Rational Philosophy

In an odd but apparently cleverly orchestrated sequence of events, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has tightened his grip on his rule by dispensing with the Supreme Court and scrapping the constitution. This only a few weeks after the return to Pakistan of the self-exiled former leader Banazir Bhutto (whose jubilant welcome-home parade was marred by a deadly bomb attack). And only months after Musharraf promised to relinquish his military post if elected president.

Apart from the obvious questions about how these distressing events will affect the future of Pakistan and the region, they pose another question that calls upon the current US administration to decide whether it will denounce Musharraf’s dismantling of democracy, or whether it will decide that it needs a friend in Pakistan more than it needs to stand by the principles of global freedom.

Surprising some, Pat Robertson, the television evangelist and Christian Coalition founder, has endorsed Republican White House hopeful Rudy Giuliani for president. Roberston feels that Giuliani’s qualities as a leader outweigh his shortcomings as someone who supports abortion and gay rights.

And house Republicans have joined Democrats to overturn the President’s veto of the water resources development act, just one a several funding bills that seem set to pit Republicans against their leader.

To quote American Theologian Tryon Edwards “Compromise is but the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of retaining another - too often ending in the loss of both.” But is this the case? What is the philosophy of compromise?

If Bush continues to court Musharraf’s favor by going easy on him in the face of his anti-democratic measures he will discredit the very ideal he says he seeks to promote — global democracy. Now, there are some who think (I’m one of them) that Bush may even believe that he supports global democracy, when what he really wants is to feel safer and to make his friends and allies wealthier. In which case, compromise would seem to be the most attractive strategy; a slap on the wrist for Musharraf so that America can continue to rely on his support.

Reading Pat Robertson’s comments, his goal in compromise seems to be that he hopes to have a strong leader in the White House, one sympathetic to a broad swath of Christian concerns, even if not all of them.

And house Republicans seek to approve funding they feel their constituents support, even if it weakens the overall coherence of their party and its goals. The long term result of which may be that they hurt Republican chances in the next election and thereby risk not getting what their constituents want in the long term.

From a purely conceptual perspective, Tryon Edwards definition of compromise seems quite good: “the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of retaining another.” But what Edwards’ sobering analysis doesn’t account for is whether, if one were not to compromise, one would forgo a greater right or good. What’s the alternative? in other words.

Therefore, in considering any specific instance of a compromise, we need to evaluate three things:

1. What do we give up by the compromise?
2. What do we gain by the compromise?
3. What options do we have if we don’t compromise?

Bush’s task at hand will be made more difficult if he denounces Musharraf’s actions and isolates Pakistan. But it won’t be made impossible. From a practical perspective, even without Pakistan’s support Bush can continue to fight the war on terror, albeit less adeptly (if that’s the right word). As a matter of principle, not denouncing Musharraf’s actions would undermine Bush’s declared objectives and make a further global mockery of his rhetoric of freedom.

It’s hard to know what Robertson expects to gain from his endorsment of Giuliani, and it’s hard to imagine that he will lose a great deal by endorsing him, but he did have alternatives (McCain, for instance) who would have provided a safer bet. Perhaps then his endorsement of Giuliani reflects a more principled choice than it might first appear. Perhaps he really does believe that Giuliani will make a strong leader and that this is more important than having a president who doesn’t support abortion and gay rights.

And for the house Republicans, voting with the president would have meant voting, symbolically at least, in favor of fiscal responsibility. This would have been a greater good, perhaps, than achieving some short-lived favor with their constituents. But perhaps the chance to distance themselves from Bush was just too appealing to pass up.

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In the wake of the departure of E. Stanley O’Neal from Merrill Lynch and the possible departure of Richard D. Parsons (of Time Warner), the NY Times has compiled a piece about the opportunities for black executives at the heads of large corporations.  Interviewed for the piece, the chief executive of StarCom, Renatta McCann, said “we have yet to reach a tipping point where the pipeline organically regenerates. We have to achieve momentum and velocity, and it has to achieve scale to make it sustainable.”

Another Times story presents a collection of new data about sexual stereotypes in the workplace. One of the researchers, Professor Glick, found that a female job applicant in a revealing blouse and tight skirt is less likely to be considered appropriate for an executive job than a woman who is conservatively dressed. The story quotes Professor Glick as commenting: “Sexy men don’t have that disconnect. While they might lose respect for wearing tight pants and unbuttoned shirts to the office, the attributes considered most sexy in men — power, status, salary — are in keeping with an executive image at work.”

