Richard Pryor: vulnerability and bravado

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading the news of Richard Pryor’s death yesterday, I have to say that it surprised me—not that he died, but that he’d still been alive. He had been so sadly debilitated in recent years that it seemed remarkable that he’d lived so long.

And it was remarkable, considering the ways in which he’d abused his body and mind when younger, and the bad luck he had in also coming down with a vicious case of MS.

So, RIP Richard Pryor.

You may or may not have noticed (probably not) that in my old normblog profile, I answered one of Norm’s questions this way:

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > I liked Richard Pryor when he was in his prime, and also the classic early Saturday Night Live crew.

I thought this might be a good time to explain why I went out of my way to mention Pryor.

He was shocking, he was crazy, yes, but that wasn’t it for me. He was funny, really really funny. I haven’t watched any of his stuff in decades, so I don’t know how I’d react to it today, but at the time it came out, I thought his “Live in Concert” act was a work of genius.

What was it about Pryor, way back then? Well, first of all, he truly was groundbreaking. Even though he talked about race, and talked more raunchily and freely than I’d heard previous comics speak on the subject, it seemed that he was talking person to person, from the heart.

As Roger Simon (who knew him) wrote today:

…it was Richard’s remarkable humanity [the audience was] reacting to, his ability to express a people’s pain without rancor or anger, with a forgiving grace that finally defused all rage in laughter and put everything on a different, even strangely color-blind, level.

My sentiments exactly. Pryor sometimes (although not always, by any means) focused on race, but his routines transcended race at the same time. How did he do this?

If you watch those old Pryor routines, look at his eyes. I was always transfixed by them. They are the eyes of a brave but very very frightened child. An intense and very feeling one, as well, who seems almost too vulnerable to bear the world and its hardships, but is going forward nevertheless into every experience it has to offer.

I’m not saying Pryor was a child. But he kept within him, quite close to the surface (and somehow managed to express, despite his all-too-adult persona and his wild comic flair) the intensity of vulnerability and pain most people feel when very young. For the majority of us this pain and vulnerability lessens, or goes underground, with adulthood. But for Pryor, both always appeared all-too-easily accessible—much too easily for his own good.

And it was his own good that he seemed famously and carelessly unconcerned with, developing a legendary cocaine habit that probably was responsible for an early heart attack, as well as being the mechanism for his near-death (and probable suicide attempt) back in 1980.

In “Live in Concert,” Pryor isn’t just a comedian, he’s an actor. He becomes each character he talks about, using his body effectively to create the illusions of change. But what I considered the most memorable part of the evening was the portion of his routine (although it was anything but “routine”) about his heart attack. He was somehow screamingly funny (how could that be?) while at the same time deadly serious as he described what it had felt like. This had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with humanity.

As for his actual death from a heart attack at age 65–well, according to Wikipedia (so I suppose we need to take it with a grain of salt), Pryor:

…was brought to the hospital after his wife’s attempts to resuscitate him failed. His wife was quoted as saying that “at the end there was a smile on his face.”

It’s possible. If anyone could die with a smile on his face, it might just be Richard Pryor.

Lessons from the first snow

The New Neo Posted on by

No, it wasn’t technically the first snow. We’d had a few flurries earlier this fall. Once, a tiny bit had even remained on the ground for a few hours, before melting.

But yesterday was the first true snowstorm, signalling the start of the longest-seeming season in New England. No matter that the calendar says it’s a few weeks yet before the official first day of winter. It’s cold, it’s dark, it’s snowed over a foot: it’s winter.

When it snows like that—long, and hard—whatever you’d thought to do that day (unless it was to stay home and rearrange your closets) is off.

So the first lesson of the storm is: surrender. You’d planned to do this, and then that, and then the other thing? You needed to do this, and then that, and then the other thing? There was a party Friday night that promised to be fun?

Forget about it. Not gonna happen. Choose something else—something that doesn’t involve going outside at all.

And preferably something that doesn’t involve electricity. Where I live there are a lot of tall trees, and so in every storm—rain or snow—there’s a highly enhanced chance of losing it due to branches fallen on the power lines.

The second lesson of the storm, then, is: dependence. We rely on electricity for heat and light, for cooking, and for many kinds of entertainment (not to mention the solace, distraction, and demands of the computer). We are dependent on the snowplows that come to clear the streets–until then, there’s no getting out, except on foot. Because of old back injuries, I am dependent on the guy who comes to plow the driveway, and this time he came late and managed to pile up little mountains in front of the garage door rather than away from it. Hmmm, we’re going to have to have a little talk about that.

I didn’t think of still another dependence until, early in the afternoon, I got a call from the agency that provides my mother’s caretakers. “I bet you thought you’d be hearing from me” the head of scheduling said when I answered the phone. Stumped for a moment, I had no idea why she’d said that–till I realized that of course, the caregiver of the day was probably having trouble getting to my mother’s apartment, in which my mother is relatively helpless (relatively, not absolutely any more) without her.

Yet another lesson of the storm is transcendence through transformation. Every landmark covered in white, including the huge evergreens that bow low under its weight; the world is an unfamiliar place of stark, monochrome beauty. It won’t last long–the wind will blow the snow off the trees; dirt and dog pee will turn the snow on the ground mixed colors of gray, brown, and yellow. And it all will finally melt, revealing the straw-colored grass beneath.

But for now all this is in the future. For now everything is the whitest of whites.

For the children, since the snow came on a Friday, there’s the abounding and surpassing joy of no school. For skiers, the knowledge that soon they can hit the slopes and encounter what in New England passes (or substitutes) for powder.

Back when I myself was in school—on non-snow days, that is—I was fascinated by the group of people known at the time as the Eskimo, and now as the Inuit. I learned of their ability to live in a harsh and challenging winter landscape (so like New Englanders, only to the nth degree), their inventiveness, even the wide variety of exotic games they played.

So I was wondering now: what of the legend of the hundred—or three hundred–Eskimo words for snow? Well, it turns out there are quite a few, although certainly not hundreds. Here are the root words. No doubt you’ll find them useful:

Snow particles

(1) Snowflake
qanuk ‘snowflake’
qanir- ‘to snow’
qanunge- ‘to snow’ [NUN]
qanugglir- ‘to snow’ [NUN]

(2) Frost
kaneq ‘frost’
kaner- ‘be frosty/frost sth.’

