281. "Safe Transgression" in "Fifty Shades of Grey."

"Safe transgression."  Is there such a thing?  In a column on "Fifty Shades of Grey" (NYT 2-15) Ross Douthat calls it a dream.  He sees the sado-masochism in that movie as a power exercise in which the woman is anything but safe.  On the other hand when my wife's parents played a game of cards that was forbidden I'd say they were safe.  They were 450 miles from their home town and they had pulled down the shades.  There were no victims.

Somebody with a higher view would no doubt say that the card game was not really a transgression.  It only violated a social code that my wife's parents had abandoned.  All that was left of the violation was the tingle.

So what is a real transgression?  If we say there are such things, how do we distinguish real ones from apparent, and therefore safe, ones?

One way, drawing on our examples above, would be to say that violation of a code you believe in is real (or, to avoid the objective reality problem, "real for you"); any other "violation" is only apparent. 

Fine, but from the higher view that's a poor way to do it.  The victimizer, by adjusting his code locator, gets off free.  The sexual revolution Christian Grey joins becomes, in Douthat's terms, "a permission slip for the strong and privileged to prey upon the weak and easily exploited."

Then there's the moment when the violation you thought was only apparent turns out to be real.  "That was a terrible thing I did to that woman."  The permission slip turns into a summons.

What explains such transitions?  Resurrection, through memory, of an earlier code, parental or religious?  Or just maturity, learning that life is not a garden where you can pick any pleasure you want?

Socrates would say that it's learning more about yourself, what's inside.  That might be your conscience, excavated by inquiry, or it might be your soul, seen in a vision.  If it's the latter you're really down there, uncovering the generator, the "nexus of your values," or, as Socrates would have it, The Real You.  You see that you've got something inside that can be injured and needs care.

You can't go down that far, though, without opening up your vocabulary to some striking changes.  "Soul" enters on grounds of vitality and tradition.  Who ever heard of caring for a nexus?  "Transgression" has to include transgression against yourself, and "victim," who does that refer to?  You, Christian Grey, you too.

280. The Return of Spiderman — in The Economist!

If a citizen of a democracy doesn't have the time or brain to figure all the ins and outs of his country's foreign policy he has to rely on a few newspapers and magazines.  And that, fellow voters, can be ticklish business.  Choose a publication that looks like it will save a busy middlebrow's time most efficiently and you discover that it's slanted, really, toward lowbrows.  With me that was Time magazine.  Pick one that seems the brainiest, and therefore least likely to slant, and you discover that its brains all slant, intellectually, one way.  With me that was the Partisan Review.  (I was equating brains with academic neutrality.  I had to age some.)

Now in old age my three-quarters of a brow counts, for the daily view, on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and, for the larger view, on The Economist, the New York Review, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker.  For fill-in and state of the controversy I count on Wikipedia, which tries harder than any of them to maintain academic neutrality.  (See its Guidelines for contributors.) 

With the conservative Journal in there you can see that I'm looking to balance the liberal Economist, particularly in foreign affairs.  But, with the Economist getting more and more emotional about Vladimir Putin that's getting harder to do.  In July they had him on the cover looking out from the middle of a spider web (see Post 253).  Now here he is as a puppet master, the strings from his fingers descending to darkly controlled agents, unseen below.  He's a man ready, as the lead editorial puts it, "to stoop to methods the West cannot emulate without sullying itself" (2/14-20).

I'm getting worked up the way Time used to work me up over the Communists allowed to spread their tentacles all over East Asia. Oh these evil people.  Oh how we need somebody to stand up to them.

But that can't be.  This is The Economist.  How can it be doing the Time magazine thing?  Wikipedia says "it targets highly educated readers."  Its own masthead puts it on the side of "intelligence" against "an unworthy ignorance."  Its brow is higher than anybody's.

279. "The Utter Absurdity of War"

Now here's Nora Roberts in Sunday's NYT Book Review saying that she'd like to have President Obama and every other world leader read Joseph Heller's Catch-22 because it's "a brilliant, funny, crazed story that perfectly depicts the utter absurdity of war."

I have little energy left to beat on Catch-22 (three blog posts, two articles, and a dozen or more dinner-table rants will really take it out of you) so I will simply say one thing: that I have yet to find, among all the people I have questioned, one person willing to say that fighting the Nazis was "'wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate" — that is, absurd. 

