275. Responding Safely to Islamist Terrorism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. "Discrimination," Rational and Irrational.

Can I rationally discriminate against green people?

No, friend, because your word "against" shows that you are singling them out just because they are green, and not for any purpose. That's not rational, that's sentimental, done for emotional satisfaction. Hitler's killing of the Jews was, in that sense, sentimental. If he'd been rational he'd have preserved them, since their loss weakened, on the whole, his war effort. Some of them might have helped him build an atom bomb.

So if I single green people out for a purpose, like reducing the chances of explosion on my airplane, I discriminate rationally.

Yes. And what has caused you to worry about this is the ambiguity in the word "discriminate." It means both "distinguish" and "distinguish with prejudice." While the former uses reason vitally, the latter abandons it. You judge before you have relevant knowledge. That's prejudgment, or prejudice.

So if I have studied previous explosions on airplanes and know that a high percentage have been caused by green people, and have studied their faith and know that there are stronger justifications of martyrdom in it than in other faiths, and find that this bears on their behavior, my discrimination is rational. I can then, after I have done everything I can within time and money constraints to avoid offense, support airport profiling, something I have not supported in the actions that gave it a bad name, policemen stopping drivers just because they were black people.

Absolutely. It's rational to distinguish a religion from others and connect the behavior of its adherents (though of course not all of its adherents) to the teachings in it. Only an irrational person would say that there's no connection between teachings and behavior.

So it will be rational for me to do the same thing I did with green people when I look at blue people.

It would be irrational not to.

Very well, I see that a man nominated to be an adviser to our President is blue. I examine the blue religion and see that a central belief in it, one that distinguishes it from other religions, is that a higher power, God, gave its adherents the land some of them are now contesting for. I know that claims to be backed in a contest by a higher power make such contests very hard to adjudicate and dangerous to friends who may be appealed to for support. I look at the evidence and calculate the probabilities of danger to myself and my country — just as I did with the green person in the airport — and decide to ask my congressman to back the other nominee. That meets all the standards of rationality, doesn't it?

I'd hesitate to say so until I knew how thoroughly you looked at the evidence. You may have concluded too quickly that the nominee shares his fellow blues' belief in the gift of land. In that case I'd have to call your request to your congressman irrational. You judged to soon. The word for that is "prejudice."

How close does a look at evidence have to be before it ceases to be irrational and becomes rational? How thoroughly did I look at the green person? With us mortals, rationality consists in calculating probability on the basis of what you can learn in the time given you. With so much at stake I don't need to find more than a very slight probability that the blue will be swayed, but all I have, really, are labels: "Academic," "Liberal," "Scholar," and the like. The only one that distinguishes him from the other nominee is "Unbelieving Blue." I check the evidence and find very little difference between believing blues and unbelieving blues in support of settlements on the land. I let that label sway me. Is that a "prejudice"?

No, it's not, it's a "judice." Rational. But if those unbelieving blues quit supporting the believers then your judgment-tipping evidence changes. If your judgment doesn't change with it then it's no longer rational. But remember, "rational" doesn't mean "good" or "wise." Those words apply to the choice of ends. "Rational" applies only to the choice of means to ends. You can be called good, and even wise, while you do something irrational.