Justice and the Same Article

The subject that happened to have our Pulitzer-winning critic so incensed as to rethink free speech was, it happens, the war in Israel. Or, as she puts it:

We do not protest the war on Gaza because we have an abstract right to do so; we protest it because it is one of the great moral atrocities of our lifetimes and because the widespread refusal to admit this in America is an atrocity in its own right.

The war in Israel compares and contrasts to the ongoing war in Syria in interesting ways. Points of comparison: they are both wars in the Middle East that have involved intense urban combat and the consequent unsettling of large urban populations. The unsettled communities were already on thin ice in terms of access to human goods like food, water, health care; the systems collapsed under the weight of the war, resulting in a lot of suffering. Many, perhaps most, of the people suffering are innocent of any intent to participate in the war: they are, formally, noncombatants. Noncombatant immunity is an important principle of the moral considerations that followed especially the Second World War, and thus our framework for evaluating conflicts considers violations of that principle to be war crimes of one sort or another. 

Points of contrast: Assad's war on his own population involved chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and so forth, but they never garnered any significant action against him from the same Left that is so intensely opposed to Israel. Barack Obama invoked but never enforced a 'red line' on the subject. Instead, the displacement of far more people -- some thirteen million, more than six and a half million of whom were forced to flee the country and resettle abroad -- was accomodated by Western governments with center Left to Leftist policies. If Israel forced everyone in Gaza out of the country, it would not even be a third as many as Assad did. 

Justice, I said below, entails something like 'treating relevantly similar cases similarly.' Assad is still in power; indeed, he is increasingly rehabilitated as people realize that he's not going anywhere. The West accepted and accomodated his actions, and the refugees who went abroad seeking better lives than were possible for them in the war zone of Syria. 

There are differences in degree -- differences on which Assad is worse -- but it is striking that so many people want to treat the events as different in kind. This is a product of the frame in which the contemporary Left is trained to divide people into classes and judge them by their class membership: and Israelis are considered "colonialists" and "imperialists" and "oppressors," whereas the Palestinians are considered a victim class. It is thus a "great moral atrocity" that victimizers are being allowed to victimize victims. In Syria, none of the classes rise to the conscious assignment of a status: they aren't important enough to the Left to be thought worthy of, well, thought. 

There's no justice in that evaluation that I can discern.

It is noteworthy, by the way, that people were also so much more willing to accept Syrian refugees as Palestinian ones. This is not merely by accident, i.e., because the Palestinian ones would be coming later than the Syrian ones. No, there is a reason behind it that is not well understood outside the Middle East. Palestinian refugees were once accepted, in millions, by Kuwait: their political structure, the PLO at the time, set itself up as a state-within-a-state and then cooperated with Saddam in overthrowing the government which had taken them in and given them new hope. After the war, Kuwait expelled them in their millions. Jordan also accepted Palestinian refugees: the PLO once again formed a state-within-a-state and waged civil war on the Jordanian kingdom until it finally successfully expelled them. Lebanon likewise had such refugees, who formed a state-within-a-state and joined forces with the civil war and allied with Hezbollah. The Egyptians deployed their army to the Sinai, promising "to sacrifice millions" of their soldiers if necessary, not to wage war against Israel on behalf of fellow Arabs. They did it to prevent Palestinians from coming into Egypt in any real numbers. Neighbor states will not accept Palestinian refugees until this toxic political culture has been replaced with one that can make peace with its hosts. 

That's another relevant difference to be considered. That toxic political culture is the reason for the present war and for all the other ones just mentioned. Hamas is itself an outgrowth of that same PLO culture, and it has itself constituted a state-within-a-state for the purpose of waging war on its host. The enduring ceasefire activists want was in place on October 6th: it turns out Hamas had been planning, training, and equipping for more than a year for the purpose of ending it. Neither could Israel, nor any state, sustain its political legitimacy if it did not respond to an attack like October 7th without military action designed to prevent such things happening in the future.

