Posted Saturday, May 17 Nussbaum On Grotius A thought-experiment. Suppose there was a cop. Let's make that a crazy cop. A slightly crazy cop. Think Harvey Keitel in some movie called Slightly Bad Lieutenant. We'll call our cop G. He's got it in for this other guy, S, who is unquestionably a criminal. A bad dude. Not clear what the source of the bad blood is between G and S, exactly. Maybe something going way back. (G's dad, also named G, was a cop, too; had a run-in with S that did not conclude to either's complete satisfaction.) Anyway, the criminal, S, is thought to be guilty of big-time drug dealing and - oh, let's say - severe serial brutilization of his own large family: beating and torturing and killing many girlfriends and kids. He hasn't, however, done anything egregiously, publically awful lately (that anyone knows about); and the boys downtown can't be bothered about him just right this year. So G goes to the judge with a pretext for a warrant for kicking in S's door. Just makes it up, from beginning to end. Fake. Lies. Bogus. Anyway, to make a long story short: SWAT team goes in, some shots fired - less serious resistance than some had feared. And it looks like S wasn't in the drug line anymore. And the wife and kids are rescued, and they were indeed in horrible shape and basically glad to see the cops come through the door. Definitely - only a fool would deny it - many lives are saved as a result of today's bold operation. And now, well, frankly, there is a good chance that all the past trauma has screwed them all up for life. But it might work out OK. You never know. Where there's life, there's hope. Now how do we feel about G? (He's riding high. Got a medal. Looking at promotion.) Not so good. He's a loose cannon. The warrant was bogus. We don't want that again. How do we feel about today's SWAT operation? We have trouble wiping the wry smile off our face. A good thing happens for all the wrong reasons. Life is funny that way. You cannot look at live people - whole families alive, who would have been dead, if the rules had been followed - and not say: life is funny that way. The rules were good rules. But they would have condemned these people to death. So, in whatever follows, you do not harp on the horribleness of today's operation, since the results were good. You make clear that you regard the human results as overall good. Yet you have procedural objections - for future reference - to events leading up to these results. And you are seriously concerned about G. End of thought experiment. Now, the wrap-up. I've just painted in the blackest colors that I could bring myself to use. Dug down to the bottom of the moral crayon box for a darker one and came up empty. You cannot have a more negative view of George Bush - and US foreign policy - than the one I just lightly disguised, and be a reasonable person. This is why I feel a bit uneasy reading the likes of this piece by Martha Nussbaum, from Newsday. She is, at points, skirting the edge of plain unreasonableness. I'm leaving Chomsky and Drabble and other critics clean out, please note, on the grounds that they obviously fell off the edge of the flat earth long ago. I am targetting Nussbaum not because she obviously deserves to be shot down, but because there is a point to talking to her like a normal person. Namely, she would probably listen and consider what I have to say on the merits. Nussbaum is a fervent intenationalist, cosmopolitan leftist. There is no mystery at all about her abiding animosity towards George Bush. But consider this passage (read the whole thing, in fact): For me, the events of the past weeks engender a powerful grief, grief for a hope that is dying. And yet, moral norms are not docile, submissive things. They do not quit the scene when people treat them with contempt. Instead, they call us to outrage and protest. Just as the leaders of the Civil Rights movement did not abandon their vision of human equality in the face of the contempt and scorn of white society, so those of us who care about the vision of international society that Grotius bequeathed to us should insist on that vision. The problem I have with this is not Nussbaum's feeling that Bush and co. are lamentably indifferent to international opinion/relations/treaties. Relative to Nussbaum, they obviously are, so she should be sad. And Nussbaum carefully makes clear that she does not - along with a surprising gaggle of fools - feel grief for the misfortune of the Iraqi people, who have the unique distinction of being the only people on earth pretty much guaranteed to not be worse off as a result of all this confusion. If you start off in second to last place, after North Korea, it's pretty hard not to tread water, at the very least. If 'freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose', as the man wrote, then the success of Operation Iraqi Freedom was practically analytically guaranteed. I just don't think it is right to be unconflicted enough to feel powerful grief as a result of the events of the past weeks. The Iraqi people are too lucky for that, despite everything. Yes, everything. The bombing. Everything. The smile just has to creep back, making all the scolding a tad unbelievable. Some died. Many died. Terribly. But many would have died terribly anyway. And now