211. Love democracy, love the killing in Cairo.

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Listen up, third-worlders.  Here's what it like to be a lover of democracy at this moment, with Egypt's army having just killed a couple of hundred Muslims demonstrating for the return of democracy.

No, I'm not going to add to the six dozen ironies already piled up by the developments in Egypt.  I'm just going to explain what's democratic and what isn't.

That killing now, by a dictator installed by an Army coup.  It's not, as it may appear, the opposite of democracy.  It's not like all the strongman takeovers the U.S. has opposed, not like one aristocratic clique overthrowing another in South America, not like a warlord suddenly declaring a heavenly mandate in Asia, not like a Bolshevik few striking in Europe.  Those are all deniers of democracy.  This is an expression of it.  A circuitous expression, yes, but nevertheless an expression.

Here, in big chalk, is the circuit.  Begin with the fact that the U. S. is a democracy.  The things that it does or does not do express the will of its people.  ("Democracy" means "rule by the people," right"?)  Not all the people, but a majority, which means the most votes in Congress.  Votes in the past show that any action that makes Israel less secure will be voted down — if it manages even to be brought up.  Action against the dictator installed by the army coup will in the eyes of Congress make Israel less secure than it would be under a militant Muslim president installed by an election.  It's bound to be voted down or kept from coming up.

To be believed that paragraph requires, probably, six pages of little chalk — whether or not Congressmen do express the will of the people here, whether their vote can be predicted, whether that vote can make a difference in Egypt, why they think an army regime in Egypt will make Israel more secure — but there's just not space here to supply it.  You'll just have to trust me.

Anyway, if you believe as I do that American action against the Egyptian ruling general could stop him (for one thing we could cut off the money that pays his army) then yesterday's killing in Cairo is an expression of democracy, American democracy.  It is the will of the American people that the Egyptian people be denied their will.

Forget trying to relieve the pain of this by showing your abhorrence of killing, Americans.  ("I didn't mean that.  They shouldn't go that far.")  Any time you want other people to do your will they can (as Clausewitz has shown) force you to become a killer just by refusing to do it, up to the end.  If you vote for Israel's security here (or for a Congressman who will vote for it) you show that you want to kill the Egyptians who refuse to accept the removal of their president.  You're a killer.

And forget all the sophistical demonstrations that the elected president wasn't really elected or wasn't really a president or that the coup wasn't really a coup.  The man got a majority of the votes in an election that qualified neutral observers called reasonably free.  There's no reason to believe that another election would turn out differently.  The will of a majority of the Egyptian people has been expressed.  And that's all democracy means, or needs to mean.

So forget, third-worlders, all those golden benefits promised you under the word "democracy."  And don't think it has anything to do with the goodness of a people.  It doesn't assure virtue.  All democracy assures is that the majority of people in your country, the people who most of the time will have the greatest power, or potential power, will have in place the machinery by which they can express their will.  That's good, maybe golden, especially when time comes for a transfer of power, but if it's good it's good only internally.

Externally, in dealing with other nations, you can no more count on it being good than you can count on the human will being good.  And allowing it to be collectively expressed isn't going to improve the odds.  Whatever the collective will is, though, whether it's good or bad, remember: it's just the will of one people, in one country.  If that will denies the will of another people in another country, if it denies them even unto death, that could be very bad.  We can call it terrible names — "hypocritical," "evil," "criminal."  But we can't call it "undemocratic."

210. David Brooks's Bad People

Do you hear what I hear in David Brooks's column yesterday (7-5-13) in the Times?  In his words describing the Muslims running Egypt and justifying their removal?  He says "they have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets."  He says "they have a strange fascination with a culture of death."  I hear, "These are bad people."

In democracies being bad can't be admitted as a justification for throwing people out before an election.  You have to do bad.  Do something that prevents the election of somebody to replace you and you have done the one thing that democracies have to call bad, since it ends democracy. 

You can do something that will lead to the prevention of an election, or has a high probability of leading to prevention, and that could be bad enough to justify your removal, but still you must do something.  Do something. 

