In the middle decades of the 20th century people were concerned about a question we have entirely forgotten. The question was: How will our society cope with automation? The problem was that human beings living in western industrialized societies lived, as most of them still do, by earning wages. In a market economy, the value of a person lies in his or her ability to perform useful work. Automation, at that time generally defined as the production of goods by machinery, with a minimum of human effort, threatened to break the fundamental reciprocal relationship between capital and labor. If profits could be increased by the elimination of the workforce, what industrialist would not want to automate? But, if all of industry became heavily automated, who would be left who could afford to buy the manufactured goods?
While this debate over this question is forgotten, the issues raised were not irrelevant. Indeed, many of the problems we currently face are the direct result of our failure to resolve the social consequences of the hyperproductivity characteristic of our technologically driven, energy intensive age.
It is not my intention to moralize here, or to either advocate or decry particular forms of social organization. My goal, to the best of my ability, is simply to understand and explain what has actually occurred. However, no coherent analysis of historical events can exclude some consideration of the forms of social organization that shape those events.1
The automation dilemma poses the greatest problem for the advocate of completely unfettered free markets. This is because the free market presumes a sort of game in which the goal of the players is to maximize their ownership of the available capital, and while de-emphasizing any notions of collective responsibility. Again, I am talking about the rules by which the game itself operates, not about the ethics of individual players. Free market capitalism is essentially Darwinian in nature: the competitive environment favors the individual who acts according to the principle of self-interest. Automation, by minimizing labor costs, maximizes profits for those who remain – the management and shareholders. That the progress of automation continually renders more and more members of the workforce superfluous is not a problem for the purely self-interested individualist. However, as the process can only serve to concentrate economic activity into fewer and fewer hands, it continuously shrinks the number of viable customers for products until the game itself is wrecked. In the classical liberal model, one becomes wealthy by providing goods for people who have at least some measure of wealth to exchange for those goods. Most people, in all societies, can only sustain themselves by selling their own individual effort or the immediate products of that effort. The game ends when that effort is not needed. One can rove the world for untapped markets, but as automation spreads all markets must eventually become depleted of any customers worth having.
Planned economies are different, at least in theory. In principal, automation should only spell utopia for the socialist. Socialism is something of an anti-Darwinian game, in which the goal is not the advancement of the individual but of the homogenized collective. Since wealth is to be distributed more-or-less equally, the fruits of automation are more material comfort for everyone with a smaller investment in individual effort and time. A shorter work week, and more hours to pursue those finer points of human advancement very few people ever actually pursue.
The statements above, of course, are idealized abstractions. Reality is more complex. Free market capitalist societies are rife with all sorts of non-self-interested motives and processes. Planned economies, on the other hand, are seldom very good at finding planners that are beyond the reach of petty self-interest.
What has actually occurred, at least in the United States and Western Europe, has been a kind of synthesis of market economies with socialistic government policies. As automation has displaced people from obviously meaningful and necessary work, programs of relief and assistance have provided support for them to varying degrees. Thus, we have created a hybrid system in which wealth is redistributed from hyperproductive free market enterprises to sustain a growing number of fundamentally non-productive persons.
By non-productive I do not mean merely the unemployed, but all of the people not involved in producing food or other relative essentials. In this extended sense, most of us are non-productive workers of one kind or another. No society can get along without food. No society of any great size or complexity can get along without material industry. However, the sudden disappearance of financial advisers, lawyers, musicians, web designers, insurance agents or baristas would not bring any society to an immediate crisis. All of these occupations are the product of having excess wealth and labor to throw around. They are a feature of an economy which has reached a hyperproductive state in its material essentials. The greater the productivity of a society in producing necessities, the greater the employment for the populous in producing non-necessities.
While I don’t mean to moralize too much about non-productive effort, I do want to make clear its real character. One should understand that non-productive effort is essentially fungible. So long as a society is employing enough people to feed itself and maintain its essential infrastructure, it may employ the rest of the population in any activity whatsoever. It may employ them as palace guards, monks, or folk musicians. As long as the society considers what these people do either important enough to finance with private funds or public taxation, any activity, no matter how fundamentally unproductive, may become a form of employment. America, from at least the 1950’s on, dedicated itself to putting most people in cars and suburban houses, not that any society on the planet had ever found a need to commute thirty miles to work in two-ton steel boxes before. We did so because we could – and because someone sold us on the idea. Fifty years earlier, when we were already a very prosperous society, no one would have imagined that automobile manufacturing would become the backbone of American industry.
When serious foreign competition and further automation eroded employment in the American auto industry sometime in the late 1970’s, the “service economy” was born. In short, this was the shift from making lots of unnecessary stuff to providing lots of unnecessary services. It was touted as progress, the beginning of a new age, but in fact it was a further departure of the economy from its fundamentals. If we could buy our cars from Japan, then why not buy almost all of our other manufactured goods from China? Thus, we began to live under the illusion that we could have a healthy economy that produced almost nothing, in which foreigners would do the dirty, polluting work of making things and Americans would simply own the world and sell each other insurance, cable services, and expensive cups of coffee. The unexpected consequence of automation was to make agriculture and manufacturing, once the vital organs of the nation’s economic corpus, seem economically unattractive and unimportant. The new way to make money, in a world in which making things was discouraged by social stigma and regulation, was to find various clever ways of moving paper around. It was only a short step from there to the dreamland of electronic, interconnected, virtual reality we live in now. Who builds our computers and cell phones? Some unfortunate quasi-slaves in China. Who grows the food? Who cares!
The percentage of the total population employed in American agriculture in colonial times was about 90%. Through most of the 19th century, it was at least 70%. In 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this had fallen to an astonishing 0.115%! A scant 358,000 people out of a population of 312 million. To put this into perspective, there are nearly three times as my many software developers as food-producers. There are almost twice as many lawyers.
The decline in manufacturing is also striking. In 1943, 12.1% the U.S. population made things. By 2011, this fraction had fallen to 3.8%. There are now more people employed in sales than in manufacturing, and nearly twice as many people employed in what the BLS subsumes under the heading “Office and Administrative Support Occupations”.
Automation, whether it is applied to industry or agriculture, can also correctly be seen as a process of replacing human and animal muscle power with energy derived from fossil fuels. We have financial advisers, lawyers, musicians, web designers, insurance agents and baristas in abundance only because we need a mere one person in a thousand to grow food and one in twenty-six to make goods. It is not machines that make this possible, but the coal, oil and gas that drive them. Without energy there could be no automation at all. Without abundant and cheap energy, we will be forced to de-automate, at least to some degree, and the age of hyperproductivity will end.
Even ancient civilizations produced whole classes of people who did ultimately non-essential things. Arguably, a preoccupation with non-essentials is the defining characteristic of civilization. As long as there have been cities, there have been priests, sculptors, and professional musicians. The achievement of recent decades has not been one of creating more and more esoteric occupations, but of running out of occupations altogether – of being content to employ really large numbers of people in doing not merely trivial things, but in doing nothing at all.
The laziness (and criminality) of the poor is a commonplace on the right side of the political spectrum. It is a commonplace which, unfortunately, is not without some basis in fact. While some large fraction of poor people are neither lazy nor criminal, it must be admitted that a propensity for either sloth or criminality will tend to make a person settle near the bottom of the socio-economic heap. However, if we take an honest look at how the economy actually functions, we must also admit that there are simply more people than jobs to employ them. The means of individual survival and the need to personally grow food began to detach in ancient times. The hyperproductivity of the present era has detached the means of survival from any inherently productive effort whatsoever, even effort of questionable or fleeting social value. A ruthless application of market forces might have kept the population more-or-less equal to the available work. A ruthless application of socialist principles might have distributed the work more evenly at the expense of individual liberty. The peculiar synthesis of the two that we actually pursued simply heaps the support of more and more people on a continually eroding middle class. People who produce necessities rarely mind, or even notice, when other people are employed in senseless tasks – provided those people are working. But most members of the productive classes resent, with good reason, the idly dependent – whether those dependents are generational welfare recipients or hereditary royalty. No one likes to carry those who sneer at them for working. If energy depletion were not about to change things, social upheaval would eventually do so anyway.
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1 For the record, I believe that market economies, though not without their weaknesses and pitfalls, do a significantly better job of preserving individual freedom and collective material wealth than do centrally planned economies. Central planning does a slightly better job of preserving equality – even if only by making everyone equally poor. Neither system has a particularly good record of maintaining stability. I have my doubts that nations on the contemporary scale of hundreds of millions can be made stable under any social system.
July 9, 2012
July 6, 2012
The Efficacy of Torture
Not long ago I wrote a post arguing, among other things, against the use of torture as an instrument of public policy. I stand by this conviction for three reasons. First, though I recognize that while torture will probably always occur here and there as an inevitable consequence of war, I believe that it is fundamentally an immoral form of behavior. For torture to be moral one must give up the notion that people ought to have certain rights simply because they are people. Having given up such a core concept, the only realm in which one can discuss morality is within the confines of some particular group. Being moral only on an ad hoc basis (that is, only toward “good” people) leaves the whole concept rather superfluous. A promise not to beat one’s friends is not particularly constraining. My second objection to torture comes from a belief that the value of any information gained by exercising the practice as an instrument of public policy is probably far outweighed by the level of hatred it inspires in an enemy, aiding in his recruiting efforts, hardening his resolve, and justifying his own resort to the use of similar forms of atrocity. I know that such an assertion, like most others that involve the psychology of groups, is all but impossible to prove. That does not render it untrue, but I admit it weakens it as an argument. Third, I believe that a public policy which condones torture is fundamentally incompatible with the stability of a Republic. If the government can exercise such a policy as a legal option, no citizen can long feel free to dissent. A nation that condones the torture of foreigners will, soon enough, employ torture against its own citizens. As an instrument of repression, torture has few peers.