(3) Fine snow/rain particles
kanevvluk ‘fine snow/rain particles
kanevcir- to get fine snow/rain particles

(4) Drifting particles
natquik ‘drifting snow/etc’
natqu(v)igte- ‘for snow/etc. to drift along ground’

(5) Clinging particles
nevluk ‘clinging debris/
nevlugte- ‘have clinging debris/…’lint/snow/dirt…’

B. Fallen snow

(6) Fallen snow on the ground
aniu [NS] ‘snow on ground’
aniu- [NS] ‘get snow on ground’
apun [NS] ‘snow on ground’
qanikcaq ‘snow on ground’
qanikcir- ‘get snow on ground’

(7) Soft, deep fallen snow on the ground
muruaneq ‘soft deep snow’

(8) Crust on fallen snow
qetrar- [NSU] ‘for snow to crust’
qerretrar- [NSU] ‘for snow to crust’

(9) Fresh fallen snow on the ground
nutaryuk ‘fresh snow’ [HBC]

(10) Fallen snow floating on water
qanisqineq ‘snow floating on water’

C. Snow formations

(11) Snow bank
qengaruk ‘snow bank’ [Y, HBC]

(12) Snow block
utvak ‘snow carved in block’

(13) Snow cornice
navcaq [NSU] ‘snow cornice, snow (formation) about to collapse’
navcite- ‘get caught in an avalanche’

D. Meterological events

(14) Blizzard, snowstorm
pirta ‘blizzard, snowstorm’
pircir- ‘to blizzard’
pirtuk ‘blizzard, snowstorm’

(15) Severe blizzard
cellallir-, cellarrlir- ‘to snow heavily’
pir(e)t(e)pag- ‘to blizzard severely’
pirrelvag- ‘to blizzard severely’

And now I do believe it’s time to go out and play.

Journalism: fact-checking and full disclosure

The New Neo Posted on by

Omri Ceren is none too pleased with the LA Times. After reading his post, I doubt you will be, either.

I haven’t read the full backup materials to which Ceren links (it’s a book-length Strategic Studies Institute document), just a summary and the excerpts Ceren offers. So I haven’t done my own independent analysis, and am relying on his. With that caveat, though, I must say that he makes an excellent case that the Times op-ed piece in question, by George Bisharat, is at the very least misleading.

Here’s Bisharat’s opinion piece from the Times. And here’s the SSI–US Army War College document on which Bisharat based his article.

Bisharat’s thesis is as follows:

To avert Iran’s apparent drive for nuclear weapons, concludes Henry Sokolski, a co-editor of “Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran,” [the SSI report] Israel should freeze and begin to dismantle its nuclear capability…[T]here is an Achilles heel in our nonproliferation policy: the double standard that U.S. administrations since the 1960s have applied with respect to Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s suspected arsenal includes chemical, biological and about 100 to 200 nuclear warheads, and the capacity to deliver them.

Initially, the United States opposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program. President Kennedy dispatched inspectors to the Dimona generating plant in Israel’s south, and he cautioned Israel against developing atomic weapons. Anticipating the 1962 visit of American inspectors, Israel reportedly constructed a fake wall at Dimona to conceal its weapons production.

Since then, no U.S. administration has effectively pressured Israel to either halt its program or to submit to inspections under the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nor has Israel been required to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The apparent rationale: Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of an ally are simply not an urgent concern.

Yet this rationale neglects a fundamental law of arms proliferation. Nations seek WMD when their rivals already possess them. Israel’s nuclear capability has clearly fueled WMD ambitions within the Middle East. Saddam Hussein, for example, in an April 1990 speech to his military, threatened to retaliate against any Israeli nuclear attack with chemical weapons 郂— the “poor man’s atomic bomb.”…

[The SSI report’s] suggestion is comparatively mild: Israel should take small, reversible steps toward nuclear disarmament to encourage Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

I’ve quoted Bisharat at some length in order to be fair to him. The thrust of his message to the casual reader who hasn’t read the SSI report (and my guess is that that would be close to 100% of his readers), is that the report recommended that Israel start disarming, and that Iran would then follow suit.

That is indeed a distortion of the report’s message. Here is a summary of the report’s recommendations, taken from the report itself (which, by the way, is almost totally about the threat posed by Iran):

To contain and deter Iran from posing such threats, the United States and its friends could take a number of steps: increasing military cooperation (particularly in the naval sphere) to deter Iranian naval interference; reducing the vulnerability of oil facilities in the Gulf outside of Iran to terrorist attacks, building and completing pipelines in the lower Gulf region that would allow most of the non-Iranian oil and gas in the Gulf to be exported without having to transit the Straits of Hormuz; diplomatically isolating Iran by calling for the demilitarization of the Straits and adjacent islands, creating country-neutral rules against Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty state members who are suspected of violating the treaty from getting nuclear assistance from other state members and making withdrawal from the treaty more difficult; encouraging Israel to set the pace of nuclear restraint in the region by freezing its large reactor at Dimona and calling on all other states that have large nuclear reactors to follow suit; and getting the Europeans to back targeted economic sanctions against Iran if it fails to shut down its most sensitive nuclear activities.

Ceren, who has apparently read the full report, states that what it actually recommends is this:

(1) The SSI report explicitly calls for Israel to “not yet dismantle” any nuclear capability, in direct and undeniable contrast to Bisharat’s claim that it calls for Israel to “begin to dismantle its nuclear capability”

(2) The report deals only with Israel mothballing fissile material – not nuclear weapons. This is a critical distinction – it’s the difference between Israel resting on its arsenal of 150-200 nuclear weapons in an otherwise de-nuclearized Middle East, and Israel weakening itself by dismantling its arsenal. The SSI report does not believe that Israel actually disarming would have any effect on Iranian motives for proliferation because Iran is not developing their arsenal for defensive purposes. They’re developing it to destroy Israel…

The report recommends that Israel trade its ability to produce future bombs for Iran’s ability to produce future bombs…There’s a very specific reason why the SSI authors do not recommend that Israel publicly dismantle its nuclear arsenal – because they think it would risk a regional nuclear war.

In Bisharat’s piece, he omits the details–and, as usual, the real story is in the details. If one reads Ceren’s piece first and then reads Bisharat’s, one can see that Bisharat does not actually say, point blank, that the report asks Israel to start disarming its nuclear arsenal, although one can also see that, if one has read only Bisharat’s article, a typical reader might easily come to the conclusion that that is what he’s saying.

Yes, Bisharat does mention that the report asks that Israel perform “small, reversible steps towards disarmament.” By this he no doubt is referring to the steps Ceren mentions, which involve mothballing fissile material and freezing a reactor, in exchange for a host of similar steps and obligations by other Arab and Moslem countries. But by failing to explain precisely what those steps asked of Israel are, and by not emphasizing the quid pro quo aspects of them, he is misleading the reader.

