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.

272. The Lying, Cheating London Economist

I refer to The Economist the old way because I'm thinking of integrity.   It was the soul of it.  Now I have received in the mail from that newsmagazine an offer for subscribers to the New York Times which tells me, in big type, in a box, that instead of the regular price of The Economist for twelve weeks, $334.97, I can pay $15.00.  This, with the goodies broken down and individually priced, is repeated in a column below, with an adjacent column showing that all come to me with my one payment of $15.00, the number now displayed in a red box.

Then on the detachable Preferred Discount Order Form, following the biggest YOU PAY ONLY, is the $15.00 again, in the biggest box.  Only when I look at the fine print above where I give my credit card number and sign up do I get the operating words: "You will be billed $15 on your credit card immediately and then $15 every month thereafter."

This didn't really harm me because I am onto what the Economist is up to — sort of the way a Muscovite was onto what Pravda was up to.  You don't expect straight shooting.  The only problem is that this is coming from people I thought were straight shooters.

"No, it's coming from crooked shooters they hired, experts in the subscription scam."

Makes no difference.  Hire a crook, become a crook.  You cause the harm.  If one of our low-mentation, bad eyesight residents here falls for this scam she is harmed.  The Economist did it to her.

Luckily my mentation is still high enough for me to avoid this harm, bank account harm, but still, even if no bank account in the whole place is harmed, something is harmed.  I think it's the culture.  No, not the American culture (though that may be harmed too) but one of those sub-categories we now freely call "cultures" — the culture of Wall Street, the culture of book collectors, the culture of pool players.  Here it's the culture of liberal letters, the culture of, as I see them, readers of the New York Times and The Economist. 

We went so long thinking, as John Stuart Mill did, of harm as individual harm that we still have a hard time getting our minds around social harm, which is only vaguely felt anyway.  We cry out much more readily over the first.  It's the clarity of a bank account against the obscurity of an unsatisfying tennis afternoon.  It's your score on the wire against your knowledge that you played dirty pool.

You have to be there and feel it.  I feel it when Jimmy Connors comes over and rubs out the ball-mark his opponent has asked the judge to inspect.  The culture of tennis is harmed.  As the culture of baseball is harmed when our high school's hero, impersonating a fielder's teammate, yells "I got it" near a descending fly ball.  The culture of all athletes is harmed when Mohammed Ali says "I am the greatest."  When these actions are admired (as Howard Cosell admired Mohammed Ali, and led the nation's admiration) the culture is changed for the worse.  (I reveal a culture that scorns cultural relativism.)

The harm deepens when you become complicit.  I play dirty pool because everybody around me is playing dirty pool, and no longer calls it that.  I yell "I got it" close to the fielder because that's the way to win, however many painful collisions follow from my poisoning of their system.  The harm radiates because now the language is harmed, the trust of words within a culture. 

Trust in words.  Oh how our culture, editors of The Economist, depends on it.  How it distinguishes us from salesmen at the door, from hucksters on television, from voices on the phone trying to suck you into a "survey."  That culture.

I'm not laying the Decline of the West on you, editors.  All print people have to make their buck too, especially now.  I know that there's a price to pay for free-enterprise capitalism, my country's system, the system I have accepted as the best.  I know that the Invisible Hand gets dirty sometimes.  But geez.  You were my hero.  You should be the last to play dirty pool.

264. William Butler Yeats on Attack Ads

-->

 

Have you ever pined for more educated voters?  Have you ever tried, as the League of Women Voters has tried, to educate them?  As their teachers in school and college have?   Have you ever urged them to wrench their eyes from the TV screen and turn them to editorial and OpEd pages, hoping they would go on to journals and books? Have you tried to sneak in a subscription to a good news magazine (like The Economist) and hoped, just hoped, that it would lead to a really responsible journal (like the New York Review or Foreign Affairs), something that would keep their academic study going?  Well, you have company:

The Leaders of the Crowd

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no Solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

William Butler Yeats

262. The Use of the Word "Uneducated"

-->

Democracy's faith in the common man gives well-informed, carefully analyzing citizens of democracies a problem when they want to refer to poorly informed, carelessly analyzing citizens.  Ignorance and carelessness on the part of voters can be dangerous, and you want to use words that will discredit it, but you don't want to use words that discredit the common man enough to make you a danger to democracy.  The contempt in Bill Maher's "dipshits" could have made him a danger.  Slurs like his make smart "men on horseback" (macho dictators) an attractive alternative.

