The basics

I forgot to finish editing the sentence about habeas corpus after I changed it a bit. Sorry.

It should read,

“…many others were right, like our justice system of habeas corpus, but have been effectively jettisoned. “

I want someone who is ethical, not moral. If they’re having an affair with their secretary, like FDR did, I just don’t care, and neither should you, if they’re doing a good job for the country.

I absolutely agree with the specific point here regarding personal life vs. public life, and whether or not we should give a fig about private transgressions in this context.

I just want to go on the record as pointing out that I think you may have made too clean a break between the idea of “moral” vs. “ethical.” To wit, it could be easily argued that the above “affair with secretary” bit could be characterized as “unethical” due to the power imbalance and the violation of an implied contract between the parties (not to mention any spouses being deceived.) I don’t think the “people you know” vs. those you don’t is the right distinction here…?

I do agree with you, however, that such “private” behaviour should not, on its face, be counted against the execution of public duties. Screeching about stuff like that is usually cover for more political motivations, anyway.

The “fake it ’til you make it” observations are spot on as well.

My only quibble:

I can make a very strong argument that the more a society acts like this, the more everyone is happy, including the rich and powerful, but that’s not why you should act that way, as powerful arguments can be made for selfish and destructive self-interest. You should act that way because it’s the right thing to do, and you know it is, deep in your gut.

Having experienced one national leader do things because his gut told him to, I think I’ll pass. The Tea Party is full of gut-heeders. Their guts tell them that a brown-skinned guy can’t possibly be President of the US, that homosexuality and interracial marriage is disgusting, that religions other than Christianity weird. That torture is OK.

The whole idea of the Enlightenment was that we should listen to our minds on these matters, not our guts. As for the “strong arguments for selfish and destructive self-interest”, I believe that the difference between good and “rational” evil is one if mere *time*. Evil can seem “rational” only when gaged from a short-term perspective, for individuals and for nations alike. The evil you do comes back to hurt you, via a variety of mechanisms.

The reason why hunter-gathers seem virtuous compared to us is that all their social relations are long-term. Lie, cheat, steal, defraud your companions, and in a small society 1) everyone finds out soon enough and 2) you’re stuck with them for life; the best outcome for you is that your reputation is toast (the least form of punishment). They seem virtuous because in their societies a long-term perspective is nurtured and encouraged. More deriv3ed cultures have created short-term relationships, where one can seemingly gain by immoral and unethical behavior. Though even here it’s at a cost–your actions help construct the society in which you live, and if it’s “OK” to do what you just did to others, then you’ve increased the chance that someone will do it to you. Even if that comes to pass, you never get peace of mind that it won’t happen.

StewartM

Some quietly profound stuff here, concisely put, that, unless you’ve had a few semesters thinking about these things, it takes many of us decades to figure even a portion of this out. Good Sunday morning reading.

I admit that I suspect many of our ruling elite are essentially sociopaths and so they lack empathy and they not only do not follow the Golden Rule, they don’t even understand it. Most of us, however, surely do. The question is why do we tolerate being ruled by sociopaths.

BDBLue, I agree.

We tolerate being ruled by sociopaths, at least in part, because we think they will protect us from even more dangerous sociopaths, and because most believe we’re on the “same side.”

(I suppose that sounds a little like the argument from that UK documentary “The Power of Nightmares.”)

Maybe the reason the ostensible left and ostensible right are being driven farther apart from each other by politicians and the media is because more and more people realize they’re not on our side, so we need to fear each other and be protected from each other instead.

It takes awhile to recognize a sociopath, or to recognize that there is a distinct class of sociopaths operating at various levels of society. We let ourselves be fooled or manipulated by their charm; sociopaths excell at mimicking human behavior (this from a self-admitted sociopath). And so there is an education or wising up aspect to this.

Ian Welsh

Pure rationality leads nowhere good, it is a tool to obtain what we value, it cannot tell us what to value. Reason devoid of love argues that we often can fuck other people to get what we want, and be better off.

I differ. To me the worst type of morality is what I call “fact-free morality”, morality divorced from knowledge. What you *know* should govern your morality; if it doesn’t, we have major problems. Find out that you were factually wrong on something? That should change your moral behavior. “Love” which is blind to tangible reality can do some very horrible things. Carbonizing people alive for witchcraft was purportedly an act of “love” and mercy–but said “love” was justified by matters intangible and mystic, not material and measurable.

