the look Europeans like Jacques Chirac were taking.  Hadn't these religious people noticed that looking to God didn't relieve you of this other kind of looking?  Hadn't they noticed the damage single-vision God-gazers had been doing in the world — taking planes and buildings down with "God is great" on their lips, taking over land because God had given it to them, destroying temples and statues because they weren't the true God's.  All this by people sure of God's will.

OK, I know there were plenty of people on Bush's staff doing rational, realistic analysis.  Their memoirs show it.   But they were over-ruled, or over-powered, or out-faced.  Was it a matter of confidence, and the authority of the office?

Bush himself, at the beginning, lacked confidence.  And what did he do?  Called in experts in God's will, scholars with all the academic credentials.  Get a reading from them and you'll be as sure as you can be.  You can walk into your staff meeting, into your war, with confidence.

There are two things, though, that you can't be confident about, that nobody can be justifiably confident about: that you know God's will, and that you know how to carry it out, down here on earth.

It's the latter, the part President Bush's theologian looked away from, the part generals and statesmen and historians look so closely at, that will make you as president look foolish.  Whether what you're doing is God's work or not you will screw it up.  And God, they say, will not have his work in the world be made manifest by fools.

But before he undertook God's work George Bush didn't need to reflect on that.  The experts from Chicago apparently gave him enough confidence to do what something in him (I'm not leaving out the Texas soil) made him want to do.

212. New Yorker poems (2)

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Everything in the world

has a name

if you know it.

That's the sentence the second poem in the current New Yorker begins with.  It affronts me because it is false.  Things have names whether or not I know them. 

I have an explanation for my affront: I am reading the sentence the way I told my English composition students their readers would read sentences.  "Your readers expect sense, your readers are skeptical, your readers want to be treated with respect."  I am affronted because I have made myself one of those readers.

That's not right, I know.  I should be the reader I am now, knowing what the New Yorker is, knowing what contemporary poetry is, knowing that all poetry asks us to move out of the prose classroom.  But those old comp-class readers are still around, and some of them are buying New Yorkers.  They should a least know that there are poets who themselves believed that poetry "should at least be good prose," and that their expectations are respectable.

So slap them right off with a flat falsehood, that "everything has a name if you know it," as Maureen N. McLane does (New Yorker, 8-12,19-13) and they are going to take offense.  "You expect me to believe that?  What do you think I am?"

I'm not the only retired composition teacher with former students out in the world.  There are going to be a lot of offended people out there.  It's not just me.  I know we'll be told that if the above is our response then we shouldn't be reading the New Yorker.  Maybe we shouldn't even be reading poetry.

Fair enough.  We'll keep our $6.99 and accept our position as common people.  Let the nation of the educated fall into an aristocrat-commoner division.  You can believe that it already has if you read McLane's next sentence.  Here's the whole stanza:

Everything in the world

has a name

if you know it.

You already know that.

We may think the first sentence is false but what do we know?  We don't even know ourselves.  We've already accepted it.  And we don't even know we've accepted it.  Not until the one with authority reminds us.

The lordly tone of that reminder confirms our position.  "Believe it because I tell you."  Yessir, yessir.  Sorry I asked

211. Love democracy, love the killing in Cairo.

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Listen up, third-worlders.  Here's what it like to be a lover of democracy at this moment, with Egypt's army having just killed a couple of hundred Muslims demonstrating for the return of democracy.

No, I'm not going to add to the six dozen ironies already piled up by the developments in Egypt.  I'm just going to explain what's democratic and what isn't.

That killing now, by a dictator installed by an Army coup.  It's not, as it may appear, the opposite of democracy.  It's not like all the strongman takeovers the U.S. has opposed, not like one aristocratic clique overthrowing another in South America, not like a warlord suddenly declaring a heavenly mandate in Asia, not like a Bolshevik few striking in Europe.  Those are all deniers of democracy.  This is an expression of it.  A circuitous expression, yes, but nevertheless an expression.

Here, in big chalk, is the circuit.  Begin with the fact that the U. S. is a democracy.  The things that it does or does not do express the will of its people.  ("Democracy" means "rule by the people," right"?)  Not all the people, but a majority, which means the most votes in Congress.  Votes in the past show that any action that makes Israel less secure will be voted down — if it manages even to be brought up.  Action against the dictator installed by the army coup will in the eyes of Congress make Israel less secure than it would be under a militant Muslim president installed by an election.  It's bound to be voted down or kept from coming up.

To be believed that paragraph requires, probably, six pages of little chalk — whether or not Congressmen do express the will of the people here, whether their vote can be predicted, whether that vote can make a difference in Egypt, why they think an army regime in Egypt will make Israel more secure — but there's just not space here to supply it.  You'll just have to trust me.

Anyway, if you believe as I do that American action against the Egyptian ruling general could stop him (for one thing we could cut off the money that pays his army) then yesterday's killing in Cairo is an expression of democracy, American democracy.  It is the will of the American people that the Egyptian people be denied their will.

Forget trying to relieve the pain of this by showing your abhorrence of killing, Americans.  ("I didn't mean that.  They shouldn't go that far.")  Any time you want other people to do your will they can (as Clausewitz has shown) force you to become a killer just by refusing to do it, up to the end.  If you vote for Israel's security here (or for a Congressman who will vote for it) you show that you want to kill the Egyptians who refuse to accept the removal of their president.  You're a killer.

And forget all the sophistical demonstrations that the elected president wasn't really elected or wasn't really a president or that the coup wasn't really a coup.  The man got a majority of the votes in an election that qualified neutral observers called reasonably free.  There's no reason to believe that another election would turn out differently.  The will of a majority of the Egyptian people has been expressed.  And that's all democracy means, or needs to mean.

So forget, third-worlders, all those golden benefits promised you under the word "democracy."  And don't think it has anything to do with the goodness of a people.  It doesn't assure virtue.  All democracy assures is that the majority of people in your country, the people who most of the time will have the greatest power, or potential power, will have in place the machinery by which they can express their will.  That's good, maybe golden, especially when time comes for a transfer of power, but if it's good it's good only internally.

Externally, in dealing with other nations, you can no more count on it being good than you can count on the human will being good.  And allowing it to be collectively expressed isn't going to improve the odds.  Whatever the collective will is, though, whether it's good or bad, remember: it's just the will of one people, in one country.  If that will denies the will of another people in another country, if it denies them even unto death, that could be very bad.  We can call it terrible names — "hypocritical," "evil," "criminal."  But we can't call it "undemocratic."