This is not an isolated case; it seems that, when op-ed pieces (or even straight news pieces) are written based on documents about policy recommendations, those recommendations are frequently distorted almost beyond recognition (remember Duelfer?). Is this a reading comprehension problem on the part of the writers and journalists composing these pieces? Or a writing problem? Or is it deliberate obfuscation?

What is the obligation of editors at newspapers such as the LA Times to fact-check these pieces by reading the original reports, and to see if the articles fairly represent what’s actually in them? And do those editors have a duty to fire journalists who consistently distort such reports? In addition, what should the editors’ standards be in choosing op-ed writers, and do they need to identify those writers in such a way as to clarify whatever agendas they may bring to their works?

When we see an op-ed piece by Pat Buchanan, for example, or by Jimmy Carter, we pretty well know what we are dealing with. We know their history and their political agendas, and we know how to weigh what they are saying, adding into the mix our own notions of how they might be predisposed to slant things to advance those agendas. If this piece had been written by the Iranian ambassador to the UN, for example, we’d know where he was coming from; likewise, if it had been written by his Israeli counterpart. That doesn’t mean either would be lying, by the way; it simply means they would be bringing known biases to the table. The reader should always evaluate each piece of writing on the merits of its own logic, of course. But knowing what biases to look out for can only enhance our ability to perform such evaluations.

So, it is in that spirit that I ask: who is Bisharat, and what are his political biases in the area of the Middle East and Israel? Does he have any? The Times identifies him as: is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East. And this is, in fact, the case.

But if you read the entire bio to which I just linked, you’ll find the following:

[Bisharat’s] study of the impact of Israeli occupation on the Palestinian legal profession of the West Bank, Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule: Law and Disorder in the West Bank, was published in 1989. In recent years, Professor Bisharat has consulted with the Palestinian Legislative Council over the structure of the Palestinian judiciary, reforms in criminal procedure, and other aspects of legal development.

Again, let me emphasize that such a history is not a disqualification for writing on this subject. Nor is being a Palestinian (or a Jew or an Israeli, for that matter), a disqualification; not at all. But we do need to know whether Bisharat is or is not an objective observer here; does he have a relevant political agenda?

With just a bit more research, one can easily come up with more information about a possible political agenda.
Here, for example, is a piece written in early 2004 by Bisharat for the extreme leftist periodical Counterpunch. It’s entitled, “The Right of Return: two-state solution sells Palestine short.” The opening paragraph:

It is a tragic irony that, more than 55 years ago, one desperate people seeking sanctuary from murderous racism decimated another–and continue to oppress its scattered survivors to this day. In 1948, about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, their land and possessions taken by the new Jewish state of Israel. This included the Jerusalem home of my grandparents, Hanna and Mathilde Bisharat, which was expropriated through a process tantamount to state-sanctioned theft.

One can only conclude that Bisharat does have a clear political agenda. The rest of the piece is basically an indictment of Israel and a call, not only for a two-state solution, but for a full implementation of the “right-to-return” for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants. And it’s clear that Bisharat considers himself one of those descendants, and wants to have that right; in fact, he uses the term “we” consistently throughout the article to refer to Palestinians desiring to return, and to Palestinians as a whole.

I have no intention in this post to debate the issue of the right to return, or the conditions under which the Palestinians originally left and under which they remained unassimilated refugees in other Arab lands. Suffice to say there are nearly innumerable websites that present each side of the question. You can (and perhaps you already have) certainly read them for yourself, taking into account the possible biases of their respective authors, and weighing the issues as best you can on the preponderance of the evidence presented, as well as its authenticity and veracity.

At any rate, my point in quoting the “Right of Return” article by Bisharat is merely to say that, clearly, this is not a disinterested and impartial party. Now, getting into identities and assuming bias on the basis of those identities is one of those slippery slopes that feel dangerous. So I’m not saying Bisharat’s objectivity is questionable because of his Palestinian origins or his cultural identity. Rather, it’s because Bisharat has the clearest of political agendas–one which he has stated unequivocally in a public forum–and it is a fairly extreme one.

Of course, Bisharat is entitled to his position about Palestine, the SSI report–or for that matter, anything else. He’s also entitled to state it, and the LA Times is entitled to print it, if they so choose. But, before publishing it, shouldn’t the Times check to see whether he’s presenting the report fairly? And doesn’t the LA Times also have a duty to inform us about Bisharat’s extremist agenda, rather than to present him as a neutral and disinterested party? Of course, if the first were true (we could rely on the Times to make sure his article was fair before they printed it) the second (identifying his agenda) would not be necessary–it would be irrelevant.

Literary leftists: H.G. Wells and the future (Part III)

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I: Reading Lolita in Tehran]
[Part II: Hemingway and Dos Passos and the Spanish Civil War]

We all know H.G. Wells.

That is, we all think we know him. He’s the author of science fiction novels that seem to have been designed with the express purpose of being made into films. One might almost think he foresaw the invention of movies, too–but films were actually in the process of being invented when Wells wrote his most famous books–The Time Machine in 1895, and War of the Worlds in 1898.

When Wells was alive, he was considered by many to be far more than a mere spinner of tall tales, entertaining though those tales might be:

In his lifetime and after his death, Wells was considered a prominent socialist thinker. In his book The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek, one of the twentieth century’s most famous proponents of laissez-faire capitalism, held up Wells in particular as an example of the idealist intellectuals who believed in “the most comprehensive central planning” and could “at the same time, write an ardent defence of the rights of man”.

Wells became a socialist in 1903, when he joined the Fabian Society. But Wells (and the Fabians) was a gradualist; he did not believe in revolutionary socialism:

The Fabians believed that social reform could be achieved by a new political approach of gradual and patient argument, ‘permeating’ their ideas into the circles of those with power: ‘the inevitability of gradualism’ was an early slogan.

As Sidney Webb wrote to the Fabian Edward Pease in 1886, “Nothing is done in England without the consent of a small intellectual yet political class in London, not 2000 in number. We alone could get at that class.” The Fabians were especially active in London local government. The Fabians aimed for democratic socialism. Believing that voters could be persuaded of socialism’s justice, they sought to achieve reform by education, stimulating debate through lectures and discussions initiated by democratically accountable and educated professionals.

Wells flirted for a time with the Soviets, but he quickly learned that his aims and theirs were antithetical:

Although Wells had many reservations about the Soviet system, he understood the broad aims of the Russian Revolution, and had in 1920 a fairly amiable meeting with Lenin. In the early 1920s Wells was a labour candidate for Parliament…In 1934 he had discussions with both Stalin, who left him disillusioned, and Roosevelt, trying to recruit them without success to his world-saving schemes. Wells was convinced that Western socialists cannot compromise with Communism, and that the best hope for the future lay in Washington…In THE HOLY TERROR (1939) Wells studied the psychological development of a modern dictator exemplified in the careers of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.