Noncombatant immunity may not be a sustainable principle: certainly it was wanted after World War II precisely because it was so frequently violated during World War II, and by all sides (including especially ours). Pragmatism as a philosophy suggests that a principle that cannot be sustained in reality is false; there are reasons to think that, however desirable this one may be, it may not in fact be pragmatically sustainable. There may be no way to wage war in urban environments, especially against a group like Hamas that intentionally uses the population as hostages (and physical cover), without violating the principle. Yet where such groups that plot and manifest atrocities exist, they will sometimes need to be fought. Whether the principle can survive remains to be seen.

Justice, though, somehow has to evaluate all of this in an impartial and even-handed manner. This does not entail not caring about the innocents who are harmed and displaced, but it may mean finding ways to accomodate them. I frankly think the Syrians who fled to Germany are better off than the ones who remain internally displaced in Syria; and that, in fact, their children are now likely to know better, more peaceful, and more prosperous lives in their futures than would ever have been possible in Syria.  Yet the Palestinians are not a parallel case: there is the relevant similarity, but also the relevant difference of a toxic politics that has proven incompatible even with several other Arab states, Muslim states. Sometimes justice may mean accepting that the world does not live up to our principles, and that when it does not it is we who must give way.

Free Speech and the Left

An article by another quasi-elite -- a "Pulitzer winning book critic" -- tries to craft a new view for the Left of freedom of speech. She regards freedom of speech not as an unalloyed good or a natural right, but as a kind of public utility that a decent society should have (like, she says, universal healthcare), provided however that it needs to be conditioned by "justice." 

I read this to mean "freedom of speech is a good thing if and only if we get our way on all substantive questions," which I don't personally find a compelling argument for the content of justice. I realize she may have trouble distinguishing between obtaining the outcomes endorsed by her view, which she manifestly believe to be identical to justice, and actual justice. Nevertheless, whatever else justice is it entails a manner of addressing controversies and disagreements between human beings in a way that produces outcomes that treat both sides fairly. "Fairly" means something like "treating relevantly similar things similarly," which involves a lot of slipperiness -- what is relevant? what level of 'similarly' sufficies? What it cannot mean is simply resolving everything in favor of the one side. 

However, such a view is consistent with her view of what free speech is about (at least for Kant). She writes: 

Freedom of speech, when elevated to the status of a moral good, is just another name for thoughtful obedience. Under such a rule, the right of everyone to disagree is protected as long as the state’s authority to limit action is respected. This way, the state may ensure that conflicts of value never turn into contests of value; it blesses us with the freedom to argue about morality on the condition that we never decide who is right. Kant’s foremost goal, after all, was to minimize the possibility of what he called the “worst, most punishable crime in a community” — namely, revolution. 

Under her proposed solution, you and I and everyone would have the right to think and say whatever we like, as long as we obeyed the "just" solution that she and hers determined. This really is much more like Kant's view than she admits to herself: it just moves the locus of determining justice from the state, as Kant prefers, to the Left. 

Readers know that I disagree with Kant quite deeply on this point of revolution being a bad thing: I endorse revolutions, rebellions, and even treason when pointed at overweening powers that would derail human liberty and natural virtue. The last thing I wanted out of freedom of speech was "thoughtful obedience," neither to the state nor to the elite (nor its outliers and functionaries). 

What I did want was respect for human dignity, which Kant also addressed in a view I modify here:

Unlike a rock or a fallen twig, a human being cannot just be broken or otherwise used for your amusement or instrumental purpose. A child might enjoy throwing rocks in a stream, or floating twigs down it; it might be useful to repurpose a rock as part of the foundation of your house, or a set of twigs to start a fire to warm that house. Another human being cannot be seized by force and used without their permission: this is to say that they have a dignity that rocks and twigs and the other merely material stuff of the world does not.

For Kant, dignity arises from your access to the Order of Reason. That is, you are dignified in a way that a twig or a rock is not because you can think for yourself about what you ought to do, what it would be best for you to do, in a way that they cannot. Thus, it is no harm to them to use them for your purposes, because they have no capacity to determine a better purpose for themselves (insfoar as a non-thinking 'thing' can constitute a 'self' or even, in fact, a 'thing'). 