Moreover, it’s not “reason” I’m defending, but the Enlightenment, which in turn I define as an attempt to apply the scientific method to human and social problems. In the scientific method, properly done, one lays out the very criteria by which *you yourself* will admit you’re wrong if met when advocating a hypothesis. Now notice how little this honesty is actually practiced in our politics, particularly by the Right.

The counterculture decried the primacy of science in modern Western life. But what I said above shows how wrong they were. Some 200 years after the Enlightenment, our politics are still mired in ideologies akin to mysticism. The fact that politicos can call for more, say, tax cuts for the rich, despite decades of experience showing that said experiment’s been run and doesn’t yield what they say it will, doesn’t force them to admit that they were wrong, far from it. They keep saying it anyway. From a scientific perspective, as you say, our problems are simple to fix, if not easy.

StewartM

On sociopaths in leadership:

Deprived of the joys of empathy, I think the only “juice” sociopaths have is a trope to power over others, so they are probably disproportionately represented in political circles. They often see the advantage of the “cover” of social respectability, and popularity provides this (in one book I read on the subject, this sort of need for cover explained why they are often found to be active in the church.)

@Rob Grigjanis:

In arguing with [right-wingers], I often get the impression (strengthened by their extreme defensiveness and very thin skins), that somewhere deep down they know they are wrong.

This has been my observation, as well. I have a particularly nice right-winger friend, who has empathy to the gills, and one of my bemused frustrations is that I often bring him into agreement with me, only to have him snap back so that we have the same argument all over again another night. This has gone on for decades.

@StewartM:

Any discussion of the Enlightenment is incomplete if its “dark side” is not acknowledged. While a necessary pendulum-swing it was away from the superstition that preceded it, the late-19th Century & 20th Century saw a dangerous adoption of “scientific” behaviourism and B.F. Skinner/Pavlovion tabula rasa determinism in education and the social sciences. This was consciously, and neatly, exploited by the wealth class in enabling mass consumerism.

Which underlines Ian’s running point here about rationalism in isolation from moral IQ.

God, I love these threads, you guys.

“Good is innate in human beings, as is evil. There are plenty of reasons to believe that good is the more powerful of the two impulses, so long as we are able to move beyond tribalism.”

Hell yes!

“Martin Luther King, Jesus, Buddha, or Gandhi” were all stern moralists: Gandhi a literal lawgiver. And they all triumphed, non-violently, over unimaginable evil. I don’t understand how, but we are not likely to out-reason them on ethics, morals, or in the cases of King and Gandhi, political strategy. As Orwell wrote, “I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure.” “Reflections on Gandhi,” essay.

“Good and evil; do they even exist?” Perhaps not. But suffering and death, they exist.

Celsius 233 and Raven,
Suffering and Death.
You are of course, starting a conversation begun, and certainly not for the first time, by a guy named Gautama Sakyamuni on the Gangetic plain of North India 2500 years ago. Although a lot of religious mumbo jumbo has accrued to this discussion over the years, the lineage still offers some pretty good insights.
Ian’s starting point is about basic empathy. Some humans are so broken, defiled and obscured that they are quite deficient in this area. The incidents of cruelty to animals may have given some clues about George Bush to the knowing observer.
And as far as deep gut reactions are concerned, the Eastern traditions generally see the gut as the seat of survival issues…important but not the whole thing.
I have recently been advised to explore and abide in what the Tibetan traditions refer to as the deep and vast Wisdom of the Heart.
I am fairly certain that the Golden rule and empathy are foundational structures of that space.

Norman Finkelstein making a few observations about Ghandi and non-violence:

Ghandi was not a categorical pacifict. His views were very clear. He says: I prefer that people use non-violence. I think it’s morally superior. I believe it’s as effective as violence to achieve your goals, but with much less cost.

However, he enters two qualifications. Number one: you have no right to tell people they must use non-violence. Because he says, and I’m quoting him: According to the current standards of right and wrong, violence is allowed…he’s very clear on that. Number two: Ghandi’s also very clear and it will come as a surprise to many of you, Ghandi says: If you do not have it in you to act non-violently – and for him it’s a very high standard, for him to act non-violently means to be willing to go as he puts it smilingly and cheerfully into gunfire and allow yourself to be blown to bits. That’s for him what non-violence meant, to march right into the gunfire and allow yourself to be killed.