Wells was clear-eyed enough to understand tyranny, and he had no use for it.

Why am I writing about Wells? He was a fascinating combination of amazing foresight about scientific discoveries, unrealistic idealism about human nature, and pessimism about that very same human nature.

I came across some astounding excerpts from his novel The World Set Free (written in 1914) in the November 28, 2005 issue of the New Yorker (yes, indeed; that magazine again!), which amply illustrate the first and last of these Wellsian characteristics. They are part of an article by Tom Reiss entitled “Imagining the Worst: How a literary genre anticipated the modern world,” about futuristic science fiction and its relation to reality.

In his book The World Set Free, Wells had the distinction of foreseeing nuclear war. His vision was not of some generalized and unspecified sort of apocalyptic weaponry; it was of nuclear weapons themselves, including an excellent description of a chain reaction. He even seems to have used the term “atomic bombs.”

Reiss writes:

When the book appeared, no physicists thought that an artificially induced chain reaction–which Wells called “the disease of matter”–was possible. Wells based the science in his story on research by the British physicists Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford, both of whom dismissed the idea (Rutherford called it “moonshine.”) In 1932, however, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist working at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, in Berlin, read the novel in a German translation. The following year, while on a walk in London, Szilard had an epiphany in which he conceived how a nuclear weapon might actually be built. He subsequently sent the first chapter of Wells’ book to Sir Hugo Hirst, the founder of British General Electric, accompanied by a letter in which he wrote, “The forecast of the writers may prove to be more accurate than the forecast of the scientists. The physicists have conclusive arguments as to why we cannot create at present new sources of energy…I am not so sure whether they do not miss the point.”…

The book’s main character is the nuclear chain reaction itself;: a phenomenon portrayed in such intimate and creepy detail that it seems almost like a living thing…The last part of the book takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where…[m]ost of the capital cities of the world were burning, millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.

Wells had a solution for the problem, too–at the end of the book, nations abandon their nationhood and form a world government that ends war. It was the only solution that seemed possible to him; but even then, it came at the end of nuclear catastrophe, not in time to prevent it.

Here’s Wells in The World Set Free (and as you read this passage, remember that it was written and published at the beginning of World War I):

All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing…Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionizing the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, “Fooled around” with the paraphernalia and pretensions of war.

I think it’s a truly impressive prediction in light of today’s talk of suitcase bombs. And of course there’s that phrase “any little body of malcontents;” Wells foresaw, if not the exact identity of Islamicist terrorists, then the general phenomenon of a small group of angry people gaining incredible destructive power and being willing to use it.

Wells was stellar at foreseeing the march of science and the problems to which it would lead. What he didn’t have was a solution–although he wanted to find one, and tried to find one. His idea of a world government banning war was certainly attractive, and is difficult to give up even today, when it has proven untenable.

The idea was a hope born of desperation. Towards the end of his life, Wells seems to have abandoned it to despair. It was his fortune–or misfortune; I’m not sure which–to have lived to see the end of World War II, and even the beginnings of atomic war (although not the out-of-control worldwide atomic war he foretold and feared). He died almost exactly one year after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while working on a project on the dangers of nuclear war.

In his preface to a 1923 edition of The World Set Free, Wells still retained hope, although it was fading and tenuous:

[T]he question whether it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one of the most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But he has to confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that is in the working class movement throughout the world. And labour internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a profound social revolution. If world peace is to be attained through labour internationalism, it will have to be attained at the price of the completest social and economic reconstruction and by passing through a phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is in the labour class, and the labour class alone, that any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far appeared. The dream of The World Set Free, a dream of highly educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus far remained a dream.

Wells was both a man of science and a dreamer. But he was enough of a realist, I believe, to sadly renounce his dream in the face of evidence that it wasn’t tenable. His final book, World at the End of its Tether (compare that to the optimistic title of his earlier work, The World Set Free), was utterly despairing about the prospects for the future. My suspicion is that the abject failure of the League of Nations, the horrors of Stalin’s USSR, and the conflagration of World War II made Wells recognize that salvation did not lie in working class internationalism. That realization was probably nearly unbearable for him.

Would Wells have been encouraged or dismayed if he had somehow taken a time machine and found himself in our present world? I don’t know. But I like to think he’d be pleasantly surprised to find, at least, that the world has lasted as long as it has without total nuclear destruction. I also like to think he would have given up–albeit reluctantly–on the old but unrealistic dream of international bodies such as the UN solving the problem. I like to think he’d see a certain amount of hope in the spread–however tenuous–of democracy in areas of the world which have never seen it before.

And I like to think that he wasn’t so very prescient after all, and that his vision of destruction never comes to pass–and that, at least in that respect, life does not imitate art.

The price for keeping our hands clean

The New Neo Posted on by

Wretchard of Belmont Club has written another of his signature, deeply thoughtful, posts.

All I can say is “read the whole thing.” Well, no, actually; that’s not all I can say.

Wretchard is writing about whether we can afford the luxury of moral absolutism in fighting the terrorists/Islamofascists/jihadists (select whichever word you think best), or whether the most moral course is to choose the lesser of two evils. He quotes this article by Conor Gearty, a human rights law professor at the London School of Economics (and with whom he disagrees), on the subject:

The moment the human rights discourse moves in this way into the realm of good and evil is the moment when it has fatally compromised its integrity. For once these grand terms are deployed in the discussion, all bets are off as far as equality of esteem is concerned. If we are good and they are bad, then of course equality of esteem as between all of us is ludicrous. Why esteem the evildoer in the same way as he or she who does good?…

International humanitarian and human rights law represents the apogee of [the] civilizing trend in global affairs, with rules of decent conduct that took their colour from the fact of our shared humanity rather than the superiority of our particular cause being agreed and promulgated.

Reading this, I felt a certain “aha!” moment come upon me. Gearty’s words are an almost perfect illustration of a certain mindset I hadn’t heard articulated so well before, one I believe is behind some seemingly incomprehensible positions taken by quite a few liberals and a large number of leftists.

Gearty speaks for many, I believe, in voicing a sort of morally absolute moral relativism. Lest this seem merely to be a tongue-twisting oxymoron, I’ll try to explain.

If I’m understanding him correctly, Gearty is saying that calling one side in a conflict good and another evil–or even calling one side morally better and the other worse in the relative sense–is itself a step onto the slippery slope that inexorably leads to human rights abuses. For that reason, such statements cannot ever be allowed, because allowing any such abuses would be to fatally and utterly compromise our own moral standing, the absolute and total protection of human rights being the highest good of all, one that trumps all others.