A lot of people are willing to say, "Men who gave orders in World War II were often wildly unreasonable or illogical etc," and a lot more are willing to say, "War is bloody and cruel and terrible," and the latter is probably what Roberts means, but there's this word "absurd," and she, and (my guess) all the professors who voted Catch-22 the seventh best novel of the twentieth century, can't resist it.  It's so existential-philosophical.  What else could elevate a shallow book for 1960s juveniles, a book full of frat-boy sexism, vaudeville logic, ponderous whimsicality, and specious humanity, to such heights?  And keep it there after all these years of education and sophistication?  (See Posts 7, 54, 125, 129, 224.)

278. Update on the Great Game

If you don't remember how Prof. John J. Mearshimer deplored our move to expand NATO eastward (Foreign Affairs 93:5, 2014, my Post 262) maybe you remember diplomat George Kennan's warning at the time, "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely."  I placed the move as part of "The Great Game" played by Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century and joined enthusiastically by the U. S. in the twentieth (Post 262).

Even if you have been too busy to pay close attention you probably know that the game hasn't been going too well for us.  We looked either weak or stupid after Putin did what he wanted to the country of the good man we supported [Saakashvili, of Georgia] and we looked like a mere noisemaker when he went into Crimea. 

Now it looks like our opponent is going to put some serious points on the board.  As the leaders of Germany, France, Ukraine, and Russia sat down in Minsk he still, as the NYT analysis (Andrew Higgins, 2-12-15) made clear, "held the decisive cards."  The leaders "confronted the reality that Mr. Putin held the upper hand precisely because he is prepared to use military force to get what he wants in diplomacy."

Why couldn't we see that moving NATO so close to Russia was a bad move, that it was even what Kennan called it at the time, "a tragic mistake"?  Why couldn't we listen to Kennan?  Because, I think, we were deafened by our own sounds.  Democrats wanted to make good sounds and Republicans wanted to make tough sounds.  And now here we are, reduced to a squeak.   We weren't willing to go to war.  We never were.  Putin is.  Squeak, squeak while his points go up.

The game is played in front of American voters.  An administration can't retreat in front of Republicans because that would be soft.  An administration has to go forward because of Democrats, who can't leave good people to their fate (the first moves east were made under the Carter and Clinton administrations). 

Part of the problem is that we keep getting the wrong people into the game.  Generals and Defense department types (think Rumsfeld) are not the people to play diplomacy.  Not even, if they are in the administration, to comment on it.  Their job (as in the administrative reform I dreamed of in Post 271) is to carry out what the policy-makers decide on, and give advice on capabilities. 

 But just a week ago Lt. Gen. Frederick Hodges' view of  "NATO's Russian Front" appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion pages (7-8 Feb, 15).  He "won't weigh in directly in the Washington policy debate" but Russia, he says, "has set out to redraw the boundaries of Europe."  And he won't worry about our provoking dangerous responses.  "You know, frankly, you hear this often from people in the West, 'Oh, we don't want to provoke the Russians.'  I think concern about provoking the Russians is probably misplaced.  You can't provoke them.  They're already on a path to do what they want to do."

Once again I find myself wishing that American leaders, and behind them the American people, would ask themselves the question asked in tough bars, and the sooner the better: "Are you willing to fight?"  If the answer is no you sit back and keep your mouth shut. 

277. It's Not the Religion, It's How It's Taken

OK, both our religions, Christianity and Islam, urge violence here and there in their ancient scriptures.  There's no difference between Christians and Muslims on that score.  But there is a difference in how those scriptures are taken.  There are more Muslims who want to impose Shariah, a law for an ancient desert people, than there are Christians (or Jews) who want to impose the laws of the Old Testament.

I think we can go on and say the more dangerous (because we're on the edge of prejudice and persecution) thing: that Muslims generally are more willing to obey or approve ancient commands to violence than Christians are.  And pushing to the edge, that that makes them a greater danger to a state.

So we can argue accidental superiority.  History has given Christians a sociological condition that is more favorable to state security than it has given Muslims.  This superiority is functional and temporal (See my Post #77).  It does not allow claims to any other superiority (race, ethnicity, origin, genome, etc.) but in states needing to protect themselves it needs to be recognized.

In preceding posts I suggested that we could avoid prejudice and persecution by keeping our eyes only on security and the laws necessary to it.  But, raising our vision, we saw that for long-term security we needed something more.  I suggested a nationwide mandatory educational program which, in light of the above, would for Muslims help correct the accidents of history that had made them dangerous. 

When we think that way we can't help opposing strong liberal instincts: to avoid invidious comparisons of cultures; to find the merciful and humane in every scripture; to say that that expresses the true nature of the religion; to oppose restrictions on freedom; to resist mandates from the central government, particularly in education; and beyond that to make no moves whatsoever toward a totalitarian state.

