221. Our word "Democracy": How serious is the wound in Egypt?

 
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I know, I know.  What we have done to our political vocabulary by supporting the Egyptian generals who took power from the elected Muslims is too obvious to comment on.  Everybody knows that our word "democracy" no longer means "power to the majority of the people through elections."  Everybody knows that if it doesn't mean that then it has no spine.  And everybody knows that the next time we use it to go nyah nyah to the Russians we will fall on our asses.  But still.

And here's something else everybody, including word-picky English teachers like me, knows: that your linguistic ass is sometimes the last thing that needs protection.  Anybody who doesn't know that should read Michael Gordon and Mark Landler's story in Thursday's New York Times (10-10-13), identifying what currently most needs our protection in the Middle East: the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.  The generals are our best guarantee that the treaty, and therefore Israel, and several hundred American Congressmen, will remain upright.  Gordon and Landler point to what every patriot old in statecaft knows: the political comes before the linguistic.  But still.

But doesn't the ethical come before the political?  If it does then we've put the linguistic further back in the line.  I tell myself that it would be unethical to betray Israel now, after so much support, so much common interest, so much sympathy after the Holocaust.  And betrayal, man that's what Dante said was the worst sin, to be punished on the floor of Hell.  And Dante was speaking for Thomas Aquinas, who spoke for Aristotle, who in ethics spoke for all of Western Civilization.  If you've got that kind of support for your move on the Muslims how can you hold back?  And, more to the point, what excuse do you have to whine about word use?

Well, you might have an excuse, the ever-ready realpolitik excuse, if you were persuaded that what you see as ethical behavior is really tribal behavior.  Loyalty to the Judeo-Christian tribe, upped to Western Tribe, is what drives our actions in the Middle East.  It's a war of tribe against tribe out there, and words are soldiers in that war.  We had some pretty stout ones — like "democracy" and "human rights," with "Enlightenment" backing them up — that are no longer standing up so well.  For the strength of the tribal army alone our generals (word-generals, PR guys) need to know that.  Telling them of the reality is not whining.

But even habitual whiners are making no comments.  Might it be like commenting on a cripple?  After Secretary of State John Kerry, said, right after the coup, that Egypt’s military leaders were “restoring democracy” (NYT 8-1-13) everybody looked away from the word — as they surely will do again after the statement he made Thursday, that "the United States will consider resuming aid to Egypt 'on the basis of performance' that encourages democracy through elections" (Reuters, 10-10-13).  I have no doubt that, as he keeps flogging the poor, broke-back word along, we will keep averting our eyes.

And I suppose we will keep biting our tongues because only the socially clueless, the out-of-it prof, would speak in such poor taste.  That's it, I guess, but maybe not all of it.  There is another reason: consistency, unwillingness to contradict oneself.  This is the way you play the tribal game once you have committed yourself to it.  Tribes fight pragmatically, with rhetoric.  Their test is not, "Is it true?" but "Does it work for us."  When an untruth works better (or in this case, less disastrously) than a truth you use it.  Pointing out that your tribe's spokesman speaks an untruth keeps it from working.  That weakens the tribe.  Good tribesmen don't weaken their tribe.  Ethics again, plus logic.

But there's a remaining question, still realpolitikal, still intra-tribal: what weakens a tribe more, breaking the backs of its words or calling attention to their brokenness?  And, as so often with that kind of question, we have to look long-term and short term.  For the short term I think we might well say that it's best not to call attention to the fact that our finest word-soldier is crippled.  But we can't forget the long term.  Broken backs don't heal quickly, and we don't know what battles lie ahead, what regimes we'll have to claim a difference from.

220. Congress: Debt Ceilings and Term Limits

What does the debt ceiling, due to screw up national decision-making again on October 17, have in common with the two-term limit on the service of our presidents?  Both are cases of the ignorant tying the hands of the knowing.

People living in the past are always going to know less about the needs of the nation in the future than the people living in that future.  The men of 1789 knew very little about what the U. S. would need in the way of a President in 1940.  The people of 1917 didn't know a damn thing about the expenditures needed in 2013.  Hell, nobody in the world could, even a year ahead of time, tell what the nation was going to need in 2013.

