Trying to See the Principle

Incoherence happens, one might say. But when it happens in the social context, the cause can usually be traced to muddled principles. Having said this, let me sort out my own reactions to the pending U.S. intervention to punish Syria for using nerve gas in its civil war.

At the basic level it seems to me logical to assert that deadly violence is deadly violence no matter how it is applied to a target. The weapons system that produces it—be it bullets or grenades or IUDs, artillery, bombing, drones, gas, or atomic bombs—is therefore a secondary consideration. Under what principle, therefore, is gas attack so much more heinous than the conventional killing that has already taken place?

Yes, I know. I was a child through World War II; the use of gas in WW I was then a still fresh and horrid collective memory. But WW II produced its own mass killings of civilian populations; atomic bombs on two Japanese cities are but the most awesome examples. Does it matter whether you convulse to death or die by having your flesh melt off your bones?

Under what principle may one sovereign attack another if no state of war exists between the two? Is that the principle of Might is Right? Is there a principle under Natural Law that makes one country Cop of the World? The principle of collective self defense is present in that law, not selective and you might say boutique attacks with missiles and such in certain carefully selected cases to justify threats made in speeches in order to deter Syria from using nerve gas—the threats themselves not justified except by might. That might also guarantees our own fairly certain invulnerability to a response.

Yes, incoherence happens. I note that wherever it happens, it also sets the stage for random violence in other venues as well. The young are hungry for rhyme and reason. When it is denied by the society as a whole, by the family structure, it can sometimes burst into a kind of madness we’ve come to call “going postal.”

Articulating Principles

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all.

Liberty and justice stand in tension one with the other—and this tension by itself provides the rationale for government. Justice for all implies limitations on liberty—lest liberty turn into license. John Locke, in Of the State of Nature, gave formal arguments for this in the seventeenth century. Limited government, similarly, arises from the same tension. Liberty must be curbed for the sake of justice—but not more than justice demands.

And what applies to government applies with equal force to the exercise of any power—be that of a parent over a child, the head of a household over a family, a corporation, agency, etc. But if power must be curbed, the national government ultimately is the point of last recourse; but of course it is itself a power—and must be curbed in turn. And thus arises the notion articulated in the Declaration of Independence that government derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Is it really necessary to rehash all these old ideas once again? We know all this, don’t we? Well, we live in an age when the meaning of words like “is” is debated in grand jury hearings by sitting presidents; thus it may be a good idea to ponder fundamentals. Not least words like “all,” as in “justice for all.” And “justice” for that matter.

You might say that every time a tension appears, parties will form to either side. This seems to be the situation in our politics today. We have a party of liberty trying to maximize the limitation of government—and a party of justice, trying to maximize the justice for all. The tendencies are illustrated in the only passages, within the 2008 platforms for the two parties, one passage in each, that mention core principles at all:

From the Democrats:

Today, we pledge a return to core moral principles like stewardship, service to others, personal responsibility, shared sacrifice and a fair shot for all–values that emanate from the integrity and optimism of our Founders and generations of Americans since.

From the Republicans:

Republicans will uphold and defend our party’s core principles: Constrain the federal government to its legitimate constitutional functions. Let it empower people, while limiting its reach into their lives. Spend only what is necessary, and tax only to raise revenue for essential government functions. Unleash the power of enterprise, innovation, civic energy, and the American spirit—and never pretend that government is a substitute for family or community.

These two most recent formal platforms are here (Republicans, Democrats).

Now the difficulties here are to determine how to measure justice for all. In effect it is impossible, but there are certain indicators that might be meaningful. A clear one, from my perspective, is income inequality. It strikes me as a meaningful pointer indicating the slippage of justice in the United States that the Gini Coefficient, which measures income inequality, stood at 0.397 in 1975 and at 0.469 in 2010. The higher the Gini, the greater the inequality. This means that in the last 35 years income inequality has increased by 18 percent. Now a certain inequality is natural, of course. But what level is too high? Consider what the military pay differentials are. A four-star general earns 11.5 times more than a private does. In our economy, the top quintile of the population earns 15.4 more than the lowest quintile. Now while the number of four-star generals is a tiny fraction of all soldiers, the top quintile of the population is a full fifth of it. Therefore that 15.4 multiplier means more.

Liberty, to be sure, will minimally produce economic inequality—so that some, but not all, will have much greater wealth. The perception, at minimum, of “justice for all” erodes when this happens; and as it does, disorder mounts. Now, of course, this is a free country. Those who wish to work to maximize justice (thus constraints on the economy) and those who wish to maximize liberty (hence inequality in wealth), are free to do so. But it would certainly help if the underlying principles were spelled out and more openly discussed in debates and punditry than they are. Some people, indeed the masses, don’t seem to understand what is is.

Separation, Adaptation

The foundation of all principled activity seems to be a separation of the authentically human from nature. That sounds odd in an era the thought of which rests on the opposite notion, namely that the human not only arises from but is nature and that, strictly speaking, no qualitative differences (better, higher) mark the human. Today’s dominant thought, however, also has a system of valuation. It values adaptation. Pragmatism is its philosophical expression: whatever works. In the absence of separation from nature, everything must be relative to something else. Not surprisingly the highest revelation of our age is the Theory of Relativity.