And in a speech to the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) today, George W. Bush declared: “We are at war. And we cannot win this war by wishing it away or pretending it does not exist.”

As I chomped down these three stories, I found something sticking in my gullet. In each one, what people have to say and the way that they say it seems to create a mask, or to continue to hold up a mask, that obscures the real questions at hand, or, perhaps, obscures whether there are really questions at hand.

Renatta McCann managed to string together an impressive array of buzzcepts in making her point about the relative dearth of black executives in corporate America. If we try to read through her words to find the meaning behind the ideas of “tipping point,” “organic regeneration,” “achieving momentum and velocity,” and “sustainable scale,” I think she’s saying that only by having more up and coming black executives will we end up with more black executives in the boardroom. This seems logical, but hardly profound. Surely the issue is much broader and much more complex than the actions or inactions of corporations. Corporations comprise people and exist within and in service of society. And executives come and go all the time. It’s the nature of the beast. That we’re talking about the race of the two departing executives seems to be a problem in itself.

The article about sexual stereotypes left me with a nagging feeling that all of this research was kind of screwy. If you ask people about stereotypes with stereotypes in mind, and devise a study to present those stereotypes, doesn’t that to some extent throw doubt on the results of the study? Glick’s presumption that a woman revealing cleavage is sexier than a woman conservatively dressed introduces bias into his analysis. He then compounds this bias with his assertion that the attributes considered most sexy in men are power, status and salary. But surely sexual stereotypes vary according to the context and according to the details? Inappropriateness, for instance, can be for some a very unsexy characteristic. What’s to say that the people in the study weren’t reacting to the inappropriateness of the sexy attire rather than the sexy attire itself?

The words of the piece express a logic and a rational set of conclusions that draws me in and I feel that I have to agree with them, but stepping back I reflect on my personal experience in the workforce and find that the logic weakens and begins to disintegrate. I’m left only with suspicion about the arguments presented rather than a newfound insight into the particular problems faced by women in the workforce.

And our old favorite George W. Bush, who uses words with such audacious disregard for their meaning that one almost feels awed by it, accomplishes several feats of extreme sophistry today for no other reason, one feels, than that he’s begun to have some fun now that he’s a lame duck. He scorns the democrats for not taking seriously a war that he once declared we’d won; he further lambasts them for holding up the nomination of Mukasey at a time when the country needs such high profile positions filled, when, as was reported recently, he himself has left unfilled many such top positions for weeks and months; and he criticizes them for attaching “wasteful Washington spending” to another multibillion dollar war spending bill. Hmmm.

Bush uses an athletic analogy as he closes his speech his most dazzling verbal salvo of all; “I’m looking forward to working with you for the next 14 months,” he says, “but you better put on your running shoes, because my spirits are high and my energy level is good and I’m sprinting to the finish line.” I’m sure he didn’t mean it this way, or at least not consciously, but I’m relieved that he’s in such a hurry to get out of office.

The concept of motive has many facets. Understanding a person’s motive often proves to be critical in knowing how to respond to what they do or say. I was left perplexed by Lou Dobb’s comment today, because although he makes it clear that he thinks the Bush administration misstates (or lies about) the reasons why the US should sign onto the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, he doesn’t provide a motive for them to do so. I’m left uncertain whether they just don’t understand (in which case, how do they know to twist the truth?) or whether Bush has some nefarious reason he wants the US to sign the treaty.

(I went looking for some sound hypothesis that explains the administration’s true motives, but although everyone agrees that Bush’s support for the treaty seems odd, theories of motive lie thin on the ground. Some claim that as a lame duck Bush is pursuing a global socialist agenda. This, I thought, had to be meant as a joke. And another proposes that Bush seeks to mollify global critics of his detention policies. Again, not a convincing theory. I have to believe that there must be an economic motive, and a very immediate one. Cheney apparently signed on as a supporter of the treaty before Bush did. If that’s not a clue to there being an economic motive, then I’ll eat my hat…!)

Earlier today, I set off to school with my son as my wife ran down the street to move our car before the 8:30 street-cleaning curfew. Alas, despite her shouted pleas, when she arrived the traffic cop insisted on issuing the ticket. The traffic cop (or ticket vendor) explained that she couldn’t stop once she’d started otherwise she’d “get into trouble.” I see the exterior motive for writing tickets on street cleaning days — so that the street cleaning truck can rumble unencumbered down the curb, sweeping up all of the dirt and detritus that has accummulated in the preceding few days. But since I passed a second traffic cop also writing tickets at a shade after 8:30am, I wondered afresh whether the city might not have an ulterior motive — to collect from as many sleepy Brooklynites as possible.