These things said, there is one argument against torture that is not only ludicrous, but dangerous and tragic in its own right. That is the argument that torture simply doesn’t yield any useful information. You can read a synopsis of this position in the article at the link below:
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/09/hbc-90005768
In essence, the argument is that neurobiological research shows that the extreme stress of torture has a negative effect on memory, producing statements that are uncertain or susceptible to the interrogator’s suggestion. Further, while torture increases one’s willingness to talk, it does not guarantee that one will speak the truth. I don’t have any particular doubts about the science itself, but the conclusions drawn, at least by Harper's, The Daily Beast, et al, are oversimplifications and erroneous.
The presumption is that stress not only impairs memory, but that it impairs it to such a degree as to render it wholly dysfunctional. Further, the Harpers article, at least, fails to make any distinctions between different methods of questioning, corroboration between different subjects, corroboration with outside evidence, etc. The implicit scenario is one in which the subject of torture is simply abused until he discerns from sloppy interrogation technique more-or-less what it is that his torturers expect to hear, whereupon he delivers up that narrative and his torturers go away with a presumption they have uncovered a fact. As much as we may hate the practice of torture, we are not justified in presuming that its practitioners are uniformly that credulous and amateurish. The CIA, for example, has been torturing people since its origins as the OSS in Second World War. While they are far from infallible, there is no reason to believe that they are any less methodical about torture than they are about any other intelligence gathering activity.
Deriving information from any sort of interrogation is a signal-to-noise ratio problem – a matter of sorting what is true from the noise of both impaired memory and deception on the part of the subject, and from poor questioning technique on the part of the interrogator. Methods and circumstances matter.
Imagine six people have been physically separated since capture and are asked, under torture, to give up the name of their immediate superior. One successfully resists, three give unique names, and two give the same name. While not utterly conclusive, the result of getting the same name from two separated individuals certainly increases the probability that the two are telling the truth. If the neurobiological objection implied by Harper’s were correct, all six subjects would be so impaired that their answers would be essentially random, thus any consensus that occurred between them would also be either random or the product of leading questions, and, therefore, irrelevant. This, frankly, is absurd. If our cognitive abilities failed utterly under severe stress, no one could be tortured effectively for the purpose of extracting information – but we probably could not have survived the rigors of our evolutionary history either.
The kind of scenario described above has not been unusual in wartime. During the Second World War, for example, the Soviets, the Germans, the Japanese and others all conducted, with some regularity, battlefield interrogation under torture along these general lines. Military interrogations are an entirely different matter from, say, the interrogations of the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition’s goal was, in some sense, to get at the truth – but since whether one was a heretic or not was entirely dependent on the Inquisition’s verdict, torture served largely to make the words of the accused conform to the Inquisitor’s prior conclusions. Having been broken by torture one confessed to one’s sins in open court. In a case like this, accurate memory of past events was not particularly important. Military interrogations are, on the other hand, wholly disinterested with the guilt, innocence, or immortal souls of the interrogation subjects. Their goal is simply to extract specific, factual information about the status of enemy forces. The military interrogator does not record his (or her) findings in a history book, but disseminates them to military commanders who in turn use them as the basis for their battle plans. If the information deviates very greatly from actual facts, plans will fail and soldiers will die in greater numbers. As a rule, battlefield commanders tend to notice such things. If we accept the Harper’s headline that “Torture Doesn’t Work,” we have to conclude that thousands of military leaders just never caught on. Somehow, they never noticed that the reports of their intelligence officers, derived from tortured prisoners’ statements, were never any more reliable than random guesses. Military leaders have often been dogmatic and thick headed – but they are not completely blind. They do eventually discard methods that don’t produce results.
Again, I am not advocating torture. The mere fact that something may be effective does not make it justifiable. However, it must be admitted that the empirical record trumps neurobiological theory and educational credentials. The mere fact that an expert does a study, and a group of people append that study to their cultural narrative, does not put the matter beyond the realm of further inquiry and rational doubt. To believe that torture never yields useful information is to believe that those who employ it are either too stupid to notice or too sadistic to care. While I am no admirer of the KGB, the Gestapo, the Kempeitai, or the CIA, one must have a decidedly peculiar view of history to imagine the depredations on their unfortunate victims never yielded at least enough correct information to justify the trouble of asking questions. If one’s goal is simply to produce terror or to vent sadistic impulses, asking questions serves no purpose.
That much of the American left believes the neurobiological argument without question should not be surprising. It fits their view that military and intelligence people are by nature simply stupid and sadistic. The neurobiological argument is dangerous, however, because it abandons the difficult but worthwhile moral and political arguments for a rhetorically powerful but empirically vapid claim. And even if that claim were true, as a basis for judgment, it would still have very dangerous implications. If efficacy were the real problem, would torture become acceptable if a drug could be administered which improved the victim’s memory? Is the problem with “enhanced interrogation” that it is an affront to basic decency – or merely that it isn’t enhanced scientifically by someone with the proper credentials?
It seems that plain empirical truth does not have many friends these days. Fortunately, it needs none.
These things said, there is one argument against torture that is not only ludicrous, but dangerous and tragic in its own right. That is the argument that torture simply doesn’t yield any useful information. You can read a synopsis of this position in the article at the link below:
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/09/hbc-90005768
In essence, the argument is that neurobiological research shows that the extreme stress of torture has a negative effect on memory, producing statements that are uncertain or susceptible to the interrogator’s suggestion. Further, while torture increases one’s willingness to talk, it does not guarantee that one will speak the truth. I don’t have any particular doubts about the science itself, but the conclusions drawn, at least by Harper's, The Daily Beast, et al, are oversimplifications and erroneous.
The presumption is that stress not only impairs memory, but that it impairs it to such a degree as to render it wholly dysfunctional. Further, the Harpers article, at least, fails to make any distinctions between different methods of questioning, corroboration between different subjects, corroboration with outside evidence, etc. The implicit scenario is one in which the subject of torture is simply abused until he discerns from sloppy interrogation technique more-or-less what it is that his torturers expect to hear, whereupon he delivers up that narrative and his torturers go away with a presumption they have uncovered a fact. As much as we may hate the practice of torture, we are not justified in presuming that its practitioners are uniformly that credulous and amateurish. The CIA, for example, has been torturing people since its origins as the OSS in Second World War. While they are far from infallible, there is no reason to believe that they are any less methodical about torture than they are about any other intelligence gathering activity.
Deriving information from any sort of interrogation is a signal-to-noise ratio problem – a matter of sorting what is true from the noise of both impaired memory and deception on the part of the subject, and from poor questioning technique on the part of the interrogator. Methods and circumstances matter.
Imagine six people have been physically separated since capture and are asked, under torture, to give up the name of their immediate superior. One successfully resists, three give unique names, and two give the same name. While not utterly conclusive, the result of getting the same name from two separated individuals certainly increases the probability that the two are telling the truth. If the neurobiological objection implied by Harper’s were correct, all six subjects would be so impaired that their answers would be essentially random, thus any consensus that occurred between them would also be either random or the product of leading questions, and, therefore, irrelevant. This, frankly, is absurd. If our cognitive abilities failed utterly under severe stress, no one could be tortured effectively for the purpose of extracting information – but we probably could not have survived the rigors of our evolutionary history either.
The kind of scenario described above has not been unusual in wartime. During the Second World War, for example, the Soviets, the Germans, the Japanese and others all conducted, with some regularity, battlefield interrogation under torture along these general lines. Military interrogations are an entirely different matter from, say, the interrogations of the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition’s goal was, in some sense, to get at the truth – but since whether one was a heretic or not was entirely dependent on the Inquisition’s verdict, torture served largely to make the words of the accused conform to the Inquisitor’s prior conclusions. Having been broken by torture one confessed to one’s sins in open court. In a case like this, accurate memory of past events was not particularly important. Military interrogations are, on the other hand, wholly disinterested with the guilt, innocence, or immortal souls of the interrogation subjects. Their goal is simply to extract specific, factual information about the status of enemy forces. The military interrogator does not record his (or her) findings in a history book, but disseminates them to military commanders who in turn use them as the basis for their battle plans. If the information deviates very greatly from actual facts, plans will fail and soldiers will die in greater numbers. As a rule, battlefield commanders tend to notice such things. If we accept the Harper’s headline that “Torture Doesn’t Work,” we have to conclude that thousands of military leaders just never caught on. Somehow, they never noticed that the reports of their intelligence officers, derived from tortured prisoners’ statements, were never any more reliable than random guesses. Military leaders have often been dogmatic and thick headed – but they are not completely blind. They do eventually discard methods that don’t produce results.
Again, I am not advocating torture. The mere fact that something may be effective does not make it justifiable. However, it must be admitted that the empirical record trumps neurobiological theory and educational credentials. The mere fact that an expert does a study, and a group of people append that study to their cultural narrative, does not put the matter beyond the realm of further inquiry and rational doubt. To believe that torture never yields useful information is to believe that those who employ it are either too stupid to notice or too sadistic to care. While I am no admirer of the KGB, the Gestapo, the Kempeitai, or the CIA, one must have a decidedly peculiar view of history to imagine the depredations on their unfortunate victims never yielded at least enough correct information to justify the trouble of asking questions. If one’s goal is simply to produce terror or to vent sadistic impulses, asking questions serves no purpose.
That much of the American left believes the neurobiological argument without question should not be surprising. It fits their view that military and intelligence people are by nature simply stupid and sadistic. The neurobiological argument is dangerous, however, because it abandons the difficult but worthwhile moral and political arguments for a rhetorically powerful but empirically vapid claim. And even if that claim were true, as a basis for judgment, it would still have very dangerous implications. If efficacy were the real problem, would torture become acceptable if a drug could be administered which improved the victim’s memory? Is the problem with “enhanced interrogation” that it is an affront to basic decency – or merely that it isn’t enhanced scientifically by someone with the proper credentials?
It seems that plain empirical truth does not have many friends these days. Fortunately, it needs none.