Thomas Jefferson freely referred to the masses of the cities of Europe as "canaille," a pack of dogs, which, if given power, would destroy "everything public and private."  Friedrich Nietzsche fought to defend himself "hand and foot" against people who confused him with the "anti-Semitic canaille" of those cities.  But no American can use "canaille" to refer to the masses in American cities.

Once Americans could get away with a term like "Know-Nothings" but not now.  We say "low-information voter," and are happy at not being thought elitists, since the opposite is only "high-information voter."

Plato's "the multitude" refers exactly to the group we are worried about, those who form opinions uncritically, but its discrediting power is lost if it's taken as mere quantification, as those who don't know Plato are likely to do.  The same with his "the many," which could be more strongly elitist, suggesting "we few," we smart ones.  "Masses" won't do since we don't have "classes."  Masses are those lumpen things that swelled up in Europe and got talked about by Karl Marx, that word-poisoner.

Set against those options, "uneducated" looks attractive, but we've got to be careful with it.  We don't want to imply a permanent condition or a kind of people.  Recognize that nobody is educated all of the time and everybody is educated some of the time.  Play safe, maybe, by using it only in combination with "in."  Poets are "uneducated in" worldly consequences. 

The Ukraine crisis gives us an excellent opportunity to see how this usage would go.  Say I sound off about the crucial issue, one way or the other ("NATO is justified in expanding to take in Ukraine." "No, no, it isn't.")  But I don't know much about the back story.  A friend directs me to two articles in the September/October issue of the periodical Foreign Affairs.

The first, by John J. Mearsheimer, is titled "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin."  It gives me the history of and reasons for Russian sensitivity to unfriendly powers on its borders, asks me to "imagine the outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico," and shows me how firmly Russian leaders expected Western diplomats to respect their concerns.

The second article, by Mary Elise Sarotte, is titled "A Broken Promise?  What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion."  It shows me that Russian expectations, at least with respect to a promise supposedly made to get Russia to approve the unification of Germany, had no reason to be so firm.  There was no promise.

After I read these articles I say that I have been "educated in the Ukraine crisis."  And I am willing to say that before reading them I was "uneducated in the Ukraine crisis."  But that makes me say that people who haven't read those articles are "uneducated."   That's too categorical, too much of a knock.  Better say that the readers are "better educated" than the non-readers.

Yes, I think we've got it, an accurate expression that preserves respect or the common man and keeps democracy safe.

Uh huh, and when SS men take over "Aryan" to justify smashing Semites' shop windows I'm going to refer to them as "less well educated" than men who have learned what "Aryan" really means?  I'm making "canaille," even "dipshits," look good.  Discrediting force must count for something in a word.

Such a problem.  The safer I make a word the more I weaken it.  But not everywhere.  How will it go in the circle of Economist, New York Review, and New Yorker readers?  Which would we rather the editors overhear (our constant hope), "Well, the Foreign Affairs editors are certainly better educated than the Economist editors," or "Well, the Economist editors have just joined the Know Nothings...or the canaille," or even, at the end, "gone dipshit"?  Remember, we're talking about that issue with spider Putin on the cover (10 July - 1 August, 2014 — see Post 253). 

I'm not sure of the discrediting force here but I feel sure the former expression, the one that makes them less well educated, will have some force on the editors, and maybe it will have enough to do some good.

Would it have enough to make up for what it fails to do in the streets, the daily media, where we so need good police work?  Have we turned our guys' billy sticks into ladies' fans?  With the SS on their rampage what would we be longing for?  "These guys are dipshits!"  Of course.  And we'd be defending, not jeopardizing, democracy.

