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.

167. What Barack Obama learned from my urologist.

 
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The President must have the same urologist I have.  He believes in watchful waiting.

Let me tell you about "watchful waiting."  It's the greatest treatment ever to rise to the top of the options-list doctors give their patients.  You know, in those waiting-room brochures. 

For prostate malignancies "watchful waiting" used to be well below the aggressive treatments — prostatectomy, radiation therapy, hormone therapy.  My first urologist, as soon as he saw the biopsy results, wanted to do major surgery.  A later one wanted to chemically castrate me.  "We've got to go right at this thing."  That fit the temperament of most of his manly patients.  This is malignant, man.  We don't want to mess around.  "OK Doc, let's roll."

This was so common in my town and in the literature that I began to think urologists all had the same mentor.  Some Edmund Burke.  "All that is needed for the triumph of prostate cancer is for good urologists to do nothing."

Well, my present urologist, the one I share with Barack Obama, didn't follow him.  He advised something pretty close to nothing.  You just keep an eye on the tumor and not until you get a reliable sign that it's going lethal do you act.

What led him to differ from his colleagues then, or what led so many of them to come over to his side since then, I don't know.  Maybe they saw so many people (like my brother) suffering so much from the aggressive treatment that they began to have doubts.  Maybe the experience of a few patients (like me, with seven years of normal life) was so happy that they thought it was a good gamble.  Whatever it was, the order on the list was reversed, no dire consequences followed, and my urologist (Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic) is getting praise from all over the country.

Now I want to praise Obama for the way he, ignoring the manly Republicans, has adopted "watchful waiting" as his approach to malignancies in world affairs.  Where George Bush, with nearly all of Congress behind him, wanted to roll in Iraq, Obama wanted to wait.  Where John McCain wants to roll in the Middle East Obama wants to wait.  To Bush Saddam Hussein was clearly malignant.  To John McCain Bashar al-Assad is clearly malignant. " When you've got a malignancy why mess around?"

Maybe by now the suffering caused by the roll into Iraq is changing some minds.  Maybe Congress and the electorate are ready to join the small, unmanly cohort (the French, those accordion players) who wanted to watch and wait in 2003.  They clearly seem less willing to roll against that evil monster Assad.

I use the word "evil" there because that's the word gung-ho spin-doctors use when they want to move a nation's citizens to roll with their client in international affairs.  It's the word George Bush's doctors used for the Iraqi and Iranian and North Korean malignancies.  It's the word Ronald Reagan's doctors used for the Soviet Union.  It makes watching and waiting much harder.  "This is evil, man."  But it's very effective with a religious electorate.  It makes the malignancy more "theological" — as Bush's speechwriter explained when he inserted it.

"Evil" is just one of those words that Republicans (and some Democrats — mainly out of the need to compete with them for votes) use to tap into American testosterone (see "holy testosterone" in Post #158).  And the users are nearly always vague with respect to specific action.  What do you do to stamp out evil?  What do you do to show you are not "soft on" communism?  that you are not surrendering in the "war on terrorism"?

Well, one thing about my urologist, he was not vague.  And he made sure you knew what he meant. "Watchful waiting" did not mean "gentle acting."  If the threat was lethal there would be no limit to his aggressiveness.  He was ready to cut, plant, and castrate.  All in substantive action.  Nothing symbolic. 

OK, here's where I see President Obama, listening to a physician who didn't just say "malignancy!" but asked right away, "How fast is it growing?  What can it do to change this patient's life, in comparison with the other options?  Is it a lethal threat?"  All are specific and precise questions whose parallels I see in the questions I think Obama is asking about the malignancies his countrymen urge him to treat around the world.

166. Changing the Culture at Penn State

How do you change a culture?  Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, thinks you can do it by hurting people who are part of that culture. 

Was there "a culture of reverence for the football program" at Penn State?  Yes.  The NCAA executive committee's findings (or rather the findings of Louis Freeh, which Emmert and his committee followed) showed that it was "ingrained at all levels of the campus community." 

So the NCAA kept the football team out of bowl games for four years, reduced the number of scholarships that could be granted its players, turned 111 of its victories into losses, and fined the school 60 million dollars.  That hurts the students, the alumni, the fans, the players, the coaches, and, thinking of that 60 million, the professors, the librarians, the administrators, and anybody who has a stake in Penn State's reputation in any enterprise that requires money.  All of them.

This action has been subject to some very sharp criticism.  Gary Alan Fine, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, has compared the changing of wins to losses in the record book to the rewriting of history by the communists in Orwell's 1984.  Twenty-nine past chairs of the Penn State Faculty Senate have objected that the Freeh statement about the culture is plain false: not one of them had ever "been asked to change grades for athletes or approve of phantom courses or majors."

