271. A Dream After Reading Memoirs by Presidential Advisers

First decree of the Word Czar:  No memo submitted to the President by a security adviser will contain the words "evil," "vile," "depraved," "vicious," "monstrous," "heinous" or any other word indicating that the nation is dealing with a ruler of despicable character.  Nothing that a ruler does entirely inside his country or to his own people will be referred to in the context of security.

Second decree: No memo submitted by the Secretary of Defense will contain the word "policy."  The words "objectives," "aims," and "strategy" will be used only with respect to goals already determined by the Secretary of State and the President.  Corollary:  the position Under Secretary of Defense for Policy will be eliminated.

Third decree: The CIA is subject to the above restrictions and in addition is ordered to eliminate the word "action" from its memos.  That agency's memos will be restricted entirely to information.

Fourth decree: No security advisor will be permitted to use, in memos referring to people outside this country, the words "liberty," "freedom," or "self-determination" with respect to their aims, or "oppressed," "exploited," or "deprived" with respect to their condition.

Fifth decree:  Atrocities will never be spoken of as actions characteristic of particular peoples; all peoples will be assumed to be, under the right conditions, capable of atrocities.

Coda:

(1) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Political Adviser, or any adviser for whom words serve the power that gives power to all in the executive branch.  For example, if voters want to hear talk about human rights then the Political Adviser may freely advise talk about human rights.

(2) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Diplomatic Adviser (the Secretary of State), or any of his or her subordinates for whom words serve international power.  For example, if talk about human rights weakens a nation or faction (say by causing internal division) that the Secretary of State finds it useful to weaken, or strengthens a nation or faction that the Secretary of State finds it useful to strengthen, then he may freely advise talk about human rights.

(3) No decree of the Word Czar is binding on the Legacy Adviser, or any subordinates for whom words serve to influence historians.  For example, if the Legacy Adviser thinks talk about human rights will, by indicating that those rights are an aim, raise historians' estimates of a President's performance, then he may freely advise talk about human rights.

Note:  All decrees are issued on the understanding that the restructuring of the Executive Branch is complete.  See the President's orders

(1) that all functions of the National Security Adviser and the National Security Council will be subsumed under the Department of State or the Department of the Interior (expanded to include Homeland Security);

(2) that all functions of the CIA having to do with action, covert or overt, will be taken over by the Department of State (to which any agent may be transferred);

(3) that the President will meet regularly only with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Interior, the White House Chief of Staff, and the four new appointees, Political Adviser, Linguistic Adviser, Resource Adviser, and Legacy Adviser (the Permanent Advisers);

(4) that all other meetings of advisers with the President will be ad hoc, or contingency,  meetings, with attendance determined by the contingency and the expertise or wisdom available to meet it;

(5) that for help in selecting attendees at contingency meetings the President will employ the Resource Adviser, charged with matching contingency to available expertise or wisdom, in which he or she will become expert;

(6) that official position will not be a qualification or a disqualification for attendance at contingency meetings (the Vice President will be an attendee only if selected, though he is expected to attend as an observer);

(7) that the Resource Adviser may attend any meeting, as an observer in order to gain knowledge for future selections;

(8) that the Linguistic Adviser (the adviser charged with keeping verbal and conceptual order — the Word Czar) may attend any meeting, as an observer, in order to gain knowledge for future decrees.

Note for those expecting to be observed: It will be well to keep in mind the purposes of the President's restructuring: (1) to avoid the transfer fallacy — taking expertise in one area to be transferable to expertise in another, as, say, from warfare to foreign policy; (2) to avoid the personality danger, where a person (say a general), or a type (say military) has such force or charisma (as gained, say, through past success, as in World War II) that his lack of expertise or wisdom with respect to the immediate contingency goes unrecognized.  (The President's gratitude to and respect for the Joint Chiefs of Staff should not conceal from you the fact that their removal from all advisory meetings — the Secretary of Defense will speak for them — reflects his desire to avoid the charisma danger, clearly evident in their imposing presence in the past.