It's easy, especially for academics, to undervalue verbal violence.  In skillful hands, in satire, in ridicule, in pointed abuse, it can substitute for physical violence, and make government crackdowns unnecessary.  "Yahoos!" says Jonathan Swift of the rabble in Houyhnhnm land.  "Yahoos!" says Whitney Balliett of the fraternity boys disrupting the jazz festival in Newport.  The sting brings order to the next jazz festival, without more constricting government orders.

255. The Sex Business

-->

 

In The Economist's leader this week on the sex business only two kinds of people are mentioned as being opposed to prostitution: puritans, "who think that women selling sex are sinners," and do-gooders, "who think they are victims."  I would add a third category: teachers, who think that prostitutes are children.  In the sense that they are under-educated.

You understand that I regard anybody who doesn't know the literature his civilization has produced, as under-educated.  A student who has taken only science and engineering courses is under-educated.

What those students are missing by not taking those humanities courses, and what literature courses will best give them, is what prostitutes most need: a dramatized view of life as a whole.

Drama.  How do you get drama that gives you a sense of the whole of life?  By looking at death.  The end.  While you're right in the middle of life.

Oh, did the poets I taught ever do that!  First in the middle, the joy.  "There it is, oh golden, golden, there it is, seize it, seize it," and then "Gone, gone, gone forever, as it will all go."  Carpe diem, then ubi sunt, in the terms given us by the Roman poets.

But poets in any period do that, arousing you to the intensity of physical love and then sticking you with finality of physical death.  If you don't seize the love, the joy, when you're able to, you'll lose your chance.  At the end you'll die deprived, and in between time, if Milton is right, you'll suffer the little deaths of a deprived (he would say "depraved") mechanism, an inability to seize, seize all that's there, together.  Because you (I'm including the client now) wasted your abilities on a part, in a childish seizure, "loveless, joyless, unindeared." 

So, children, know the whole, glimpse the human future, and you'll be less likely to lie with the "cold-hearted witch,/ And after, drained dry,/ Come to the chamber where/ Lies one long sought with despair."   Yeats knows that, for most of us, there will be a period when we can't help looking back.

That looking back.  Is there a way to make it less regretful?  Yes, if you have produced children, a family, grandchildren, the "large posterity" that Spenser saw possessing the earth, all the product of the "wedded love" that Milton saw driving "adulterous lust" to range "among the bestial herds."  Physical love viewed in the fullest context.

Awareness of that context, however dim, must be what makes Christmas the saddest day of the whorehouse year.  Family, family, reminders everywhere.  Polly Adler's book, A House is Not a Home, told us about it.

There were more victims then, the forced, to whom none of this applies.  Now, with prostitutes able to charge $250 an hour (recently $350) there are fewer.

It's the people with the choice who need the drama.  Some, of course, have the imagination to provide it on their own.  But they won't get it from the True Romance magazines that, Adler says, litter the whores' private quarters.

However you get the drama, though, you can easily lose it, lose your sense that something important in human life is at stake. How, reader responsive to literature and art, do you lose that?  By becoming a scientist (you think), a clinician, a Kinsey, or an aloof Economist writer too cool to see prostitutes as anything but "workers."

253. The Case of the Transformed Leader

 
-->

I'm talking about public intellectual leadership, like that of Le Monde in Paris.  I thought the editors of The Economist were providing that for us.  When they decided to back the invasion of Iraq their spokesman, in the leading "leader" (editorial), stuck to what mattered in international relations.  Only once did he (or she) refer to Saddam Hussein's personal qualities ("violent and murderous") and not once did he refer to his behavior inside his country, like gassing his people.

Contrast that with the leading leader in the current Economist, urging more forceful action in the Ukraine.  It's all about Vladimir Putin — trying to get an "unwilling" world to see him "as he really is."  That is, basically, as a liar, a point reinforced by the picture of a sinister-looking, grey-faced Putin looking out from the middle of a spider web on the magazine's cover.

Yet theirs is not just a case against a person.  It ends with a recommendation for action.   America has been "talking tough but has done nothing new."  Then the rock-em, sock-em conclusion: "Bridge-building and resets will not persuade [Putin] to behave as a normal leader.  The West should impose tough sanctions now, pursue his corrupt friends and throw him out of every international talking shop that relies on telling the truth."

