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.

233. Regrets of an Anti-Postmodernist Bore

 In the early 90s, before I retired, I became an anti-postmodernist bore.  I couldn't shut up about what was happening in English departments.  Now I see in the Wall Street Journal (Opinion, Jan. 4-5) that UCLA has dropped its requirement that English majors take "one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton."  Instead it will require that they take "a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing."

Why didn't I bore more people?

232. The Lesson of the Poop-Knockers

I noticed right after I moved to Fort Collins last summer that the sidewalk cleaners in my neighborhood had something odd attached to their blowers: a dowel rod that extended about six inches below the barrel, to which it was firmly fastened by duct tape.  I couldn't figure it out.  Finally I asked a cleaner.  "It's to knock the goose poop off the sidewalk, she said — when it doesn't blow off." 

I was up on Canadian geese, the plague of golf courses and parks and beaches.  They were a terrible problem in some of the Eastern cities I knew.  The city of Ottawa, I'd read, was using drone helicopters to chase them away.  One Western city had tried decoy coyotes, another had hired a crew of border collies.  You wouldn't believe the innovative solutions to the problem — specially trained dogs, special goose repellent, fake goose-in-distress calls, "lethal control," water cannon, egg addling (oil on the shells), and "capture and euthanasia using carbon dioxide."  Can't you hear the pitches being made to city councils by ambitious salesmen and pro-active city managers?  Now here was Fort Collins handling its Canadian geese with a method that would hardly have a chance in your ordinary American council or boardroom: just live with them.

Sure they pooped on your sidewalk.  Sure they waddled in front of your car.  Is that going to wreck your life?  Why not go to a little trouble, like taping a dowel to your blower or stopping your car for a moment, and get on with what you're doing?  With your mind at rest.

If sociologists had a reliable happiness meter I'm willing to bet that it would show Fort Collins registering far better numbers than those cities all bent out of shape over their Canadian geese.  And if that's true then the reason, I think, is that they've gotten ahold of a great, life-enhancing principle: live with the shit that doesn't kill you.

At the moment, especially in France, many people in Europe think Gypsies are shit.  They don't get jobs, they clutter the landscape, and they steal.  Mon Dieu, how they steal.  They hang around tourists like crows, picking every badly closed pocket.  We need a bold program.  How about eviction from the country?

Well, that's one solution, but it's not the Fort Collins solution.  The Fort Collins solution would be to tighten the thievery laws and enforce them strictly.  Go after the objectionable behavior, not the objectionable ethnicity.  In other words, get the shit off the sidewalk, the shit that bothers you, and learn to live with the people that bother you.  (I might point out that the Americans, doing a fair job of integrating Gypsies into the work force, could be an example here.)  If part of that learning to live together is avoiding offense then the poop-knocker is a wonderful model: it knocks anybody's, any nationality's, any race's, any species' poop off the sidewalk without respect to its origin.  If geese were sensitive to slights they'd have nothing to fasten on.

The Fort Collins principle is very useful in guiding people away from cruelty to the sensitive.  I remember that in some James Gould Cozzens novel or other there was a congregation in New England demanding that their rector tell the organist to quit practicing on the carillon at odd hours of the afternoon.  It was such a jolt hearing this burst of bells when you didn't expect it.  The rector's advice, as I remember, was pure Fort Collins: live with it a little longer.  The organist was old, and thought the town was happy to hear his music any time.  It would have hurt him deeply to think he had been mistaken all these years.  So, just live with the man.  Bear the jolt.

What the Fort Collins people do is adjust our perspective on the activist, the pro-activist, the man with a plan, the guy who in an interview, or on the hustings, lights everybody up and, in the job or office, is a new broom, sweeping clean.  As president of a company he'll have the stock up 70% in three years.  As President of the U. S. he'll have the nation back leading the world in a year.  He won't take any shit from anybody.  I think you can find the same kind of action-promoter on the other side, leading the occupiers into the administration building, posting the non-negotiable demands, waving the shirt from the barricades. 

Neither of those activists would be where they are if somewhere along the line they hadn't made an impassioned speech, a pitch to a board of directors, or a party convention, or a rally of the disaffected.  Everybody in red-blooded America knows how the speech goes.