The President recognizes as a final danger that you, particularly if you come from within the government structure (remember, the Resource Adviser draws on the entire nation for expertise), may be so intimidated by the presence of the Linguistic Adviser that your advice may not be as free and full as it would otherwise be.  That adviser recognizes the problem but believes that if you give single-minded attention to the contingency before you, defining it and locating it to the best of your ability, you will forget him, see what is required, and go on to give the President the best advice he can get.

267. "Evil" in the World

How variously we react to the word "evil."  George W. Bush, in his memoirs, thinks all the fuss about his use of "axis of evil" was over the word "axis," suggesting that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea had formed an alliance like the one Germany and Italy had formed.  "Evil" was not worth remark.

Years later, as his memoirs appeared, others were still lamenting the consequences of all that the word had brought into play.  "Oh that Manichaean view of the world.  Oh the demonizing of enemies.  Look where it's left us."  A leader who inserts "evil" into a speech about another nation, as Ronald Reagan first did, has dropped a canister full of bad germs.

Reviewing all that George Bush was unaware of is a fool's task, I know, but here we've got a puzzle.  He and his advisors seemed to be doing their best to make themselves aware.  I can't count the number of places in Rumsfeld's and Gates's memoirs where, sometimes at Bush's insistence, they stop to "review all the assumptions" and make sure they haven't missed any "concealed hazards" in the course they have chosen.  They are highly motivated, they are bright, and they have gone to the best schools.  And yet, as revealed by their casual acceptance of the bomb-word "evil," they are clueless.  Where it may have counted most.

And it wasn't rocket science.  David Loy, a teacher like the rest in our liberal arts philosophy departments, could have told them right away what was in that bomb.  As he did after 9/11, explaining that "evil" is a term that people in our society, in contrast to a Buddhist society (he was living in Japan at the time), need in order to feel good about themselves.  "We can feel comfortable and secure in our own goodness only by attacking and destroying the evil outside us. If you want to be a hero, well, occasionally a natural disaster will do, but the best thing is a villain to battle.  St. George needs that dragon in order to be St. George."

Listen to Loy and professors like him and you, as soon as you hear "evil" come out of Bush's mouth, will start wondering whether Iraq was maybe George's dragon. 

You have a lot to go on.  Bush certainly was rooted in the Christian tradition that makes the opposition of good and evil most dramatic.  He himself had fallen into evil and been reborn into good.   He had chosen a speechwriter from fundamentalist Wheaton College, Michael Gerson, who spoke the language of moral dualism most readily.  And for philosophical justification of the Iraq invasion he chose, for a visit to the White House, a University of Chicago theologian, Jean Bethke Elshtain, whose bedrock convictions, according to colleagues, included "the existence of an absolute good and evil" (see Post #213).  For an alert student Bush will look like just the person who would reach for the word "evil," and start the whole Manichaean thing going.

Except he didn't reach for it.  It was fed to him.  By that graduate of Wheaton, Michael Gerson, who sees "axis of hate" in a draft of the State of the Union speech and knows right away it's not going to get the most out of Midwestern voters.  Change it to "axis of evil."  What's wrong with "hate"?   It's "not theological enough."

So we get the word that drove liberally educated people up the wall.  Graduates of Wheaton College are not liberally educated; they are theologically educated.  And this puts them in tune with voters in the Heartland, most of whom still gain their education in church.  This is power, votes in the Heartland.  Manichaeism is in the saddle.

In a liberal education you learn how to stand outside a culture and its vocabulary.  In English courses you learn how words work, and, drawing on what you have learned in history and philosophy courses, you get an idea of the dangers in words.  In the word "evil" you see, or give yourself a chance of seeing, how it turns eyes from threats to be avoided to natures to be abhorred.  "Evil" is an extreme abhorrence word.  And it brings a string of abhorrent-nature adjectives in its trail — vile, monstrous, wicked, vicious, base, depraved.  You see how those who use these words will be carried further and further from the external world and any threats it might present them with. You see (oh history, history) how it polarizes, how it turns opponents into demons, how it makes compromise or surrender difficult.