Which international, truth-reliant talking shops, we wonder, does The Economist have in mind?  The UN Security Council, with Colin Powell laying out the evidence for WMD?  The General Assembly, where Andrei Gromyko denied the shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba?  Or maybe just the world television theater, where Lyndon Johnson explained the aggression against us in the Tonkin Gulf? "

Suppose the Economist editors win on this issue.  Suppose they get the West to impose really severe sanctions.  And then, when they don't work, more severe sanctions, and more.  Isn't there a point where Putin will ask, "How much more have I got to lose if I just invade and take over the place?"  After he bites the bullet on lost trade he can do that so easily.  For this job he's got overwhelming military weight, his countrymen are behind him, and the battlefield is on his doorstep, not ours.

I see the Economist editors gathering in the office the next day.  They see that those responsible in our government face the choice of a backdown or World War III.  In any case, another gigantic mess — with the promise of worse in a renewal of the Cold War.  My guess is that somebody in that room will be conceiving the kind of blog post recently produced about the decision to support the Iraq invasion.  It's titled "Anniversary of a mass delusion," and the author, M. S., was apparently privy to the discussions at the New York Times when its editors decided to back the war.  His post, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/03/iraq-war,  is said by The Economist  to come from "one of our blogs."

It is so full of regret.  What they had taken as justification for war is now seen to be "all a fever dream" in the minds of "otherwise intelligent men."  The author is left with a very sad conclusion:

that all of us, including those of us considered the most responsible, well-trained and serious, are entirely capable of talking ourselves into lurid fantasies; that the actions we believe constitute difficult but necessary choices may in fact be the gestures of sleepwalkers battling phantoms.

He has in mind discussions in which the thinking looks very much like the thinking of the present Economist editors.  Just as much concentration on irrelevancies (Putin's and his country's vices), just as many ideas presented in inflammatory way (Putin in a spider web on the cover).  It's not too much of a stretch to see the editors as Cold War sleepwalkers.

I think our last thoughts, though, should be on this blogger's regret.  What he's regretting is hawkishness that's different from the hawkishness in The Economist's present leader.  In its leader on Iraq The Economist reasoned its way into a position we had to call "hawkish."  In its leader on the Ukraine the Economist argued in a way we can hardly distinguish from that of the emotional hawks writing for the newspapers we once cast aside in favor of The Economist — because it was more balanced and thoughtful, more focused on the relevant.

242. The Descent of "The Economist"

-->

The Economist just (Leader, 3-8-14) called Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovich "a home-grown autocrat."  That's another thing against him as a very bad man.  But it's a thing not accurately named.  Yanukovich was voted into office.  He is "a home-elected democrat."

So is Mohammed Morsi and so are Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, to name elected officials demonstrated against in the streets by people we have been asked to sympathize with.  Asked, that is, by people who put goodness above democracy.  In America those people must not be very sensitive to words, since they, or their newspapers, are also quick, not noticing the irony, to reproach other people (nations, leaders) for their hostility to democracy.

By now there are now, as I count them, 83 ironies in Americans' use of the word "democracy" since their government backed the Egyptian generals (yes, we controlled them; we could have cut off parts to their tanks and planes) in their overthrow of the elected president.  There was a time when The Economist was sensitive to these ironies, at least enough to keep the blatant slant, the Murdoch slant, out of their nouns.  Maybe after you've made the "vileness" of a regime (Syria's. among others) sufficient cause for action against it the slant gets easier.

Democracy makes  "badness" hard to locate.  What do you call the people who elected the bad Yanukovich (in an election the international community found to be well within "democratic standards")?  What do you call the candidate who lost to him, prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, or the president elected to serve from 2005 to 2010, Viktor Yuschenko?   They were West-leaning so they must have been good, right?  Well the good politicians had their chance and the people had their choice.  And they elected the bad politician.  What are they, bad people? 

And you know what?  In all that time there wasn't an autocrat in sight.  