But he says: a lot of people don’t have it in them. And he says: if you don’t have it in you to meet that standard, and you are humiliated, abused by someone else (then he says) you better hit back, and you better hit back hard. Because for Ghandi there was nothing more disreputable than cowardice. If you read his writings, the two things you keep reading are manliness and manhood, which he prized, and cowardice which he loathes.

And he says: if you don’t have it in you to be non-violent, don’t go running away and using as a pretext that you’re non-violent. He says: If you run away, you’re running away because you’re a coward. If you can’t be non-violent, and you’re being insulted, you’re being abused, then you have an obligation to hit back and hit back hard. That’s the real Ghandi, not the Hollywood Ghandi.

Orwell, “But it was not in trying to smooth down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his life. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained.” Similarly, King achieved his goal. If they did not win their wars, they won great battles. Can you honestly imagine any way that violence as a strategy would have been more successful in India or the USA? It is one of the fantasies of revolutionaries to imagine that violence leads to quick victory; the “short, sharp shock.” I believe this idea is secretly a fantasy of male ape power, and to be viewed suspiciously. The reality is that violence corrupts revolutions, sometimes irrevocably, and it is only revolutions that have and pursue goals of peace first that succeed: there must be a vision of something after the revolution, or there will be nothing. In India, a violent revolution would have left the subcontinent in flames and, likely still ruled by the British, who could have used a divide and conquer strategy, as they had in other colonies. In the 1960s United States, a violent uprising of blacks would have been put down without mercy. For both these men, non-violence was the only strategy that could possibly have worked.

Jake, that was what I meant when I described Gandhi as a stern lawgiver. I caution, though, against citing his thought in part and using it to justify a violent position which he in whole did not take. I caution, in particular, against taking his shaming of the violent as the pursuers of a lesser path as support of violence. BTW, the “H” comes later in his name than you are placing it.

“There have been many great leaders and philosophers in history.” Of course. It’s just that it is far too easy to say, “I believe in non-violence, but–,” and let the “but” become the whole story. This is even true of Bush II, who, after all, is a fanatical believer in a religion of love and peace and yet started a war that may have killed a million people. That is why it is important to recognize the what the victorious advocates of non-violence got right, and not be seduced by violence.

For example, I might think certain types of being are not fully human… if I exterminate them I am not breaking your ‘golden rule’ because these beings are not human.

Gobsmacked, am I.

So, for example, the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were moral/ethical acts.

This burns.

Go, read, digest, sir:

Though most Americans are unaware of the fact, increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.

Petro, I am eager not to be sidetracked into historical quarrels. I have read your comment carefully and am struck by the element of hindsight contained within it. All those you refer to expressed their opinions *after* the war! Perhaps the best qualified historian of the period, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, places the bombs in their proper context as a contributory factor to the ending of the war although he states that it was the Russian declaration which clinched the Japanese decision to surrender. But of course, Truman et al, had no certainty that Russia would declare and no knowledge of its effect on Japanese thinking. I would add, finally, in an effort to bring us back to the question of morality offered up by our host, that the death and destruction, to both Americans and Japanese, civilian and military, entailed in an allied landing in the south island and a campaign to fight up to the north against fanatical opposition would have made the casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki look feeble.

However, if that sticks in your craw as an historical fact, treat it as a thought experiment and then tell me that it is more moral/ethical that several hundreds of thousands of casualties should be incurred as against two bomb strikes whose casualties barely went above 150,ooo.

Rob, of course, my qualifying beings into human and, er, sub-human are not *my* thoughts. I am merely trying to get across the point that not everyone in this world shares the same moral/ethical base as our host. Nor, of course, are such apparently ‘evil’ beliefs restricted to history. The current leadership of Iran would happily wipe every Jew from the face of the earth – and consider it a *virtuous* act!

Rob, of course, my qualifying beings into human and, er, sub-human are not *my* thoughts.

That was clear, David.