We can, and that power is the basis of human dignity. But if your thoughts are the basis of your dignity, well, speech is only a way of thinking out loud. To suppress your ability to think is to attack the very basis of your dignity. Freedom of speech is thus properly and fundamentally a moral good. Her view is simply wrong. 

Last Day Mining Coal

One Two more to add to Grim's new music post below.

More New Music

Country radio is terrible, but there's good stuff being made if you pay attention. Here are a couple of young artists who have a style of their own. It may not perfectly fit the genre conditions, but neither did Waylon or Willie at their best. Maybe, just like in the early Outlaw era, a new thing is emerging away from Nashville. 

Further Thoughts on Countering Elitism

 This follows the last post, the one immediately below.

Readers know that I tend to be suspicious of elitism of most sorts, while nevertheless aware that it is important that anyone entrusted with power also have virtue: it would be nearly as bad to be governed by crackheads as the corrupt ("nearly" because the corrupt are often much more efficient at harming those over whom they have power, in pursuit of their own and their class interest). This is why I have favored a kind of anarchism, sometimes called "voluntaryism," in which (modeled openly on the fire/rescue service) you don't get paid for the work, and you can't actually do the work anyway unless you really have the necessary virtues for it. The power you exercise is limited and tested, not by a system of exams that might be cheated, but by the hard edges of reality: can you lift the hose? Can you go into the burning building? Will you prove resolute enough for the training for mountain, swiftwater, or wilderness rescue?

This is simialr to a model that was known of old: Aristotle calls the Greek variation timocracy, which he didn't prefer. He meant government by a more specific class, mostly by the warrior class. In discussing a Greek constitution he writes: 

The artisans, and the husbandmen, and the warriors, all have a share in the government. But the husbandmen have no arms, and the artisans neither arms nor land, and therefore they become all but slaves of the warrior class. That they should share in all the offices is an impossibility; for generals and guardians of the citizens, and nearly all the principal magistrates, must be taken from the class of those who carry arms. Yet, if the two other classes have no share in the government, how can they be loyal citizens? It may be said that those who have arms must necessarily be masters of both the other classes, but this is not so easily accomplished unless they are numerous; and if they are, why should the other classes share in the government at all, or have power to appoint magistrates? 

American citizens generally are (and ought to be) the class who bears arms; and they are numerous, enough that the government cannot quite exercise the thoroughgoing power wielded in other places in spite of a powerful surveillance system operated jointly by the government and major corporations (in order to bypass constitutional protections that apply to the government but not the citizens). 

Likewise, a voluntaryist system would not entail nearly as much power to begin with as a traditional government, relying for defense principally on the armed citizen militia and its unwillingness to brook troublemakers. This works here already, invisibly but actually: the Mexican cartels that cause so much trouble in Mexico are also present and operating in America. They do not attempt to terrorize our police the way they do their own: the police here aren't necessarily better, but they are reinforced by a huge mass of Americans who would defend them if called upon to do so. Cartels can often (but not always) terrorize the unarmed Mexican populace, but do not even try to take over American counties the way they do Mexican ones.

The system of voluntaryism also leverages another Aristotelian idea, that what he calls the middle class is the most trustworthy place to repose political power. (See here, here, and here; the reference in Aristotle is Politics V.Iff). By 'middle class' he means those who do not need to be paid a salary to do the work of government, but who are not rich enough that they can make their living without significant attention to business. By not being paid for the govenrment work, they are not that interested in governing compared to minding their own business: they will do what must be done, but no more, which is close to the Jeffersonian admonition that the government that governs best governs least. 

I suppose I've written a lot about all of this over the years. All political solutions are likely imperfect, as the world to which they are intended to apply never quite matches our ideas about it, and also because of the identified problems in human nature. Still, I think this one has merit. I hope that at some point, when humanity next is looking for a good way to self-govern, elements of it might be incorporated or adopted as a general theory of how to go about it.

