Demonizing: never should be heard a discouraging word
It’s no surprise that a professor has written a piece that goes even further than the NIE in its assessment of the nuclear tameness of Iran. Cinnamon Stillwell reports that Dr. William O. Beeman, chair of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, says that Iran never had any nuclear weapons program at all.
Not a surprise, really. But what’s of much greater interest to me is the fact that Beeman has written a book entitled The Great Satan vs. the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other. I haven’t read the book, I must admit; it’s the title that fascinates me.
It’s no surprise that Beeman is an anthropologist. Now, anthropology happens to be one of my favorite disciplines; I minored in it in college. But anthropologists must take a stance towards other cultures that is a bit like the balancing act therapists must take towards clients: listening, learning, and keeping an open mind about other customs and their function.
This doesn’t mean that, as people in private life, anthropologists can’t or shouldn’t make moral judgments about good and bad. The same is true of therapists. In fact, we all must do so in our private lives, in our relationships, and in our political decisions. But anthropologists (and therapists) often try to generalize their professional stance of acceptance and apply it to situations where to do so would be to create a dangerous moral vacuum.
I’ve previously described how this process often works for therapists. Anthropologists work on a larger scale: societies and cultures, rather than individuals and/or families.
When Beeman is criticizing the US and Iran for “demonizing” each other, he appears to be suggesting that it’s the word that matters and is abhorrent, rather than the behavior of the countries involved. This is a classic example of the postmodernist emphasis on words rather than reality.
To take the analogy a few steps further into absurdity, one might as well write a book entitled, “How Hitler and the Jews Demonize Each Other.” After all, Hitler called the Jews names, and the Jews call Hitler names, right? And name-calling is bad, right? Surely if we all came to the table with nicer words, we could all get along so much better…
And then there’s “WWII: How the Axis and the Allies Demonized Each Other.” Or perhaps, “How Blacks and the KKK Demonize Each Other.”
That’s probably enough; you get the idea.
Sometimes it’s actually correct to “demonize” a person or a group that is actually acting somewhat—well, somewhat demonic. The word “demonize” is an interesting one, putting the locus of action in the person doing the criticizing (“He demonizes,” “She demonizes,” “They demonize…”) rather than the person or people performing the acts that are criticized. Are those latter people doing something that should be condemned? And if so, what’s wrong with condemning it? And if those people then condemn the condemner, does that somehow make them both morally equal, and does it make both charges equally correct or equally incorrect?
Of course not. These are not well-matched siblings squabbling “He hit me first!” and being told to both go to their rooms. These are countries with a track record on rhetoric, human rights, and civil liberties, records that can and should be judged.
Reframes may be very helpful in therapy, to cast a more positive light on actions that the client has previously seen as negative, and to create room for helpful and constructive change. Unfortunately, nations are not people, nor are they nor their leaders seeking therapy.
The accusation of “demonizing” is pretty much a slam-dunk whitewash of the behavior in question.
The debate then goes to the proper penalty for the accused demonizer.
I don’t think anybody who uses the word actually believes it is anything but a distraction, a stall, an obfuscation, and a way of shutting down a discussion not otherwise manageable.
Absolutely right about anthropologists, neoneo.
Liberals in America are far gone in moral equivalence. They simply cannot call actions by non-Americans evil. Literally cannot. If you held a gun to Dr. Beeman’s head and ordered him to say “the Iranian regime is evil” I think he would by physically unable to make his lips form the words.
The difficulty with social and cultural anthropology is cultural and social relativism, with no judgements by the observor. Thus it is fine to watch the cannibals dine and ask what herbs are used in the preparation, but not to suggest that perhaps the behavior is not appropriate. Similarly, although Ph.D. can be equated with “pile it higher and deeper,” it is all too often seen as a permit to opine on matters not understood.
I think there’s way too much emotionalism and knee-jerk reactions on both the left and the right. I have leftist friends (whom I really like a great deal) who criticize every action by the United States, almost by default — if we did it, it must be wrong/evil/criminal. On the other side are America Can Do No Wrong right-wingers who believe in the supremacy of our country in nearly every respect.
The stereotype is that liberals are too “soft” and conservatives are too “hard”, but my view is that both sides are affected too much by emotion — on the left, love and compassion, on the right, fear and distrust. Thus the left is concerned more about being inclusive, the right more concerned about self-defense, etc.
My view is that both emotional standpoints are both rational and irrational, depending on the situation. There are in fact times when we do “demonize” the other side unfairly — and there are times when we rightly ought to fear and defend ourselves against a threat. The problem I have with both the left and the right is that they both associate themselves with a *tactic*, as though you should always do the same tactic, over and over again, no matter what the situation is.