Yes, there is a difference between those people.  The men of 1789, however willing they were to bind men of the future in other ways, refused to bind them in this way.  They left it to the choice of the men on the spot at the time.  Washington declined a third term, and established a custom; Roosevelt went for a third term, and broke the custom.  Then the people of the time could make their choice.  Binding by law didn't come until 1951.

The men of 1917, on the other hand, were not only willing to bind men of the future to what they thought best for them, they were willing to give men of any party the ability to bind all the men who came after them, at any distance — decades, years, months — to what they thought best for them.  I know, the men of 1917 did this by accident, and it took the men and women of 1995 (the new Republican Congress), to do it by intent, but still it was done.  Both oppose the democratic notion that people, by majority vote, should be free to determine what's best for them.

Where do knowledge and ignorance come in?  In the claim that justifies such apparently undemocratic action: we're smarter people.  There's nothing new there.  All people in parties think they're smarter than people in other parties.  But these people, or whoever put the binding into law, were saying that they were smarter than everybody, including those who might come along later.  "We know the nation's needs at that time better than they will know them."  No, it's worse than that.  It's the howler, "We know the nation's needs better than we ourselves will know them."  In the case of the debt ceiling they will be referring to the on-the-spot measures they will have knowledgably passed, or let pass, but which still, maybe a week later, have to be funded.  They assert, practically simultaneously, A and not-A.

I think we can bear the arrogance here — "Since we are smarter than all the dumb bunnies who follow us, we'll fix it so that they'll have to recognize our wisdom" — but I'm not sure we can bear the stupidity.  How smart do you have to be to recognize that people facing a problem are going to know more about it than people guessing at it from the past? 

No, you can't argue that that's what our Founding Fathers believed.  "Didn't those fathers see the need to protect dumb bunnies from themselves?  And aren't we all dumb bunnies?" Of course we are, and they devised a Constitution to protect us from ourselves, binding us.  But none of those bindings, like the one to keep us from uniting church and state, are like these, binding one set of Congressmen (or voters) to another, earlier set, on the grounds that the later set will be less wise in the choice of a candidate or budget.  And you can't argue that the Athenians, our models, did that, by setting limits.  They did, but only for offices chosen by lot.  For the rest they trusted elections.

"Yes, but there's nothing in our Constitution to protect dumb-bunny voters from the demagogue who learns how to make his position permanent, or from spendthrift Congressmen who break the bank." 

That's just wrong.  Elections are specified in the Constitution and they protect us.  But that appeal to the Constitution, like so many others, is beside the point.  It's not that debt- and term-limit setters are saying that voters are dumb bunnies; it's that they're saying that some bunnies are less dumb than others, and that's them.  With no basis whatsoever.

Where did they get the idea that future voters could not identify a three-term-hungry demagogue (or a bank-breaking Congressman) but that they could?  The idea that future voters couldn't throw him out with an election but that he had to be thrown out by a law?  If they were so smart why didn't they see that along with the bad demagogue they were going to throw out all the bright, good, non-demagogic nation-savers that might be there in the same bathwater.   I think they got their idea of future incompetence from the conviction that they themselves were the nation-savers.  They couldn't wait for history to bestow that title.

Oh how a democracy needs that, ability to wait.  Leaders who wait for history, citizens who wait for an election.  It's the ability Egyptians so needed if they were to have a democracy, ability to bear the Muslims in power long enough to meet the requirement that they throw them out in an election.  No, they saw nation-destroyers, and needed nation-savers.  And got what Thomas Jefferson could have predicted, a tyrant, one who, like all tyrants and demagogues, sells himself as a nation-saver.

Well, nation-saving is as nation-saving does, and maybe Egypt needed such saving.  Maybe we can come up with a justification of General el-Sisi, and maybe we can justify our democracy in supporting him.  It's hard but it probably can be done.  Worse things can happen to a country than loss of democracy, I suppose.  But of all the kinds of saving we try to justify I think the saving of our nation from its dumb bunnies by another set of dumb bunnies must surely be the hardest.

219. The Contest Between Paintings and Wallpaper.

 

At each meal in my retirement home I face a wall that has a painting of wallpaper on it.  That's all that's in the frame.  Just a section of wallpaper.

Though it doesn't throw me into transports it does transport me: back to that train station (Post #2) where I immediately thought better of what some people were doing in a passageway when my companion told me that it was "performance art."

You can see what makes the connection between the station and the wall wall: a thing we look at is given added value through a name.  My companion said, "This is art," and so, I think, does the frame.