Furthermore, Gearty believes that one cannot make judgments about good or evil while simultaneously maintaining esteem (I think by this he means “respect”) for the evildoer. And, since Geary elevates equal esteem for all humanity as the highest good because it underpins human rights, then we cannot make judgments about good and evil.

However, in writing it out that way, I think a basic contradiction becomes glaringly obvious: Geary is himself making such a “good and evil” sort of moral judgment, and that is that the greatest good is to esteem all people on earth equally, and accord them all equal and complete human rights. It’s impossible, however, if one follows his logic, to escape the notion that groups with more of a dedication to preserving human rights would be more “good” and less “evil” than those who torture freely. I think this is an illustration of the fact that it’s simply impossible to talk about moral decisions without making some sort of moral judgments.

I guess Gearty has never heard of the notion of “hating the sin but loving the sinner”–that is, in secular and less loaded terms, believing someone has done something evil and yet still believing him/her to be a human being worthy of respect and with rights to be protected. Our entire legal system is actually predicated on such notions, and it’s difficult to see how a moral legal system could work if it were not. Surely all imprisonment, however just, includes the fact of depriving people of certain rights (although not basic ones). All imprisonment involves some sort of unpleasantness (therefore, according to some, “abuse” or even “torture”), both physical and mental. In addition, all imprisonment involves judgment of the wrongdoer’s acts as–well, as wrong, or even that old-fashioned word that Gearty so detests, “evil.”

This isn’t the place for a lengthy discussion on the nature of good and evil, and what is meant by those words (although…someday…). But I believe the heart of Gearty’s problem here is that he is mistaking what might be called “person-oriented” judgments with “act-oriented” judgments.

What is meant by that? Our legal system is based almost entirely on the latter rather than the former; we actually don’t judge people to be evil, we judge their acts to be such. Even Saddam Hussein is on trial for acts, not for the crime of being an evil person.

People who continually cross moral lines and do bad things are called, in a sort of shorthand, “evildoers”–that is, those who do evil. Does this mean they are inherently evil, have lost their claim to be human beings and to be respected as such? That’s primarily a religious/philosophical rather than a legal question, and it’s much too big for this essay, but as far as the law goes (and that’s what’s being discussed here), the answer is no, they have not lost their claim to be human.

So I see no contradiction between calling someone evil and calling them human. Even psychopaths and sociopaths, who seem to lack a conscience, are still human beings, although extremely dangerous and unusual ones. As humans, they are worthy of some respect, but that respect is not absolute. For example, it can certainly be argued that, even though we consider them humans, we are well within our rights to deprive them of their freedom and their right to harm us, if they are found guilty after a fair trial. Many argue that, in extreme cases, we are well within our rights to deprive them even of their lives.

And, in the unusual and rare situation of the “ticking time bomb,” it could be argued that despite the humanity of the evildoer, the consideration of some sort of physical coercion cannot and should not be taken off the table. What the dimensions of that coercion might be (for example, might it be limited to such methods as sleep deprivation), and when it would be not only morally acceptable but morally justified to apply it, are exceedingly difficult questions of extreme moral complexity. But to shy away from those questions and to propose an absolute ban is an act that leads to moral complexities of its own, a fact which Gearty refuses to acknowledge.

If you read Gearty’s piece, you’ll find an excellent example of the ivory-tower approach to the messy business of ethical decision-making. Gearty ignores almost everything about the real world as it actually works. As human beings making choices, I don’t see how we can ever avoid making moral judgments about relative good and evil (oh, how Gearty hates that word “relative!”). Even Gearty is making them here, whether he realizes it or not.

In the real world in which we live–rather than the lofty world of the London School of Economics in which Gearty seems to live, and where I’m sure no one ever does anything unethical–moral choices are usually between the lesser of two evils (or, as I’ve written before, the least crazy of several competing crazinesses). Failure to make such choices between relative goods/evils would make us into moral monsters of another sort, trapped in a rigid rules-bound way of thinking that would lead almost inevitably to tragic consequences. (If you doubt the latter, please see my pacifism series, particularly the one on Gandhi, who exhibited a similar rigidity of thought.)

But Gearty and his ilk believe that the rules will make you free, and that these rules must be rigid, since humans are incapable of making nuanced moral decisions (in other words, morally speaking, it’s all a slippery slope). Gearty believes that the rules of international law, based on ideas of shared humanity, are superior and must supercede any ad hoc notions of the good or evil of a certain cause. (Of course, Gearty is conveniently ignoring the fact that terrorists explicitly reject all such rules of international law, as well as any notions of the human rights that underlie them, although they will use international law to suit their purposes if faced with their own trials under its rules).

And, as Wretchard points out in his post, international rules of law are only enforceable if there is some teeth behind them, or in a society in which they are generally accepted: Humanitarian law works where law is obeyed, like the electric shaver that works where there is electricity. Otherwise, they are meaningless.

So, what is behind Gearty’s ability to hold his illogical and absolutist position? After all, he doesn’t seem to lack what we usually think of as intelligence, or a concern with morality itself. Quite the contrary.

It is my firm belief that a basic motivation behind positions such as Gearty’s (whether he’s aware of it or not) is the need to keep his own moral purity, and his notion of the moral purity of the society of which he is a member. That is, he desires to keep his own hands totally clean, his own conscience morally pure.

It is very difficult for many people to think of themselves as morally compromised. Gearty clearly believes he occupies the moral high ground in being an absolutist against human rights abuses such as any form of torture under any circumstances (as Gandhi did about violence). He never explores the actual real-world consequences of his position.

After all, it is far easier to see the consequences of action: that is, we torture someone, and someone suffers. Ergo, we are guilty of causing harm and pain to another human being. That cannot be denied. But the pain and suffering caused in certain cases by inaction, by not applying some form of human rights abuse or even physical pain (which I’m not here advocating; whether that is ever necessary or effective is a separate issue) is never factored by Gearty into his equation.

But it needs to be. Of course, it’s harder to see what the consequences of inaction might be, because the results of not acting are always speculative. But it would be illogical to ignore them, although that’s exactly what people such as Gearty–and pacifists worldwide–do.

As I wrote in another context, that of a discussion about the morality of the Iraq war:

My main point is quite a simple one: advocating a pullout–or even a timetable for a pullout–without understanding or recognizing the probable consequences of such action is utterly irresponsible…Yes, indeed, there’s enough blood to go around. There always is in war; wars involve blood on everyone’s hands, including pacifists, who are responsible for some of the blood involved in feeding the crocodile.
The important question is: how much blood is on whose hands, and to what end?