June 28, 2012
The Culture of Upheaval
The values of a society change over time, in response of forces internal and external. America is in the throes of many changes, but at the moment one particular change seems to be seizing more than its share of attention. The general issue of gay marriage doesn’t seem to be going away. Like the unresolved abortion issue before it, gay marriage divides the nation all too sharply into two cultures – the progressive, largely urban left, and the traditional, largely rural right. The major political parties have made the most of this issue to fire up their respective bases, and we await some eventual pronouncement by the fatally divided government. If the congress decides this issue either way, either by declaring marriage to be between a man and woman, or simply between two adults of either gender, it is committing a deliberate act of social engineering – more precisely defining an official culture of the state. This is not a trivial matter.
I have already offered a perspective on the specific issue of gay marriage in a previous post. I will summarize by saying that, in my view, all marriages and civil unions should be synonymous from the government’s perspective, and should solely entail the recording and oversight of a legal contract. It should not be the government’s role to adjudicate what either is or isn’t a valid sacrament, anymore than it should rule on whether or not the pope is divine, witches should be burned, or the tooth fairy’s gifts should be taxed. If there is a God, he, she or it certainly does not need the government’s help defining what is or isn’t sacred. If there isn’t a God, the government should not enforce the dictates of anyone’s mythology. The US constitution made this a secular country. We are free to entertain, or not to entertain, any religious belief, but not to impose our particular beliefs on our neighbors using the authority of the state as a cudgel. Our head of state is not the head of a state church. If you like that sort of thing, move to England – or better yet, to Iran.
I do not believe there is a god, but I find the exercise of going out of my way to bash the religious right both unproductive and uncivilized. I know full well that nothing I can say is going to change their minds, and that any effort to convert them to my perspective tends to make them feel besieged and erode any common ground that might exist between us. That, frankly, benefits no one. I find that it is perfectly possible for someone to harbor the most flimsy and naïve sort of beliefs and still be a very decent human being. The world, in fact, is full of people like that. I have no doubt that the ill-informed comprise the world’s majority. I have no doubt that under the right circumstance flimsy, naïve ideas can become dangerous ones – but I see all too clearly, too, that to make war on ideas, even incorrect ones, is more than a little dangerous in itself. Anyone who is sure enough of the truth to be willing to impose it on someone else is a fanatic – even if that person actually knows the truth. Soon, the idealist will metamorphose, spontaneously and invisibly, from being an advocate of the truth to being the author of the truth. Human beings, even well-educated ones, are seldom as wise as they think. History is piled thick with the victims of the noblest ideas. Ideas cannot be hurt, perhaps – but flesh and blood invariably can. Doubt is a precious commodity, probably worth more than certainty.
I have nothing against gay or lesbian persons, either as a group or as individuals – at least not on the basis of their sexual orientation alone. I will not say that I have plenty of gay and lesbian friends, because, at least to my knowledge, I don’t. I have had a few acquaintances who were gay, and they were good, bad, or unremarkable in about the same proportion that any random collection of non-gay people are good, bad, or unremarkable. I find gays and lesbians irritating in proportion to their tendency to be true to stereotype, but I also find evangelicals, business people, Appalachians, blacks, New Yorkers, and Californians irritating in proportion to their tendency to be true to stereotype. If one must have an identity, it is usually more ingratiating to at least invent one’s own rather than pulling a one-size-fits all identity off the rack. This, of course, is simply my view and is not intended to be proscriptive. Mildly annoying other people is a privilege no one should be entirely denied.
In discussing the values of a society, though, annoyance is no offhand joke. It is often the crux of the matter. The gay marriage debate is essentially a conflict between those who want the state’s seal of official approval on their relationships and those who want to see, at least at the symbolic level, a measure of official censure imposed on homosexual relationships. This is wholly a cultural conflict, a matter of whose particular set of preferences is going to be favored and whose isn’t.
There is a perception by the left, a part of their cultural narrative, that more tolerance and more equality are always better. They have a marked tendency to keep the concepts of tolerance and equality rather vague, but this is in the nature of any cultural belief. Freedom is a popular buzz word for many cultures around the world, but there are dozens of different definitions of freedom, all substantially different. So it is with tolerance and equality as they are bandied about by the liberals of America. In practice, it means advancing the cause of people would who have the minimum number of certain offending traits. Those offending traits are, typically: being white, being male, being Christian, being affluent, and (now) being heterosexual. You can have two or even three of these traits and still be numbered among enlightened – provided you are prepared to do a public penance of repudiation of your personal and hereditary sins. If you have few or none of these reprehensible traits, you are welcomed into the liberal tribe pretty much without regard to your behavior – even if, ideologically, you’re a conservative.1 Catholic Latinos and misogynist Muslims are Ok. The uneducated will not be invited to the wine and cheese parties of the leadership, of course. As George Orwell astutely observed – “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” – but don’t worry, uneducated tribe members are always on the beneficiaries list. Yes, I know – I should not be so intolerantly mischievous toward the left. I simply cannot help myself. It isn’t that the average conservative is fundamentally smarter or better – it’s just that they’re a little more likely to at least be honest about their basic tribalism, swathing themselves in the usual tribal accoutrements of flags and scriptures, rather than in tired narrative dressed up as scientific truth. Denying the truth is one thing, but inventing it while pretending to be fair and neutral is something else. But I digress.
Supporting gay marriage is not straightforwardly a rational decision. It is simply a cultural one. The arguments for allowing gay marriage are the same as those for gay rights generally. These can be succinctly summarized as a combination of naturalism and the harm principle.
Much has been made of the idea that being homosexual is an innate characteristic of some individuals – like being tall, or having red hair. Since I take the position that we have no free will in any absolute sense, I won’t even argue this point. Whether people are gay because of their genes or because of factors in their life experience, I believe they are gay for fundamentally causal reasons. A thorough acceptance of naturalism must entail that everything is what it is for causal reasons. In this view, the whole idea of moralities based on choice becomes senseless. If it is unfair to deride the homosexual for being homosexual – then it is equally unfair to deride the bigot for being bigoted. Where there is no choice, in an absolute sense, there is no responsibility, in an absolute sense. People simply have the behavioral and moral predispositions they do until external circumstances cause them to acquire different ones. We become unhappy when we discover that the universe has not molded others to be in harmony with our beliefs. This rule applies to both the homosexual and the homophobe. Morality, viewed objectively, is just some congeries of beliefs held in common with a big enough group to constitute a culture.
To cast this in a rather different light (one that does not require that you accept my position on free will) the fact that a characteristic is innate should not, even under some principle of fairness, absolutely preclude a society from condemning it. Consider the case of the serial murderer, Jeffrey Dahmer. The consensus of opinion, even expert opinion, is that Dahmer’s psychopathic tendencies were in some way organic – that nothing in his experience or upbringing could have brought them about. That said, no group of semi-rational jurors, with the facts of seventeen murders laid before them, could have concluded that, since it was not his fault that he liked to murder people, he should have been set free to do it again. Any society that hopes to survive must be prepared to protect itself against established threats – whether the threatening individuals are acting by choice or not. This is not to say that gay marriage in particular, or homosexuality in general, are proven threats. It is to say that the matter of whether or not gays have any choice about their orientation should not be the final desiderata of their status. In fact, the matter of whether or not homosexuality really does pose any sort of threat to the survival of society would be difficult to determine, and in practice no one tries. The culture of the left just knows it doesn’t and the culture of the right just knows it does. Tribal knowledge prevails in either case.
Let’s now move on the mushy old harm principle:
According to J.S. Mill:
“…the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others… …Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
The argument for gay marriage, then, would be that it harms no one and should therefore be allowed. I have already stated that a pluralistic secular government cannot justifiably limit any individual’s right to define his or her own relationships in whatever mystical terms one happens to chose, nor should such a government curtail an individual’s worship of imaginary beings – provided, I suppose, that such imaginary beings do not require frequent sacrifices in non-imaginary human blood. To codify a relationship in any extralegal sense – to say that it either is or isn’t a sacrament – is to create an official state culture. This certainly interferes with exactly the individual liberty that Mill was concerned about.
A thorough application of the harm principle would, however, produce consequences much more far reaching than a tolerance of gay marriage. I think we have to assume that Mill did not consider merely offending someone as causing them harm. If offense is harm, then authority is justified in banning any activity with causes anyone offense. Since the act of banning the activity will probably cause offence to the person whose pet behavior is banned, we reach an impasse very quickly. Such impasses, of course, have really occurred. To insult a recognized minority is hate speech, but to stage a gay pride parade in front of a Catholic church on Easter Sunday cannot be any less an exercise of hate. Offensive as both activities might be, invoking the harm principle to censure only one or the other is hypocritical. Censuring every conceivable offence, on the other hand, would be unbelievably oppressive and, thankfully, impossible.
If harm only means physical harm, we are on at least a little better ground. Though one can find impasses and definitional problems here too, at least they don’t crop up in practically every case. All right then, if Carla and Susan want to get married, that doesn’t cause me or anyone else any obvious physical harm – and anyone who wants to say it does is going to have quite a difficult case to make. I think one should always be free to argue such a case, but “my deity will smite us if we allow it” doesn’t constitute much of a start for me. Of course, if we are drawing the line there, I am free to follow Carla and Susan around and shriek insults at them all day for any reason or no reason, and authority has no right to stop me as I am causing them no physical harm. I’d feel like a pig and my throat would get sore, but neither of those eventualities have any bearing on the harm principle.
Drawing the line at physical harm has plenty of other ramifications too. Take the case of the avid nudist. Many have expressed the feeling that they find clothing both dishonest and constrictive. If the harm principle is to guide us, public nudity should never be officially constrained. Seeing a person nude does not cause anyone physical harm. What argument could one make in favor of requiring people to wear clothing in public? Public nudity violates tradition or community standards? Please – that’s merely a bigoted, intolerant view. You don’t want your kids to be exposed to nude adults, perhaps leering at them from the edge of the playground? Well, if they feel shocked or threatened it is only because you raised them to be narrow-minded; that is not the fault of the nudist. And you can obviously forget the argument that nudism is unnatural. Neither can you argue that, while unrestrained nudism might be fine in principle, society is just not ready for it at this time. The harm principle abhors such flimsy rationalization. Public nudity now, public nudity tomorrow, public nudity forever. Prudes and bigots can all move to somewhere cold.