217. Attacking Assad: does analysis matter?

 

 

What is it about the Middle East that makes our best journals, our most thoughtful, our most analytical, journals so dismissive of careful thought, even their own, when they see a chance to act there?  Remember the Times in 2003.  Now look at the August 31 Economist.  The analytical writer (p.20) wipes out the big distinction President Obama has made (asphyxiating gases horrible?  "so are most weapons") but the lead editorial writer cries (p. 9) for us to end the peculiar horror of gassing in Syria.  Is it that they think that the results of analysis have only academic interest?

You don't have to be a Clausewitz to see what's wrong with our taking military action in Syria.  I think you just have to do the kind of ends-means, cost-benefit thinking we demand in our other enterprises.  And carry it through to the end, asking the usual questions, demanding specific answers.  "OK, we take the course of action X to accomplish Y which will bring the outcome Z which will be worth the cost A and be superior to the outcomes of alternative courses of action M, N, O, P, and Q measured against their costs B, C, D, E, and F.  Could you go over your projections for that in the Syrian operation?"

I feel sure, if only by the example of General Shinseki before Iraq, that military men like General Dempsey have put this kind of question, more acutely than I have, to the administration.  Nobody is better at getting the details of execution than those who are going to have to execute.  But nobody, in the case of our military, is more helpless.

But let's just  limit our analytical attention to the end, Y, which will justify the whole thing.  If we don't see that clearly everybody's in trouble.  The ends brought most urgently to our attention are (1) to punish the Assad regime for using gas, (2) to reduce their ability to use it, (3) to bring a better regime to power, and (4) to preserve American credibility.

Punish.  Just to make Assad hurt?  Say he's sorry?  Makes no sense unless you reduce it to (2), the material effect, and (2) imposes a great handicap.  You can't bomb stockpiles of gas shells without bringing about the very thing you're trying to avoid, clouds of people-killing gas.  In any event, there's likely to be enough gas left for him (or anybody who grabs it) to use if he wants to.

So (3), bring a better regime to power, a more co-operative, more enlightened regime?  Anybody who can see the makings of that regime now, in that scramble of guerrillas, has eyesight better than anybody I know.  I think (3) is about the longest shot on the track.

And (4), preserving America's credibility, America's word?  You don't ever want to dismiss credibility.  Too many wars have been avoided by one side backing down in the face of credible power and will.  But you can ask why our credibility is on the line here, and whether it's America's credibility. 

If President Obama had not drawn that red line the question would not have arisen.  He'd have no word to take back.  And here's the place to reflect on analysis, and pickiness with words, and Socrates' demand that we slice nature at her joints.  Obama's line, as I hope I established in Post #215, was drawn far from any natural joint.  It was drawn halfway up the horror bone, up where no knife can get through.  Gassing is not really distinct from other horrors.  Yes, it's horrible, but if you think it's much more horrible than the other horrors of warfare you just haven't looked closely enough at those other horrors.  Your eye, or your mind's eye, needs to take in what's in the stretchers coming back from the Iwo Jima beach, or at the barbed wire rolls on the Somme, with disemboweled draftees hung up calling all night for their mothers.

How do you know you're at a joint and not at the far end of a bone?  When your knife can't slide back.  Lyndon Johnson's cut into Viet Nam at Da Nang, when he ordered the Marines into combat with the Viet Cong, is a perfect example.  He couldn't go back because to do so would be to "lose," "fail," "get beat," "cut and run," and, after the first casualty, "betray those who had given their lives in this cause."  Once he had made it a fight, us against them, those expressions kicked in, and became obstacles to retreat.  None them applied when he was sliding around with advising and training and supplying the South Vietnamese.  He had hit the joint normally recognized in a declaration of war. 

I'm afraid that Johnson's failure to recognize a joint could be Obama's failure.  And Congress's and the Economist's.  And the public's.  We all need Socrates here.  Gassing, he could point out, is one point on a scale (of horrors) that has plenty of degree marks.  There are no degree marks on warring.  You either win or lose, succeed or fail. 