Petro, mea culpa, I confess that last night I lacked the time to look up the casualty figures and took a rough stab it. *As I understand it*, the figures for post-war deaths due to radiation and other effects of the bombs is highly disputed – natch!

But returning to the main point, I think it was Clausewitz who recommended that war, being a terrible business, must always be executed with maximum power and efficiency in order to bring it to an end as qucikly as possible.

Raven, I take absolutely your point (assuming I have it right) that war must never be entered into lightly but sometimes there is no alternative. Ghandi and King were operating under systems which, for a variety of social, religious and cultural reasons, refused, or were not capable, of answering insurrection with the most ruthless responses. Neither, I fear, would find their methods successful in other places at other times – witness, Syria today!

Then comes the time when force must be met with force, and evil met with evil. And the question then is how not to become that which you fight, how to, in Christopher Dawson’s words, “not become indistinguishable from the evil (you) fight”.

i’m going to stop reading and just jump in and say: Ian, come on. i hope you get to this later in this essay, but blunt, plain history proves: you can’t. or rather, some can’t. there is always a part of every revolutionary and rebellious movement in which some people have to be evil. be with evil. be with the enemy, until the moment they are not. but in general, sell their souls for the cause. and perhaps even be mistaken for the enemy when the conflict ends, and punished as such. even Duras agrees on this point. moral lines blur to the indistinguishable in real conflict, as they must for such is the nature of war. and why we should always view it as a tool of last resort. you know it’s people like us who will pay that price, once the time comes.

I agree.
(sorry, I did not read all the comments, but anyway)
There are some disturbances minor re he posting , though.

Robespierre was a highly insightful person, much like You -Ian- are.
Just read some speeches of him.

The social conditioning today says, that Robespierre was an evil person — much more evil than lets say: Napoleon.
If one reads what he says, it is the other way round.

The latter-day Robespierre in the US was George Carlin.
His gouillotine was words.
If the satyrist does not get heard, then stronger forces will be put into position.
From both sides.
The ‘other side’ is applying already these measures.
Getting Physical. One has to recognize that!
As W.Buffet said: “There has been a class war, and ‘we’ won it already”

To add irony to the statement:
And ‘you’ idiots did’nt even notice!

So I interpret this as a universal intelligence-test:
If you are dumb enough to accept what ‘we’ are doing, then you deserve to be treated this way.
In the next step (which has been taken long ago), it is pure mind-fucking, down to the lowest acceptable level, which is monitored by the pollers.
See plain stupid idiots like Perry.
Why do they appear in the political arena?

I tell you.
Those clowns are posited as a gauge, just to find out the populace/electorate has been dumbed down.
This is Hegelian dialectics in reverse (a downward spiral), if You think about that for some time.

George Carlin got it intuitively and intellectually right with that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7utc0OTIj88#t=0s

The capitulation of the ‘normal-ahem- hard working- people’ took place a long time ago.
And theý even did not notice that!

What is the cause?
Were they overworked, or what caused their dementia?

Just asking.

Ian Welsh

At the same time, an insistence on complete moral purity is a road to evil of another kind, it is the road that leads to a man like Robespierre. And a strange part of the route to this evil is a refusal to accept petty human failings (like adultery, for example). A refusal to see that a person who has once done wrong, may still do much good. A refusal to believe that those who have done evil, can be redeemed.

So that’s what you mean by “a Robespierre”.

I don’t necessarily disagree on your characterization of the man insofar as you go. But to me, the French revolution turned out the way it did because–unlike the American–France (and Russia too) were thrust into war and did not enjoy a shake-down period of peace where less violent and less extreme voices could win out. When your revolution is immediately met by invasions by foreign armies and intrigues, those who are willing to crack the most heads start sounding more and more reasonable. Even then, the American Republic came close to outlawing dissent (the Alien and Sedition Acts) and some 2 % of the American population was hounded out of the country because they were Loyalists.

Robespierre not only represents that, but he and his “Republic of Virtue” also represents (going back to our discussion on the scientific method and what is “good”) disembodied “reason” just as much as Ayn Rand does. One is willing to guillotine thousands for splitting hairs about ideological points, even former allies, while the other is willing to let millions die from want in the name of “progress”. Both advocated these things in the name of “reason”, but “reason” and definitions of “good” and “virtue” that aren’t in the least empirical. Robespierre’s “Republic of Virtue” fails to deliver its promise of heaven-on-earth just like Rand’s “Virtue of Selfishness” does.