And in another political story, the Bush administration denounces Iran and its Republican Guard, issuing details of automatic economic sanctions unless they shape up. The story concludes by mentioning that since Iran has done very little business with the US in the past twenty years, the effect of the sanctions would be more “political and psychological.” Again, doesn’t this either seem incredibly naive or duplicitous? Does the administration really think that sanctions without spine will deter Iran? Rice perhaps believes this — she seems quite naive — but surely for the leaders of the administration this is another step along the path toward conflict.

We are adept at letting our true motives guide us, and we are adept at concealing our true motives when we think they won’t be viewed favorably. But what is a motive, what is the mental process concealed within that word?

Motive rests on the concepts of desired outcome and action (or inaction). For a motive to exist, we must conceive of a desired outcome. Bush wants the LOST treaty signed to achieve a particular outcome. The actions he takes to achieve that outcome consist of promoting the treaty and, we posit, concealing his true motive. The traffic copy issuing the ticket is motivated by her desire not to be sanctioned, and the city, one presumes, has as its motive for setting her and her colleagues forth at 8:30am precisely the desire to collect as much ticket income as possible.

A particular problem with concealed motives seems to be lack of imagination. When we conceal our motives we don’t expose them to critique and challenge. I can hear you saying that that’s the whole point. But by this I mean that the more openly we share our motives the more likely we’ll end up reaching a better conclusion on the strategy to achieve them. Bush can’t imagine that the LOST treaty will be a bad thing for the US once he’s concealed his motive for why he thinks it’s a good thing. The City of New York can’t be open to the idea that it’s ultimately better for the City (and probably more profitable) not to be so hard-ass about parking tickets when it must conceal its motive to recoup as much ticket revenue as possible. Issue tickets with more discrimination and a little heart, and you’ll create good will, make people happier, more motivated to stay and contribute income to the city’s coffers by their commerce.

And since the concealed motives that led us to attack Iraq still haven’t been disclosed, here we are heading toward a similar disastrous outcome with Iran.

A concealed motive locks us so tightly in to a narrow perspective that it can be almost impossible to adjust.

In the third installment of Erroll Morris’s fascinating essay on the history and historical veracity of two photographs taken during the Crimean war, we find this wonderful quote from one of Morris’s interlocutors — “Certainly the more information we get, the higher the level of ignorance seems to be.” I couldn’t agree more. Beyond a certain point, the amount of information available to us becomes overwhelming. We cease to be able to discern what’s imporant.

It’s for this reason that I have a certain nostalgia for the idea of Cuba. I’ve never been there, but it seems that along with his willful limitation of personal and political freedoms Fidel has kept Cuba constrained in a bubble of simplicity. People have less to process. Life takes on an easier pace. People appreciate what they have all the more for what they don’t have. Now that Castro’s rein seems close to an end, and his brother Raul seems set to pick up where Fidel left off, but not exactly, we look on and wonder whether the bubble will burst.

My daughter has been writing a High School paper on whether and how the ideals of the enlightenment have been upheld or betrayed in Cuba over the past thirty years. It’s been fairly straightforward for her to research and list the various freedoms that have been withheld from the Cuban people. But it got me wondering about freedom. I asked her if the history teacher had assigned anyone the task of writing the same essay about the United States. He hadn’t.

Which of the ideals of the enlightenment have been upheld or betrayed in this country over the past thirty years? United States citizens and permanent residents (such as myself) do have certain important rights and freedoms (some of them that squeaked in quite close to that 30 year boundary!!) but in certain important and insidious ways I believe our freedoms are restricted.

If we sit back and think about how the forces of government and economics shape and constrain our lives, we start to feel somewhat less free. We elect a government, but the political parties are increasingly constrained by the forces of economics and political exigency… which are in turn constrained by economics. And we get to choose what we do with our lives, but unless those choices fall into some pretty neat buckets we’re going to have a hard time of it.

I’m not defending Castro’s abuses. But I’m just trying to get to the heart of the idea of freedom. Isn’t a large part of freedom the feeling of ease that one gets when one doesn’t feel beseiged? And in America today aren’t we beseiged by information, by images and expectations, by fears and constraints?