But, like the song says, you gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em … or, more appropriately, know when to attack, know when to retreat, know when to give the benefit of the doubt, know when to be skeptical, etc.
Because of my rather peculiar political position, I find myself agreeing with the right some of the time and with the left the rest of the time. I pretty much never agree with the right on most social issues, but when it comes to war, peace, economic policy, etc., I find some truth on both sides. Free markets are usually good (but I believe some regulation is optimal for reasons I won’t go into here). When it comes to dealing with potentially threatening forces, I think the best approach is a cool-headed analysis of the risks and benefits of any given strategy.
There are reasons when being aggressive is warranted, but aggression carries with it both risks and costs. Balancing all these risks requires a deep understanding of your enemy, and the problem with “demonizing” isn’t that it involves thinking badly of your potential enemy, but that it often involves not learning about your potential enemy. Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite up to and even for a while after the Iraq war started, for example — that’s a level of ignorance that can’t serve you well at a strategic or tactical level. On the other hand, bending over backwards to avoid ever offending a potential enemy is foolhardy.
I just don’t understand why people decide to identify so strongly with just one tactic. “I’m a pacifist” to me is wrongheaded — though I respect the idealism it seems very naive in many ways. But jingoism is also wrongheaded — not for moral reasons but simply pragmatic ones. In the end I believe in pragmatism: what works. Neither being eager to go to war nor always trying appeasement works in the long run — you choose what strategy works depending on the situation, I think. To me associating with just one tactic is akin to saying “I’m a leftist! I always turn left at every intersection!” Only turn in one direction and you just go in circles.
I admire an anthropologist with the integrity to keep anthropologizing while his subjects are shooting poisoned darts at him. He will go straight to anthropologist heaven the moment the batrachotoxin stops his heart.
However, I think it’s more fun to be a live headhunter than a dead anthropologist.
It seem many modern day anthropologist belong to the Jared Diamond “Im OK, you’re OK” school of anthropology. I think Victor Davis Hanson has the drop on him though.
I’m amused that anyone would try to review a book without reading it, based on the title alone. If those who are commenting on it bother to read the book, they will see plenty of analysis of real behavior on both sides. The “demonizing” aspect of the book for both Iranians and Americans is to see in what ways they construct the actions of the other according to their own culturally based notions of evil. This is why the United States and Iran talk past each other. They don’t understand the basis for each other’s moral judgments–that and the fact that the process of demonization serves their internal political purposes. The book will be published in paperback by the University of Chicago Press in February. It is already required reading both for the State Department and the Department of Defense.
i try to keep an open mind but, are you kidding? don’t want to unfairly jump to conclusions here, but right from the get-go, the beeman (catchy) seems to be immediately buzzing that everything is relative…. now that’s just not true, unless you’re dumb enuf to think mo’s dogma is equal to the united states constitution….
Mitsu:
Liberals motivated by love and compassion? Conservatives motivated by fear and distrust? What alternate universe did you drop in from?
Liberals are the ones who distrust their fellow citizens so much they dont’ want them allowed to carry arms. They fear harm to the planet so much they’re willing to condemn billions to poverty and misery. They fear dissent so much they want to silence any opposing voices. They distrust ordinary citizens’ ability to decide what to do with their money.
Conservatives love their country. They love their fellow citizens. They feel compassion for the victims of foreign tyrannies. They feel compassion for nations under threat of annihilation by terrorists.
There is one thing at which liberals are definitely superior to conservatives: they are FAR better at congratulating themselves on how swell they are.
Well, right after the insightful comment that “you choose what strategy works depending on the situation”, we get the perfect exemplar of neo’s post:
The “demonizing” aspect of the book for both Iranians and Americans is to see in what ways they construct the actions of the other according to their own culturally based notions of evil.
Just like, as neo pointed out, the ways that the Nazis and the Jews “constructed” the actions of the other “according to their own culturally based notions of evil”. There might be a point of saying something about this very common sort of academic banality, along the lines of pointing out its implicit and always self-flattering assumption that the speaker himself is somehow elevated out of either culture, and indeed all culture, and so able to view human folly from some godlike, or merely alien, but in all cases illusory, standpoint. On the other hand, it’s simpler just to say that it’s ethically stunted, like a self-administered moral lobotomy.
Trimegistus,
I wasn’t trying to “congratulate” the left — I was in fact trying to say that emotionalism rules both sides of the political spectrum. As this very post points out “love thy enemy” can be enlightened, and it can also be foolish. Similarly, being overly distrustful and fearful of one’s enemies can also be both prudent and paranoid.
Sally,
You’re writing as though I wrote both posts above? But I only wrote the first. The second post was written by someone else.