I can't help thinking of how the Fort Collins competitor with those charismatic dynamos must have made his or her pitch for election or employment.  "I propose to let well enough alone, to take up problems as they arise, and to look first for the least radical solution.  With problems I can't solve — and there are many — I will draw on my special expertise: muddling along doing the least amount of damage.  I expect to live with some inefficiency and sharp practice in my organization, as I expect the disaffected in my constituency to live with some injustice and oppression.  As they are all now living with some goose poop."

It's the glory of this community that they elected or hired such a person.  And no, I don't think that means that they are passively reconciled to the evils of the world.  I think it shows that they have a sense of proportion, and can see what's worth spending their energy on, their saved-up energy, and what's not.

231. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist

 

First, never say anything to a conspiracy theorist about the theory itself.  You are an academic, a scientist, and you don't pronounce on anything without examining it.  So you say, "I haven't looked into it."

Your excuse (and you need one; scientists are supposed to be curious) is that you are pressed for time and have to trust others to filter out theories worth looking into.  In this case you say, "I trust the mainstream American newspapers."

Your defense (and you need one; scientists are supposed to draw only on reliable sources) is that mainstream American newspapers are more reliable filters than any source you can turn to.  You regard an American journalist as a scientist pressed for time.  But remember, you are asking American newspapers only to tell you whether or not to take the theory seriously, not to tell you whether or not it is sound.

Your argument (and you need one; you have named the people who, by ignoring their theorizing, have gotten these theorists called "conspiracy" theorists) is that those who write for mainstream American newspapers are in competition with each other, and are as eager to get ahead as scientists, and are as alert to each other's lapses, while the sources the theorists rely on are in harmony with each other, and ignore each other's lapses.  You believe that judgment tested in competition is more reliable than judgment free of such testing.

Your purpose is to leave open the possibility that the conspiracy theory is true (a scientist never closes the door to new evidence and alternate theories) while avoiding commitment to investigation and even discussion. 

Your chief enemy is your own conscience as a scientist.  You feel uncomfortable showing indifference to offered evidence of a world-changing truth, and trusting non-academics to support that indifference.  You feel guilty turning away from people that look up to you.  But trust me.  If you value ordinary life you don't want to open yourself up to the extraordinary effort examination of a conspiracy theory will require, not if it's anything like the currently popular ones.   There's no end to what's on the Zapruder film, or in the Tower debris, or at the Roswell site.

Maybe, though, the best defense is to get people to stop looking up to you.  Change your identity.  Pull Error Philosophy on them.  Say, "Look, I'm not really a scientist.  I'm just a time-pressed wonk getting through life by making the best hunches he can.  My hunch that the Times and the Post have the right slant on this has taken me this far and since there's not a whole lot of good ordinary life left I think I'll just stick with them."

230. "Don't tell me about your doubts, tell me something you BELIEVE in."

 

Let's say an Error Philosopher hears that, Dave Gardner playing the Southern preacher, and takes it seriously.

"Well, the first thing I believe in is my own mortality.  I am going to die and I don't know when.  If I thought I were going to live forever I'd be wrong to give up on the Ideal, the Truth.  If I thought I had no mortal limitations I'd be wrong to have such a low aim, to avoid Error.  I'd have time to overcome my limitations.  I couldn't be an Error Philosopher.

"The second thing I believe in is the Good Hunch, what truth philosophers call probable inference.  I believe that in the time I have, with my limited abilities, I can come pretty close to what brilliant creatures, with a lot of time, will conclude is very reliable belief.  I mean, close enough, enough anyway to get me through the rest of my life without making Big Mistakes.

"The third thing I believe in is the value of ordinary, normal life.  That's what avoidance of Big Mistakes lets you live.  It's so valuable that, especially for those who have made a Big Mistake or two, or come close, you don't mind missing out on the extraordinary."

Does that mean you doubt the value of the extraordinary achievement?

"No, I doubt the value of a gamble for it.  You often risk the loss of what I have put a high value on, normal life, and you don't get very good odds.  They're like for a straight flush.  But you've got to figure the odds in each case.  And keep in mind that there's a joker in this deck.  From time to time up jumps, from the normal life, an extraordinary achievement.  The person going along, enjoying all that daily life has to offer, suddenly produces work that knocks the socks off of everybody.  That's more likely in some fields than in others (I'm thinking of mathematics) but it's possible in all.  t has something to do, maybe, with peace of mind."

One last thing.  Why do you call this a "philosophy"?

"For the same reason Mark Twain signed a letter to the editor with the name of a preacher friend of his: to give it more weight."