Yes, and there before us in my last post is my move: broaden the definition of incitement to violence so we can arrest more people, make every school in the country, every private school, every religious school, even every home school, hold to the curriculum that will best protect the state, and specify the exact courses that will make children grow up our way.

And to what noble end?  I'll put it bluntly: so that our grown-ups won't become fundamentalists.  So that children raised in a religion will say something like this, "Well yes, there's God's law, and yes, it's there in our Scripture, and it's a wonderful guide to life, but shucks, it does go to extremes sometimes.  It's just got to have a few tweaks."

"You want to get that out of fundamentalists?  They're all, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, dead against tweaking.  If they tweaked they wouldn't be fundamentalists.  And you want to make tweaking, religious tweaking, into a virtue."

Not exactly.  I want to make refusal to tweak into a vice.  The Jewish settler on the West Bank who says, "The Law says God gave us this land and I don't care what law, Israeli or International, says otherwise, I'm following a Higher Law," that settler is threatening the peace of the world, and I consider such threatening a vice.  And I consider support of that threatening a complicit vice.  The American fundamentalists who support the settlers for the same reason, that the words are in Holy Scripture, are complicit.  My fundamentalist, tweak-abominating mother was complicit, and the grateful letter she got from Binyamin Netanyahu confirmed it.

"Ah, but refusal to tweak is just what made our ancestors strong.  Their fundamentalist religion strengthened their spines and gave order to their lives.  It helped them survive, out on the prairie, far from the home city, or in a new country, far from the old one."  I know I can hear the same from an Arab fundamentalist.  "It helped us survive, out in the desert.  It gave order to our lives."

I don't deny that.  I'm just saying that there's a flip side, a dangerous side, an even vicious side, to their virtue.   And I don't deny that by softening that vicious side with a liberal education we may be softening the virtuous side, and losing a character valuable to the nation.  I just believe that for our nation's, and maybe the world's, security, all fundamentalism now has to be exposed to the education that will destroy it.

"And you're confident that your liberal education will destroy it?  You'd better be sure about that before you go mandating it in every school.  David Ben-Gurion, you know, thought that in an Enlightened Israel Jewish Orthodoxy would just 'wither away.'"

Yes, my confidence is high because my expectations are low.  I don't expect a Muslim teenager in Britain to come out of school taking the Koran the way an Anglican adult takes the Bible.  You know, with gentlemanly ease.  I just expect him to take it with a little more salt.  From the French mines, from Voltaire.

"And you'll get that in your education for democratic citizenship?"

Yes, out of this curriculum that I'm sure any number of my liberal arts colleagues could quickly provide.  I myself would make Introductory Logic and Speech 1 (making sure it included debates) mandatory.   And heavens, English Composition, the most important one of all.  ("Address the question, avoid prejudgments, cite evidence, anticipate objections, be skeptical, suspect absolute generalizations" — I've quoted it a hundred times.)  Out of my colleagues' arguments we could add more — a political science course, a history course — to the list of required courses.  Taken somewhere along the line.  No degree without them.  I'm willing to say, "No degree in engineering, no degree in any technological field, without them."  That would include students from all Enlightenment-deprived countries.  No going back loaded only with the results of skeptical, scientific thinking.  You've got to learn the Socratic-scientific way.

"And to enforce this?"

No way but the Teutonic, I'm afraid. "Achtung!  Make it so."  From the President, after Congressional approval.

"And what do the president's subordinates then say to school boards, 'No government money unless you comply'?  To colleges, 'No student loans'?  To foreigners, 'No scholarships' or worse, 'No visas'?" 

You're showing how unrealistic my plan is.  But surely our academic realists could come up with something not too far from it, couldn't they?  I know that our Socratic-scientific inheritance is a strong force in them.  I know they're willing to sacrifice a lot for our long-term security.

276. Negotiating Muslim Culture

To change tomorrow, change children.  If we've got adults who don't distinguish private religious responsibility from public political responsibility, who take their Holy Scripture as literal and unchanging truth, who think that dying attacking unbelievers is rewarded in heaven, and who take insults to their Prophet with deadly seriousness, and if we don't want to live with such adults in the future (see preceding post), then we've got to change them.

It's a problem of education, also called (in the marketplace) brainwashing, indoctrinating, robot-making, and cookie-cutting.  I decided I had to face it when I saw that short-term measures to live with Islamic fundamentalism were not sustainable.  In the metaphor I had going at the time we just can't afford to have our young fish maturing in that kind of water.

We in the West can avoid that only under the constraints imposed by our dominant culture, that of (still) the Enlightenment.  Here it's the need to preserve freedom.  We were restricting freedom of speech when we justified having lawmen sitting in on imams' sermons, listening for our newly defined incitements to violence.  Here it's the freedom of local governments, specifically school boards, that we want to restrict.  Should a school in Birmingham, England, be free to teach Islamic principles?  Should a school in Kansas be free to teach the Bible creation story?