All,
Most of the commenters on this blog tend to repeat the same refrain: we have to take a comprehensive approach to the problem, we have to conquer them, subdue them, diplomacy isn’t enough, etc. One commenter even suggested we should preemptively strike them with nuclear weapons and end the problem once and for all, i.e., through an act of premeditated genocide. Another enthusiastically supported the violent overthrow of the government and the imposition, through force of arms, of right-wing rule.
Much as I, and most sane people, strongly disagree with the more extreme of these ideas, my point in noting these reactions is simply to point out that they are driven by one side of the spectrum: a fear-driven reaction. And fear is a perfectly natural emotion, we’ve evolved to act aggressively in the face of threats, and it’s natural for us to feel fear when faced with danger, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.
But my point is that emotionalism on either side, driving one to think about extreme solutions, either by being overly trusting of others or overly suspicious — it’s seems absurd to me. I do think most of you who call yourselves “conservative” are overreacting on one side — my leftist friends, overreact on the other, always blaming America first.
My view is: go to war reluctantly, but if you go to war, do it all-out. But if you go to war you’d better be prepared for it to go very wrong — war can backfire, it can do more to hurt your own security than it helps.
It seems to me that even if you are a red, white and blue Yankee Doodle Dandy, you might be interested in how the Iranians “demonize” the USA. We want that, as some point, they will see that they are wrong. If we hope to influence them in the matter, it may help us to understand their own inner logic so that we may see how to break or exhaust the memes, and to recognize whatever opportunity we may have to do so.
Sorry, Mitsu, I should have made it clear that I was quoting from two different commenters. I think your own points here are well-meant and well-taken, but suffer a bit from the sort of conventional wisdom, “can’t-we-all-just-get-along”ism that doesn’t get us very far. But at least they’re miles beyond the stale cultural relativism that still infects great herds of academics, and that was illustrated in the other quote.
I appreciate your clarification, Sally.
William O. Beeman: Glad it’s amusing, but actually I would not presume to review a book I haven’t read, nor is this post a review of yours. I am simply reacting to the title and what it implies, and commenting on the disciplines of anthropology and therapy in general and their stance towards the cultures of the people they study and/or work with.
And, as for “constructing” the actions of others according to one’s own “culturally based notions of evil,” that’s exactly the sort of statement I mean. It works with anthropology, but it doesn’t work in terms of morality. Once you adopt the idea that notions of evil are culturally based, and that there is no meta-definition of evil, you have slid almost all the way down a very slippery slope.
Balancing all these risks requires a deep understanding of your enemy, and the problem with “demonizing” isn’t that it involves thinking badly of your potential enemy, but that it often involves not learning about your potential enemy. Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite up to and even for a while after the Iraq war started, for example – that’s a level of ignorance that can’t serve you well at a strategic or tactical level.
Given that you didn’t take the time to learn whether Bush knew or did not know about such things, it rather undercuts your attempted claim.
it doesn’t work in terms of morality. Once you adopt the idea that notions of evil are culturally based, and that there is no meta-definition of evil
This is a false dichotomy, is it not? One doesn’t have to believe that notions of evil are COMPLETELY relative to understand that there is some cultural relativity to the idea of evil. One doesn’t have to adopt a notion of absolute, universal definitions of good and evil to believe that such ideas are not entirely arbitrary.
In other words, the idea that both Iran and the US culturally construct each other as evil doesn’t necessarily imply moral equivalence between Iran and the US. That is — it can be both the case that each country does this to the other, AND the case that one country is in some sense more “evil” than another.
I tend to take the view that what we call “evil” can roughly correspond to notions of utility when looked at over larger scales of time and space (for example, altruism makes sense when you consider selective pressure on populations of individuals, i.e., “group selection”). So I do believe there’s some objectivity to the idea of “evil”.
On the other hand, people used to think premarital sex was evil, now most of us don’t. Who was right? There are obviously some good arguments against premarital sex, but also arguments that premarital sex may make relationships more stable later. It’s not an obvious black and white distinction, where one is obviously right and the other completely wrong.
Conservatives love their country. They love their fellow citizens. They feel compassion for the victims of foreign tyrannies. They feel compassion for nations under threat of annihilation by terrorists.Trime
It is really the difference between love of oneself and love of another. A parent is motivated into protecting and taking care of their children. But at what point do they have to place their love of their children and what is best for them, over their fear of losing something valuable? Some people attempt to eternally protect their children, never letting them take any risks or go into any dangeorus situations without them, the parents. Other parents encourage their children to take risks and learn from experience.
This is all a philosophical difference based upon the long term results. Some people prefer to spoil the object of their love in return for short term gain and long term destruction. Other people prefer taking a short term risk for a long term gain. Even more people believe you can have your cake and eat it too. That you can get free protection, like Europe has, and still come out in the long term the stronger and better for it.