That's awesome, an alternative like that, so you want people facing it to proceed very carefully, even Socratically:  Just what will it take to win here?  What does it mean to win?  What does our experience tell us?  I think General Dempsey is proceeding carefully, and maybe even asking those questions, but I don't think President Obama is proceeding carefully.

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.

205. The Dangerous Humanity of the Intelligentsia

 

In the New York Times (May 5) Bill Keller begins his case for intervention in Syria thoughtfully and moderately, in a way no neutral academic could fault.  But in no time, as David Bromwich has just shown (New York Review, June 20), he is using words, and leading other writers on his newspaper to use words, that would take our country where the least thoughtful and moderate would take it.

Bromwich is good at showing what New York Times tendentiousness shares with Republican hawkishness: vagueness about the details.  John McCain says, "We could train and arm well-vetted Syrian opposition forces."  Bromwich asks, "'Vetted' by whom?"  McCain says, "We could destroy artillery and drive Assad's forces from their posts."  Bromwich asks, "All without ground forces?"  NYT editors pass an innocent-sounding headline, "Whitehouse Sticks to Cautious Path on Syria."  Bromwich says that's telling us that "the common sense of the well-informed now favors intervention."

That may be over-reading, but you don't have to over-read to see the tendentiousness in the case The Economist (May 18) makes.  Doing nothing could "even result in a victory for the loathsome regime of Bashar Assad."  "Loathsome" tells us that the common morality of the humanely moved favors intervention in Syria — as George Bush's "evil" told us that common Christianity favored intervention in Iraq. 

I don't see manipulation in this tendentiousness.  I see the genuine transmission of the humanity of the Enlightenment, and find flowing in these journals the stream the journals of Paris opened up.  It's what we count on them for, and are grateful for.  But it's not the whole Enlightenment.

Part of the Enlightenment is analysis which requires complexity to be acknowledged and not over-simplified.  Both the Times and The Economist show that they are doing that with the Syria problem.  "None of the options are risk free," the one the Times recommends "must be carefully choreographed and accompanied by... diplomacy," and still "it might well be that the internal grievances are too deep and bitter to forestall a bloody period of reprisals." "All options for the West" are "fraught," we could be "dragged into a quagmire," and the best choice is "imperfect," says The Economist.  The two newspapers could hardly do more to reassure the skeptical, high-information reader.  And still they do the things that Bromwich nails them for.

But there's still another part of the Enlightenment, trust in the common man, or (these days), the low-information reader. He's the man we all rely on to carry out our policies.  But he's the joker in the Enlightenment deck, and I'm not sure these editorialists understand him or know how to play him.

Say our nation is "enforcing a no-fly zone."  In an editorial room that's going to be different from waging war.  If you listen in a debriefing room, though, you won't detect much of a difference.  "I shot that son of a bitch right out of the sky."  Among common warriors, in the air or on the ground, the difference between enforcing a zone and waging war lies only in the number of sons of bitches.

Ah, but The Economist's no-fly zone will be set up "on humanitarian grounds."  There's the humanity the intelligentsia wants to see.  The common warrior, maybe played by a Jon Stewart, will see it too.  "Well, at least I got shot out of the sky on humanitarian grounds."  Not shot down by a son of a bitch?  "No, he was a good American human being."

The fact is that the process of killing, any kind of killing, turns the people who are trying to kill you into sons of bitches.  And the things you can do to a son of a bitch are different from the things you can do to a fellow human being.  War, bless Clausewitz for telling us, is an irreversible extension, on both sides, of what can be done to sons of bitches and an inexorable escalation of their number.  Technology, as in drones, may slow this process, or dull our awareness of it, but I don't think it can stop it.

That's a danger, letting your nation get into killing, but there's a prior danger: letting your nation get into a contest.  It's a danger heightened in the United States by the common American man's hatred of losing, as can be observed in any stadium.  If you start losing in a contest he'll want you to do more.  If you don't, manager or coach or President, he'll make trouble for you.  He hates losers.  And he, in the Enlightenment's most significant gift, has the votes.  He can throw losing presidents out.