My answer, minus its development, is, "Yes, as long as they're taught in an academic way, and as long as they're not a substitute for the teaching that prepares youth for democratic citizenship."

The academic way is the way Socrates taught the West, testing beliefs in an impersonal fashion and abandoning those that fail.  The way of science.  Presentation of its results requires disinterestedness.  An academic presenting the creation story says, "This is what Christians believe."

The teaching that prepares youth for democratic citizenship is less distinct, though the ideal product is clear enough, at least for me.  It's that voter who takes up a candidacy or an issue the way a Supreme Court justice takes up a case, holding his or her thinking to what has consequences in the practical world.  Ms. Perfect Voter is Sandra Day O'Connor acting under a time constraint, as Ms. Perfect Journalist is Barbara Tuchman writing in haste.  Perfect-in-the-World is a university scientist without the leisure or the grants.

I believe that a Western democracy's need for something close to this in its citizens is so great that I am willing to reduce almost any of democracy's associated values that get in its way.  Freedom of local citizens from control by the central government is a long-held value in the United States, especially in the Heartland.  I want to say, to the citizens of Ohio, and now Colorado, "Here is something every school must teach.  You are free to teach other things, but you are not free to substitute anything for this."  And I will present them with what I think will make their students most like Sandra Day O'Connor, the curriculum for ideal democratic citizenship.

The benefit of this constraint (I'll get around to the curriculum) is that, like many constraints, it allows greater freedom elsewhere.  Be recognized as an approximation of Sandra Day O'Connor and you can say nearly anything you want, anywhere.  That goes for Muslims who have achieved the approximation.  Regardless of how they started out.  We trust our mandated education.

We also trust the social pressure O'Connor approximations can bring to bear.  Slam an ethnic group, as you are free to do, and O'Connor will show the irrelevance of your slam to the issue at hand.  No gratuitous slaps among her kind, not without bringing a blush.  Her kind attack a belief by demonstrating its consequences.  Call that a slap and you'll blush from the opposite direction. 

Because we think we have enough of O'Connor's kind out in the marketplace we let people there slap and slam as they will.  Satire is fine.  (It's an Enlightened Western country's substitute for violence.)   Incitement to ridicule is OK.  Insult is expected.  Developed populations can call undeveloped populations benighted and barbaric.  Undeveloped populations can call developed populations decadent and rapacious.  All because such callers can be put in their place by better-educated callers, who in Enlightened countries will, like Supreme Court Justices, carry the greater weight.  We in Enlightened countries trust in our education system to supply that weight.  When it does we don't need laws against such speech.

For the weight-supplying curriculum I am going to impose on every local school, I look first to what produced Sandra Day O'Connor.  And I will present school governors with what I think will make their students most like her.   I can make a pretty good guess about what was taught in her El Paso high school, classic college-prep, and an even better guess about what was taught at Stanford, where she got her B.A. in 1950 (my time in school): classic liberal arts.  For the latter, in American colleges, the key course was English Composition.  It was the course, then and now, that was counted on to introduce newcomers to the academic way.  "Address the question, avoid prejudgments, cite evidence, anticipate objections, be skeptical, suspect absolute generalizations" — those were the big imperatives in nearly every composition handbook.

And I would require that they be obeyed in English.  Because that is the language in which democratic debate goes on in America.  It is the language of the marketplace out of which votes come, determining elections. The marketplace.  Where the need for the protection of free speech arose in the minds of our founding fathers. 

So our advice to Muslim leaders is, "Get in on the marketplace scrimmage, friends.  Mix it up.   There are so many things you can attack: our drone strikes, our behavior at Abhu Graib, our insensitive satires of the Prophet.  Go beyond that immediate ugliness; attack our materialism, our hypocrisy, our arrogance, our vulgar popular culture, our all-consuming consumerism, our pornifaction of the inner life.   If you go too far our Sandra O'Connors will put you to shame.  If you incite to violence our police will put you in prison."

275. Responding Safely to Islamist Terrorism

The trouble with my saying that a culture can be a threat to a state (preceding post) is that Hitler would love it.  Jewish culture spawned subversives.  It was the water Bolsheviks swam in.  And Bolsheviks, who were they eliminating?  Anybody spawned in bourgeois culture.  All Stalin's executioners needed to see in a Ukrainian was a mark of it.