(And I’m not even touching on the encroachments on the right to privacy and right to liberty and right to fair treatment meted out by the Bush administration. Ironic for Bush to lecture Cuba on freedoms. But that’s another story.)

I watched The Age of Innocence last weekend — Martin Scorcese’s rendering of Edith Wharton’s novel of the constraining customs of New York society. As one character points out, she had thought that people came to New York to escape the restrictions of European society, and is surprised to find out that the restrictions, if anything, are subtler but more pronounced.

To sum it up, perhaps, the kind of freedom I’m talking about is that enjoyed at its fullest by the young child who knows nothing of expectations or correctness or obligation. It’s the freedom to take off all your clothes and play with your toy trains while the world around you teeters on in fear and uncertainty.

President Bush warned yesterday of the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran. He spoke of his pressure tactics, including economic sanctions, by which he intends to encourage the people of Iran to find new leadership. I’m not the only one to experience deja vue and to read into this that if the sanctions and pressure fail, Bush would consider that we should do with Iran what we have done with Iraq, use force.

In a different story, but with a similar underlying theme, the head of the Federal Communications Commission has a plan to relax decades-old restrictions and again allow media companies to own a newspaper as well as a radio or television company in the same city.

Whether it’s apochryphal or not seems unlcear (although likely,) that the determination of a web-spinning spider inspired Robert I of Scotland to come out of hiding and return North to inflict a series of defeats on the English, thus originating the sentiment that if at first one doesn’t succeed, one should try, try again. (Perhaps Bush has heard of that legend.)

My connecting thought today has landed vaguely on the principle of determination, of trying again. Why do we try again? What conceptual basis causes us to respond to failure with another attempt at the same thing?

It occurs to me that there may be several reasons why one would try again: Because one believes that the circumstances have changed in one’s favor. Because one feels that one can try harder. Because one feels that the only choice one has is to keep trying, that it is the right thing to do. Or because one lacks the imagination or insight to do anything else.

In the legend of the spider, Robert I of Scotland took from the spider’s efforts a sense that defeat should not be accepted. That the right thing to do was to go back and try again. The current head of the FCC seems to feel that circumstances have changed that the communcations landscape no longer calls for the same restrictions on media ownership.

But what of Bush and Iran?

Of course, I realize now that I am following a completely erroneous path of reasoning. Bush believes that he has not failed in Iraq. He acknowledges that there have been problems. But he believes still that the approach he took was not just right, but also effective. With Iran, in his mind, he is not reapplying a failed strategy, but a winning strategy.

At which point the question becomes one of why the president doesn’t perceive his Iraq policy and his foreign policy generally as a failed policy. Why, in the face of contrary evidence, does Bush cling to the idea that he is right, that he has made good choices not poor ones?

Self-insight requires courage. We all make mistakes. We all fail. Every day I do things I shouldn’t do, say things I regret, avoid doing things that I know I should be doing. Occasionally I manage to overcome my failures, to make good on something, to follow through when I’ve procrastinated, to apologize when I’ve insulted. It’s in those moments that I feel a glimmer of courage. That I realize how much I lack by way of courage. That glimmer however slight permits me some self insight.

Bush then must lack courage. Thinking back over this administration’s failures, Bush’s lack of courage has perhaps been the single biggest impediment to his success as a leader. His lack of sharpness hasn’t helped. One wants a leader who can understand the complexities of the challenges at hand. His laziness has been a problem from time to time. But without courage he has been doomed to fail and to continue to fail, to never be able to recognize his failure for what it is, and to address his mistakes.

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(My computer erased my first attempt at this post. A circumstance I’m trying not to take to heart.)

In writing yesterday’s post (”The Joy of Sexual Reproduction“) I came across the work of Herbert Spencer, who apparently first coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” after reading about Darwin’s theory of “natural selection.” While Herbert Spencer’s ideas seem to have much soundness in some respects (that all organic and inorganic stuff must exist according to the principles of space and time, for instance) they are run through with an idealistic belief that evolution has an end point, at which life will have reached a state of perfect equilibrium. A thrust that comes across implicitly in his spin on Darwin’s theory of natural selection in his misleading use of the absolute term “fittest.”

(I love Wikipedia’s choice of this marvelously sinister-looking photograph of Spencer.)