there is hope, however slight and uncertain. Let's just consider the Grotius angle. Grotius obviously wanted an international community of properly governed nations to enforce moral norms. Problem is: it is not clear to me Grotius would not have been in favor of an invasion of Iraq. By his behavior towards his own people alone, Saddam pretty much forfeited any claim to Grotian sovereignty. So let's set aside that item, on which Nussbaum expends considerable ink. Then you have the consideration that Saddam was, from where we were sitting, a relative push-over. Why not push him over? Of course, the UN said no. So we have a conflict. The body that would ideally be enforcing Grotian moral principles (but why should the UN do that, realistically?) does not. And those who are functionally enforcing these principles, out of convenience rather than conviction, are not Grotians. What's a poor Grotian to feel? Not grief, of all things. Bemusement. Confusion. Relief, for the undeniable good done in recent weeks. Anxiety for the future. Resolve to oppose Bush through appropriate political channels. That's it, surely. Am I right or wrong? Posted Friday, May 16 Not Better Than Your Average Bear, But That's Still Very Good Last night I finished Greg Bear's pretty OK, fairly new novel Vitals. Better than Darwin's Radio, not as good as most of his other stuff. (Haven't read Darwin's Children yet.) Thematically, Vitals reworks material from Blood Music, which is, however, the far better book. Bacteria. Creepy and wierder than any other Outbreak-type freak-you-out-with-germs thriller. Bear is far and away the best hard s-f writer ever. Just thought I should get that fact out there. I mean, the six best space operas of all time are all his: Forge of God and Anvil of Stars; Aeon and Eternity, Moving Mars and Slant. OK, the last isn't space opera. Sue me. And the best, um, space operetta (novella): Hardfought. Bear is better than the giants of the past, Asimov or Niven (hallowed be thy names and others). He's better than his co-killer B's Brin and Benford. And Brin is damn good, you know. (Benford I can take or leave.) He's better than that other killer B from across the lake, Iain M. Banks. I think Banks' Consider Phlebas is the number seven best space opera of all time, but I must admit I haven't read them all. Well, maybe Banks is actually better than Bear. It's very hard to say. They are the top two contenders. While I'm vaguely on the subject, there's a class of people who have somehow gotten the notion fixed in their heads that William Gibson writes the only 'quality' science fiction. Somehow Gibson is thought to have infused this questionable genre with class and subtlety and literary ... I know not what. I love Gibson, don't get me wrong. (And just today he has enriched my life with this strange link via his blog.) But what Gibson really did, most notably, was cross certain sci-fi elements with certain noir-ish elements. He created hybrid genre cliches, and then colored them handsome chrome and matte black. The most stylish interior decorator sci-fi has yet known. Wonderful taste. And so Japanese. The likes of Bear have clearly learned how to dress characters better since Neuromancer. But that doesn't make Gibson better, in my book. And again, I don't mean to sound so critical. Gibson knows how to use very well-worn genre elements to very good, very fresh effect. (and I haven't even read Pattern Recognition yet, which some are saying is his best.) My point is: sci-fi is thought to be poor cousin to much serious fiction because its so cliched; but, if that is your complaint, why give Gibson alone a free pass? He doesn't especially distinguish himself along that axis. Makes no sense. Anyway, as I was saying: Bears' Queen of Angels and Slant are his most stylistically mature. I think they contain the most deftly drawn characters in all of hard s-f. And, of course, they are excellent in all the obligatory ways. Fantastic technological invention. I also like Vernor Vinge and Neal Stephenson. Oh, and Ted Chiang definitely deserved to win his Hugo for "Hell is the Absence of God" last year. Get his book, Stories of Your Life and Others. You won't regret it. UPDATE: Hadn't been to Gibson's blog for a while. Good stuff of late. First, he gratifies me by admitting that, in certain ways, my life is better than his: why should I have to go out of my way to get Singaporean hawker food? Why, indeed? Then (keep scrolling down), he explains how it is a conspiracy of the Religious Right that the world has remained ignorant of the fact that Dolph Lundgren can do comedy. Wow. Oh, and then he links to this. Gotta get with the teen lingo. Posed Thursday, May 15 Infant Cosmology Tonight I learned that human beings are hard-wired to make up cool poetic stuff about the world. Wait, no, I already knew that. But here's the proof! Due to confusion and jet lag Zoë and I woke up at 5:30 p.m. again today. This tends to make the day a little on the short side, given that the sun goes down at 7. So there we were, admiring the moon from our balcony. One day off full, obscured by a scrim of clouds; very nice. But Zoë thinks the moon is crying. Why? Because she's just a baby moon and wants her mommy. Who could be a mommy for the moon, I asked. Zoë looked at me like I was stupid: the sun (well, I guess I should have seen that coming.) Yes, it turns out that the moon has a sad face and is crying because she needs to find her mommy and nurse more. And she's white from all the milk! If you heard some preliterate culture had that idea you'd think, "cool! They somehow knew that the moon got its light from the sun." Or maybe they were just making things up as they went along. Posted Thursday, May 15 Just a Few Things Gonna go light. Henry Farrell wins most interesting post of the week for his game-theory vs. sociology ruminations. (Then scroll up for the follow-up.) And, via A&L Daily, this Atlantic piece, "The Return of the Pig", about the resurgence of male chauvinism. It's OK overall, not unthoughtful, but this line - from the department of questions that answer themselves - gave me a laugh: Considering that for at least a generation polite opinion has been unanimous in the view that women should not be objectified, this chauvinist revival is astonishing. What caused it? Surely the proper question to ask is: why didn't anyone deduce the future existence of Maxim as early as 1980? Posted Wednesday, May 14 Why the Dems Have Trouble Punching Their Weight Bit of a mystery, eh? I've been thinking. I haven't come up with anything that isn't dumb, mind you, but I take small comfort from the fact that George Lakoff's ideas - virulently unempirical, like my own - are surely dumber. Lakoff is one of the folks I periodically turn to when the flames of the garrulousness of my wrath burn healthily low and need stoking. I can't even afford to get started today. But OK, I'll just get started. He's gone and and written a new edition of his book, Moral Politics (which I have read, but not the new edition) and got himself interviewed by Tom Paine (part 1, part 2). And - point of ethics - I'm not going to fisk what was obviously a transcript of a taped interview. It's tough to emit blocks of talk that fit together so well an unkind fellow cannot insert a dialectical knifeblade here and there. I'm just going to indicate the obvious big stuff. What you get in the book (more than the interview) is a speculative and reductionistic account of how two different metaphors of family explain ... well, everything about the dynamics of our political culture. Just a bit more boiling down won't make is less palatable, so here goes. It turns out cognitive science has figured out that conservatives are bad and a bit crazy. And liberals are basically sensible and good. For example (this makes it into the interview) one of the things that distinguishes the two groups is that liberals are concerned with 'fairness' and 'fulfillment in life'. And, no, Lakoff doesn't come out and say it quite like that - science proves it! Republicans are nuts! - but that's what it comes to. And I'm a liberal - yes, sir, I am - but I doubt the reproducibility of such results in a lab staffed by conservatives or by empiricists. (I tremble to think what a Republican scientist might do to Lakoff's stuff.) It's really quite obvious what Lakoff has done. He's hammered out two templates a priori: strict and nurturing. They are vague, and the one is vaguely bad and the other vaguely good. Perfect. So you are free to shoehorn with great impunity. And after you have crammed everything into the slot it's supposed to be in - abracadabra! empirical result! Everything fits into the correct slot! And it's not that there isn't a kernel of truth, mind you, but you could pretty much write it out on a bumpersticker: 'Republicans are hard asses; Democrats are bleeding hearts'. (I can't even think how to make it funny, honestly. To be funny things have to be a little surprising or odd-angled or fresh or something.) Here's the thing about Lakoff - he's been doing this to philosophy for years. He's got a formula for failing on two levels at once. There's the abstract level of argument - the Normative Kingdom of Ought. It's hard to know how relevant it is to actual political life (or philosophical life, but we'll stick with politics today); it's the level where conservatives and liberals occasionally try to reason out their positions, argue things through in a sensible, rational sort of way, so forth. Sometimes they consider evidence. Call me kooky. I find this stuff interesting once in a great while. And then there is the nitty gritty smoky backroom of real politics; the Descriptive Sausage-Factory of Is. Where policy is made with love and hate and votes and money and, no doubt, spiced with metaphors. This stuff is awfully interesting; gross things often are. Lakoff manages to have nothing whatsoever worth saying about the first level, the abstract level. To be fair, he manages - with a sort of amiable guilelesslness, if you like that sort of thing - to openly presuppose that his own ethical outlook is wholly unproblematically correct. That's it for Ought. And he has nothing worth saying about the second level, the Sausage-Making of Is. This should be his strong suit as cognitive scientist. And, to be fair, the politics-as-family thing is sound, in a flagrantly obvious and rough-and-ready way. But Lakoff appears to suffer from the peculiar delusion that he's discovered that political speechifying is rhetorically loaded. Lakoff thinks the PR people the liberals use don't know this. These