IT was never really about “love” in so much as it was always about the wisdom of the person attempting to hold to that emotion. I liked to say at Bookwormroom that wisdom has always had a higher price than intelligence. One cannot choose one’s smart genes or one’s family or those people that folks just happen to fall in love with. But wisdom has always been a choice given to humans to attempt to obtain, so long as they were willing to shoulder the price, or not.
Neither being eager to go to war nor always trying appeasement works in the long run – you choose what strategy works depending on the situation, I think.-Mitsu
Of what use is the belief of me choosing what strategy you think would work? It has no objective basis; for who knows whether your opinions would work in the real world or not, Mitsu. There is no way to objectively validate such. You can support other people’s beliefs and stated policy positions, such as Obama’s, but his actions will not perfectly mirror yours. Obviously there is no way to check how your policies will turn out even if there is for Obama. So there is no point in validating what you believe will work in the long term based upon the situation as you see it, and then attempting to extrapolate it to what US foreign policy should be.
But jingoism is also wrongheaded – not for moral reasons but simply pragmatic ones.-Mitsu
There are two metaphysical and epistemological judgements you have to make. One concerns what jingoism is and who has it. The second concerns whether pragmatism means only what you think will work or whether it means what really works.
Until people have an objectively uniform and consistent method of deciding what is true, talking about what is pragmatic ir not is simply speaking at cross purposes. Without the commonality of which I speak, there is no common language from which to communicate ideas with any predictable accuracy.
The “demonizing” aspect of the book for both Iranians and Americans is to see in what ways they construct the actions of the other according to their own culturally based notions of evil.-WOB
That is done far more effectively in fiction where the author can control all the variables and thus make the metaphysics consistent with the stated belief or action set of the characters/sides in question. Consistent logic is not necessarily correct, but it makes for easy checking all the same.
Even if an author gets the culturally based notion of evil correct for the two- the notion of evil to us is the removal of free will while to the Islamic Revolution it is the ability of men and women to freely reject Allah and Shariah – it still doesn’t address the problem of finding a solution to differences in culture and language. Finding commonality between two value sets is always harder than splitting cracks in the foundation.
There are two classical solutions. War and diplomacy. Cultures learn about each other through envoys and trade or cultures learn about each other through war and devastation. The latter is always more effective, on a mass scale, than the former. But of course if some individuals disagree, then we have an entire collapse of the solution set. State and Defense, for example, will likely still be at cross purposes even if they do read this “must read” addition. Such an addition is no solution, while it certainly engenders additional conflict.
listening, learning, and keeping an open mind about other customs and their function.-Neo
Anthropology learns by observing, thus running into Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. How can you observe conditions in the field, when the very act of being there and observing changes the conditions in the field?
Yet anthropology cannot actively intervene in the past and acquire their information, so passive review, even more so than for psychology, becomes mandatory.
Yet in order to win against an enemy, one must be pro-active rather than reactive. One must attack instead of waiting to be attacked. Such is the general strategic nature of war, even if the tactics varied. How anthropology can be applied to the actual analysis and prediction of enemy human actions, remains unseen. There is only so much you can tell from a people’s culture and artifacts. Only their wars and myths tell you about a people’s character. Maybe their government as well, but little of that can be seen in anthropology. Human suffering and joy simply does not transmit that well through the ground.
Unfortunately, nations are not people, nor are they nor their leaders seeking therapy.-Neo
They are groups of people, which aren’t the same as dealing with individuals that are isolated. Interrogators know this very well. People just don’t act the same in a group as they do alone.
The tools of a therapist are woefully underdeveloped for dealing with mobs and hierarchies in which behavior is ordered by another, not inspired by the will of the person conducting the behavior.
In other words, the idea that both Iran and the US culturally construct each other as evil doesn’t necessarily imply moral equivalence between Iran and the US.-Mitsu
That was never the problem to begin with. What is problematical is people’s philosophical understanding of the situation. If flawed, such things lead to disastrous policies. Even when it is solid, it can still lead to disastrous consequences due to Murphy and the first law of warfare.
Understanding how people construe each other as evil is only 1/4th of the solution. Understanding how people can construe foreigners as being good in the eyes of the local culture, that is the other major part of the solution, which is both much harder to achieve and also much rarer.
AND the case that one country is in some sense more “evil” than another.
That doesn’t mean anything. Policies always have to be formulated on what the benefits are, not just what’s risky and bad. You can’t cut it out, but neither should you be focused on such negative profiles. They are only important in relation to the pieces of good that should be promoted.