I didn’t set out to write about Spencer. It occurred to me though that a parallel may exist between the Spencer-like utopia of a perfect evolutionary end point, and the common belief that markets should be left to freely find their form; that a theoretically perfectly free market (which is impossible) would ultimately most benefit society. I don’t want to get stuck in attacking or defending absolutes, just examine whether flawed idealism might be doing us a disservice.

It’s easy to pick on George Bush, but in this case (as in so many others) he serves as a great example of what may be wrong with freely advocating a free market. While it’s hard to imagine that he ever had anything to do with actually writing a book, he did put his name as Author to one called “A Charge to Keep.” Herein we find a quote that will be perfect for our discussion: “A free market promotes dreams and individuality.” (I must add that I found this quote elsewhere; I didn’t read the book. But I can readily imagine Bush subscribing to this perspective.)

It’s easy to point to failures in the market — for instance the recent shakiness caused by subprime loans. But it’s also easy for a free market proponent to point out that poor choices cause these problems and that they are actually examples that indicate that the market isn’t yet operating transparently or efficiently enough. As Alan Greenspan argued: “the securitization of home loans for people with poor credit - not the loans themselves - were to blame for the current global credit crisis.”

If we get into debates between free market advocacy and free market opposition, we’ll never get anywhere (that’s just politics as usual).

Instead, I’m wondering whether there may be a philosophical basis for understanding whether a free market is necessarily good or bad. I’ll try to explain what I mean. If we consider the free market as a concept it must rest on the two concepts of impulse and friction. Market changes require impulse or friction. An impulse initiates a market motion or activity based on an expectation of return or profit. A friction or counter-impulse provides inhibition to the momentum of the market in a particular direction. I’m being deliberately abstract. But we quickly determine that nowhere in the concepts for a free market do we come across any concept of virtue or goodness, other than the reflexive concept that freeness is virtue.

To be more specific. Let’s say a person engaging in commerce spies an opportunity for profit. He or she pursues that opportunity freely, responding to the impulse to benefit from the profit. And let’s say that in a perfectly free and transparent market, another person or group responds to that action by providing friction, thereby reducing or sharing in the profit, or generating an alternate profit for themselves.

A free and transparent market consists of a multitude of such transactions. Each person operates always according to impulse or friction. Never, in free market terms, does any subjective desire to act virtuously enter the equation.

Now, if we look again at Adam Smith (the father of the free market concept?) we find that he firmly believed that selfishness was immoral and that the individual would a act in accordance with the good of themselves and the good of all, since society is required for the market to exist.

But I go back to this idea of impulse and friction. People have coopted the concept of the free market as a virtuous mechanism. But a perfectly free market just “is.” People act and it responds, not according to any virtue, but according to its internal structure (which can never be perfect).

As the real market (synonymous in some ways with the stock market) becomes more abstract and more remote from the worldly barter and trade that Adam Smith witnessed, we lose the very connection to humanity that transforms a morally neutral market into a socially responsible market.

People love to tout the idea of the free market because it notionally frees them from worrying about the fiscal responsibility of the government in ensuring that markets operate responsibly and sensibly. Bush may be right in saying that a free market promotes dreams and individuality, but if we think that’s a good thing, we should perhaps think again.

‘They just shoot at anything and everybody,’ says one of the interviewees in a CNN story today on chronic youth violence in parts of Philadelphia.

Responding to Al Gore’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, Rob Edwards of Woodbridge, Connecticut is reported as saying: “It is a sad world in which we live when bad science (and even a lack of any data at all on many points) leads to so much hype or accolades, especially the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. The IPCC is a farce. View the CBC documentary from 2005, which is backed up by clear and reproducible science, to understand how wrong the IPCC and Al Gore actually are.” (Which prompted me to go look up the CBC documentary.)

And on logic matters today (a philosophy blog,) a post questioning whether there “isn’t something inelegant about stocking up on assignments of objects to variables only not to use infinitely many of them?” I couldn’t understand a word of it. I don’t mean to pick on this post; I wouldn’t understand most of them, I’m sure.

Which brings me to the question of what is reality, and whether philosophy can help us answer it. If we live in a world where kids shoot each other mindlessly, what use is the study of model theory? And if Al Gore’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize raises a scornful response from many quarters, some of them apparently well meant and well informed, are we to trust our understanding of the world around us, or the understanding of others?

Our perception of reality itself of course is somewhat of an illusion. We see and feel and hear things because we have evolved to see and hear and feel them in that way. Our eyes respond to a thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, our ears to a narrow portion of the frequency spectrum. Things are solid for us because we perceive them at as solid, but at the smallest perspective, subatomic particles are smears of energy spread out relatively huge distances. Smaller particles can just go whizzing through us.