spin doctors are, in his eyes, innocent of the original sin of spin. (What he thinks they do all day is a mystery. He is analogously mysterious about philosophers, but we won't go there today.) Conservative spin doctors and FOX News, by contrast, are credited with a sort of instinctive animal cunning in the metaphor department. Anyway, Lakoff spends an inordinate amount of time trying to make out that old, obvious stuff is new and discovered by cognitive scientists, and cognitively scientific, which it ain't. And somehow he manages to make so many tendentious metaphysical and epistemological claims in the process of clearing his throat of something that hardly even bears mentioning. Well, I'll just quote a chunk: The conservatives understand that language is framed - that it is not neutral, that it expresses ideas, that ideas are important, that ideas govern the way people act as well as the way they think. When they put out news releases or have interviews, they have learned to frame things very carefully. OK, just one itsty fisking. Only conservatives have an inkling that language expresses ideas? And that ideas are important? Oh, never mind. It's all so silly. Now, the news business, and liberals have not yet learned this - they have not learned how to do this - because they believe that language is neutral; that it can express neutral ideas; that simply the facts will set you free.... So the [liberal] assumption is that news is objective, there is objective truth (who, what, when, where, why), that there is no particular framing that slants things one way or another, that episodes are neutral; that when you report simply one event, not looking at its context, that that is neutral, and that they are there for being fair and balanced -- whereas they very well may not be. The whole idea of news reporting, as it is taught in journalism schools, is that you can report things -- just the facts -- and get them out there: who, what, when, where, why, period. What cognitive scientists have discovered is that this is never true. Conservatives have discovered it too. They discovered that everything has a point of view. That even the idea of episodic news, where you report the news without its context, that is a political decision on the part of the news room. That political decisions are made all the time, and they have gone out and started to make those decisions. They will put in their context on their stories. They will frame it in all sorts of ways by using appropriate language, and Fox News is completely slanted toward a conservative world-view.... Maybe tomorrow I'll go check out his book and see whether it's really as bad as I remember. Posted Tuesday, May 13 Ancient Fisking, Early Modern Blogging, The First Seinfeld Episode Not long ago Matthew Yglesias promised to take me to a place where I would hear tales of the prehistory of fisking. Cool! Babylonian fiskings! I've read Gilgamesh, but nothing sprang to mind, nor could I recall impertinent interpolations - by anyone named Urukpundit - into the Code of Hammurabi. I took it for granted ancient Egyptians didn't fisk. Out of character. Dragging masonry point A to point B. Yes. Buried alive with dead Pharoahs. Sometimes. But you could be reasonably sure no sly scribe would fact-check your sideways guys, herons, eyes, ankhs and three rows of wiggles with his. Confucius didn't fisk (since the Duke of Chou didn't say that the Shang ever fisked.) The ancient Jews were verbally careful folk but not fiskers. I don't think there was Vedic fisking. I had always taken it for granted that Socrates was the first fisker. And when, in the Symposium, falling-down drunk Alcibiades says he's never met or heard of anyone anything like Socrates before, that's a sign he was the first. But I digress. Turns out Oxblog found a fisking from 1982. Oh, well, that's all right then. I remember a while back - google fails me - Andrew Sullivan opined that Montaigne might have been the first blogger. Yeah. I can sort of see it. So Moveable Type is the killer app of 1517. All this by way of working around to telling you I've found the first Seinfeld episode. It's Danish - but Jewish - from 1837. It's included in a volume entitled Encounters With Kierkegaard. (Actually, I think Kierkegaard and his contemporary Copenhagenians formed one of the first virtual chatrooms, in which pseudonyms flamed pseudonyms. But that's another story.) Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, editor in chief of the satirical Corsair - which gave much trouble to Søren, but he asked for it - tells a tale in which nothing happens, really. (He is Jerry, wearing the pirate shirt; Kramer is Søren.) Actually, it's much funnier than that if you have just a bit more context. But it will do, it will do. I'll make it a giant thought. Posted Tuesday, May 13 The Beeb I enjoy watching the BBC, for the most part, but sometimes they really do go over the top. It would be nice to sit in on one of the sneering seminars just to pick up a few tricks. This Sunday they made what might charitably be called an editing error in placing the following two stories, both strongly critical of the administration of post-war Iraq, back to back on their This Week show. 1) Story one concerned the planning of a revenge killing in southern Iraq (where the