Public nudity is really only the mildest of examples one might use. Forgive me if the following strikes you as tasteless, but we cannot be squeamish over matters of high principle. Bestiality, indeed public bestiality, would also prove unassailable under a rigorous application of the harm principle. I argued this point to a friend once. He was trying to make a philosophical justification for the normalization of homosexuality that would not equally justify a broad range of other behaviors, many of which he personally found offensive. His initial argument against bestiality was that it constituted a physical imposition on the animal. This is insufficient. Some animals, so I hear, are willing to interact with humans in that fashion. Then he insisted that animals lack the intellectual capacity to consent. This is certainly a debatable claim, but even if I were to accept it without argument it must also be true that cats do not consent to be declawed, horses do not consent to be ridden, and pigs certainly don’t consent to being eaten. Am I to accept, from a free-thinking, sexually-tolerant liberal that there is something special about sex that needs to be constrained, but the life or death of an animal is a matter to be shrugged? People who invoke the harm principle invariably use it to justify whatever particular behavior they would like to promote or engage in, but not to justify the full range of behaviors that it must ultimately allow.
My position is not that homosexuals are no different than bestiaphiles, but that determining what behaviors are acceptable or unacceptable is a cultural matter, and not an impartial evaluation. Societies have existed that have tolerated or encouraged practically the full gamut of possible human behaviors. Genes may change slowly, but societies are much more plastic. My objection to the current thrust of change in western society is not that all the changes are “bad” in any absolute sense, but that all of the changes are cloaked in a protective halo of kindness, fairness, and inevitability are not rationally justified. To begin with, unlimited tolerance and anti-traditionalism are mutually exclusive. Saying everybody in the global village is just fine, except for western conservatives, simply cannot be an objectively rational position.
Considered from a very general and rather abstract perspective, contemporary western liberalism is neither a movement toward fairness nor equality, but simply a movement to reject traditional norms. It is a social movement whose end product in continual upheaval. If western liberalism were truly rooted in the principles of fairness and equality, it would not have spawned affirmative action, which is discriminatory on its face. It would not have created the new category of hate crimes, which in effect make the lives, or even emotional sensitivities, of certain designated minorities more important under the law than the lives and sensitivities of those who are not so designated. Contemporary western liberalism does not protect the individual, for it is the consistent advocate of the sacrifice of individual rights for the sake of redressing historical wrongs inflicted on particular collective groups. While it is true that blacks continue to suffer from the disadvantages of poverty and poor education, it is hard to imagine white Appalachians suffer any less from those conditions – yet they are part of the enemy camp, so there are no affirmative action programs or protective hate crimes laws for them. How can this be fair or equal?
It would be easy to convince oneself that my earlier examples of public nudity and bestiality were merely offensive rhetoric, and that such outlandish things would never be advocated by anyone other than the occasional crank. Given the nature of contemporary liberalism’s anti-traditional thrust, however, these things are serious possibilities. Imagine you could go back in time, and tell the serious, dignified, well-dressed and well-mannered civil rights marchers in Memphis that the lineal descendents of their movement would be protesting for the rights of homosexuals to marry one another. They would have been both incredulous and deeply offended. As the culture changes, for whatever reason, we get used to things that our parents or grandparents would have found unthinkable. Perhaps our descendents will not give a second thought to seeing neighbor humping fido in front of his house. Historically, people have become indifferent to far more harmful and even more peculiar behavior. And, as time progresses, it will certainly require a higher threshold of deviation to offend the increasingly numbed and fatigued fraction of the population that would have to fill the role of the conservative enemy.
It is fair to say that, already, much of what is seen by the left as positive change in our culture is more the product of moral fatigue than humane impulse. Consider the products of our entertainment industry in the last few decades. More than a generation has grown up watching the likes of Silence of the Lambs and Kill Bill. The first was a loving homage to the pleasures of psychotic cannibalism; the second included the rape of a nearly paralyzed woman, who killed her assailant by pulling his tongue out with her teeth. Can people who consider such depravity “entertainment” possibly object to anything on moral grounds? I suppose one can be persuaded into different views by humanists like Martin Luther King or intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, but the plain fact is that Howard Stern and Quentin Tarantino create a cruder but more far-reaching form of tolerance by making hash of morality altogether. And religious conservatives are not to be left out in the general brutalization of society. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was nothing more than a sadistic blood orgy for the faithful. Our culture has lost the grounds on which to even think coherently about morality. Atrocity is cool. Little wonder we object so little to having a public policy of torture. The only wonder is that people don’t demand that it be televised.
In the end, I believe the continual creation of upheaval is a very questionable guiding principle on which to found a culture. A culture is, in fact, nothing but a set of constraints that allow people to have stable expectations of one another’s behavior. If these social constraints are too many and too excessive, they may indeed make life a misery – but the utter annihilation of social constraints is the annihilation of society itself. Without rules, even arbitrary ones, we have no culture to defend or even discuss. If you do not care if you offend me, you cannot reasonably expect me to cooperate with you. Societies live in a continual uneasy balance between individual freedom on the one hand, and collective identity and shared standards on the other. Those which overemphasize the latter are oppressive. Those which overemphasize the former are unsustainable.
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1 My wife points out, quite correctly, that black conservatives are the exception to this rule.
I have already offered a perspective on the specific issue of gay marriage in a previous post. I will summarize by saying that, in my view, all marriages and civil unions should be synonymous from the government’s perspective, and should solely entail the recording and oversight of a legal contract. It should not be the government’s role to adjudicate what either is or isn’t a valid sacrament, anymore than it should rule on whether or not the pope is divine, witches should be burned, or the tooth fairy’s gifts should be taxed. If there is a God, he, she or it certainly does not need the government’s help defining what is or isn’t sacred. If there isn’t a God, the government should not enforce the dictates of anyone’s mythology. The US constitution made this a secular country. We are free to entertain, or not to entertain, any religious belief, but not to impose our particular beliefs on our neighbors using the authority of the state as a cudgel. Our head of state is not the head of a state church. If you like that sort of thing, move to England – or better yet, to Iran.
I do not believe there is a god, but I find the exercise of going out of my way to bash the religious right both unproductive and uncivilized. I know full well that nothing I can say is going to change their minds, and that any effort to convert them to my perspective tends to make them feel besieged and erode any common ground that might exist between us. That, frankly, benefits no one. I find that it is perfectly possible for someone to harbor the most flimsy and naïve sort of beliefs and still be a very decent human being. The world, in fact, is full of people like that. I have no doubt that the ill-informed comprise the world’s majority. I have no doubt that under the right circumstance flimsy, naïve ideas can become dangerous ones – but I see all too clearly, too, that to make war on ideas, even incorrect ones, is more than a little dangerous in itself. Anyone who is sure enough of the truth to be willing to impose it on someone else is a fanatic – even if that person actually knows the truth. Soon, the idealist will metamorphose, spontaneously and invisibly, from being an advocate of the truth to being the author of the truth. Human beings, even well-educated ones, are seldom as wise as they think. History is piled thick with the victims of the noblest ideas. Ideas cannot be hurt, perhaps – but flesh and blood invariably can. Doubt is a precious commodity, probably worth more than certainty.
I have nothing against gay or lesbian persons, either as a group or as individuals – at least not on the basis of their sexual orientation alone. I will not say that I have plenty of gay and lesbian friends, because, at least to my knowledge, I don’t. I have had a few acquaintances who were gay, and they were good, bad, or unremarkable in about the same proportion that any random collection of non-gay people are good, bad, or unremarkable. I find gays and lesbians irritating in proportion to their tendency to be true to stereotype, but I also find evangelicals, business people, Appalachians, blacks, New Yorkers, and Californians irritating in proportion to their tendency to be true to stereotype. If one must have an identity, it is usually more ingratiating to at least invent one’s own rather than pulling a one-size-fits all identity off the rack. This, of course, is simply my view and is not intended to be proscriptive. Mildly annoying other people is a privilege no one should be entirely denied.
In discussing the values of a society, though, annoyance is no offhand joke. It is often the crux of the matter. The gay marriage debate is essentially a conflict between those who want the state’s seal of official approval on their relationships and those who want to see, at least at the symbolic level, a measure of official censure imposed on homosexual relationships. This is wholly a cultural conflict, a matter of whose particular set of preferences is going to be favored and whose isn’t.
There is a perception by the left, a part of their cultural narrative, that more tolerance and more equality are always better. They have a marked tendency to keep the concepts of tolerance and equality rather vague, but this is in the nature of any cultural belief. Freedom is a popular buzz word for many cultures around the world, but there are dozens of different definitions of freedom, all substantially different. So it is with tolerance and equality as they are bandied about by the liberals of America. In practice, it means advancing the cause of people would who have the minimum number of certain offending traits. Those offending traits are, typically: being white, being male, being Christian, being affluent, and (now) being heterosexual. You can have two or even three of these traits and still be numbered among enlightened – provided you are prepared to do a public penance of repudiation of your personal and hereditary sins. If you have few or none of these reprehensible traits, you are welcomed into the liberal tribe pretty much without regard to your behavior – even if, ideologically, you’re a conservative.1 Catholic Latinos and misogynist Muslims are Ok. The uneducated will not be invited to the wine and cheese parties of the leadership, of course. As George Orwell astutely observed – “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” – but don’t worry, uneducated tribe members are always on the beneficiaries list. Yes, I know – I should not be so intolerantly mischievous toward the left. I simply cannot help myself. It isn’t that the average conservative is fundamentally smarter or better – it’s just that they’re a little more likely to at least be honest about their basic tribalism, swathing themselves in the usual tribal accoutrements of flags and scriptures, rather than in tired narrative dressed up as scientific truth. Denying the truth is one thing, but inventing it while pretending to be fair and neutral is something else. But I digress.