Reality is perception. Consistency in that perception can reassure us of consistency in the world around us. Logic can help us build models that may or may not prove reliable. And progress can only be measured with hindsight.

Where does that leave us?

President Bush today in referring to his desire to meet with the Dalai Lama says that he hopes that China will one day see the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader and someone who wants peace.

I guess that could just about sum up the mind-boggling futility in seeking out logical consistency in the world around us… But then I think about Plato. Plato said: “It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.” And this kind of philosophy seems to give us courage and a reason to continue to think.

Senator Larry Craig today reversed his promise to resign from the senate if he couldn’t retract his guilty plea on charges of disorderly conduct (after he allegedly propositioned a plain clothes officer in an airport bathroom). As CNN reports: “On the House side, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, said Friday that elected officials have a responsibility “to exhibit behavior that upholds the dignity of the office.”"

In the wake of David McSwane’s four word column: “Taser this: F**k Bush,” Colorado State University’s Board of Communications decided to admonish the editor-in-chief of its newspaper for unethical and unprofessional behavior rather than fire him. College conservatives, who had sought the editor’s ouster and called for advertisers to pull their ads, were disappointed.

And in the midst of the new furore (see yesterday’s post) about the administration’s legal machinations to allow the CIA to continue with severe interrogation of detainees, President Bush again reiterates his claim that “we do not torture.” Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, comments: “I suspect that former Deputy Attorney General Comey will again prove to be right in his prediction that the Department of Justice will be ashamed when we learn more about all that they have done.”

Elected officials, those in positions of influence and responsibility, and those with ethical obligations have been doing bad things for as long as such positions have existed. Craig’s alleged behavior wouldn’t have even made it as a footnote in the history of the senators of ancient Rome. It may sometimes seem as though there’s far more wrongdoing now than ever before, but I expect it’s just that we get to know about more of it.

But while at first it seems to be resonant and solid, the phrase “to exhibit behavior that upholds the dignity of the office” becomes fuzzier and fuzzier the more I think about it.

Surely nobody can always exhibit dignified behavior, whenever any of us visits the bathroom, even if not propositioning for sex, we are not at our most dignified. And it the phrase refers more to upholding appearances, then is it really an important benchmark for an elected official? It seems more important that our elected officials and those in positions of responsibility think and act responsibly as they carry out their responsibilities. The CSU editor, for instance, perhaps should have weighed his words a little longer before going to print. And the current president, perhaps, should have weighed his motives a little longer before running for office.

Dignity is an odd concept. I found this quote from John Stuart Blackie - On Self-culture 1874 - quite helpful: “The real dignity of a man lies not in what he has, but in what he is.” The OED defines dignity as the quality of being worthy or honorable. Which of course presents us with a question about the concept of worthiness and honor.

Taking these two ideas together, dignity lies in doing that which one feels is right. Dignity is not in the office because the office may stink. If Craig feels it is right for him to continue to work in the senate, because he can continue to be effective, more effective than a replacement, as he says, then his actions have dignity.

Likewise, a fellow editor at CSU’s paper praised his boss’s handling of the situation and his general leadership. Some dignity then rests with him. But what about the college republicans who called for the newspaper’s sponsors to pull their ads?

And what of our fearless leader, Mr. Bush? Does dignity rest with him? All indications are that Bush is doing one thing and saying another. He hides his actions behind his words. He would claim that he does this because what he is doing is right. But perhaps he does it because he knows that others would feel he is wrong.

 

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The New York Times article today on Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations is both appalling and fascinating in its thorough exposure of the administration’s dogged efforts to encourage and enable the CIA to use a wide range and combination of brutal interrogation techniques without having to worry about their legality. But beyond the pertinent questions of what constitutes torture and in what ways the administration blurred the line between branches of government, and, once again, abused its executive power, I was struck by the universal themes of courage and cowardice that sprang out of the circumstances of the story.

The Times reports on a White House meeting involving James Comey, deputy attorney general: “Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.”

Sitting at home reading the newspaper or watching events on TV it’s easy to regard the administration as laughable and not worthy of respect. But to be in its midst, as Comey was, surrounded by powerful supporters of the White House, with your job on the line, his boldness took real courage.

The Times also reports that within the circle of unswervingly loyal Bush insiders “there was a sense that Comey was a wimp” on national security matters.