And that's why, when your president, in apparent innocence (I leave open the possibility that it was cynicism in his speechwriters), opens the bomb bays in his State of the Union Address and drops a canister like this you are going to be halfway up the wall with everybody else who has profited from a liberal education.

And the only way you can go is further up, because nobody in power, and least of all the president, will be noticing you.  With the painful consequences of the president's neglect of the complex external world in Iraq already, after three years, registering on the nation there he is, in the chapel at Camp David, having "one of the best preachers" he's ever heard confirm the stand he has taken.  "Evil is real, biblical, and prevalent.... Some say ignore it, some say it doesn't exist.  But evil must not be ignored, it must be restrained."  There would be a cost, but, according to Bush's memoir, the preacher reminded the president that "there has never been a noble cause devoid of sacrifice" and assured him that "the Scriptures put great premiums on faithfulness, perseverance, and overcoming.  We do not quit or give up.  We always believe there is no such thing as a hopeless situation."  A Christian up against evil can't compromise, and can't quit.  A liberally educated student, standing outside the Christian culture and vocabulary, will observe how easy it is to substitute "Islamist" for "Christian" in the preacher's vocabulary.

And he or she won't be distracted by the goodness or brightness or earnestness of individual Christians or those who help them.  Bush's helpers, the ones who went over and over their assumptions and listed again and again the hazards, were as good and bright and earnest as any you can find.  They thought hard.  They just didn't think broadly.  It was all theological or military.  They all might as well have gone to Wheaton or West Point.

So, another plug for liberal education and English courses.  Parents, direct your children to them.  Children, listen closely and study hard.  Everybody hope that the teachers understand the tradition they work in.  The further it spreads among citizens the wiser the country's foreign policy will be.  Start in the Heartland.

226. When Error Philosophers Become Kings

 

Call somebody a philosopher and sure enough you'll get the question, "But how will he do as a ruler?"  Too many minds have been seeded by Plato's pronouncement: "There will be no end to the troubles of the state or indeed of humanity until philosophers become kings or until those we now call kings really and truly become philosophers."  So how do I think my error philosopher (pictured in Post 224) will behave as a king, or ruler?

The error philosopher's first concern, remember, was to avoid gross mistakes, rather than attain fine truths.  And that concern, to avoid rather than attain, would no doubt be carried into government.  In the financial crisis of 2008, for example, he would ask, not "What can we do to rise shining out of this recession?" but "What can we do to avoid falling into a Great Depression?"  Both George Bush and Barack Obama could, I think, be called Avoidance Rulers in that year, and I think most of us now approve — as we disapprove of Herbert Hoover for the mistake that in 1931 tipped recession into World Depression: raising tariffs.

In foreign policy the Cold War gave us perhaps our clearest distinction, since the grossest mistake was so terrible: falling into a nuclear war.  There was no goal so fine that it would be worth suffering that, though there was a goal that came close: containing communism.  So close.  For some it was almost a tie.  What a problem! And there it stood for forty years: to patrol the line against communism without blundering over it into world destruction.

There we have no trouble identifying our Avoidance Statesman: he's the one being so careful to step on the safe side.  The Attainment Statesman will be careful too but he'll have a harder time keeping his balance.  He's got too many forces impelling him ("Drive on, American, drive on!  Fulfill your high destiny!") and too many people pushing on him ("What are you going to be, soft?  A wuss?").  Feel sorry for the poor Avoidance Statesman.  He's got all that testosterone against him, with all that idealism it can dress itself in.