What matters is which country is better than the other. Which one is more deserving of victory. The country that best represents the vision and reality of human progress towards a better world must be favored, if two countries are at conflict with the other.
People mention the detriments and the evil of a nation in relation to the other, but none of that matters the way they claim it does. Detriments, risks, and negatives only matter in how they impact upon the capability of a human nation to grow and procede further along the road to something better.
If your primary goal is not what I just stated, then everything else falls apart. Two different languages then.
So I do believe there’s some objectivity to the idea of “evil”.
That in itself is no where near as important as the personal philosophy of ethics that individuals hold. You said you hold to the ethical philosophy of utility, which I know of as utilitarianism. The problems with that ethical philosophy, as with most others, have already been analyzed. Or should have been, at least.
On the other hand, people used to think premarital sex was evil, now most of us don’t. Who was right?
According to your philosophy, which isn’t mine, the answer to that question depends upon the utility of pre-marital sex, now doesn’t it?
but also [good] arguments that premarital sex may make relationships more stable later.
And there it is. I ask the question and then I read the answer, which was already predicted with accuracy.
I didn’t read that sentence in bold when I stated the logical consequences of utilitarianism. I didn’t need to.
It’s not an obvious black and white distinction, where one is obviously right and the other completely wrong.
Again, that is of little to no importance given that the ethical philosophy of utilitarianism started off wrong and ended erroneously. Looking at the utility of any particular action, as if it can provide you truth on the matter, violates Heisenberg’s Law. There is no two ways about it. Well, there is, but not at the same time.
Those looking at the utility of an action are looking in the wrong place, if they wish to predict and correctly analyze long term consequences. As people well know, what is useful today may not be tomorrow. What matters is humanity and human nature. Those operate by principles that will never change, or at least they haven’t changed for a very long time. Which is just as good.
Those that look first towards the utility of any action will always fall prey to the first law of battle, murphy, and heisenberg. Those that look towards to the correct principles and the ultimate methods by which their stated goals can be accomplished, won’t be able to avoid problems, murphy, or heisenberg, but at least they will have a far better chance of ultimate success than their competitors.
A simple example would be the topic of objectivity concerning US foreign policy. If people want long term results, then why are they using short term consequences, such as the utility of any particular action, to judge the correctness or incorrectness of a stated policy? If people want long term benefits, then should they not base their decisions upon the eternal principles and human nature that has never changed at all in the past? That would provide a far greater percentage of accuracy than the utility of any particular action at any particular time for any particular sample population, for utility changes with technology, people, industrial capacity, and so forth. What is of use to one person, may not be of use to another. What is of use to a US Marine may not be of use to a Code Pink activist. Why should US foreign policy be based upon such mercurial “long term” analysis techniques?
Philosophy has to be grounded upon what is the most real amongst the earth, for it to be of any use.
>Philosophy has to be grounded upon what is the most real
I am not a utilitarian, I am a pragmatist, which is somewhat different. I believe in what works, which is to say, what works over time, which is to say: what is successful at surviving and competing over time. I think that most things we call “ethical” actually have survival benefits if not for the individual narrowly construed, for the overall group they belong to.
What I mean by the above is that I think it’s pretty obvious that the best strategy (whether to be a dove or a hawk, whether to go for diplomacy or war, etc.) does depend on the details of a situation and it’s absurd to promote just one strategy as being the “best” in general when there’s no such thing as a “general” situation. It seems like an obvious point yet much of political discourse is hamstrung by people identifying with only one principle and ignoring the other. I.e., free markets vs. regulation, war vs. diplomacy, blaming America vs. blaming other countries, etc. The best strategy varies depending on the circumstances. Totally unregulated free markets are problematic for many reasons, too much regulation is problematic for other reasons. Yet political movements always latch on to one or the other, as though you can solve all problems with one tool.
I like to have a variety of tools in my toolchest, and I learn to use different tools for different jobs.
You can call that my political philosophy if you want.
So no, I don’t believe it makes sense to make decisions based on “human nature that has never changed at all in the past”. Humanity changes all the time, even year by year things change, certainly decade by decade and you have to adapt. That’s my view.
Mitsu knows when to be an anthropologist and when to be a headhunter. Or at least he tries to know.
So extending this principle from anthropology to sociology, it would be ignorant and foolish to demonize, say, George Bush?
Or is that OK?
And with all due respect, as a physical scientist, I lump anthropology and sociology in with astrology as roughly meritorious endeavors.
Make that “equally meritorious endeavors.”
Sorry.
Mitsu is a person with an open mind. Certainly that is a good thing to be when you have no evidence or facts on which to make decisions.
In the case of demonizing Iran or Iran demonizing the Great Satan, it seems we could look at a few facts and discover which is correct.