And why do you capitalize so many of your ideas?

"Same reason.  It's what Germans do.  I've even considered giving the whole cluster a German name: Irrtumphilosophie."

229. From First Grade to Weapons Grade

 

"Don't be a Just Me" was a motto on the wall of my first grade classroom.  In seventh grade, where we learned to debate, this had become, "Look at it from the other fellow's point of view."  I thought of this when I read Geoff Dyer's explanation (Financial Times, 12-4-13) of China's declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea: China is "attempting what aspiring great powers often do to prevent another country from dominating its own region."

All right, grown-up youngster, be fair.  Look at it from China's point of view.  There's the U.S. with its Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) covering all the waters around its borders, there's Japan with its ADIZ, there's Russia with its.  An ADIZ is not a legal or treaty thing; it's just declared.  Great, and sometimes not-so-great, powers have such things. 

Say you're Chinese.  For such a long time your country was far from being a great power.  Just the opposite.  Great powers took from China what they wanted.  In 1895 Japan took, among bigger things (like Taiwan), the Diaoyu Islands.  A small thing  but still a great power thing.  Do you want to be a great power?  Get an Air Defense Identification Zone.  And if it overlaps Japan's ADIZ  at the Diaoyu Islands, so much the better.  Here's mud in your eye, Shinzo Abe.

Not so fast, says Joe Biden, you're "unilaterally trying to change the status quo" (NYT, 12-3-13).

"Whose status quo?" the fair-minded seventh-grader sees himself, Chinese, asking the U.S.  "The established situation in the Pacific has you running things right up to our coastal waters.  Just the way you ran things in 1961 (this 12-year-old does well in history) when Khrushchev sent his boatload of missiles to Cuba.  Remember?  The U.S. had missiles in Turkey, right on the Soviet Union's border.  And was ready to press the button if the Soviets put some on its borders.  "We can do it but you can't," that was the status-quo motto in 1961.

That's the way established powers talk to rising powers.  Most of it is probably arrogance and habit but, you know, I think a lot of it is just plain fear.  Like what Spartans felt when they saw the power of Athens rising.  "What will they do to us when they are fully powerful?"  Martin Wolf, writing in last Tuesday's Financial Times ("China must not copy the Kaiser's errors," 12-3-13) makes the comparison to Germany, and gives us a telling reminder of the fear in the hearts of the established powers, Britain and France, as Germany rose, and moved to stand alongside them in the 20th century.  Wolf shows how that move was mishandled, and we come away certain that established powers can mishandle their establishment as badly as rising powers can mishandle their rising.  His reminder, that "seemingly minor events can quickly escalate to catastrophic proportions," needs no elaboration to give us a shudder.

Keeping an established power happy without making a rising power unhappy is pretty difficult but smart statesmen can do it.  The Kennedy team handling the missiles the Soviet Union (in the position of a rising power) was sending to Cuba did it.  They made a deal: the Soviets would turn their boat around and we would remove the missiles we had stationed in Turkey.  But there would be no public announcement of the removal, or even admission of the deal.  That left Americans, the mass of them, believing that they were as great as they ever were.  Since the turnaround was public they could claim victory.  But their leaders would make no such claims.  "No crowing" was Kennedy's final instruction to the team.  That would let the Soviets think they were as good as anybody. 

The seventh-grader has no seat at the realpoliticians' table but is his voice unheard?  I think not.  No graduate of an American elementary school can entirely silence the voice that speaks for fairness to the other fellow and in this case, inside those tough, anti-communist counselors, I think there must have been a voice asking why the U.S. could put missiles on its adversary's borders and the adversary could not do the same.  I'll go further.  I'll bet some were asking, "What would I be feeling about my borders if countries along them had not leaped across them so many times to savage us, as the Germans did so devastatingly to the Russians just a few years ago?"  Americans, with their 3000 miles of ocean on each side, have a hard time imagining the feelings of exposed countries, but if they're not going to be haunted by their seventh-grade teachers they have to.

Smart seventh-graders read "Look at it from the other fellow's point of view" as a sub-motto of "Use your imagination," and when they grow into realpoliticians the blackboard motto will become "get inside the other fellow's head, look at the world the way he looks at it, and the way he looks at you."  The results could be as different as what's inside a Chinese head and what's inside an Iranian head.