Yes, it’s relativistic. But I see no other way. In the real world in which we live, rather than the ideal one that exists only in the heads of academics such as Gearty or pacifists such as Gandhi, there is blood on everyone’s hands.

Viewing the “Amnesia: a love story” video

The New Neo Posted on by

I forgot to mention the following in yesterday’s post about Clive Wearing: for those of you in the states who get cable TV, the video is scheduled to be aired again on TLC on Dec. 19 at 10:00 PM, and on Dec. 20 at 1:00 AM. Watch or set your recorders; it’s really quite an extraordinary document.

[NOTE: This is not the only post I’m writing today. I often publish in the early afternoon, but today my schedule dictates that I’ll be putting something up in the late afternoon or early evening. Just thought I’d let you know.]

Amnesia: a love story

The New Neo Posted on by

A few years ago I saw the last few minutes of a TV documentary. Those moments made a deep impression on me, although I saw so little of it I didn’t really even know who or what it was about, except that it concerned a man in England who’d lost his memory in a very profound way. Then the other day, just by chance, I came across another documentary on the same subject, and finally learned his story.

Clive Wearing was a British musician, conductor, and musicologist who came down with encephalitis about twenty years ago, a sudden attack that left him with only his short-term memory. Now short-term memory is a wonderful thing—it allows us to remember things briefly—but it’s not everything. Ordinarily, after events or facts are put in our short-term memory for a few seconds, we can either delete them or store them for future reference. It’s this long-term storage capacity that Clive Wearing utterly lacks.

And I mean utterly. Lots of people—especially the elderly—have some problems with memory. But Wearing not only has almost no long-term memory, but his extremely formidable intellectual capacity and verbal proficiency are totally intact, making his situation all the more poignant and horrific.

Why am I mentioning all this? It’s hard to explain without seeing the man himself on the tapes. There is something utterly gripping and profoundly disturbing about his plight, one that I would never wish on a living soul. His life has been shattered and blasted, and yet he is still alive—a terrible fate, indeed. But there’s another thing about Wearing, and that’s the real reason I’m writing this. He shows the extraordinary resilience human beings can sometimes exhibit, and the sustaining power of love.

Love you say? What’s love got to do with it?

In Wearing’s case, just about everything. In fact, I am convinced it’s love that keeps him alive, and keeps him sane despite his tragic and lamentable disability.

I’m not whitewashing the situation, believe me. It is terrible, and if you watch the documentary you’ll see Clive utter many remarks such as these:

Can you imagine what it’s like ”” one night 20 years long with no dreams and no thoughts. My brain has been totally inactive, day and night exactly the same. There’s no difference between this and death.

Or engage in dialogues such as this:

TARA BROWN: To live without memory makes Clive angry when you ask him to think about it. Are you a happy man?

CLIVE WEARING: Sorry?

TARA BROWN: Are you a happy man?

CLIVE WEARING: Happy? I’ve been unconscious for how many years? That doesn’t make you happy, does it?

TARA BROWN: So are you an unhappy man?

CLIVE WEARING: Of course I am. I’ve never seen a human being before. Never heard a note. Never seen anything at all. Day and night exactly the same with no dreams of any kind.

But Wearing’s story illustrates that that elusive construct, personality, seems to be something very real. Somehow, even without much memory, Clive is still himself; he retains his “Cliveness,” as his wife says. Even now his personality and intelligence are impressive; if he retains a tremendous charm under these conditions, one can only imagine how extraordinary he must have been before.

From the beginning of his illness Clive always could remember certain elements about himself and his life, even though he had no memories of a single actual event in a life filled with honors and accomplishments as well as personal fulfillment. He remembered, for example, that he’d been a musician and conductor. He remembered he was married and who his wife was; he remembered his children from a previous marriage (although not their names). That was pretty much it, however.

What is the thread that holds all three things together? I submit that it is love.

Clive Wearing seems to be a man who was unusually gifted—and blessed—with love. Actually, I don’t know why I use the past tense—he is unusually gifted with love. Here is a description of his relationship with his wife, Deborah (the interviewer is named Tara Brown):

TARA BROWN:… it’s his pleas for Deborah to visit that are the hardest to read [in his diary] for, though she visits often, he has no recollection of seeing her. You wrote here, “Please fly here at once, darling Deborah”.

CLIVE WEARING: No, “at infinite miles per hour”.

TARA BROWN: Oh, sorry.

CLIVE WEARING: She says at once.

TARA BROWN: I can’t read your writing.

CLIVE WEARING: I can, I’m used to it.

TARA BROWN: Do you remember writing that?

CLIVE WEARING: No.

TARA BROWN: Why did you implore Deborah to arrive here?

CLIVE WEARING: I love her.

TARA BROWN: You love her.

CLIVE WEARING: Didn’t you know?

TARA BROWN: I’ve been working it out.

CLIVE WEARING: Hooray!

TARA BROWN: Do you think of your relationship with him as a husband and wife or is it mother and child?

DEBORAH WEARING: Oh, no. Husband and wife. It’s, it’s, it’s a marriage, although it’s … obviously, apart. It’s not an ”¦ it’s quite an unusual marriage, let’s say. Hello.

CLIVE WEARING: Oh! Ooh! You’re the best angel on earth.

TARA BROWN: It doesn’t matter who’s in the room, they can’t hide their affection for one another. They only knew each other for six-and-a-half years before Clive got sick. He can’t remember people he’s known all his life, yet Clive can’t forget Deborah.

DEBORAH WEARING: Who needs music?

CLIVE WEARING: Who’s music?

DEBORAH WEARING: No, who needs music?

CLIVE WEARING: A madman like me.

TARA BROWN: Even in those very first days when he couldn’t communicate, he could still say to you “I love you.”

DEBORAH WEARING: Yes.

TARA BROWN: How do you explain that?

DEBORAH WEARING: Because it’s very, very important. Some words I think that are just sealed in to our minds and our hearts, some feelings are just sealed in and not ”¦ they’re not open to corruption.

If you see Clive and Deborah in action, you cannot help but come to the conclusion that she is correct, although a scientist might put it quite differently than she does. It seems that feelings can exist outside of specific memories, and can give a certain continuity—a leitmotif, as it were—to a life, even one as bereft of memory as Wearing’s.

I used the word “leitmotif” in the previous paragraph for a reason; it’s a musical term. For music is the other great love of Wearing’s life, and in this, as in his marriage (although certainly not in many other things), he has been an extraordinarily fortunate man. And this is because musical learning seems to be quite different from ordinary memory, and more likely to remain intact despite a disease such as his.