Iran is a totalitarian theocracy that punishes people for homosexuality, infidelity, open disloyalty, and any number of other things that are tolerated in free societies. Many people in Iran would leave if they could. Since 1979 Iran has been openly hostile to the U.S. In fact they have trained and supplied terrorists that have killed Americans.
On the other hand the U.S. tolerates all the things Iran does not and much more. The U.S, has tried to defend itself from the attacks that Iran has launched over the years in as restrained and moral way as possible. In addition, the U.S. has a problem with people sneaking into the country. It seems they are willing to risk life and limb for a chance to live in freedom. That, in itself says a lot about the desirability of the way we do things.
Based on the evidence, which country is less evil?
Mitsu also mentioned something about free market and economics not necessarily being so wonderful. Let’s examine the evidence.
The most prosperous countries in the world practice some form of free market economics. We have seen free market economics compared side by side in several cases. West Germany versus East Germany. South Korea versus North Korea. Taiwan versus Red China. In all cases free market economics provided the people with a higher standard of living, better health, and more hope for the future. Now what was formerly Red China is trying a combo of free market economics along with one party government. Thus far it seems to be working. On the other hand we can look around the world and see that those countries ruled by dictators, theocracies, and kleptocracies do not subscribe to free market ideas. And they are all pretty much lagging in the prosperity. If the last 100 years have been a lab experiment to see how free market economics works, I would say it has proven superior to any other system yet devised.
So you see Mitsu there are examples and facts about issues that allow one to make value judgments. Absent that it is good to keep an open mind.
I think that most things we call “ethical” actually have survival benefits
I don’t disagree with that.
I am not a utilitarian, I am a pragmatist, which is somewhat different.
However, I don’t see why that is so different from utilitarianism.
does depend on the details of a situation and it’s absurd to promote just one strategy as being the “best” in general when there’s no such thing as a “general” situation.
Of course, which is why conservatives have hadlong discussions and arguments with others and with each other over these past few years. They have produced and figured out what works and what doesn’t. You see the fruits of such labors as being motivated by fear though, which ignores the forge from whence the products came.
The obvious difference is just that. What people see as logical and inevitable consequences of Democrat actions, seem to extreme and unbeneficial to you. It is because the sense of reality is different between you and conservatives. Not all conservatives agree on the basic principles, either. Ralph Peters favored the Democrat’s plan of a divided Iraq, because he got demoralized and probably listened to too many other writers and media propaganda products. I say favored, because I haven’t heard him go on that tone for awhile given the new success of Petraeus.
I guess in the end, it is a simple fact that what you, Mitsu, sees as the “details of a situation” differs from what other people would see. This may be a glaringly obvious observation, but it does have some long reaching consequences to your description of strategy and long term gains.
It seems like an obvious point yet much of political discourse is hamstrung by people identifying with only one principle and ignoring the other.
I am not that sure that those that the conservatives see as traitors have any principles that they follow, except perhaps for the principle of power and status.
Totally unregulated free markets are problematic for many reasons, too much regulation is problematic for other reasons.
Such things are of political debates made of. It doesn’t address the beliefs which power people’s behavior and actions. Aside from the problem of policy and how that impacts on people and their welfare, we still have basic human nature itself to contend with. Which is totally independent of whether a policy favors unregulated free markets or not. This applies to all situations, not just ones about the free market.
Yet political movements always latch on to one or the other, as though you can solve all problems with one tool.
Politics, by their very nature, have to adopt government solutions. In foreign policy, one cannot govern other nations as one would govern one’s own nation.
Thus it doesn’t really matter all that much what political movements latch onto, since politics are local, not foreign based. What impacts Iraq and Afghanistan are local politics. The idea that there is a political movement here in this country that specifically formulates its recommendations based upon the problem of Iraq, is unlikely to be true.
Neither the Democrats, the Republicans, or the Jacksonians are dealing with Iraq using one tool. The differences and similarities are wholly due to local political concerns, just as local politics decide the geographic map of Iraq.
I know you’re trying to say that you occupy the middle ground of the perfect balance between hot and cold. That the Left are too cold on war and the Right is too hot. Yet you yourself hold to a particular brand of beliefs, that power your toolbox. Tools are just tools, it is beliefs and people by which they are used. Why is your belief set superior to the Left or the Right? That’s the real question, not the basic assumption that you hold a balanced position of knowledge.
Many of the things you write and describe are true generally. But there is no reason that you have provided concerning why they should be true for you, your beliefs, and your recommended solutions.
Humanity changes all the time, even year by year things change,
That’s just one of those “details of the situation” that people disagree with you on, Mitsu. I don’t see how you can hold yourself as being the better adviser/party amongst your competitors, just because people hold to different philosophies than you do.