That's often complicated, tracing the doing, and that's where we rely on experts and columnists to show us what's been done, and where it leads.  They're like defenders and prosecutors, going over the evidence and following laws that define guilt.  Readers, like jurors, know that in democratic societies beliefs are not a crime.  Display bad ones to them and you're out of bounds.  "What are you, thought police?"

I think Brooks is a little embarrassed calling these people bad.  That's why he goes on to call them incompetent.  They are "incapable of running a modern government," they "lack the mental equipment," incompetence  "is built into the intellectual DNA of radical Islam."  I can believe what he says, and more.  Certainly Morsi and his Brotherhood didn't play it very smart after they took office.

The thing is, in a democracy we have a remedy for that.  At the next election we throw the evil, stupid rascals out.  That's what we have to do if our constitution does not provide for an impeachment process, as, I understand, the Egyptian constitution does not.

We in the West speak to the world for law and logic and constitutions.  We speak to the world for our national game.  America is Babe Ruth.  And oh what that does for us now when we think of trying to write a constitution that will fit in the actions we (Brooks, at least) are now approving.  "Governments will be removed by ballot, but if governments are run by very bad people, or very incompetent people, or very stupid people, they may be removed by the army."

I know.  You can hardly open your mouth now about Egypt without fourteen ironies and a satire leaping out of it.  But not all ironies are equal.  The ones roused by defenders of the army's action in Egypt take the cake.  And shove it down our throats.

But hell, gag on irony and there are many important actions you'll be incapacitated for.  Israel's security is important.  An Egyptian army in our pay ($1.3 billion a year) working with a sympathetic regime is a much firmer guarantee of that security than a regime sympathetic to Hamas promising that yes, yes, they will give us our money's worth.

So what, then?  Read Brooks and gag.  He's probably gagging too.  You just have to remember that watching Israel go down the tube could be lot more sickening than watching your democratic ideals go down.

209. My Students Are Better Writers than Heidegger's Students

 

I have never had an English Composition student who wrote a piece — no, left my office with a piece — as bad as the one by Heidegger's student, Hannah Arendt, writing in 1969 at the height of her reputation as a political theorist and philosopher.  You can see it now, in abbreviated form, in the current (July 11) New York Review, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary by reprinting significant articles from the past.

Just look at how she opens an important section of her essay, the philosophical section:

What makes man is his faculty to act. It enables him to get together with his peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises which would never enter his mind, let alone the desires of his heart, had he not been given this gift — to embark on something new.

Think about that "faculty to act."  It's what distinguishes you as a human being.  Have you ever thought of that before?  "Jeez, I can act.  I'm a human being."

Maybe the reason you haven't thought of it before is that it's so hard for you to think of yourself as not being able to act.  Of any living creature not being able to act.  Maybe, if you're a chemistry major, of anything not being able to act.  "Hell," I hear from the back of the room, "salt acts on iron.  Makes rust.  Isn't that an action?" 

So here is a writer — unless she's picked out her words with a dart — making a big, special philosophical deal out of something ordinary people can't see as special at all.  How can it be special when everything but a motionless blob of inert chemicals qualifies? 

If a reader doesn't see that right away, in the first sentence, if he thinks that triviality in common meaning will play out into deep philosophical significance rather than come back and bite you, he'll see it in the second.  But at greater cost.  If he's not a dull reader (not to be confused with the common reader) it will take him about three seconds to see that this wonderful faculty also lets him do a hundred million other, very different, things — like get together with his inferiors, act out of concert with them, reject goals and enterprises, frustrate desires, and embark on something old.  Unless he catches on to Arendt as a ponderous declarer of the obvious in the second item in the series (act in concert without, duh, the ability to act?) our reader is going to waste twice as much effort, and feel twice as much pain, as he would have if he'd twigged in after the first sentence.

In an English Comp essay the more pain you cause your reader, the more of his time you waste, the more laughter you provoke in him, the lower your grade is.  By those standards Arendt's essay gets the lowest grade in the class.  She must not have come to my office.  Oh no, of course not.  She went to Heidegger's office.  Why didn't the very first sentence in the essay reveal that to me?  Or at least the first three sentences:

Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end which must justify it.  And since when we act we never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals.  Violence does not promote causes, it promotes neither History nor Revolution....