Supporting gay marriage is not straightforwardly a rational decision. It is simply a cultural one. The arguments for allowing gay marriage are the same as those for gay rights generally. These can be succinctly summarized as a combination of naturalism and the harm principle.
Much has been made of the idea that being homosexual is an innate characteristic of some individuals – like being tall, or having red hair. Since I take the position that we have no free will in any absolute sense, I won’t even argue this point. Whether people are gay because of their genes or because of factors in their life experience, I believe they are gay for fundamentally causal reasons. A thorough acceptance of naturalism must entail that everything is what it is for causal reasons. In this view, the whole idea of moralities based on choice becomes senseless. If it is unfair to deride the homosexual for being homosexual – then it is equally unfair to deride the bigot for being bigoted. Where there is no choice, in an absolute sense, there is no responsibility, in an absolute sense. People simply have the behavioral and moral predispositions they do until external circumstances cause them to acquire different ones. We become unhappy when we discover that the universe has not molded others to be in harmony with our beliefs. This rule applies to both the homosexual and the homophobe. Morality, viewed objectively, is just some congeries of beliefs held in common with a big enough group to constitute a culture.
To cast this in a rather different light (one that does not require that you accept my position on free will) the fact that a characteristic is innate should not, even under some principle of fairness, absolutely preclude a society from condemning it. Consider the case of the serial murderer, Jeffrey Dahmer. The consensus of opinion, even expert opinion, is that Dahmer’s psychopathic tendencies were in some way organic – that nothing in his experience or upbringing could have brought them about. That said, no group of semi-rational jurors, with the facts of seventeen murders laid before them, could have concluded that, since it was not his fault that he liked to murder people, he should have been set free to do it again. Any society that hopes to survive must be prepared to protect itself against established threats – whether the threatening individuals are acting by choice or not. This is not to say that gay marriage in particular, or homosexuality in general, are proven threats. It is to say that the matter of whether or not gays have any choice about their orientation should not be the final desiderata of their status. In fact, the matter of whether or not homosexuality really does pose any sort of threat to the survival of society would be difficult to determine, and in practice no one tries. The culture of the left just knows it doesn’t and the culture of the right just knows it does. Tribal knowledge prevails in either case.
Let’s now move on the mushy old harm principle:
According to J.S. Mill:
“…the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others… …Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
The argument for gay marriage, then, would be that it harms no one and should therefore be allowed. I have already stated that a pluralistic secular government cannot justifiably limit any individual’s right to define his or her own relationships in whatever mystical terms one happens to chose, nor should such a government curtail an individual’s worship of imaginary beings – provided, I suppose, that such imaginary beings do not require frequent sacrifices in non-imaginary human blood. To codify a relationship in any extralegal sense – to say that it either is or isn’t a sacrament – is to create an official state culture. This certainly interferes with exactly the individual liberty that Mill was concerned about.
A thorough application of the harm principle would, however, produce consequences much more far reaching than a tolerance of gay marriage. I think we have to assume that Mill did not consider merely offending someone as causing them harm. If offense is harm, then authority is justified in banning any activity with causes anyone offense. Since the act of banning the activity will probably cause offence to the person whose pet behavior is banned, we reach an impasse very quickly. Such impasses, of course, have really occurred. To insult a recognized minority is hate speech, but to stage a gay pride parade in front of a Catholic church on Easter Sunday cannot be any less an exercise of hate. Offensive as both activities might be, invoking the harm principle to censure only one or the other is hypocritical. Censuring every conceivable offence, on the other hand, would be unbelievably oppressive and, thankfully, impossible.
If harm only means physical harm, we are on at least a little better ground. Though one can find impasses and definitional problems here too, at least they don’t crop up in practically every case. All right then, if Carla and Susan want to get married, that doesn’t cause me or anyone else any obvious physical harm – and anyone who wants to say it does is going to have quite a difficult case to make. I think one should always be free to argue such a case, but “my deity will smite us if we allow it” doesn’t constitute much of a start for me. Of course, if we are drawing the line there, I am free to follow Carla and Susan around and shriek insults at them all day for any reason or no reason, and authority has no right to stop me as I am causing them no physical harm. I’d feel like a pig and my throat would get sore, but neither of those eventualities have any bearing on the harm principle.
Drawing the line at physical harm has plenty of other ramifications too. Take the case of the avid nudist. Many have expressed the feeling that they find clothing both dishonest and constrictive. If the harm principle is to guide us, public nudity should never be officially constrained. Seeing a person nude does not cause anyone physical harm. What argument could one make in favor of requiring people to wear clothing in public? Public nudity violates tradition or community standards? Please – that’s merely a bigoted, intolerant view. You don’t want your kids to be exposed to nude adults, perhaps leering at them from the edge of the playground? Well, if they feel shocked or threatened it is only because you raised them to be narrow-minded; that is not the fault of the nudist. And you can obviously forget the argument that nudism is unnatural. Neither can you argue that, while unrestrained nudism might be fine in principle, society is just not ready for it at this time. The harm principle abhors such flimsy rationalization. Public nudity now, public nudity tomorrow, public nudity forever. Prudes and bigots can all move to somewhere cold.
Public nudity is really only the mildest of examples one might use. Forgive me if the following strikes you as tasteless, but we cannot be squeamish over matters of high principle. Bestiality, indeed public bestiality, would also prove unassailable under a rigorous application of the harm principle. I argued this point to a friend once. He was trying to make a philosophical justification for the normalization of homosexuality that would not equally justify a broad range of other behaviors, many of which he personally found offensive. His initial argument against bestiality was that it constituted a physical imposition on the animal. This is insufficient. Some animals, so I hear, are willing to interact with humans in that fashion. Then he insisted that animals lack the intellectual capacity to consent. This is certainly a debatable claim, but even if I were to accept it without argument it must also be true that cats do not consent to be declawed, horses do not consent to be ridden, and pigs certainly don’t consent to being eaten. Am I to accept, from a free-thinking, sexually-tolerant liberal that there is something special about sex that needs to be constrained, but the life or death of an animal is a matter to be shrugged? People who invoke the harm principle invariably use it to justify whatever particular behavior they would like to promote or engage in, but not to justify the full range of behaviors that it must ultimately allow.
My position is not that homosexuals are no different than bestiaphiles, but that determining what behaviors are acceptable or unacceptable is a cultural matter, and not an impartial evaluation. Societies have existed that have tolerated or encouraged practically the full gamut of possible human behaviors. Genes may change slowly, but societies are much more plastic. My objection to the current thrust of change in western society is not that all the changes are “bad” in any absolute sense, but that all of the changes are cloaked in a protective halo of kindness, fairness, and inevitability are not rationally justified. To begin with, unlimited tolerance and anti-traditionalism are mutually exclusive. Saying everybody in the global village is just fine, except for western conservatives, simply cannot be an objectively rational position.
Considered from a very general and rather abstract perspective, contemporary western liberalism is neither a movement toward fairness nor equality, but simply a movement to reject traditional norms. It is a social movement whose end product in continual upheaval. If western liberalism were truly rooted in the principles of fairness and equality, it would not have spawned affirmative action, which is discriminatory on its face. It would not have created the new category of hate crimes, which in effect make the lives, or even emotional sensitivities, of certain designated minorities more important under the law than the lives and sensitivities of those who are not so designated. Contemporary western liberalism does not protect the individual, for it is the consistent advocate of the sacrifice of individual rights for the sake of redressing historical wrongs inflicted on particular collective groups. While it is true that blacks continue to suffer from the disadvantages of poverty and poor education, it is hard to imagine white Appalachians suffer any less from those conditions – yet they are part of the enemy camp, so there are no affirmative action programs or protective hate crimes laws for them. How can this be fair or equal?
It would be easy to convince oneself that my earlier examples of public nudity and bestiality were merely offensive rhetoric, and that such outlandish things would never be advocated by anyone other than the occasional crank. Given the nature of contemporary liberalism’s anti-traditional thrust, however, these things are serious possibilities. Imagine you could go back in time, and tell the serious, dignified, well-dressed and well-mannered civil rights marchers in Memphis that the lineal descendents of their movement would be protesting for the rights of homosexuals to marry one another. They would have been both incredulous and deeply offended. As the culture changes, for whatever reason, we get used to things that our parents or grandparents would have found unthinkable. Perhaps our descendents will not give a second thought to seeing neighbor humping fido in front of his house. Historically, people have become indifferent to far more harmful and even more peculiar behavior. And, as time progresses, it will certainly require a higher threshold of deviation to offend the increasingly numbed and fatigued fraction of the population that would have to fill the role of the conservative enemy.
It is fair to say that, already, much of what is seen by the left as positive change in our culture is more the product of moral fatigue than humane impulse. Consider the products of our entertainment industry in the last few decades. More than a generation has grown up watching the likes of Silence of the Lambs and Kill Bill. The first was a loving homage to the pleasures of psychotic cannibalism; the second included the rape of a nearly paralyzed woman, who killed her assailant by pulling his tongue out with her teeth. Can people who consider such depravity “entertainment” possibly object to anything on moral grounds? I suppose one can be persuaded into different views by humanists like Martin Luther King or intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, but the plain fact is that Howard Stern and Quentin Tarantino create a cruder but more far-reaching form of tolerance by making hash of morality altogether. And religious conservatives are not to be left out in the general brutalization of society. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was nothing more than a sadistic blood orgy for the faithful. Our culture has lost the grounds on which to even think coherently about morality. Atrocity is cool. Little wonder we object so little to having a public policy of torture. The only wonder is that people don’t demand that it be televised.
In the end, I believe the continual creation of upheaval is a very questionable guiding principle on which to found a culture. A culture is, in fact, nothing but a set of constraints that allow people to have stable expectations of one another’s behavior. If these social constraints are too many and too excessive, they may indeed make life a misery – but the utter annihilation of social constraints is the annihilation of society itself. Without rules, even arbitrary ones, we have no culture to defend or even discuss. If you do not care if you offend me, you cannot reasonably expect me to cooperate with you. Societies live in a continual uneasy balance between individual freedom on the one hand, and collective identity and shared standards on the other. Those which overemphasize the latter are oppressive. Those which overemphasize the former are unsustainable.