Another word for idealism here is romanticism, typified in Robert Browning's famous lines "A man's reach should exceed his grasp/ Or what's a heaven for?"  The Avoidance Ruler and his Statesman are anti-romantics.  Anti-romantics (sometimes called classicists), if they were to write a counter-poem, would write, "A man's reach should coincide with his grasp, and that's how you mount to heaven."  A few years ago they'd have put their view, or found it, in Greek, to show how deeply rooted it was in ancient wisdom, the old warnings about over-reaching.  Hubris, you know.  But no Greek at election time.  You look a little wussy.

In politics and foreign affairs a close-observing classicist (the most common kind) would see that the romantic idealist's banner-word, "freedom," now means (or has been revealed by our experience in the Middle East to include) "freedom of warlords to go at each other."  So: "Pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship for that?  Extremism in defense of that is no vice?  moderation no virtue?" Oh that young idealist, John F. Kennedy.  Ah that old romantic, Barry Goldwater.  John McCain, would you step forward?

You can feel sorry for the Attainment Statesman too, though.  He's got all those people trying to put more hair on his chest.  Look at him at election time, a manly enough fellow already, being badgered to open his shirt.  Even so, as we observed, he's got to be careful too, and think, and choose the least dangerous steps, and risk looking like a wuss, even on the way to the greatest attainment.

Nuance, that's what's needed in arguments for war or peace, especially now, when cases are so complicated and words jump around so.  Hawks are as capable of it as doves, as we know when think tanks flow out against each other.  But there's this about hawks: when they're in danger of losing an election they know they can tap another tank, the no-think tank, with a spigot doves can barely reach.   Need backing for Marines into Da Nang? bombs on Haiphong?  Out it comes, onto bumper stickers: "Victory over Communism, not Coexistence."  Think of all the work doves would have to do, all the explaining, before they could get that kind of sock into a sticker.

Sure, doves have their spigots.  There is such a thing as liberal reflex, and it's widely exploitable.  But the doves' spigots are nothing like this one.  This one opens directly, with nearly frictionless ease, into the pool of under-educated voters, the great pool that collects under every democracy.  Though a constant in the minds of political scientists, its occupants are known by different names at different times.  What I call the "under-educated" was once, in America, the "Know-Nothing" and is now, more commonly, the "low-information" voter.  Not too long ago he could be called the "dumbhead" voter.  In any case, he's in a pool most easily tapped by hawks.

"Fine.  Your Avoidance Ruler will be above that.  He'll be above — meaning indifferent to — a lot of things that could lead his country into trouble.  But he'll also be indifferent to a lot of things that could lead the world, including his country, into disaster.  Hitler militarizes the Rhineland.  What will he be doing?  Passively waiting for the Great Mistake.  What will he be saying?  'Calm down, you (dumb?) hotheads, calm down.'"

You're missing something.  The Avoidance Ruler is a philosopher, remember.  Thinks.  Sorts out and traces cause and effect.  Visualizes consequence-chains.  Does a cost-benefit.  And what he can't do he has a staff of experts do.  But what he does best, and must do all by himself, is prioritize threats.  So he can concentrate on the big ones and wave away the little ones, no matter how hot his citizens get over them.

I know that sounds presumptuous, but ranking blunders is his thing.  He (or she) is an error philosopher.  So I think, with his philosophy, and his (or his helpers') ability to work out the cause-effect chain, that when Hitler went into the Rhineland, he'd have said, "This is big.  It would be a mistake not to act.  And act big."   You can't call an Avoidance Ruler a passive ruler.

"Got you.  And I think you're letting me call George W. Bush an active Avoidance Ruler.  He went right after terrorists.  It would have been a big mistake, a Rhineland-ignoring mistake, not to."

Oh please, let's not get back into George Bush.  I'm tired of talking about him.  I know, I know, he was an Avoidance Ruler.  I've granted that.  But he wasn't a philosopher.  He didn't come close.  Low standards of evidence, haphazard justification, loose cost-benefit, weak imagination.  I don't think he finished 101.  But I don't think I need to say any more about him.  Ari Shavit, in Wednesday's NYT Op-Ed (11-21-13), has pretty well said all that needs to be said.

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.