Problems of Elites and Elitism

One of the problems with having an elite is raised by Plato in the Republic: How do you make sure that only those who belong in an elite are the ones occupying the elite? Plato's first solution is to break up the families of the elites so that they don't have the option to favor their own children. Although this might prevent people from knowing who their children are, as Aristotle points out (Rhetoric I.1, third paragraph here), it is not possible to avoid them still having affinity groups they prefer when given discretion. 

Plato has another and better suggestion in the later Laws, a kind of examination system similar to the one used in ancient China. Plato himself points out a flaw with this approach: it provokes rebellion from those who aren't actually possessed of the virtues and knowledge being tested, but who still want power. The two problems also combine, as the wealthy and powerful will seek exceptions to the rules to children they want to advance. When I lived in China twenty years ago, I taught at one of the first private colleges allowed in the Communist system: its major purpose was to create a backdoor for children of party elites who couldn't pass the examination system but still "needed" to be admitted to a university that would advance them to positions of power. We can look at the children of our own elites and quickly see ones who have been advanced in spite of a lack of capacity or, indeed, manifest flaws.

The system America has developed accidentally rather than by design has the bad features of both of these approaches, and the good features of neither. It has always advanced the interests of the children of the existing elite: the legacy system ensures that, though the average person might have only a tiny chance of admission to an Ivy League major, the children of familes who have always gone there have a much better shot. Likewise, it has admitted a lot of people who plainly do not belong in higher education but who are wanted anyway as reliable functionaries in the power structure by the elite. 

This week one of the latter resigned, after the discovery of multiple exercises of plagarism by herself. She had received the direct support in her quest not to resign of former US President Barack Obama, who plainly was one of the elites who found her to be a useful functionary in carrying out his agenda. If she'd been able to perform at the appropriate level, a Plato might have made an argument for accepting such a person's leadership; Plato would not in any way accept allowing membership in the elite via cheating.

A Political Discussion with Robert Frost

This is not directly a part of my current meditations on hope, but I do want to use one idea in this poem in them, and it's a fun poem. Two friends, a poet and a farmer, meet by chance and get to talking politics. Sounds like some of us here. It was originally published in 1936, so some of the political language has changed since then, but it's still recognizable.

Fair warning: This is 10 or so pages in the book, more than 2700 words, so settle in for a good read. I'll put the first stanza (if that's the right term in this case) above the fold and the rest below. Also, I did my best putting it in, but if you notice an error, please let me know in the comments.

Build Soil

A political pastoral 

Why Tityrus! But you’ve forgotten me.  

I’m Meliboeus the potato man,  

The one you had the talk with, you remember,  

Here on this very campus years ago.  

Hard times have struck me and I’m on the move.  

I’ve had to give my interval farm up  

For interest, and I’ve bought a mountain farm  

For nothing down, all-out-doors of a place,  

All woods and pasture only fit for sheep.  

But sheep is what I’m going into next.  

I’m done forever with potato crops  

At thirty cents a bushel. Give me sheep.  

I know wool’s down to seven cents a pound.  

But I don’t calculate to sell my wool.  

I didn’t my potatoes. I consumed them.  

I’ll dress up in sheep’s clothing and eat sheep.  

The Muse takes care of you. You live by writing  

Your poems on a farm and call that farming.  

Oh I don’t blame you. I say take life easy.  

I should myself, only I don’t know how.  

But have some pity on us who have to work.  

Why don’t you use your talents as a writer  

To advertise our farms to city buyers,  

Or else write something to improve food prices.  

Get in a poem toward the next election.  

A Different Take on Jordan Peterson

 

Meditations on Hope

Update: I've fleshed out my ideas below the fold.

Sources

“Hope” is the thing with feathers 

by Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Happy New Year!

 

"I Guess A Man’s Got To Do What He's Best At..."

AVI, explaining himself when he doesn't really need to do so because he has a perfect right to do what he wants: "...and Grim goes back to milblogger roots from time to time."

"Me and ol' Billy are both come from Georgia...."

It does seem like I end up involved in all these little conflicts, in big ways or in small ones. Maybe it's just what I'm best at, as much as I wish it were philosophy or history. Or just riding motorcycles, if you could find a way to make that pay.