It’s not that Wearing can sit down at the piano and play all the old pieces he used to know. Or actually, perhaps he could, but he doesn’t. What he can do is read music; place a sheet of music in front of him and he sight-reads it beautifully, that capacity fully intact. While he is playing, he seems whole; the flow of the music admits of no breaks, one moment leads seamlessly to the next and gives the activity a continuity that the rest of his existence lacks.

There’s no denying that there’s been a great deal of suffering involved in Wearing’s life and that of his wife and family. It was particularly acute in the first couple of years after his illness. During that time, for example, Wearing went through a month of perpetual crying:

One day when Deborah Wearing visited her husband in the hospital, his face was a picture of complete horror at his condition. That evening he started to cry. He cried all night and all through the following days. His pillow was wet with tears; he was constantly thirsty because he had lost so much fluid. Even before he opened his eyes in bed in the mornings, his tears started to roll down his cheeks and at night he fell asleep crying. After one month he was still crying but the tears had stopped flowing…

During his crying spell, Deborah Wearing would often ask her husband: “Darling, what’s wrong? Tell me.” For a long time, he didn’t answer her question; when he did, it was just one sentence: “I am utterly incapable of thinking!”

But these scenes no longer happen; in some strange way, Wearing has adjusted emotionally to his condition, and seems relatively happy much of the time, especially when Deborah is near. And she, too–with the help of religion, which she found a few years ago—seems to have adjusted, and to be in some way happy, although it’s a very different happiness than the one they had before his illness; their present happiness has been extremely hard-won indeed.

Weighted down by the almost unimaginable sorrow and strain of it all, Deborah had actually divorced Clive some nine years after his illness and moved to America to get away, perhaps even to marry and have children. But, inexorably drawn back by the power of love, she returned and remarried him. Apparently Clive retained enough of his “Cliveness” to keep her from beginning a new life with anyone else.

As she says,

I realised that we are not just brain and processes. Clive had lost all that and yet he was still Clive. Even when we didn’t see one another, when we were six months apart and only spoke on the telephone, nothing had changed. Even when he was at his worst, most acute state, he still had that huge overwhelming love … for me. That was what survived when everything else was taken away.

Clive himself seems to agree:

Clive often says: “We aren’t two, darling, we are one.” Recently, someone asked him to state his complete name. “Clive David Deborah Wearing,” he answered. “Strange name. Who knows why my parents called me that.”

As Pascal said: The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

So, when is that next “change” post coming?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve received a number of queries from readers as to just when the next “A mind is a difficult thing to change” post is coming up. They’ve all been very polite and careful not to pressure me.

Ah, but I pressure myself, and ask, “So, you [expletive deleted] old procrastinator, when is that “change” post coming, anyway? The last one was on 9/11, and it’s December already, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

My answer, both to them and to myself, is: soon. “Soon,” as in, “within the next couple of weeks.”

The trouble is that those things seem to take an unusual marshalling of energy. It’s not just the length of the “change” posts, it’s the reliving of the experiences–at least in memory–and the effort to process them in a way that would be relevant to more people than just myself.

But I’m not complaining. I, too, am eager to take on the task. After all, it’s a self-motivated and self-appointed one.

It’s just that it’s so easy to say “manana” (although it’s apparently not so easy for me to put that little ~ thingee over the “n” in “manana.” Anyone got instructions on how to do that? It’s probably something very simple and obvious, right?)

So, bear with me, the next “change” post will be coming–soon.

It’s a conspiracy

The New Neo Posted on by

Dean Esmay has a good post up about how the assumed failure of pre-war intelligence on WMDs is unlikely to have been the result of a conspiracy, but is very likely to have been an error. In it, he talks about the proliferation of conspiracy theories in general, including ones hatched by those on the right about Clinton’s murdering Vince Foster, and the like.

I’m in agreement with Dean here:

Of course, I can’t convince anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But just remember: the harder you strain to make weak evidence look supportable, the weirder the places you find yourself in. Apply Occam’s Razor and all of these speculations suddenly come into sharp relief: all things considered, the simplest explanation tends to be the most correct. The amount of assumptions you need to make before believing there was some big lie and coverup on pre-war intelligence are enormous; the number you need to believe that we–yes we, including people on all sides of the political spectrum–were simply wrong are quite small.

I’ve noticed how very popular conspiracy theories have become in my lifetime. In the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” the Jack D. Ripper character who thought flouride was a Commie plot to poison our precious body fluids was a joke. But if you stay up late some night to listen to “Coast to Coast,” you’ll hear an almost endless exchange of ideas that make that one sound positively mainstream.

In my lifetime, I really think it all began (well, not began exactly, but became popularized) with the Kennedy assassination. The vast majority of Americans believed–and still believe–that Oswald did not act alone. The polls have been fairly consistent over time: three-quarters of respondents think there was a conspiracy. Three-quarters is practically a unanimity in the world of opinion polling.

I’m not here to debate the merits of assassination theories–although my personal opinion, after doing a great deal of research a while back on the subject, (including reading Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, which I recommend to anyone interested), is that the evidence is overwhelming that Oswald was both the lone gunman and the lone planner, improbable though that may seem.

If the demographics here are representative of the population as a whole, my guess is that the majority of readers disagree with me. My real point, though, is that the Kennedy assassination opened the door to an almost kneejerk conspiratorial explanation for many subsequent events.

Why are conspiracy theories so popular? One reason, I believe, is the decline of general (not specialized) education in science, decried by Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon-Haunted World:

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

For “understanding of science and technology” I would actually substitute the more general “understanding and use of critical thinking.”

But whatever the cause, there’s little doubt in my mind that conspiracy theories have become more and more commonplace. One of my most chilling experiences was a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a good friend of mine. We were sitting having lunch and chatting when she quite casually mentioned that she believes Bush knew all about 9/11 beforehand and let it go forward for his own purposes. A lovely person (a therapist, no less–naturally!), up until that moment she’d never shown any indication of that sort of mindset. But she could not be dissuaded from her idea, and I must say I gave her a wider berth after that.

Along with Dean, I’m an Occam’s Razor person myself. I tend to think people are far more likely to be incompetent than cannily and successfully conspiratorial. And I’m aghast that so many people seem to think otherwise.

What’s the origin of the need to see a conspiracy behind every unpleasant event? One reason is the desire for order and control–even though, paradoxically, conspiracy theories posit a shadowy world out of the control of most of us. But, like children who want everything to have a reason and an explanation, conspiracy theorists can rest assured that at least someone (if only the conspirators) is in control and that there are few accidents, few random terrible and unpredictable events that we cannot control.