I argued that a painting shouldn't be given this added value.  It should earn it.  By competing fair and square with everything else offering value.  The performers in the train station are up against anything else you might see in a train station.  The stuff inside a frame is competing against anything you might see outside the frame.  Like the wallpaper.

Now what everything on the wall of a dining room is competing for is the privilege of supplying a background pleasure.  Conversation and food are the foreground pleasures.  You can find all kinds of weighty, paired terms for this division —intrinsic vs. extrinsic, essential vs. accidental, central vs. marginal — but none of them will let you reverse the privilege of the conversation and food.  They (a jazz club will tell it to you) are the trumpet and clarinet, carrying the tune; the wallpaper is just brushes on the drum.

Experience with various pleasures soon taught me, as Socrates taught me later, that for the good life pleasures have to be ranked, and proportioned, and located, foreground or background.  If you disagree I'll take you to a jazz club. 

OK, this retirement home is no jazz club, but the truth I landed on was a general one, applying everywhere.  So here I am, listening closely to my companions (don't think octogenarians aren't worth listening to), and what do I hear?  What has this painter done?  Cued the drummer to take over.  With his brush!  "Quiet, you diners, I'm showing you some art," says the frame.  I look inside.  "Ta da!"  A section of wallpaper.  Outside is inside, background is foreground, lesser is greater, and the effect on me is distraction.  I can no longer keep my mind on the conversation.

So what am I, in a comedy club?  "Hey, the wallpaper guy is here.  Thinks he can use it to test the value of painting." All right, smart-ass, test this.

I know, I'm so vain I think that song is about me, but still I can be useful. How familiar are you with the recent, and in some ways ongoing, culture wars?  Do you know that one side believed in proportion and the other side thought they believed too strongly in it?  The proportionists (also identified as traditionalists, and sometimes classicists) carefully distinguished essential from accidental, intrinsic from extrinsic, central from peripheral — and ranked the former ahead of the latter.  The anti-proportionists (identified as postmodernists) exercised less care and said, in effect, to hell with such ranking.  What traditionalists put in the center they — often playfully, just for a tweak — would put in the margin.

There you've got the retirement home dining room, foreseen by the postmodern painter.  She raises her decentering weapon, her brush, the wallpaper goes into the frame, and pow, there I am with my fork in the air.

Now I've taken enough of these shots (oh those 60s absurdists) to know that the worst thing I can do is go weighty on her.  The purpose, as with those ribbers Hemingway despised, is to get a rise out of you.  Not this time, baby.  I'll play it cool.

How do I do that?  By listening closely to the octogenarian trying to complete her promising thought.  I'll show the painter that, even though I'm internally enjoying her game, it ranks below the game we at the table are still trying to play, however well, the game of understanding life, and what's essentially good in it.  Through talk.  That's Socratic, that's classical, that's Western.  And that's what the postmodernist is turning away from — or having fun with.

218. For your collection of incomprehensible uses of the word "existential."

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Indeed, analysts said, the British Parliament's rebuff of Mr. Cameron, by rejecting his call for a response to the [gas] attacks, ended a period of foreign policy leadership by Europe's two defense powers, Britain and France.  It also provoked a kind of existential crisis, particularly for Britain, which prides itself on its "special relationship" with Washington.

— New York Times, September 5, 2013, page A8.

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.

216. The Horrors Competition

  

No, I don't mean a competition to see who can do the most horrible things to people.  Nobody tries to be a champion in that league.  I mean a competition to see who can rack up the most horrible things the other fellow has done.  It's the competition that gives us bragging rights in the Human League.  "You're more inhuman than I am."

Of course we mean "your tribe," "your race," "your religion," and, some of us, hope we can take the meaning to "your genes," "your essential nature."

People keep trying to win at this game. In the Balkans five nations are still piling up evidence that worse things were done to them than they ever did.  In Ireland Protestants are still adding up Catholic atrocities and Catholics adding up Protestant atrocities.  There's hardly time to get a count.  Stop to measure a pile in Asia — Muslims against Hindus, Buddhists against Muslims, Sikhs against Hindus — and somebody's sure to come running up with another bundle.  "Hold on!  The latest from Myanmar!  The Buddhists will never match these figures!"

