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.

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.

234. How About "Compassionate Cruelty" as a Foreign Policy?

      There comes a time in every parent's education when he or she hears a voice that says, "Pain is a better teacher than you are."  You lecture and demonstrate and harangue and then whacko, zero winds hit the child on the way home from school and the next time he puts on his jacket.

And apparently there comes a time in every advanced nation's education when it hears the same thing.  According to Schmuel Rosner (NYT, 12-27-13) Israel is discovering that its children, the Ultra-Orthodox men who choose not to work or join the army (they stay home and study the Torah while their wives work), might learn to make a better choice if they suffered more.  If, says the government reducing benefits, they prefer "their traditions over participating in the modern Israeli economy," let them freeze.  Rosner calls this policy "compassionate cruelty."  Like Daniel Moynihan's "benign neglect," a 1969 policy to get blacks to rely less on the government and more on themselves, it trusts pain to do the teaching.

The hitch in this approach, as every parent knows, is that you have to watch the pain.  It's not easy seeing a child come in blue, or, if he's of the Haredim, walk around in rags.

Nevertheless, I find myself wondering if the papa of the advanced nations, the United States, might not try this approach with the backward nations of the world.  "Do you prefer loyalty to family, or clan, or tribe over loyalty to nation?  Ancient custom to codified law?  Ruler's wishes to rational organization?  Education in Scripture to education in science?  Patriarchal security over education of women?  Assurance of wives' fidelity over their health and pleasure?  Land-holding over commerce?  Faith over reason?  Very well, continue.  We'll watch you freeze."

What lets you call this compassionate or benign is that you trust the ability of the backward people to watch also, and learn. (Only the extremely soft-hearted, the "soft bigots of low expectations," don't trust them.)  "Over there are nations prospering through commerce, and commitment to law, and education in science, and the freedom of women.  Over there are nations losing less to corruption because their office-holders put loyalty to nation over loyalty to family.  Over there are people who are strong militarily because they organize themselves rationally."  They'll get the point.  Pretty soon you will see them going out the door with their jackets on.  Pain was a good teacher.

You'd have a devil of a time pushing through such a policy but maybe some cunning and imaginative president of some commercial and military super power (that's what it would take) could do it.  Or could at least get it started.

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.

127. "Imaginative," "Tough," and "Realistic" as Compliments to a President

 

Any president of the United States who deserved those compliment-words would be pretty close to our ideal, wouldn't he? But how would he earn them? What would he look like in action? I have presumed to guess, making Jimmy Carter my star.

As my dream scenario opens he is speaking to Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, just after Begin has allowed the first settlements in the Occupied Territories (see my preceding post, #126.). He has just asked the big question, "Tell me, Menachem, do you, in your heart, want all of the Occupied Territories for your people?" Let's say that Begin, by ignoring the question, or changing the subject, or indicating that it's bad form to ask such a question, says No, the answer consistent with his representation to America of Israel's goals.

Now the ideal Carter, having already showed his imagination (in his first question, picturing the future) shows his toughness: "What then is this hammering that I hear?" You may note that the American president, who knows his Bible, is counting on Begin to hear the echo of the prophet Samuel. (After Saul had denied having any captured sheep Samuel had cocked his head and said, "What then is this bleating in mine ears?") Smart Carter is asking, "What are you driving at with those houses going up in Ariel?

Begin has been put seriously on the spot. He has to admit he wants the whole thing or look like the dumbest candidate for Israeli leadership in the Bible. Let's say Begin says, "All right, I want all of old Judea and Samaria." Smart Carter, though he knows, asks him why. Begin tells him what everybody in Israel knows about him and the Gush Emunim, the first settlers: that they want the land because God, in the Bible, gave it to them.

That answer prepares imaginative Carter to ask those of his countrymen who support Prime Minister Begin why they support him. Do they do it because they believe that God gave the Israelis the land?

Now many of Begin's supporters in Carter's country will without hesitation say yes. Anybody who takes the Bible as literal truth will have to say yes — or be embarrassed in front of his fellow believers — and that will end the conversation. But those Jews who don't read the Bible literally, they are the ones tough Carter is interested in. "What? You?" he will say, "Right alongside the people you used to scorn? I remember you in college, so full of brains, so tough on evangelical Christians. How can you keep company with them? How can you not ask of Begin the kind of questions you used to ask us?"

Tough Carter's strategy is clear. Embarrass them. Get them to explain. Out in public. Some of these skeptical Jews are influential people, giving heavy support. Carter's imagination has shown him where the settlements are heading, his realism has told him his nation can't ignore that end, and his toughness now makes him press for an explanation from settlement-supporters no matter how many friends he has to embarrass.

The same will go for the ideally imaginative, tough, realistic presidents that follow Carter. Does an Israeli prime minister continue to expand the settlements (as every one of them will do)? Do his supporters count on his reputation as a liberal, secular, enlightened man to supply — despite a settlement here, a settlement there — implicit reassurance? Ask him what he's doing giving support to the faction he scorned. Does he deny giving that support? "What then is this bleating in mine ears?"

When will our ideal presidents stop? As soon as the explanations produce public discussion and debate in Congress. That's all they'll want. Their goal is not Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Things like that are to be determined after debate, after all the other arguments — the need for defensible borders, the need for a bargaining chip, for need for defense against terrorists, and so on — are heard and tested. It would be unrealistic to push for more.

In the meantime realism requires presidents to counter attempts to discourage debate in Congress, attempts that have been so far successful. (It hasn't been just a matter of ignoring the question, or changing the subject; the question simply has not been asked.) Smart Carter's PR staff (or Clinton's or Bush's or Obama's) will, for example, have to keep control of the definition of "tough." It can't just mean "hard on your enemies"; it has to mean "hard on your friends," too." It can't mean "hard on terrorism" or, when you get down to it, anything at all we got used to in the hard-on-soft-on vocabulary of the anti-communism years, the years before Viet Nam. That's pseudo-toughness, poolroom toughness. You show it up by inviting it into the street. "Let's wait until your man mixes it up in Congress. There we'll find out how tough he is."