Forget that by "violence" she has to mean "the use of violence" (which can be rational or irrational), and just note that she tells us it's "instrumental by nature."  Not the usual "by its very nature," but still delivering the intrinsic.  Eliminating the observable.  My student and I see Lou Piniella over there throwing the furniture around in his office.  We think he's just expressing himself after a tough loss on the diamond but we've been told to be quiet.  You can't argue with deductions from the very nature of a thing.  He must have an end in view.

If you know the intrinsic you can speak in absolutes: "We never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing."  Any amount of certainty.  So when my student tells me that he's pretty sure Piniella, who had gone further and thrown second base into center field, was going to be fined, I'd have to say, "Sorry, you still can't argue.  The nature of human beings does not allow them to have the slightest idea that such a thing will happen."

Writers who talk like that, writers who think you have to believe it because they're telling you, writers who speak like lords, writers who dismiss observation, writers who make it impossible to argue, those writers never make it out of some professors' offices.  Arendt would never have made it out of Professor R. M. Hare's office.  Hare is the Oxford professor who famously explained to a New Yorker reporter what gave British philosophers their advantage over continental (mainly German and French) philosophers: "Here you read a thing to your tutor and he says to you, 'What do you mean by that?' and then you have to tell him."  You sit there until you can make it clear.  Then you can turn in your essay.

Hare's office was in England and my office was in Ohio but both of us, I think, were trying to recreate Socrates' office in ancient Athens.  Both American teachers of composition and British teachers of philosophy set the same restriction:  nobody gets out (or sits in, for that matter) without explaining himself.  In other words, "You enter here you're taking part in a dialogue."  In both countries that would be understood to be a democratic dialogue.

Now on the continent it was, by all reports, entirely different.  The signs read, "You enter here you're listening to an authority."  Different philosophical traditions, different educations.  Students learn to speak authoritatively.  That is, if they don't watch themselves, they learn to speak like lords.

Composition teachers in America are paid to watch students, in case they can't watch themselves.  Speak like a lord in your essay and you'd better not turn it in.  The prof will wonder how you ever got out of his office.  If he reads a lordly essay he asks, "What office did this student come out of?"  If he reads Hannah Arendt's essay now, though, after he's learned some history and read philosophers like Hare, he doesn't have to ask.  Though a student could have learned (and still can learn) lordliness in any number of offices in Europe, only in Heidegger's could one have learned a lordliness like this.

208. "Enlightened" and "Benighted" in Egypt

 

In Egypt, see, you've got these benighted people who don't believe in democracy or any of the other things the people of the West came up with in their Age of Enlightenment.  They still think in the religious terms — "godly"-"ungodly," "believer"-"non-believer," "good"-"evil"— people used before they became enlightened, and began to speak only of the "reasonable" and "unreasonable."  These benighted people are now in power.

"And how did they get in power?"

Oh, in the most enlightened way, through an election.  They were the majority.  But now they are doing, and threatening to do, and saying, very unenlightened things.  The enlightened people are so eager to get rid of them that they say they'll welcome a coup by the generals.

"But isn't that a very benighted thing to do, bring in the army to get rid of elected officials?"

I know.  But these people in power are really evil people.  They have killed in the name of religion.  They'll impose religion in daily life.  They'll stamp out the Enlightenment in Egypt, the few flames that are starting to rise.

"So if people are really evil you can set the benighted on them.  But you'll still be enlightened yourself?"

I know.  I've gone benighted on you.  But don't you see, I have to do that in order to defend the Enlightenment.  It's the reasonable thing to do.

"You know, your confidence in what's reasonable strikes me as almost supernatural.   You just know that these benighted people are not going to permit you to throw them out in the normal, democratic, enlightened way.  You just know that their imposition of benighted things in daily life assures their imposition of themselves as unelected rulers.  You just know that the people of Egypt can't bring off the traditional Western way of throwing rascals out.  You just know that there's something besides elections that defines democracy.  You just know you'll do less damage to democracy by turning tyrant yourself than by waiting to see if somebody else will turn tyrant.  I don't see how anybody with a reasonable, secular conception of knowledge could know those things.  Are you sure you don't believe in a higher power?"

207. Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori and the Smothers Brothers

 What's the quickest way to get a Christian blessing?  Go to a shallow preacher and be meek, mournful and poor in spirit in front of him or her.  If he doesn't respond get yourself persecuted and reviled.  He'll soon see that the blessing-words apply to you and raise his hand.  You're in.

If you want a deeper, more theological, blessing, and aren't in haste, go to a shallow Pauline Christian preacher.  Say to him, "I believe," or "I have faith."  He'll see that you've met Paul's condition for salvation.  You're in.

Outside of Christianity there are still plenty of people seeking a blessing the quickest and easiest way.  "I am different."  That's enough, often, to get a blessing from a shallow liberal.  "Diversity" is the blessing-word.  Cast it and those inside the net are forever saved. 

We teachers of English Composition have to mock the whole game — the shallow saving the shallow in a simplified world.  We try to get the young to look inside words, both blessing and cursing words, for what they refer to — how they connect to a devilishly complicated world.  You can say that we try to give the young a deep understanding, and claim that it "saves," but the depth lies only in verbal care and the salvation, if there is any, is only from mistakes.  It's the academic game as played in English departments.

The game requires that when we see the word "diversity" used to indicate a vaguely good thing we put "Ref" (reference) or "Mean" (meaning) in the margin and count on the student to look closely at the word. The idea is to get students to be more careful with words, and discriminate among their meanings. If they become lawyers (or jurors) they won't make (or accept) specious arguments.  If they become preachers they won't give shallow blessings.  If they do we're going to be disappointed.

Now a very prominent preacher, Katherine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, has just (NYT 6-22-13) given a blessing that, judging by the response of some of her fellow churchmen, is about as shallow as a Christian blessing can be.  Speaking in a church in Curaçao she blessed a woman in the Bible (Acts 16:16-34) simply because she was different.  She ignored what the Bible said she was (a fortune-teller), she ignored what she was a vessel of (demons), she ignored what every good Christian listener, beginning with St. Paul, agreed on (that she spoke untrustworthy words).  Those things were to her (we guess) simply part of our "long history of discounting and devaluing difference, finding it offensive or even evil."  That history blinds us to "the spirit of God in her," the "glory of another human being."

The Christians who write the blogs and journals I have looked at can hardly find words for Jefferts Schori's reading of the Bible passage.  I can hardly find words.  This, this, from the leader of one of our most level-headed, most sophisticated, least emotional Protestant churches, my church.  Making the papers.   Just as we were making some progress loosening the label "fuzzy minded" stuck on Christians in universities.

"It's a small thing, a reading of one passage in Scripture."

Small, yes, but it's a window — into a mind, a denomination, maybe a religion.  Is this a reality we have tried to wish away?  Have we Christian academics been kidding ourselves?  About our religion?  The essentials?  Oooh, that's tough.  Let's say it's  the weaknesses of an era.  Better yet, the weakness of a person.  One looks for excuses.  "The poor PB was just trying to get some tolerance and fairness and understanding going and happened to say more than she should have said."  But nobody, at least nobody in my hearing, has offered even that, an excuse for a personal fault. 

Composition teachers deal with public faults, listed in their textbooks, waiting for their red pencils.  With them there can be no doubt.  Jefferts Schori's sermon, word by word, puts on their blackboards a classic case of liberal superficiality.

Is there anybody who would find this sermon acceptable?  I don't know of anyone one now but fifty years ago I knew of one.  His name was Tom Smothers, and for nearly a decade he jousted comically with his brother Dick on television.  What makes me put him at Jefferts Schori's side is just one exchange:

Dick:  Your shirttail's out.

Tom: Why do you hate me?

Tom pays no attention to what your words refer to; he is interested only in what they tell him about your feelings.  Do you hate?  Do you love?

That is essentially all Jefferts Schori wants to know about us when we look at the slave girl.  Look, not listen.  For signals, not substance.  What the girl is saying might be anything — demonic lure, polytheistic error, folk wisdom, animistic abomination, dark truth, soothing nonsense, who knows — but none of it matters for the blessing.  What matters is that she is different.  And how you feel about that. 

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.