There it was, the clearest warning sign the twentieth century left us, and I was skating right up to it.  I was suggesting that Muslim culture encouraged terrorist acts.  Take my suggestion and you'll be persecuting those people.  Your thought police, your virtue squads, maybe even your executioners, are on the way.

How can we make sure we don't go past the sign?  I suggest that we begin by doing what Supreme Court justices do: not even consider the question until we have a case before us.  A legal case.  Concrete, particular, with consequences in the practical world.

We move into court to unburden ourselves.  So much of our thinking is abstract, or polemical, or competitive, or self-serving.  So much of our knowledge is inert.  In front of a case our load is lighter.  The abstractions fall to academic theorists, the polemics to pundits, the one-ups to bloggers and tweeters, and the ego-trips to confessors and shrinks.  As for knowledge, the heaviest burden, the excess is stripped from us by the test of relevance.  We are like a CIA director sorting through a mountain of intelligence.  "Is it actionable?" he asks.  In our case that becomes, "Does what we know about Muslim culture justify a change in our law punishing incitement to violence?"  All other knowledge falls to the marketplace, and takes its place in the general scrimmage.

OK, we know enough about Muslim culture — that the religion that determines the culture does not distinguish private religious responsibility from public political responsibility, that a very high percentage of its followers take the words of its Scripture and its preachers as literal and unquestionable truth, that it glorifies martyrdom, that it takes insults to its Prophet with blood seriousness — to justify considering a change in our laws about public violence.

So we set the law in front of us.  In Ohio (typical) it makes incitement to violence a crime only when the conduct "takes place under circumstances that create a clear and present danger that any offense of violence will be committed" or when "it proximately results in the commission of any offense of violence."  We close our ears to all shouts from the marketplace, all name-calling, all accusations, all guilt-thrusts, all cries of pain, all yells of triumph.  We close our minds to all judgments of moralists, preachers, priests, wise men, God.  We focus only on the danger.  Does it have to be "present"? 

We say no because we have seen Muslims inspired by the words of imams commit violence well after the words were spoken to them, as when training in Afghanistan or Syria intervenes.  That's a danger and our security is not ensured.  So we drop "present" from the first condition and scratch the whole second condition.  (See Post 273.)

Is the danger "clear"?  We're looking at another of those objective-sounding, confidently used terms (like "reasonable" in "reasonable doubt") that conceal their subjectivity (clear to whom?  reasonable to what mind?).  But, seeing that our common, liberal way of thinking about religions, inductively, will in this case leave us insecure (we're not worried about majority behavior) we think deductively and conclude that this religion encourages, and at least allows, such behavior (see Post 273). In any case we can accept whatever meaning of "clear" accumulated court decisions have given it. 

All right, let's go back and look at that warning sign.  Are we still on the right side of it? 

 I don't see how we can be on the other side, but I do see how we've opened ourselves to complaints about the law enforcement our change in the rules entails.  Our police are going to discriminate among ethnic groups and profile for one of them in surveillance.  Detectives are not going to be sitting in Methodist churches, guards are not going to be flagging Catholics.

I think most of these complaints can be silenced by pointing out that, no denying it, we are discriminating and profiling, but we are doing it in the sense of those words before they acquired the sense that racists, by their arbitrary and random actions, gave them.  Unless they can tail every citizen in the country equally our police will have to discriminate and profile.  It's a concession to their limited manpower.

For the people most directly affected by our discriminating and profiling, our Muslims, we can transpose the problem to Israel (as I did in Post 273).  Illegal settlements are being set up on the West Bank. You're a law enforcement official.  You know that in the line at check points there are going to be people who, taking their Scripture very seriously, believe that God gave them that land.  Do you want your guards to know which ones?  Do you want these believers taken aside for questioning?  And for that would you like to know which synagogue they attended and what the rabbi was saying to them?  A yes answer approves the kind of discriminating and profiling called for in our changes to our incitement-to-violence laws.

To settle an appeal in any of these cases statistics alone are sufficient.  People of this religion, holding these beliefs, have this probability of acting in this illegal way.  Our knowledge of them, our intelligence, is actionable.  We are still on the right, the objective, side of the twentieth-century's warning sign. 

That gives us security in the near future.  But dropping the word "present" also opens up the far future.  Suppose that, while reduced by the measures above, Islamist terrorist attacks are taking place ten years from now.  We can't see any reason that they won't.  The religion and culture are the same.  There's no change in the water in which these fish thrive.  Can we, within the limits our values allow us, do something about that?  Would we be justified in changing the water?  Or even, God help us, exchanging it for fresh?  

Like it or not, capable of it or not, we are in the business of manipulating culture.  How?  With what justification?  Being over-length already I'll have to take up these questions in another post.