A Failed Experiment

In science you often learn more from failures. I guess we will see if anyone learns anything here. 

The Feast of the Holy Family

The Sunday after Christmas, in years when Christmas itself is not a Sunday, is the Feast of the Holy Family. 

The diversity I wish we'd pursue

More from a series of "best of 2024" Powerline features: this excerpt from a piece by Michael Barone pitching, in part, his then-new book "Mental Maps of the Founders":

Many today speak as if the United States has just recently become diverse. The founders knew otherwise and attempted to construct a limited government that would leave room for (to use historian David Hackett Fischer's term) different folkways while providing enough unity to protect against foreign attack.

A neighbor is much enamored of Texas secession talk. I get it, but I think he's willfully blind to the issue of defense.

Mind control

Shadow-banning of books arouses my stubborn streak. Sometimes I buy a newly published book even without a strong wish to read it, just to give the author some commercial support.

Today, Powerline highlighted a decades-old French novel called "Les Camps des Saints," whose storyline rested on a million-strong immigration from India to France that overwhelms the self-loathing host country. From the Powerline review:

Westerners have made a categorical imperative out of Mrs. Jellyby’s comically flawed humanitarianism/“do-gooderism” unto a distant other, while one’s own are neglected. In this moral climate, the piety required to love one’s community and the fortitude required to defend it become vices.

The novel has since been labeled racist and colonialist, of course, with the result that its publishers did all in their power to squelch sales. Used copies in English translation therefore start at several hundred dollars for a paperback and shoot up several thousand dollars for a hardcover.

A French copy was a little more affordable and was matched by a cheap Audiobook version, also in the original French. If I listen while reading along, the gist may get through. My rudimentary French has been improved by reading science fiction novels with which I'm already familiar in English. It works OK as long as the style is fairly straightforward, as science fiction tends to be.

Another Feast

The twelve days of Christmas are all feasts, but the 30th of December is not always the same feast. Some years (but not usually, and not this year: only when Christmas is on a Sunday) it's the Feast of the Holy Family. But this year you can pick from some several, just as you prefer. 

A Chicken-Killing Day

My wife’s chicken population was reduced by two this afternoon, as she has finally conceded the necessity of eating some of the monsters. Whilst she thought of them as sort-of pets they were untouchable. Killing a chicken is otherwise a trivial matter. 

New Years Day should feature a roast chicken dinner. I’ll have to decide what to make alongside. 

The Feast of St. Thomas of Becket

Christmas continues with a celebration of "Thomas a Becket." In Ivanhoe his bones are sworn by on occasion by Prince John and the other Normans. The Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst -- i.e. Friar Tuck -- calls him on him as "Thomas a Kent," Kent being the location of Canterbury Cathedral. 

Unprepared for War

One might reasonably ask whether America wants to fight a war on three fronts, or indeed on any fronts if it can be avoided. The author seems to think that there won't be a chance to opt out.

[O]ur moment has thrown up conflicts across the globe: Israel versus Hamas, Russians versus Ukrainians, or Chinese democrats versus the Communist Party. But these disparate battles are in fact part of one whole – a struggle to dominate the future.

The new wider war includes attempts by great powers, notably China, to secure natural resources by securing alliances with authoritarian regimes around the world.... This de-facto alliance, a modern version of the World War Two “pact of steel”, is truly global in scope. It extends from Ukraine to the shutting off of the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthis, and even Venezuelan plans to conquer much of oil-rich Guyana....

The wider war pits on one side the revanchist powers – China, Russia, Islamist, Latin American and African countries – who feel they have been wronged by the West and liberal capitalism. On the other side are the West and non-European allies like Japan, South Korea and perhaps most importantly Modi-led India.

I wouldn't count too much on India, actually. If that's your 'most important' ally, you're in worse shape even than you think. India has been emphatically non-aligned since their inception, and at this point is closer to Russia. 

The author is right, of course, that the US and the West are failing on all fronts in terms of military readiness. He even identifies them fairly succinctly. How do you fix them, though? The powers are all against it, and some of the problems -- like the collapse of faith in the West among the youth, or the need to rebuild American manufacturing almost from the ground up -- are generational. 