I know that Rand’s acolytes resist any attempts to pin them down with questions of “What if your system makes things objectively worse?” I suspect Robespierre’s are the same way.

StewartM

sorry.
my goodness:
So, finetuned:

…
Basically the same lot., but a bit more softspoken..
but they carefully watch, how the teapartiers develop.

And if they are successful, they will be exported.
Cost-free, because this finances itself, as is any wet dream of the capital owners, who phantasize, that ‘money’ is a hardworking entity.

(End of corrections)

I have utterly failed to see the slightest evidence anything will change…

A bleak, but eminently defensible, statement to make. My first inclination is to parry with “well, boot-in-face does get tiresome after awhile.”

But the truth is, unless there is an “enlightened” resistance to this state of affairs, and not merely a reactionary one, it will quickly settle to more of the same.

These two quotes seem very relevant at this time;

Frederick Douglass: Find out just what any people will quietly submit to
and you have found out the exact measure of injustice
and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these
will continue till they are resisted with either
words or blows, or with both.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn;
“Don’t believe them, don’t fear them, don’t ask
anything of them.”

The original promulgator of what became known as The Golden Rule was the Hebrew sage, scholar and rabbi known as Hillel.

Various Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese and others would probably dispute this. Good point about the positive formulation though.

OT: I’ve been living for a few days in one of the stabler parts of Euroland, and I have to say, immigrating here has so far been far less hassle than it is in the USA. I remember trying to get cell phone service when I moved to the USA, and it was a huge and expensive hassle. Same for internet. Far from being “Eurobloaty”, the bureaucracy has been totally rational and friendly about everything—more so than my interactions with the bizarre and byzantine US immigration system—and I’m a Canadian so I don’t even bear the brunt of the US immigration boondoggle. Local integration services are provided for very little money. My passport was stamped without even looking at it or asking any questions.

There are annoying parts, of course, and the finding of a job (I already had one) is probably tricky unless you have special in-demand skills or have a credible business plan. But if you *can* find a job and have a passport from a developed country, then Western Europe at least welcomes you. Some countries here allow you to come *first* and *then* find a job,

The café ice cream/gelato is cheap and to die for…no $6 Ben-n-Jerry here.

Mandos, no idea what your background is, but surely the brown, the Muslim and the non-professional class immigrants experience a less warm embrace, no?

Even in my adopted Asian homeland, white westerners are treated with ridiculous deference while the natives’ fellow Asians or the brown and black suffer miserably.

jcapan: I am actually a brown Muslim, albeit of Western upbringing, but I “speak white”, have a little bit of proficiency in the local language, and look like a tourist and walk around like I own the place! I’m told reaction varies considerably by region. I am in a fairly cosmopolitan area have not so far had any trouble. The aborigines are charmed when I try to communicate with them in their own language and try to play along even though they have to stop themselves from using English to save time.

Mandos PERMALINK
September 5, 2011
jcapan: I am actually a brown Muslim, albeit of Western upbringing, but I “speak white”, have a little bit of proficiency in the local language, and look like a tourist and walk around like I own the place! I’m told reaction varies considerably by region. I am in a fairly cosmopolitan area have not so far had any trouble. The aborigines are charmed when I try to communicate with them in their own language and try to play along even though they have to stop themselves from using English to save time.
============================
Since I have a dog in your seemingly sarcastic comment to the above; could you, in plain English, please explain exactly what it was that you didn’t like/agree with?
Have you ever lived (not vacationed) in an Asian Country? Hey, just askin… 🙂

Thanks for genuinely amusing response Mandos. In any event, will be interested in your view a few months from now. In any event, the humor will serve you well.

Mandos PERMALINK
September 5, 2011
C233: Um, I wasn’t disagreeing with anything as far as I can tell. *confused* I was merely stating that I, personally, have not so far had trouble in Europe because despite being a brown Muslim, I display other markers of privilege (speaking unaccented English, etc). So I don’t understand your question or how you interpreted my remark…
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Thanks for the clarification; nuance, meaning, and communication via the web is oft times difficult to detect. Since I do not know you I just wasn’t sure; thus my comment.
Thanks again. Cheers.