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1 My wife points out, quite correctly, that black conservatives are the exception to this rule.
May 22, 2012
May 21, 2012
Torture, civil liberty, and the post-modern police state
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”
-- The words of an anonymous German academic interviewed after the fall of Nazi Germany, from “They Thought They Were Free” by Milton Mayer.
Comparisons between Nazi Germany and whatever authority one disagrees with have unfortunately long since become cliché. For that reason, I hesitate to even make such a comparison. However, if history is to do us any real good, beyond giving us a sense of identity and providing some context for our war memorials, we need to be willing to take it seriously, to detect trends, and to accept that we ourselves are not immune to the errors that others have committed.
Mark Twain once said: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” That is a truth. It rhymes because it is made by human beings, and there are certain constants in the nature of human beings, both as individuals and as whole societies. To be sure, 1930’s Germany and contemporary America are different in innumerable respects. Cultures vary. American culture, in all its many forms, is more individualistic than Germany’s was – though it is probably far less individualistic than it was fifty years ago. We have spent several generations confusing petty forms of self expression with meaningful individual liberty. We are not really free because we can have different cell phones in different colors, but because we can live independently by our own means, make our own decisions, and dispose of the fruits of our labor largely as we see fit. Unlike the Germans, the idea of democracy isn’t innately suspect to us. When I went to school, at least, we were still indoctrinated with the rather optimistic notion that, in America, it is the people themselves who ultimately rule. The Germans mistrusted this idea. They were used to being ruled by one authoritarian figure or another. I am not sure what American public school students, let alone the home schooled, are taught now. I shudder to imagine.
The quote that begins this essay caught my attention because, if you omit the word “Hitler,” it applies to current conditions in America in every detail. Since 9/11, the relationship between the people and the government has substantially changed. The beginnings of this change occurred much earlier, but 9/11 was a watershed moment in US history – a point at which we began to consider many of our cultural values, and even our laws, irrelevant and old fashioned.
There are many aspects to this transformation, but I am not up to the task of discussing them all. In general, I will say that there are few clean hands in this murder of our rights and our ideals. It is not a partisan matter – a problem of just getting the right party into office. Both parties have been complicit in the process. To understand, we need to open our eyes and take an honest look back. If one must single out a particular issue, US policy (and attitudes) regarding torture is a good point of reference. More generally, one should consider what rights one really has in light of what two administrations since 9/11 have shown themselves prepared to do.
In discussing the question of torture, I cannot just lay out some simple litany of facts. It is not that kind of subject. I was raised during the Cold War. In that era, the Soviet Union, unlike Al Qaeda, really did pose an existential threat to the United States. They had thousands of nuclear weapons and might have used them against us at any time. Occasionally, we would catch one of their spies. I do not know whether we tortured them or not. It is possible that we did. The stakes were high, and in the real world these things do occur. I do know, however, that during the Cold War we did not have a public policy of torture. It was the Soviets, we were told – not we Americans, who engaged in torture as a matter of course.
In school, I was taught that this was one of the distinctions between the Soviets and ourselves – that they used torture, ran secret gulags, conducted arrests without warrants and imprisonment without trials – and America did not. Even as a teenager, I did not believe the story was quite that simple. I knew that plenty of brutal things had been done by Americans. We are not a nation of angels. There were awful atrocities during the Indian wars, certainly. Awful things also happened in World War II. I have a distant relative who saw a group of Japanese POW’s crushed to death by an American bulldozer, not for any better reason than pure sadism. Still, while atrocities do happen, especially in war since violence is the nature of war, at least we never tortured prisoners as a matter of official policy. Our laws, at least, were better than that – even if we as individuals might not be.
When I saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison (by open acknowledgement, not the worst of the pictures taken) I was not as shocked as perhaps I should have been. A knowledge of history tends to make brutality unsurprising. In time, however, one can and should reflect. Even the most ardent supporter of what is now euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation” has to admit that a nation either uses torture as an instrument of policy or it doesn’t. They must admit that Canada, for example, or Denmark, surely have not employed torture in a very long time – and that America, China, North Korea, and Soviet Russia have. Nazi Germany tortured people. Human beings. You cannot change the nature of something just by giving it a different name. Dick Cheney promised we would do things “on the dark side”. He kept his promise. Events at Abu Ghraib were blamed on a handful of underlings, of course. The contractors who ran things scurried away. The men at the top expressed appropriate shock. And, worst of all, we all got quickly used to it. Somehow, while we went about our mundane lives, our nation of enlightened ideals had become something else. Something less admirable. This cannot be rationally denied.
It can, of course, be irrationally denied. George Bush told us that Americans don’t torture. Period. We’re the good guys, after all. New definitions had been written which made torture practically non-existent. Under such definitions (that only “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death” constituted torture) quite a few Nazi war criminals would have been acquitted. The Spanish Inquisition believed “water-boarding” was torture and its inquisitors would probably have laughed at any assertion that it wasn’t.
We were also told that the number of people tortured was really very small, and that, really, they were “the worst of the worst.” I doubt the practice was so carefully confined, but even if it was it still rhymes uncomfortably with the past. It should be remembered that the Nazis, in their own view, where only killing vermin. The Soviets, for their part, were only punishing “the enemies of the people.” “The worst of the worst,” in other words.
Then there was the argument that torture gets results. Well, perhaps it sometimes does. We do not, however, authorize our police to torture ordinary criminal suspects or, perhaps, reluctant witnesses – though it might significantly reduce the rate of crime. In any American city you can find “the worst of the worst,” – US citizens that murder and abuse the weak and innocent – and yet we do not water-board them, even if they might have information that would implicate others. Among other reasons, we do not care to entrust the police with a power they might, under unforeseen circumstances, be authorized to use against us. We do not care to have domestic tranquility at the price of a police state. This is America, not the Soviet Union – right?
The rights of a citizen, unfortunately, are only as inviolable as authority’s respect for those rights. It has been said that what the law allows, it encourages. When the government legalizes the torture of one group, no matter how heinous, it makes torture itself a righteous activity rather than an abhorrent one. It becomes a part of government’s repertoire of possibilities. I can think of no government that has legalized the use of torture against foreigners that did not eventually employ it against its own citizens. That so many Americans just accept that these are special times and that such things are not only necessary but commendable shows a lamentable ignorance of history – to say the very least.
The Bush administration may have ended but its legacy has not. Many people, both in the US and elsewhere, heaved a great sign of relief as Barack Obama took his oath of office. Those who were paying attention were soon disappointed.
Obama’s response to the abuses of the Bush administration was to sweep them under the rug. Those who ran the secret prisons, and who engaged in torture, were given a pass. “A time for reconciliation, not for retribution.” No one was punished. The deeds of the past went unrepudiated. Few laws were changed, although most (but not all) of the objectionable parts of the Patriot act were allowed to quietly expire. Gitmo remained in operation. The Imperial Presidency remained in force, the current emperor deigning not to endorse the crudity of officially sanctioned torture – for now. Officials changed, and the destruction of the rule of law proceeded in new directions more palatable to the American left.
In general, the tendency of the Bush administration had been to bypass Congress and use the Justice Department to create new laws. In general, the tendency of the Obama administration is to ignore the law whenever its limitations are inconvenient. Neither administration, though, has felt itself entirely bound by the existing law. Each new administration enforces the laws it likes and ignores the ones it doesn’t. Presidents are less constrained by the Constitution now than they are by fleeting political considerations. We have been reduced from a nation of laws to a nation of street politics. This, too, is a continuation of the old historical rhyme.
Obama is no Hitler. Hitler, for all his many faults, at least knew how to deal with unemployment. However, it is true that both men were essentially street agitators – men of oratorical gifts rather than men of any particular foresight. It is inescapable, too, that both are (or were) cult figures. I used to think that the adoration showered on Ronald Reagan was distasteful and excessive. Obama has not been merely adored, but practically deified. In his first year of office he was awarded a Nobel Prize, not for any recognizable accomplishment, but out of sheer emotional fervor on the part of the prize committee. Almost immediately after the election, bookstores sprouted children’s books about, and sometimes by, Barack Obama. Recently, a filmmaker who produced a documentary about the president stated that the man’s only fault was that he was too perfect – one could not begin to enumerate all of his virtues. George W. Bush looked entirely foolish when he couldn’t think of a single thing that he himself had done wrong while in office, but even his supporters had to wince when he said this. Obama’s supporters never seem to wince. To doubt would be a sort of secular blasphemy. The American left now lies somewhere on the continuum between infatuated teenagers and the slavish subjects of the late Kim Jong Il. These are not healthy attitudes for the people of a republic. In America, isn’t it supposed to be the people who ultimately rule? To love any leader uncritically and unquestioningly is to be unfit to cast a vote as a responsible citizen.
Entrenchment and expansion of the police powers of the state have not been neglected by the Obama administration either. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 affirms and expands the powers granted previously under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2002). This allows the president to use the armed forces to detain, indefinitely and without trial, anyone who commits a “belligerent act” against the United States or its allies in aid of enemy forces. Since any action that creates disorder in wartime can be construed as aiding Al Qaeda, the possibilities here are sobering. Is criticizing the commander-in-chief a “belligerent act”? Or blocking a street by protesting? Certainly, it could be.
Obama signed this bill into law, with feigned reluctance after an obligatory apache dance with the senate. He will never use it against the public, he says – not that his promise is in any way legally binding. What will happen after his reign? Well… who knows? C’est la guerre. An emergency measure. Don’t worry.