Those are big issues but next to culture-change they're small.  Culture-change is beginning to look like the great challenge of the 21st century.  Isn't it what we're trying to do in the Middle East?  Isn't it what Thomas Friedman and so many other editorialists wanted us to do in Iraq?  Now here's Emmert, having a go at Penn State.

And as an old culture-changer — that is, as a teacher, a supplier the arts and sciences to the undersupplied — I have to say that he has the wrong end of the stick.  You don't change culture by hurting people.  Hurting is what you do to change behavior.  You know, the way armies and police forces do.  To change culture you talk, point, sing, dance, and hold up for admiration — the way artists and profs do. 

We profs mainly talk and point.  And we have no doubt we can change a culture.  We do it all the time.  Small-town culture, fundamentalist religious culture, xenophobic Midwest culture, redneck Appalachian culture, he-man culture, more cultures than you can shake a stick at, they all send their products into our classrooms.  There's a lot of resistance there sometimes, but we're eager to, we've got to, overcome it.  Change the fundamentalist culture and you can teach evolution, change the he-man culture and you can teach poetry.  We get right at it (it's slow work) and after a while we have what we need, students assimilated into the academic culture. 

"If you're saying that that is what Emmert ought to be doing I think you have missed something.  He may be a prof but he has taken a policeman's job.  He presides over an organization that's supposed to check for violation of rules and punish violators — that is, hurt them.  That's what he's doing." 

In which case I think you've exposed the real problem here: confusion.  Emmert is trying to use his police powers to do a prof's (or a priest's, or a parent's) job.  Doesn't he see that powers, starting with the big ones named in our Constitution, should be separate?  that Americans are surprised and offended when they are not?  Look at that report he relies on.  Freeh finds "a striking lack of empathy" for the victims.  What's a judge doing talking about empathy?  That's child-psychologist talk.  Parent talk.  "I'll handle the feelings," says the mother. "You law people just tell me what he did."

That's being offended.  Here's being surprised.  The infractions committee of Emmert's own organization didn't take up the Penn State case.  The reason?  According to some former members, "because it involved a cover-up of criminal activity rather than a violation of traditional NCAA bylaws."  It wasn't in their domain.  But (surprise!) there was Emmert, imposing penalties.

By now I think we all have a pretty good idea of the division of labor.  Architects design, builders build, realtors sell.  In America that gets an early boost in our schooling, when we learn about the organization of our government.  We each play our part and avoid playing somebody else's part and we get the benefits of an ordered society.

"Ah," says my friend, "but underneath this division we are all human beings, and that's what Emmert and Freeh, when they look at what was done to those children, can't resist being.  You want to keep them in their compartments, rational and cold.  I prefer having them out as caring, feeling human beings.  I join Emmert and Freeh."

I do too.  In my heart.  What heart can resist the call to do something, to protect childhood innocence and goodness from adult evil?  But my mind holds me back.  It consults adult experience and says, "Calculate the risks."  Here the evil is a culture and what's done to it is a hurtful act against individuals, justified by the fact of evil.  But "evil," like the on-the-spot word, "bad," is not a fact word; it's a judgment word, and subjective.  Use it to justify a hurtful action and there's no place to stop.  If you're not hurting ghetto-dwellers and Roma and Inuit and anybody else whose culture you judge to be "bad" you're helpless before those who do.

How different from punishing people for their behavior.  Before you can do that you have meet all kinds of conditions, set up, usually by governments, for their protection.  Definition of the crime, rules of evidence, guarantees of process.  You can probably find most of these conditions in the books that both Freeh and Emmert have, up to this point, had to follow.  Punish them for their culture, though, and where are the books you follow?

So there's the first risk, making yourself the tolerator, if not the companion, of bigots and kooks, high-handed culture-punishers.  The second risk is that you'll make an intolerable mess.  If you sweep aside all distinctions between assigned jobs what happens to our ordered society?  What happens to order itself, to reason?  Reason says, "Keep things straight."  Humane feelings say, "Make things good."  Follow the latter at the expense of the former and you're going to wind with everything crooked, a mess.

"So, do you say to Mark Emmert. 'Do nothing'?  'Look at an attack on innocence and goodness and do nothing'?  You, my friend, are concerned about risk, and say that punishment for bad culture risks the loss of reason.  I say that failure to punish risks the triumph of evil.  Edmund Burke said, 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.'"

Yes I do say to Emmert, "Do nothing" — though I'd put it as, "Mind your own business."  Looking at Iraq, and now Syria, I have to say that.  And I'd like to add this to Burke: "All that is necessary to make a mess (in international affairs called a 'quagmire') is for good people, every time they see evil, to think they have to do something."