The “separation” that makes for principles is based on the notion of a hierarchical origin of all that there is: God, the universe, and so on. Here values, indeed absolute values, are implicit in what today we call “the narrative” itself. The modern view, violating strict consistency, also has its equivalent “higher” order, now called The Market, now Democracy. But in essence, there are these two: Separate, absolute, principled—over against monistic, relative, adaptive.

The problems in modern life arise because we refuse to apply modern ideas consistently, as already noted. When some group is stronger than ours and holds views we dislike, it is inconsistent to speak of bad will, evil, corruption, and so on. There are no absolutes by which to arrive at such negative judgments of others. It is as inconsistent to accuse other humans as it is to read malevolence into tsunamis and tornadoes. But modern man wants it both ways. It wants untrammeled freedom to choose its ideology pragmatically: principled when it is hurting, adaptive when it has the hammer hand. But this is heresy, of course. If we can’t walk the talk, sooner or later a principled era will come back and take over.

What Do You Emote?

Earth-flattener Thomas Friedman, the columnist sage, attempts once more to frame public reaction to a chaotic and incoherent policy in Libya—and surrounding the Arab explosion generally—by calling it “hard stuff.” Does he mean that as Tom Wolfe used the phrase “the right stuff” in a splendid book about the astronauts? Well, I wonder what you emote about all this?

Friedman approvingly quotes this portion of President Obama’s speech Monday evening: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And, as president, I refuse to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

It is “hard stuff,” as Friedman points out, because conflicting emotions arise as we contemplate the evolving situation, e.g. in Bahrain Shi’ites (shudder) are the “democrats” and the Saudi’s don’t like that, and we don’t want to make the Saudi’s angry, so when they march in to quell “democracy” in Bahrain, we refrain from “taking action.” But let me expand the view a little.

When in Palestine Hamas won the parliamentary elections, the Bush administration did not bow its head to say that “democracy” had spoken. No. We suspended foreign aid because we did not like the outcome. That was hard stuff too. In Rwanda in 1994 Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis in a hundred-day period. Surely that’s definable as “slaughter.” Alas, our media did not cover this holocaust with cameras; few moving images of corpses and “mass graves” reached our screens, hence we did not bother “taking action,” although we did participate in a no-fly zone in the Bosnian civil war that overlapped with the African disaster. Why? Was that because the Bosnians, Europeans all, were somehow “closer” to us than black Tutsis? And did that Bosnian no-fly zone, instituted in 1993, prevent the Srebrenica massacre in 1995? Actually, No. That one, by the way, was tiny by Rwandan standards, a mere 8,000 men and boys. But this much is enough.

Is the camera the issue? Or is it something else? Camera reminds me of a 1951 play entitled I Am a Camera. It was written by John Van Druten inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin. That book holds a sentence: “I am a camera with its shutters open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Exactly. Not thinking—but emoting. Emoting until I can no more. And then it’s time for taking action.

It’s hard stuff indeed when your emotions are in conflict and nothing else is handy to resolve the internal conflict, like thought, for example, like principle, like reason, policy. Then all the particles are in the air, frantically bouncing about, now hitting, now missing, colliding, repulsing, adhering—whatever. A tribal war erupts somewhere. Reach for the crystal ball. If images appear in it, and if you’re in the mood, and if those you hang with are also in the mood, and if there’s money in the pocket, and if the time’s right, and if it looks like you might win—but not if not—why then, forgetting what presidents are actually supposed to do, namely faithfully to execute the laws—why then it’s time for taking action. Otherwise, perhaps, we can placidly turn a blind eye. Far away, another continent, hey, they’re just lesser breeds without the law. Never mind. Issue a call or two deploring violence and asking for a political resolutions. So what’s next on the agenda?

But I’d better stop. Emoting is hard stuff. It makes me all confused. A nice bowl of crispies in cold milk? Isn’t it breakfast time? We will be back after these messages.

One Man's Principle, Another's Convenience

Attorney General Eric Holder suggested yesterday that Congress should ease up on self-incrimination statutes (the so-called Miranda rule) in cases involving terrorism—so that law enforcement shall have more “flexibility.” The Supreme Court’s Miranda decision rests on a constitutional right in the Fifth Amendment—to wit: “No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself….”—and the right to a lawyer, which appears in the Sixth Amendment: “[T]he accused shall enjoy the right … to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

The presumption behind the language of the amendments (and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of them) is that a principle is involved rooted in fundamental human rights. So at least I understand it, so I would feel myself compelled to explain it if I were teaching this matter in school. We must draw our laws from some kind of fundamental and absolute conception of rights.

But the justification Holder offers for weakening this rule is that of convenience. The New York Times quotes him as saying: “We’re now dealing with international terrorists, and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.”

This is as nice an example of relativism in ethics as I could wish. And, as such, it is ultimately of the same family, genus, and species as terrorism itself. Because this side-stepping of principle, however small the step, is the abandonment of principle. It says that we shall adhere to our values—when it suits us. And we shall, behind the veils of legislative gestures, abandon them when it suits us.

The way I understand this initiative is that “anything goes.” If those in power can pick and choose which principles they must observe, based only on the sanction of a shifting majority of votes—why then, folks, what they can do, anyone can do. But that’s precisely the ideology behind the terrorist threat—an absolute assertion that the only principle is force. The terrorists use it stealthily, we use it legislatively. In turn that means that we’re no longer a nation of laws—or that we choose to redefine what “law” means. A principled rule becomes a chameleon-like continuous shifting of responses in flexible adaptation to whatever happens. If people are going out to buy guns, I can only nod my approval.