Uncommonly bright Americans, editors, need to fix this on their walls, so they don't forget it: The American common man hates losing.  So a president who wants to stay out of war will avoid putting the country into win-lose situations.  And the uncommonly bright ought to help, not hinder, him.

175. The Economist Calls for Intervention in Syria.

 

You'd never say that the editors of The Economist write heart-rending prose, but yet they can do something to hearts.

"Is it because America and Europe have tired of their own wars that they have started to turn their backs on other people's?" one asks this week in a leader.  "The number of dead in Syria has passed 30,000 and some days 250 bodies are added to the pile."

See the bodies, see them in a pile, see it growing, and growing, and growing — unless you do something?  Images.  Not as vivid as TV images, but still images.  The writer didn't have to give us that pile.  Nor what comes next, a hypothesized picture of "Syria's great cities ... ground to rubble" in a future where "the whole Middle East would choke on dust." 

He tells us that the dictator Assad's assault is against "civilians" (not "rebels") and the violence of it "breeds implacable hatred, and so the rebels [has to be "rebels" now; "civilians" doesn't fit the final verb] will fight on."  If Assad weren't so violent the rebels wouldn't fight on?  "Let's quit; he's just arresting us"?  The nouns are ticklish but that connective ("and so") is downright painful.  Painful to one accustomed to The Economist's care with cause and effect, that is.

Their care is to avoid the vague and wishful, and yet that "and so" is wishful.  So is much that is said to show that intervention is "feasible."  "It is possible" that the "mere threat" of a no-fly zone would "keep Mr. Assad's planes on the ground."  So is the word "probably" in this sentence about the behavior of other Arab countries:  "So long as there is no invading ground force (and there won't be), they will probably fall into line."  How confident that "and there won't be" is.  I think of earlier confidence: "Bombing will do the job.  Surgical strikes."

But, in light of the whole editorial, that must be a slip.  Economist caution, Economist cool, prevails.  The writer knows that "intervention is a slippery slope," that "nobody can be sure who would replace [Assad]."  He does "not call lightly for the world to undertake such a risky operation."

Maybe the coolest reason that journals can now offer for action in any region is that somebody is "destabilizing" it.  With the rest of them The Economist assumes that stability is good, and in a State Department way.  Geopolitical.  But "stability" can remain good only if you keep your eyes off of the root, "stable."  It means "firmly established, not likely to change."  Good only, then, if it's your good.  Not good if it's Torquemada's Spain or Stalin's Russia, no matter how firmly they're established.  Torquemada and Stalin have just as much claim on the word as you do, American journal writers. So we need some other word to justify going into Syria.  The Economist needs it — if it's to be superior to other journals

If the writer of the leader doesn't use the kind of words I'm looking for, the superior words, who does?  The writer in the business section.  Yes, an accountant is what I want.  Somebody able to do a cost-benefit analysis.  Makes realistic projections.  Makes sure that what goes on her page reflects what's in the real world.  Chary of images.

I see her coming over to give some instruction to this leader writer.  She's pretty severe.  "No, no.  You can’t talk about giving Syria 'a chance to re-emerge as a nation at peace with itself and its neighbours' without readiness to tell your reader when that peace was.  You say re-emerge.  Was there a time when no Sunnis had to fear an Alawite massacre, when Syria was at peace with Israel?" 

But it's the editorial's last sentence that will get her, the sentence that gives the boss (in this case the reader) what he pays an accountant for, a solid weighing up: The sooner the world intervenes the more lives can be saved.  "What figures back that up?  What experience?  Your reader is not an accountant but he can read the news.  Just today (Oct. 20, 2012), the papers tell of 'back-to-back bomb blasts in a crowded Baghdad market near a revered Shiite shrine,' and of a 'string of shootings targeting government officials' that killed at least 17 people.  On the net he can see that in the first eight months of this year 3,323 Iraqi civilians died by violence, about 1800 of them killed by suicide attacks and vehicle bombs.  Markets, shrines, children's playgrounds, pilgrim's buses, were targets.  This eleven years after an intervention for which humanitarian goals much like yours were part of the justification.  That's our experience in the real world, and the people who pay us will expect us to take it into account."