You’re different from the Jacksonian war party, classical liberals, and security conservatives of the right and you’re different from the Left and their Democrat allies in terms of belief in America and security recommendations. But your “difference” does not mean that you hold the optimum “balance” between two extreme positions. It just means you are different, not that you are right.
The most prosperous countries in the world practice some form of free market economics.-JJ
I’m commenting on your argument against Mitsu’s reference to free markets. I think this has to deal with what was said by Goldwater. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue, and extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.
“I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans as the principle source of all their other qualities. It acts as a promoter of industry, as a stimulus to enterprise and as the most powerful restraint of public vice. . . . No government could be established on the same principle as that of the United States with a different code of morals.”
Francis Grund
There is this belief that the situation, whatever the situation at a particular moment in space and time is, commands an endless number of potential modifications to strategy and solutions. There is this belief that humanity is always changing, that new solutions always crop up to old problems because problems are never old, they are always new or at least different.
Such beliefs are very similar to what Mitsu said, but of course not exactly the same.
The key is always with human nature or your understanding of what human nature is. Understand human nature to be one thing and your ethics and beliefs go down one route. Change your understanding of human nature even a little bit, and your beliefs will change drastically.
So I don’t think Mitsu has a preconceived favor of free markets, because Mitsu does not believe that you can predict ahead of time whether something can be successful, until, that is, you know the exact situation it is in. His predictions of what is successful or not, it seems, is based upon whether a goal is pursued with zealousness or imbalance. A pre-emption attack, by its very definition, is extreme and risky. Thus it must always end bad because of blowback or just because it must always end bad.
The counter-example is that pre-emption hits upon the human condition of mortality and the OODA loop cycle. The destruction of the mortal human body and the disrption of a human mind’s OODA cycle, has not changed since humanity’s inception. Thus pre-emption that is tailored to such human features, will not fail. Of course, human beings and the societies they serve only rarely ever get the correct understanding of human nature.
That is why good general (military) officers are extremely rare. Good soldiers are many. Good general officers are few. Even fewer than solid NCOs in a way.
Those that can make things go well have always been rare. That is just the human condition and hierarchy for success vs failure, survival vs death. Everyone can’t succede and everyone can’t survive. Somebody has to die. That is just called being alive.
If you don’t base your beliefs on trying to understand human nature better, if you base your beliefs on trying to understand the situation that people are in, then you will see a conflict such as between Mitsu and me.
So you see Mitsu there are examples and facts about issues that allow one to make value judgments.
I think an expected argument would be that there are laws and regulation in such capitalist societies, thus their success is a function of being limited. Again, this is a priority outlook based upon situation as opposed to human flaws and behaviors.
in his book Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, Sam Keene comes perilously close to the silly moral equivalence you describe here. your comparison of anthropologists with therapists is an apt one, and since anthropologists deal with cultures and societies, their “private” ruminations (i.e., when they [should] set aside their “professional” persona), are actually public.
What I’ve said is I think preventive war (all-out war to conquer another nation based on the mere suspicion of some vague future attack) is almost always a mistake, for the reasons I’ve outlined before, but I don’t think all pre-emptive strikes are always mistakes — i.e., I would be in favor of threatening and even carrying out targeted strikes against the nuclear facilities of countries the steadfastly refused IAEA or UN inspections, etc. As I noted before, Bill Clinton threatened the North Koreans with this, and it forced them to allow inspections which certainly dramatically slowed their efforts to develop nuclear weapons (and at the very least prevented them from building more than one or two, because of lack of enriched uranium, until, that is, we invaded Iraq, diverting our armed forces there, and NK took the opportunity to throw out the inspectors because they knew we wouldn’t risk starting a second war with them while we were busy with Iraq — another example of where I believe the Iraq war damaged our national security.)
>open mind
As I keep saying, I am not drawing any kind of moral equivalence between Iran and the US or between all opposing principles. I have no problem with the idea that the US is in some sense more ethical or moral than Iran, on the whole. However, I also happen to agree that we do our share of needless demonizing of others, which doesn’t, I believe, help us in defending ourselves against our enemies, because it reduces them to cartoons who we will be less able to predict.
A good example of my philosophy is with the issue of free markets vs. regulation. In response to the poster above who clearly didn’t understand what I was saying, of course prosperous nations use free markets. For good reason: markets are a decentralized way of pricing goods and services in a very efficient manner. There are many other benefits to free markets which everyone understands — both Democrats and Republicans, I might add.