Say a grown-up seventh-grader gets inside an Iranian mullah's head and looks out at us.  What does he see?  Pure Evil.  The Great Satan.  When he looks, as that mullah, at his own people what does he see?  Potential martyrs for Good, caring little about their own lives in the fight against Evil.  If the seventh grader is at all an Error Philosopher (Posts #224 and 226) he'll see tolerance of nuclear weapons in the hands of such a mullah directing a nation as The Big Mistake, to avoid which his country has to Go Big (here meaning "do anything necessary to keep nuclear weapons out of such hands").  So people who adhere to seventh-grade ideals aren't necessarily going to be doves.  They could be bigger hawks than John McCain.  With controlled sympathies.  It won't matter that in the past Iranians have been victims, our victims (in 1953).  Decisions have to be made for, and sympathies directed to, the living and their descendants only.  There's no point, at a bargaining table, in sympathizing with the dead.

That in Iran is a million miles from what we have in the East China Sea, beginning with what's primary inside the Chinese head: material, or commercial, interests — all that trade with the U. S., all that need for the natural resources missing in their own country.  The trouble with the Fighter Against Evil is that in his head there are no material interests you can work with.  In the Fighter Against Foreign Devils there are God's plenty.  What Marx (dialectical materialism) didn't put there Confucius did. Confucius, that god (yes, you can call Confucianism the "Chinese religion") of realism and worldliness.

There, in the Far East, is the hope we can't have in the Near East.  Mutual material interests push China and the U. S., represented by skilled diplomats at the table, to a peaceful settlement that lets each side go home speaking like big-power winners.  "See, we got them to accept our defense zone."  "See, we got them to bring their defense zone down to match that of reasonable nations" (the Chinese ADIZ required — perhaps for future bargaining — more of entering planes than the others' did).  They come out with the Chinese feeling as good as anybody and the Americans feeling as great as they ever were. Rising power happy, established power happy.  Fairness that makes the seventh grader happy.  Achieved by diplomacy that makes the realpolitician happy.

 
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228. When Error Philosophers Become Parents.

 

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I see no reason for the Avoidance Parent not to follow the same general rule the Avoidance Ruler follows: come down big on the Big Mistakes and wave away the little ones.  The Big Mistakes a child can make are the life-ruining ones, like doing heroin.  In my day it was getting a girl pregnant, or getting pregnant.  The promising child goes, bang, from a wide world full of options (this college? that career? the best country to pursue it in?) to a narrow world of practically zilch options (work at this plant?  apprentice yourself to that trade? clerk in whose store?). That was in my town but the range of jobs available to a partially educated husband was small in nearly every town and inability to move far (how could you, with no savings and a baby?) made it smaller.

OK, that is the Big Mistake, that is the nuclear catastrophe, the quagmire, the released genocide, and unless he (or she) is confident the child will avoid it on his own the Avoidance Parent will go big on it as he went big on the toddler to keep him out of the street.  And with the same acceptance of collateral damage, physical or psychological.  No injury by a parent is as great as what an automobile or a heroin addiction can do.

Parents, like nineteenth-century rulers, are prone to gauge a mistake by the injury done not to the child but to themselves, their pride, their sense of their (or their family's) position.  And they often fail to distinguish real injury from symbolic injury.  Dress, facial hair, music, posture, indecorous language, most of the gestures of teenage rebellion, do only symbolic injury.  The Avoidance Parent, having identified the Big Threat that does Real Injury, will wave them aside — as Napoleon III, France's great Attainment Ruler, should have done with the Ems telegram, the indecorous language of which led him to declare the war that lost Alsace.  Loss of a province, loss of a child, the same confusion is behind it.

In the family, as in the world arena, the Error Philosopher will be an anti-romantic.  No "Follow your dream," no "Excelsior!" no "Be President."  Just avoid the Big Crash that, with romantics, follows not just failure but simply falling short.  He'll redefine failure.  So that a child who grows up to be a quarrelsome, dogmatic bore will be recognized as a failure.  Despite his Nobel prize.  The payoff to the child? He'll se that there's no need to make it in the big leagues.  Playing decent ball in the neighborhood is, as long as it satisfies you, good enough.  The payoff to the parent: no reproaches like Biff's to Willy Loman: "I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody!"

Does this mean that the nation will win fewer Nobel prizes?  It could well be.  Maybe that's the way Error Philosophy will play out beyond the family.  Buy into it and we may buy out of a cure for cancer.