The Proximate Cause

Over at InstaPundit, Ed Driscoll is pointing out how foolish Nikki Haley is to have fallen for the perennial trap of a Republican being asked about the causes of the Civil War. A Republican in particular cannot afford to answer this question otherwise than briefly and dogmatically; it is for others to explore the nuances. Even then, it is often said that a high school student will tell you that the war was over slavery; a grad student will tell you about nuances of economics and power; but a professor will explain again that all of those nuances were rooted in slavery.

There is a question worth exploring -- and this election cycle of all times -- about the proximate cause of the Civil War. What caused the war to become a thing that had to be fought, replacing a tense situation with the necessity of so very many Americans killing each other? 

One answer could be the election of Abraham Lincoln -- or, to put it in terms relevant to today, the very narrow election of a candidate who did not come from the major established political factions, to whose power a large part of the country was intensely opposed. Had one of the other three(!) candidates won, the war might have not occurred (or at least not at that time). As it was, Lincoln took power with less than forty percent of the vote, though a convincing majority in the electoral college.

Lincoln's election was, I think, definitely the cause of secession -- at least, the first wave of secession, which was only seven states in the Deep South. I don't think it was the proximate cause of the war. As he was inaugurated he was escorted by both cavalry and infantry, with sharpshooters covering his approach. A similar scene followed the election in 2020, when the government similarly deployed a large military force to protect itself against assumed violence (which in fact never appeared, neither in 1861 nor 2021). 

This did not necessarily mean that war was inevitable. Lincoln's inauguaral address promised not "to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." If slavery was the cause of the war simpliciter, you might then say that this should have prevented violence from springing out. It might have given a window for negotiating a new vision with the Southern states that did not leave the Union, which if it had succeeded might have eventually persuaded the seven that did to return. 

Yet war followed very quickly. There are two other answers to the question of the proximate cause that occur to me. The first one is the general collapse of trust in the government under Lincoln to obey the Constitution. Southern states had moved to seize armories with their state militias, as they no longer believed the Federal government would respect their Second Amendment right to maintain armed militias. If they had trusted the courts to protect their rights, or had trusted Lincoln not to violate their rights, this might not have occurred. If they had sent lawyers instead, the country could have remained in a period of tension but not war. 

Alternatively, you can blame Lincoln's response to the seizure of the armories and fortifications. While he pledged not to interfere with slavery, he did assert in his inauguration that he planned to defend the Federal government's property rights. He did so with the deploment of troops. You might think that the South, which was in a large part going to war to defend a property claim as inviolable, might have been persuaded that the Federal government had a right to the buildings and land (if not the arms within them, that might be seized for militia purposes). These buildings included not just armories but harbor forts -- most famously Fort Sumpter. Allowing the President to reassert physical control over armories or armed batteries that could close the harbors meant, effectively, submission to Federal authority. There was just no trust left for that: the South decided that it had to resist while it still had arms and could seize back control of the fortifications that could either protect its harbors or close them. 

That last sentence ends up collapsing the two possible proximate causes into one: the collapse of trust in each other, without which it is impossible to accept being governed by the other side. War became necessary when force was used because trust was absent. 

In our own present case, the Trump side has proven its willingness to accept being governed by a side that seems hostile to it. They stood down even after a highly disputed election and allowed the other side to take power over them. That side has certainly been hostile to them in rhetorical terms, but also seems to be bent to using Federal power to dominate and control that side. Trump himself has not promised to forswear a similar use of such power if he should get the opportunity to use it. Even if he did promise, though, it is likely that his opponents would trust it as little as was trusted Lincoln's promise not to interfere with slavery. It is not clear to me that their side would similarly accept his election, trusting to their lawyers instead of to force. 

If there is another civil war blessedly it won't be caused by slavery, which our ancestors wisely put an end to long ago. The final cause of a second war may well be a conflict between power and liberty, in which the established and entrenched bureacracy will not allow itself to be dissolved or even restricted by an elected government it does not trust. 

The proximate cause is apt to be the same, however. That is a matter that ought to concern us.