However, free markets suffer from a couple of problems, which can be addressed through a moderate amount of regulation. For example, suppose you had a lake with a finite amount of fish, and four fisheries harvesting fish from that lake. Now, let’s say that three of the four fisheries realize that if they overfish now, they may drive the fish to extinction, so they fish responsibly. The fourth fishery however, decides that it is in their short-term interest to fish as much as possible. They will sell more and make more money and be able to fish even more the following year. The market itself doesn’t prevent this from occurring because, while it is a good optimizer, it tends to optimize over short time frames, not long time frames.
Thus the government and the people have an interest in issuing some sort of regulation to prevent overfishing. One ought to make the regulation as lightweight as possible to avoid affecting the market too much, since you want the market to function as efficiently as possible. This is of course a very simple example but it illustrates the general idea I am promoting here: free markets are good, and *some* regulation is *sometimes* also good. I agree with Republicans that one ought to regulate *as little as possible* but not that one ought to aspire not to regulate at all. How do you decide what regulation is appropriate and what is not? You have to look at the details of the situation and use your brain. There’s no rule that will solve every case for you in advance.
I actually took a course with Beeman way back when we were both young and stupid. Now, neither of us are young, but only one is still stupid. Seriously, I can’t say I remember much about him, other than vaguely recalling that he was one of the outliers within the anthropology department.
Oddly, the discipline of physical anthropology is deeply rooted in the idea of evolution, but within cultural anthropology, they dare not ask such questions as, “why are some cultures more successful than others?” It’s just not something they’re interested in. But they’ll talk for hours about unusual manhood rituals in obscure tribal groups.
I eventually got a degree in Anthropology by learning to type a few pages of random nonsense in Anthropologeze language, which was invariably good for a B. The grad students who graded the papers didn’t really want to read them anyway. I found some old papers when cleaning out my folks’ basement, and couldn’t stomach reading more than a paragraph or two.
Best I can tell, the entire study of cultural anthropology is baloney. If you want to understand social behavior, economics provides better tools. Shucks, even watching soap operas provides better tools.
Mitsu,
I may have misunderstood your take on free markets. My mistake. You seem to have such an open mind about everything, that I merely wanted to point out that one can assemble facts and data on many things and make value judgements. In fact is imperative that one do so when faced with issues of life and death. Both war and economics are such issues.
Demonizing of the other side in a war is such a commonplace practice that I’m surprised you don’t understand it.
I have witnessed WWII, Korea, Vietnam (even fought there), Desert Storm, Kosovo, and our most recent military actions. In eveyone of those conflicts we felt our cause was more just than theirs. You have to make those value judgements.
Let’s say you have a neighbor who is telling you at every opportunity that he hates you and would like to see you wiped off the face of the Earth. But he then goes beyond threats and actually takes some shots at you….maybe kills one of your family. What kind of value judgement are you going to make there?
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were launched because the “neighbors had been telling us they hated our guts and would wipe us off the map. And they killed some of our family. It was not a null situation. There was casus belli.
Being too open minded is often a way of not making any value judgements or decisions. Yeah the value judgements may not be perfect because of incomplete information or bad information, but it is often necessary to make those judgements nonetheless.
I’m trying to draw a distinction between thinking your cause is just, more just than the cause of your enemies (something I have no problem with) and demonizing your enemy (i.e., turning them into a caricature, dehumanizing them). I think it’s necessary to make value judgements, but I think going too far with it can actually lead to mistakes on many levels, including mistakes that can harm your own security in the long run.
“In summary, the West is suffering from an insidious ideological assault from the outside by fundamentalist Islam that could result in profound societal damage, while at the same time we are, from the inside, undermining our core values and traditions. We are not experiencing a clash of civilizations, but an overt attempt to dismantle the worldwide status quo. The West is vulnerable, because it has failed to recognize that survival hinges on being intolerant to the intolerant and acknowledging the superiority of our way of life and the exceptionalism of America. We will probably be unable to change the Islamists and alter their three-pronged prescription for non-Muslims – death, subjugation or conversion – but we can prevent them from changing us. Through our “enlightened” democracy and lack of cultural protectionism, we are inadvertently aiding their cause. Our ability to fight has been severely weakened by the enlightened principles of tolerance and multiculturalism that we have grown to cherish and by a lack of group cohesiveness and respect for our common values and accomplishments. While we think short-term and teach our children to have contempt for our culture, the Islamists think long-term and teach their children to die for Islam.”
So this oh-so-erudite professor tells us that the way to reduce conflict with Iran is for American officials to be “unfailingly polite and humble.” I’m sure that will inspire confidence in the survivors of all the terror attacks carried out or aided by Iran.
News headline today: A top Iranian cleric, Hojatolislam Gholam Reza Hassani, says “Women Who Do Not Wear Hijab Should Die”. Now just why are we supposed to be “unfailingly polite and humble” to these fascistic thugs?