Brits were in charge). A 17-year-old boy, brandishing an AK-47 and a pathetic first moustache as proof of his seriousness, was getting ready to go shoot the Ba'ath party official who issued the order for his uncle to be tortured and executed (during the failed Shi'a uprising after Gulf War I.) The young man's father (brother of the dead man) was the prime mover. They claimed to know where this former official lived. The thrust of the BBC story was that the family was taking matters into their own hands due to the lack of any functioning justice system in Iraq. A scene shot in the devastated former law courts (burned by looters) illustrated this lack. Lots of solemn voice-overs about absence of authority, etc. etc. The brother's determined avowal of eye-for-an-eye, blood price justice at all costs somewhat glossed over. 2) Story two took place in an American-administered zone, where middle-and lower-level justice system officials had been returned to work, and a moderately well-functioning court was dealing with current crimes such as assault and looting. The BBC reporter interviewed a victim of the former regime, and his lawyer. Both felt that this was a travesty, and that no one with ties to the old order could reasonably sit in judgment over anyone, as they were complicit in terrible injustices in the recent past. New judges were needed, and all the Ba'ath party ones should take up residence in jail. Now, it is obvious that both of the situations are, indeed, problematic. I have a certain sneaking sympathy with the family in the first story. I am sure that if someone ordered my brother tortured and killed, and I could kill this person with moderate impunity, I'd be first in line with the AK. But let's grant that anarchy is a very bad thing and most people prefer almost any form of goverment, however bad. The second situation has real problems too. The prospect of some Ba'ath party fatcat making a smooth transition form sentencing people to mutilation, torture and death for political reasons to meting out justice to young men burning down the offices of the torturers...weel, not so nice. Nonetheless, it is equally obvious that, absent the magical power to will into being a functioning justice system staffed by morally pure Iraqis, one or the other of these situations is going to have to obtain for at least a while. They can't both be devastating criticisms at the same time, anyway. Perhaps the things for an enterprising reporter to do would be to investigate which is worse, and which therefore preferable by default? Just a thought. Posted Tuesday, May 13 Remember WMD? Can it really be the case that I'm the only person in the whole blogosphere to read the Washington Post? Didn't anyone else notice the headline Frustrated, U.S. Arms Teams to Leave Iraq: Task Force Unable to Find Any Weapons? Maybe they should look at one of those nuclear sites. Oh wait. that's right. They were all looted. Why isn't any of this getting any love from da Professor? This type of thing makes even me, one of those lonely, hawkish, Hitchens, let's-go-get-us-some-dictators type leftie feel like...well, feel like a sucker. And here I thought we had specific and credible intelligence about some sort of WMD program that could pose a serious threat to US national interest. My bad. On the upside, I scored a scary 9 out of 10 correct on the can you tell your coke from your household cleansers quiz. (via Gawker.) And the wrong one was a false negative (always err on the side of caution, kids.) But actually I would never, ever do any drugs, so this is all a silly exercise on the order of the what type of anime boobs do you have quiz. Small. Alas. Posted Monday, May 12 Mea Culpa A week ago I posted a post that, quite in passing, characterized Harvard ethical theorist and devout Kantian Christine Korsgaard as 'an implausible scold'. I hereby unconditionally repent of this wholly unjust mockery. I don't suppose anyone much cares, though, so I'll shunt it off as a Giant Thought. Posted Monday, May 12 Don't Act Stupid If this is good advice, you'd better follow it. Posted Monday, May 12 The Bush Diet Matthew Yglesias is right. Tacitus is to be commended. He's the conservative blogger taking on the Bush budget 'plan'. I've more than once heard the thesis advanced that the reason the Administration pushes tax cuts without concurrent spending cuts is because there's some sort of long-term master plan to dismantle big government by depriving it of funds. This always struck me as ridiculous on several counts. For starters, a sincere desire to strangle big government - and a worthy desire that would be - probably wouldn't manifest itself in the largest federal budgets ever. The Bush diet plan: force-feed the patient for a period of years, until his arms recede into the layers of adipose tissue and he can't reach the handle of the refrigerator. Then just sit back and watch as he starves himself thin! (Late night infomercial meets Survivor-style reality TV, maybe.) It strikes me that the Bush administration is propping up domestic policies that have bipartisan lack of support. (I mean, I haven't really seen anyone defending this stuff.) As I was saying: propping this up with a foreign policy that has considerable bipartisan support. That ain't good enough. And it's weird, too.