Of course the Buddhists will match them.  Groups embarrassed by current figures just go to the past.  "Yes, we're bad now but seven centuries ago you had a general that makes us all look good.  Look how he slaughtered."

Not that there haven't been undoubted, all-conquering slaughterers.  Admit it, though, and what do you hear?  "Here's one, here's an undeniable case," and up comes another victim dragging his victimizer.  One Holocaust exception opens the gates. 

And not that there haven't been pure non-slaughterers.  Be one of those and you're a sure winner.  I don't think we'll hear from you, though.  You'll be too sweet to play this game. 

With everybody else, though, it's a contest that gets more complicated with every play.  Imagine yourself the scorekeeper.  The Crusades.  "You behead!"  "You crucify."  "Yeah, but you behead more than we crucify."  "We do not."  "Yes you do.  History shows that in 1189 you beheaded this many people." "Whose history?  Yours!"  "Yes but our history is more reliable than yours."  "OK, but even if the numbers are too high we're still ahead.  Crucified people suffer more than beheaded people."

Oi, the scoreboard.  Go from quantity to quality and it's a mess.  Well how about ten points for a crucifixion and three for a beheading, three leaving room for lethal injection, etc., lying ahead.  Sounds good but you just know that as soon as you get it fixed somebody's going to come running in with a disemboweling or a gassing.  And, if you're an old historian, you'll know more: any historian who runs in claiming to have found the last horror is going to be followed by another who has looked at the period more closely.  The closer historians look at any period the more horrors they are going to find.  Sounds to me as if anybody, if they slice it right, can be on top of the leader board.  "You're all more inhuman than I am."

Maybe what we need is a big, loud voice coming in and saying, "You're all inhuman, period.  Yes you too, you weak, you meek, you oppressed.  You just haven't had a chance yet."   The voice of the old-time God would end the game all right.

215. Is gassing people essentially distinct from other ways of killing them?

Back to Plato's "Slice nature at her joints" (that is, "choose words that make essential distinctions"), the problem raised by same-sex marriage (Post #199).  Isn't President Obama missing the joint when he draws a "red line" for Bashar al-Assad between gassing "his own people" (to speak as everybody from the General Secretary of the UN to John McCain speaks) and killing them in any of the dozen or so other ways he has been killing them?  "Shoot, burn, knife, bomb, strangle, torture, drown, club, gut and starve as you will but by God you gas and we're coming after you. "

I suppose any manner of killing that is distinctly more painful than another can justifiably be singled out.  We do that regularly with "torture," which makes a great difference in our willingness to use other words, like "civilized" and "enlightened," and, through our laws and administrative rules, determines whether or not officials are punished and the government embarrassed.  The first experience of poison gas in World War I put gassing in this category, I think.  "You're torturing people to death."

So maybe that's it.  The line President Obama is drawing is a line between civilization and barbarism, and Assad's crossing it will be a movement into barbarism that civilized nations cannot tolerate.  Obama, president of the nation with enough force to influence Assad, will be justified in using it.  He is defending civilization.

Suppose Assad, facing that kind of motivation, wanted to stay on the right side of the civilized-barbaric line but couldn't understand the big difference gassing makes.  Could we deliver our belief that it's distinctly more painful than other ways of killing?  A form of torture?  Not if Assad knows some history.  "More painful than the lingering agony of radiation sickness?" he will ask.  Indeed, nobody who knows the killing history of the civilized nations is going to believe that "gassing" makes an essential distinction.  Too many of those who died by other means have suffered as much, and all are just as dead.

Still, I think, "gassing" slices at a joint. But it's not a joint in nature.  It's a joint in us, formed by our psychological (and in a democracy therefore political) needs.  We need to be good, and we need signs of our goodness, especially after doubtful behavior.  Nothing is so trivial — buttons instead of zippers, worsted instead of lace, beef instead of pork, fish instead of beef — that it can't be a sign.  "I may have lied, cheated, and stolen but at least I didn't cross the line into forbidden food."  The slide into the tribal need is easy.  "We may have bombed and burned and machine-gunned and fragged and napalmed and land-mined but at least we didn't gas."

That not only gives us an easy way of calling ourselves good, it gives us an easy way to call others bad.  "You're bad — or evil, or, as John Kerry said yesterday of Assad, 'morally obscene.' You gas."  All we need is one sign.  The moral world is divided in two.  One line, and we draw it.