The same, I believe, is true for some of the demonization of Bush: better to believe he’s evil but in control than that the situation is inherently somewhat chaotic. Nature–and people–seem to abhor the vacuum of anarchy, and conspiracy theories rush in to fill the void.

Another New England tradition bites the dust: R.I.P., Governor Dummer Academy

The New Neo Posted on by

I always used to wonder about it, whenever I’d pass the sign on the highway near Newburyport, Massachusetts that said Governor Dummer Academy.

What was it like for the students when people asked them where they attended school? What endless string of lousy puns were they subjected too, and did they take it in good stride? When the movie “Dumb and Dumber” came out, did it get better, or did it get worse?

But it’s all over now, or at least it will be on July 1, 2006. From that day forward, the nation’s oldest independent boarding school (who knew?) will just be known as the Governor’s Academy. Pick a governor, any governor:

“The board of trustees believes the long-term interests of the Academy are best served by implementation of this change in the school name,” board president Dan Morgan said in a statement.

Morgan had told alumni of plans to change the name after a preliminary vote by the trustees in December 2004, drawing questioning letters and e-mails.

But you can’t please all of the people all the time:

To appease critics, trustees agreed to include the words “Established in 1763 by Governor Wm. Dummer” on the school’s printed name and seal.

The gesture wasn’t enough for Michael Smith, a 1954 alumnus who said he has made his last donation to his alma mater.

“Why give money to a school that has no respect for history?” asked Smith, a retired federal government official who lives in McLean, Va.

They won’t be getting a penny from me.

The will to fight

The New Neo Posted on by

Blogger Dan Melson is new to me. His blog, Searchlight Crusade, (which sounded vaguely evangelical, but is not) seems to be mostly about consumer and financial issues. He’s currently employed as a real estate loan officer and agent, and has past experience as a financial planner.

No doubt Mr. Melson writes great articles about insurance and investing and real estate and all that stuff. But I wouldn’t really know, since I haven’t read them. Actually, I’ve only read one post on his blog, and it’s most decidedly not about any of those things. It’s this one, entitled “Recent US Political and Military History and the War on Terror.” It was recommended to me by a reader, and he certainly didn’t steer me wrong.

If I were to summarize what that post is about, I’d say it’s about the importance of the will to fight.

I suggest you read it. Warning: it’s long–but my guess is that anyone who’s been a reader of my blog doesn’t really mind long too much.

Melson’s post is one of the best summaries of the entire post-9/11 situation that I’ve ever seen. As such, despite its length, it’s actually rather compact, compressing an impressive amount of military and political history and combining it with logic and just plain common sense.

The post is one of those things that–if any of my liberal friends were still reading anything I might forward to them on the topic of politics/world affairs–I’d send to every person on my list. But alas, no.

As it is, I’ll just recommend it to you. And if you’ve got anyone to send it to who might still listen, you could try forwarding it.

How the left lost its way

The New Neo Posted on by

As so often happens, I want to take up a question posed in the comments section of a previous thread. Reader “kcom” expressed puzzlement at the lack of condemnation of Saddam’s regime from the left and their failure to see him as a serious problem:

“It is amazing to see such self-proclaimed progressives on the side of preserving totalitarian regimes.”

This is the one point that has had me stumped from day one. I just can’t for the life of me understand it. I can see being disturbed by or even opposing the war as a solution to the Saddam problem. But what makes my head spin is how many people don’t honestly seem to believe there was a Saddam problem.

I’m going to do something I rarely do, which is to recycle part of an old post (Well, it’s Saturday, after all–plus, this post was originally written way back in March, when my readership was relatively low, so I think it bears repeating.)

The post was originally called “Dancing in a ring,” and it was a response to a similar query posted by Norm Geras, a thinker on the left who did loudly condemn Saddam and support his overthrow, and who was later puzzled by the failure of so many of his colleagues to take a similar position (you may have noticed that in my blogroll, I refer to Geras as a “principled leftist.” That, he is).

The following excerpt from my post in response to Norm can also serve to answer the query “kcom” posed, which is essentially the same question:

[Norm asked]: Why do so many “of liberal and left outlook” focus on Bush’s supposed crimes, making the Nazi comparison at the drop of a metaphor, and ignoring the far more terrible tyrants around the world for whom the Hitlerian analogy would be more apt? Why indeed have many on the left functioned as apologists for Saddam Hussein, a man whose downfall they should be applauding? When they said they were against tyranny, didn’t they mean what they said?…[M]ore deeply, the failure involved in these de rigeur responses, the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters, is hard to comprehend.

I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer. But I do have a response.

First, I offer this quote from Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

We all want to dance in a ring, to a certain extent. It’s wonderful to be part of a coherent movement, a whole that makes sense, joined with others working for the same goal and sharing the same beliefs. But there’s a price to pay when something challenges the tenets of that movement. When that happens, there are two kinds of people: those who change their ideas to fit the new facts, even if it means leaving the fold, and those who distort and twist the facts and logic to maintain the circle dance.

Now, you might say that leftists didn’t have to compromise their beliefs to have applauded the downfall of Saddam Hussein and to have realized that he and his regime were worse (and far more Nazi-like) than George Bush. Indeed, there are many leftists who have consistently said these very things. But there are others—and their numbers are not small–who have not, or who have done it with so much “throat-clearing,” as Chris Hitchens calls it, that their statements become virtually meaningless.

What is the difference between these two types of people? I think it has to do with the extent of their devotion to the circle dance, and the hierarchy of their belief system. The former group–what Norm Geras calls “principled leftists”–truly do believe what they say about hating tyrants and tyranny, and this is one of their highest values. They apply it irrespective of where the tyranny originates. But the second group, the terrorist and Saddam apologists, the relentless Bush=Hitler accusers, are quite different. It seems that they feel that their membership in the circle of the left requires them to elevate one particular guiding principle above all else, and that is this: in any power struggle between members of a third-world country and a developed Western country (especially the most powerful of all, the United States), the third-world country is always right.

Once learned, this very simple and reductionist principle makes the world easy to understand, and dictates all further responses. If one believes this principle, then oppression and tyranny can go in one direction only, and all evidence to the contrary must be ignored, suppressed, or twisted by sophistry into something almost unrecognizable. But once that price is paid, one can go on dancing in the old circle.

In the quote with which I began this essay, Norm Geras refers to “the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters.” I think the key phrase is “which matter more than just about anything else matters.” To those intent on dancing the circle dance above all else, the priorities are different. Apparently, other things matter more.

[You might also want to take a look at this recent post by Sigmund Carl & Alfred on a different aspect of the same subject.]