Then we have the interesting case of Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki was a Yemeni imam who was undoubtedly and openly supporting terrorist activities against the US. He was also a US citizen. The Constitution and subsequent interpretations thereof create a problem here. US citizens can be tried for treason, and convicting Awlaki would probably not have been a particular legal challenge, but he was in hiding in Yemen and could not be easily arrested and brought to trial. US citizens cannot be tried and convicted in absentia. There is little question that Awlaki’s actions were treasonous (he was both advocating terrorism against the US and recruiting terrorists), but, legally, he was entitled to due process of law. What was needed, clearly, was a very narrowly-defined Constitutional amendment to cope with the realities of just this sort of circumstance. Perhaps an exception to the ruling against trials in absentia, just in cases in which the accused is living in a hostile county overseas to elude capture. It is difficult to believe that many of the state legislatures of the US would have opposed such a narrow amendment, and we have had a decade since 9/11 in which to debate the matter. And, if the state legislatures would have opposed such an amendment – sobeit. If the Constitutional process produces a “no,” we have some semblance of the public’s will and we should live with the consequences. The Obama administration got around this tricky legal question with a drone attack. They openly had Awlaki killed. If the US Constitution provides for the contingency of a trial for treason, it is safe to say that it disallows the summary execution of a citizen. If citizens lack the right to some form of due process before being deprived of their right of life, then they really have no rights whatsoever. The Obama administration knew full well that the conservative media would applaud the death of an enemy and the liberal media would not be long distracted from their expressions of devoted and undying love. A few would quibble, as I am doing now, but not enough to matter. No one important. Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, called this “Realpolitik” – practical politics. “Political power,” said Mao Tse Tung, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
We also have the case of Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst who gave classified material to WikiLeaks. Whether one approves of WikiLeaks or not, if Manning passed them the information he is being accused of, it was almost unquestionably an act of treason. It is also true that the military is not bound by every aspect of civil law, nor can it or should it be. That being said, Manning’s treatment while in custody at the Marine Corps base at Quantico was gratuitously harsh. While not physically tortured, he was deprived of sleep and clothing, and put in solitary confinement for a considerable period without any credible justification for this treatment being given. This is cruelty neither in the service of interrogation, nor even in the service of deterring others, but simply as a form of retribution in advance of any trial. The president and his administration knew full well that this was going on. But this is realpolitik again. Maybe a handful of civil libertarians cared – people who understand the danger of pushing the limits to which the state may inflict suffering upon the individual – but no one else minded much. What’s a little discomfort for a traitor, compared to an illusion of security or the right of gays to join the military – depending on where you happen to be on the political spectrum? One man, out of sight and out of mind, for whom it would have been politically inconvenient for the president to lift his godlike finger. Manning was moved to better quarters only when enough civil libertarians made enough noise to change the political calculation of the moment in his favor.
Finally, we come to the seemingly innocuous H.R. 347. This new law, another subtle alteration of an old one, curtails our first amendment rights at the convenience of the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security. Under this law, in principle, if you heckle the president or anyone else the Secret Service is protecting you could be liable for a year in Federal prison. If you trespass, even unknowingly, into an area temporarily restricted by these agencies you could suffer the same fate. The elected officials, it would seem, are prepared to protect their own security at the expense of our freedom. This law could criminalize OWS and the Tea Party alike. It depends on who wants to use it – and for what.
All of us march together toward this abyss. Together, we go angrily – screaming at one another – but we go blindly nevertheless, complacent in our convictions that our side is right and will protect us from the other side, which is wholly and completely evil. This, too, rhymes. Germany had the Nazis on the one side and the Communists on the other.
While mulling over a final paragraph for this post, I happen to catch a news story on the television. Congress has approved the use of surveillance drones by police agencies inside the US, and the Pentagon granted itself the right to use them to spy on US citizens. This is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids the US from using the military to police the public without a specific act of Congress. Several law enforcement agencies, who already use drones, have discussed the possibility of putting weapons on them.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes.”
I rest my case.
________________________________________________
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012
Bradley Manning detention
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning
H.R. 347
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr347enr/pdf/BILLS-112hr347enr.pdf
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/how-big-deal-hr-347-criminalizing-protest-bill
Drones
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/13/business/la-fi-military-drones-20120214
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”
-- The words of an anonymous German academic interviewed after the fall of Nazi Germany, from “They Thought They Were Free” by Milton Mayer.
Comparisons between Nazi Germany and whatever authority one disagrees with have unfortunately long since become cliché. For that reason, I hesitate to even make such a comparison. However, if history is to do us any real good, beyond giving us a sense of identity and providing some context for our war memorials, we need to be willing to take it seriously, to detect trends, and to accept that we ourselves are not immune to the errors that others have committed.
Mark Twain once said: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” That is a truth. It rhymes because it is made by human beings, and there are certain constants in the nature of human beings, both as individuals and as whole societies. To be sure, 1930’s Germany and contemporary America are different in innumerable respects. Cultures vary. American culture, in all its many forms, is more individualistic than Germany’s was – though it is probably far less individualistic than it was fifty years ago. We have spent several generations confusing petty forms of self expression with meaningful individual liberty. We are not really free because we can have different cell phones in different colors, but because we can live independently by our own means, make our own decisions, and dispose of the fruits of our labor largely as we see fit. Unlike the Germans, the idea of democracy isn’t innately suspect to us. When I went to school, at least, we were still indoctrinated with the rather optimistic notion that, in America, it is the people themselves who ultimately rule. The Germans mistrusted this idea. They were used to being ruled by one authoritarian figure or another. I am not sure what American public school students, let alone the home schooled, are taught now. I shudder to imagine.
The quote that begins this essay caught my attention because, if you omit the word “Hitler,” it applies to current conditions in America in every detail. Since 9/11, the relationship between the people and the government has substantially changed. The beginnings of this change occurred much earlier, but 9/11 was a watershed moment in US history – a point at which we began to consider many of our cultural values, and even our laws, irrelevant and old fashioned.
There are many aspects to this transformation, but I am not up to the task of discussing them all. In general, I will say that there are few clean hands in this murder of our rights and our ideals. It is not a partisan matter – a problem of just getting the right party into office. Both parties have been complicit in the process. To understand, we need to open our eyes and take an honest look back. If one must single out a particular issue, US policy (and attitudes) regarding torture is a good point of reference. More generally, one should consider what rights one really has in light of what two administrations since 9/11 have shown themselves prepared to do.
In discussing the question of torture, I cannot just lay out some simple litany of facts. It is not that kind of subject. I was raised during the Cold War. In that era, the Soviet Union, unlike Al Qaeda, really did pose an existential threat to the United States. They had thousands of nuclear weapons and might have used them against us at any time. Occasionally, we would catch one of their spies. I do not know whether we tortured them or not. It is possible that we did. The stakes were high, and in the real world these things do occur. I do know, however, that during the Cold War we did not have a public policy of torture. It was the Soviets, we were told – not we Americans, who engaged in torture as a matter of course.
In school, I was taught that this was one of the distinctions between the Soviets and ourselves – that they used torture, ran secret gulags, conducted arrests without warrants and imprisonment without trials – and America did not. Even as a teenager, I did not believe the story was quite that simple. I knew that plenty of brutal things had been done by Americans. We are not a nation of angels. There were awful atrocities during the Indian wars, certainly. Awful things also happened in World War II. I have a distant relative who saw a group of Japanese POW’s crushed to death by an American bulldozer, not for any better reason than pure sadism. Still, while atrocities do happen, especially in war since violence is the nature of war, at least we never tortured prisoners as a matter of official policy. Our laws, at least, were better than that – even if we as individuals might not be.
When I saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison (by open acknowledgement, not the worst of the pictures taken) I was not as shocked as perhaps I should have been. A knowledge of history tends to make brutality unsurprising. In time, however, one can and should reflect. Even the most ardent supporter of what is now euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation” has to admit that a nation either uses torture as an instrument of policy or it doesn’t. They must admit that Canada, for example, or Denmark, surely have not employed torture in a very long time – and that America, China, North Korea, and Soviet Russia have. Nazi Germany tortured people. Human beings. You cannot change the nature of something just by giving it a different name. Dick Cheney promised we would do things “on the dark side”. He kept his promise. Events at Abu Ghraib were blamed on a handful of underlings, of course. The contractors who ran things scurried away. The men at the top expressed appropriate shock. And, worst of all, we all got quickly used to it. Somehow, while we went about our mundane lives, our nation of enlightened ideals had become something else. Something less admirable. This cannot be rationally denied.
It can, of course, be irrationally denied. George Bush told us that Americans don’t torture. Period. We’re the good guys, after all. New definitions had been written which made torture practically non-existent. Under such definitions (that only “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death” constituted torture) quite a few Nazi war criminals would have been acquitted. The Spanish Inquisition believed “water-boarding” was torture and its inquisitors would probably have laughed at any assertion that it wasn’t.
We were also told that the number of people tortured was really very small, and that, really, they were “the worst of the worst.” I doubt the practice was so carefully confined, but even if it was it still rhymes uncomfortably with the past. It should be remembered that the Nazis, in their own view, where only killing vermin. The Soviets, for their part, were only punishing “the enemies of the people.” “The worst of the worst,” in other words.
Then there was the argument that torture gets results. Well, perhaps it sometimes does. We do not, however, authorize our police to torture ordinary criminal suspects or, perhaps, reluctant witnesses – though it might significantly reduce the rate of crime. In any American city you can find “the worst of the worst,” – US citizens that murder and abuse the weak and innocent – and yet we do not water-board them, even if they might have information that would implicate others. Among other reasons, we do not care to entrust the police with a power they might, under unforeseen circumstances, be authorized to use against us. We do not care to have domestic tranquility at the price of a police state. This is America, not the Soviet Union – right?
The rights of a citizen, unfortunately, are only as inviolable as authority’s respect for those rights. It has been said that what the law allows, it encourages. When the government legalizes the torture of one group, no matter how heinous, it makes torture itself a righteous activity rather than an abhorrent one. It becomes a part of government’s repertoire of possibilities. I can think of no government that has legalized the use of torture against foreigners that did not eventually employ it against its own citizens. That so many Americans just accept that these are special times and that such things are not only necessary but commendable shows a lamentable ignorance of history – to say the very least.