I’m reminded of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. In criticizing Comey’s moral stance, the administration defines a specific instance of “courage” as the ability to follow through on severe methods of interrogation in order to get valuable information. Socrates would never let them get away with that kind of rhetorical sleight of hand.

It’s notable that at no point in the several years that this story has been unfolding has the administration appeared to betray any compunction about using severe interrogation methods. This may be an extreme thing to say, but one gets the impression that the administration does not view the detainees as human or deserving of human rights, and, therefore, feels that torturing the detainees couldn’t possibly be inhuman.

And perhaps this is their true perspective. It would explain a great deal.

Let’s suppose for a moment that some within the administration don’t feel that the detainees retain any human rights; that any form of torture is justified if it achieves results. Is this a form of cowardice? Is it courageous?

Courage and cowardice are concepts. They have meaning only as formulated through mental processes. A tree is not courageous because it holds fast against the wind (unless it appears in a poem, at which point it becomes a conceptual tree).

The concept of courage is directly opposed to the concept of cowardice. And the concept of courage has as its root two other concepts — fear or an awareness of risk, and strength — holding one’s course despite the fear. Fear is a direct emotional response to a situation of real or perceived danger. Strength or resistence to fear is a result of our conscious faculty, holding back our natural urge to give in to the fear, the power of the conscious mind to control our more immediate fight or flight responses.

Cowardice, in contrast, arises from the concepts of fear and capitulation. We feel fear, we are aware that we do not want to or should not give in to the fear, yet we give in to it anyway.

Going back to my working premise that maybe some in the administration don’t view the detainees as deserving of human rights. If this is correct, then to condone and enable torture of the detainees requires no courage on their part. But neither is it, in itself, cowardly. (Since they are not, in holding this stance, capiltulating to any fear; they feel no fear of the consequences of this approach.)

However, at the risk of extending my conjecture too far, the perspective I’m presuming exists in Cheney and others itself rests on cowardice. — Whenever we decide on a course of action and act, we risk error. If we don’t recognize the possibility for error, it is because we are afraid we will have to admit our failure. Refusing to admit failure, of course, is a hallmark of the current administration. This then, is cowardice at a deeper level.

To build this logic back up: The White House chooses to pursue a policy of severe interrogation that denies the detainees their human rights. The White House refuses to accept that this premise and the course of action being followed may be wrong. In refusing to accept that it may be wrong, the White House acts out of cowardice.

Others in the story betray a more simple and obvious form of cowardice: Gonzalez and Yoo, for instance, who defend the administration’s tactics for their own ends, to please their masters, or just so they don’t have to say ‘no.’

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For some reason that I couldn’t quite put my finger on right away, I found Cafferty’s comment today (Judge makes a disgraceful decision) on a judge’s efforts to slow or halt a program that would require employers to fire workers with faulty social security status (illegal immigrants) distasteful. I think it was his sentiment rather than his logic that offended me, his presumption that enforcement of national law supercedes human decency and compassion, whatever the circumstance.

In another story — “Bush vetoes expansion of kids’ health insurance program” — Rep. Todd Akin, R-Missouri, supporting Bush’s veto, complains: “we’re going to provide health care to the children of illegal immigrants.”

In one section of LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive I examine the origin of the impulses that lead us toward a conservative or liberal way of thinking. It’s a spectrum of course, but the impulse toward conservative thinking seems to derive from a focus on the importance of the self (one’s right to govern one’s self, the live and let live mentality) versus the liberal impulse to value people generally and to not consider one’s own needs over and above the needs of others. I’m dramatically over-simplifying, but I hope you’ll see the point.

If we feel that national law should be put ahead of human decency, our perspective will tend toward a hard line on immigration. If we feel that the rights of human beings are more important than national concerns, then we’ll be concerned about the effects of a hard line approach on illegal immigrants. A conservative will tend to feel that we shouldn’t make exceptions when deportation of just some members of a family will break up that family. A liberal will wonder why the law must be so unfeeling.

Again, as I discuss in the book, once we have sought out the origin for these perspectives, we can consider whether either perspective is more right or better than the other. To cut to the chase, I conclude and show logically that the more liberal perspective is more enlightened and bodes better for the survival of the human species. I’m sure that a conservative would disagree, but I am also sure that he or she would be hard-pressed to defend such a position rationally and logically. Are we not all part of the human race, wherever we happen to be born?

 

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