The Bush administration may have ended but its legacy has not. Many people, both in the US and elsewhere, heaved a great sign of relief as Barack Obama took his oath of office. Those who were paying attention were soon disappointed.
Obama’s response to the abuses of the Bush administration was to sweep them under the rug. Those who ran the secret prisons, and who engaged in torture, were given a pass. “A time for reconciliation, not for retribution.” No one was punished. The deeds of the past went unrepudiated. Few laws were changed, although most (but not all) of the objectionable parts of the Patriot act were allowed to quietly expire. Gitmo remained in operation. The Imperial Presidency remained in force, the current emperor deigning not to endorse the crudity of officially sanctioned torture – for now. Officials changed, and the destruction of the rule of law proceeded in new directions more palatable to the American left.
In general, the tendency of the Bush administration had been to bypass Congress and use the Justice Department to create new laws. In general, the tendency of the Obama administration is to ignore the law whenever its limitations are inconvenient. Neither administration, though, has felt itself entirely bound by the existing law. Each new administration enforces the laws it likes and ignores the ones it doesn’t. Presidents are less constrained by the Constitution now than they are by fleeting political considerations. We have been reduced from a nation of laws to a nation of street politics. This, too, is a continuation of the old historical rhyme.
Obama is no Hitler. Hitler, for all his many faults, at least knew how to deal with unemployment. However, it is true that both men were essentially street agitators – men of oratorical gifts rather than men of any particular foresight. It is inescapable, too, that both are (or were) cult figures. I used to think that the adoration showered on Ronald Reagan was distasteful and excessive. Obama has not been merely adored, but practically deified. In his first year of office he was awarded a Nobel Prize, not for any recognizable accomplishment, but out of sheer emotional fervor on the part of the prize committee. Almost immediately after the election, bookstores sprouted children’s books about, and sometimes by, Barack Obama. Recently, a filmmaker who produced a documentary about the president stated that the man’s only fault was that he was too perfect – one could not begin to enumerate all of his virtues. George W. Bush looked entirely foolish when he couldn’t think of a single thing that he himself had done wrong while in office, but even his supporters had to wince when he said this. Obama’s supporters never seem to wince. To doubt would be a sort of secular blasphemy. The American left now lies somewhere on the continuum between infatuated teenagers and the slavish subjects of the late Kim Jong Il. These are not healthy attitudes for the people of a republic. In America, isn’t it supposed to be the people who ultimately rule? To love any leader uncritically and unquestioningly is to be unfit to cast a vote as a responsible citizen.
Entrenchment and expansion of the police powers of the state have not been neglected by the Obama administration either. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 affirms and expands the powers granted previously under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2002). This allows the president to use the armed forces to detain, indefinitely and without trial, anyone who commits a “belligerent act” against the United States or its allies in aid of enemy forces. Since any action that creates disorder in wartime can be construed as aiding Al Qaeda, the possibilities here are sobering. Is criticizing the commander-in-chief a “belligerent act”? Or blocking a street by protesting? Certainly, it could be.
Obama signed this bill into law, with feigned reluctance after an obligatory apache dance with the senate. He will never use it against the public, he says – not that his promise is in any way legally binding. What will happen after his reign? Well… who knows? C’est la guerre. An emergency measure. Don’t worry.
Then we have the interesting case of Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki was a Yemeni imam who was undoubtedly and openly supporting terrorist activities against the US. He was also a US citizen. The Constitution and subsequent interpretations thereof create a problem here. US citizens can be tried for treason, and convicting Awlaki would probably not have been a particular legal challenge, but he was in hiding in Yemen and could not be easily arrested and brought to trial. US citizens cannot be tried and convicted in absentia. There is little question that Awlaki’s actions were treasonous (he was both advocating terrorism against the US and recruiting terrorists), but, legally, he was entitled to due process of law. What was needed, clearly, was a very narrowly-defined Constitutional amendment to cope with the realities of just this sort of circumstance. Perhaps an exception to the ruling against trials in absentia, just in cases in which the accused is living in a hostile county overseas to elude capture. It is difficult to believe that many of the state legislatures of the US would have opposed such a narrow amendment, and we have had a decade since 9/11 in which to debate the matter. And, if the state legislatures would have opposed such an amendment – sobeit. If the Constitutional process produces a “no,” we have some semblance of the public’s will and we should live with the consequences. The Obama administration got around this tricky legal question with a drone attack. They openly had Awlaki killed. If the US Constitution provides for the contingency of a trial for treason, it is safe to say that it disallows the summary execution of a citizen. If citizens lack the right to some form of due process before being deprived of their right of life, then they really have no rights whatsoever. The Obama administration knew full well that the conservative media would applaud the death of an enemy and the liberal media would not be long distracted from their expressions of devoted and undying love. A few would quibble, as I am doing now, but not enough to matter. No one important. Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, called this “Realpolitik” – practical politics. “Political power,” said Mao Tse Tung, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
We also have the case of Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst who gave classified material to WikiLeaks. Whether one approves of WikiLeaks or not, if Manning passed them the information he is being accused of, it was almost unquestionably an act of treason. It is also true that the military is not bound by every aspect of civil law, nor can it or should it be. That being said, Manning’s treatment while in custody at the Marine Corps base at Quantico was gratuitously harsh. While not physically tortured, he was deprived of sleep and clothing, and put in solitary confinement for a considerable period without any credible justification for this treatment being given. This is cruelty neither in the service of interrogation, nor even in the service of deterring others, but simply as a form of retribution in advance of any trial. The president and his administration knew full well that this was going on. But this is realpolitik again. Maybe a handful of civil libertarians cared – people who understand the danger of pushing the limits to which the state may inflict suffering upon the individual – but no one else minded much. What’s a little discomfort for a traitor, compared to an illusion of security or the right of gays to join the military – depending on where you happen to be on the political spectrum? One man, out of sight and out of mind, for whom it would have been politically inconvenient for the president to lift his godlike finger. Manning was moved to better quarters only when enough civil libertarians made enough noise to change the political calculation of the moment in his favor.
Finally, we come to the seemingly innocuous H.R. 347. This new law, another subtle alteration of an old one, curtails our first amendment rights at the convenience of the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security. Under this law, in principle, if you heckle the president or anyone else the Secret Service is protecting you could be liable for a year in Federal prison. If you trespass, even unknowingly, into an area temporarily restricted by these agencies you could suffer the same fate. The elected officials, it would seem, are prepared to protect their own security at the expense of our freedom. This law could criminalize OWS and the Tea Party alike. It depends on who wants to use it – and for what.
All of us march together toward this abyss. Together, we go angrily – screaming at one another – but we go blindly nevertheless, complacent in our convictions that our side is right and will protect us from the other side, which is wholly and completely evil. This, too, rhymes. Germany had the Nazis on the one side and the Communists on the other.
While mulling over a final paragraph for this post, I happen to catch a news story on the television. Congress has approved the use of surveillance drones by police agencies inside the US, and the Pentagon granted itself the right to use them to spy on US citizens. This is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids the US from using the military to police the public without a specific act of Congress. Several law enforcement agencies, who already use drones, have discussed the possibility of putting weapons on them.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes.”
I rest my case.
________________________________________________
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012
Bradley Manning detention
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning
H.R. 347
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr347enr/pdf/BILLS-112hr347enr.pdf
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/how-big-deal-hr-347-criminalizing-protest-bill
Drones
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/13/business/la-fi-military-drones-20120214
May 8, 2012
Occupy Wall Street Update #2
An OWS participant was recently arrested for terrorist activity in Cleveland.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/05/terror_suspect_signed_lease_on.html
This is more-or-less the sort of thing that I predicted in my previous update on OWS. The event does not condemn the entire movement down to its last, most innocent member as a group of terrorists, but it does say something about the character of OWS as a mass movement. This is to say, that if you chant for the overthrow of capitalism in particular and authority in general, you should not be too surprised if a few people in the crowd want to push the envelope a little farther than just shouting slogans at each other. Any outpouring of popular anger gives encouragement to those people who, for one reason or another, take a sheer delight in wreaking havoc. This is simply a fact. I am not sure how creating panic around a Cleveland bridge would have brought down the capitalist system, but I’m pretty sure it would have given a great deal of emotional satisfaction to the perpetrators. Arsonists and bombers always enjoy their avocation.
OWS lacks any coherent visible leadership, and so cannot repudiate such actions. They seem to be a heterogeneous mass of the dissatisfied and disaffected, seasoned with the familiar teaspoon of the plainly antisocial. Non-violence is an attitude of some participants in OWS events, perhaps even of most of them, but not a characteristic of the movement as a whole. Members of movement can no more claim their group is opposed to violence -- but embraces the New Black Panther Party and Anonymous -- than a person could claim not to be anti-Semitic but embrace the neo-Nazis and the KKK.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/05/terror_suspect_signed_lease_on.html
This is more-or-less the sort of thing that I predicted in my previous update on OWS. The event does not condemn the entire movement down to its last, most innocent member as a group of terrorists, but it does say something about the character of OWS as a mass movement. This is to say, that if you chant for the overthrow of capitalism in particular and authority in general, you should not be too surprised if a few people in the crowd want to push the envelope a little farther than just shouting slogans at each other. Any outpouring of popular anger gives encouragement to those people who, for one reason or another, take a sheer delight in wreaking havoc. This is simply a fact. I am not sure how creating panic around a Cleveland bridge would have brought down the capitalist system, but I’m pretty sure it would have given a great deal of emotional satisfaction to the perpetrators. Arsonists and bombers always enjoy their avocation.
OWS lacks any coherent visible leadership, and so cannot repudiate such actions. They seem to be a heterogeneous mass of the dissatisfied and disaffected, seasoned with the familiar teaspoon of the plainly antisocial. Non-violence is an attitude of some participants in OWS events, perhaps even of most of them, but not a characteristic of the movement as a whole. Members of movement can no more claim their group is opposed to violence -- but embraces the New Black Panther Party and Anonymous -- than a person could claim not to be anti-Semitic but embrace the neo-Nazis and the KKK.
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