The Rest of the Story

Posted on 2005-09-18 00:42:49 [Permalink]

Black then white are all I see in my infancy
Red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me
Lets me see there is so much more
And beckons me to look through to these infinite possibilities
—Tool

Eric Raymond examines some of the memes used by Western “intellectual” apologists for terrorists:

It’s a good list. I’m working on an analysis of this and other understandings of power, but while that simmers, I noticed something a bit shallower: all of the items on this list are true — but only partially. The people who mistake their partial truths for the whole thing are missing half of the story.

Let’s go through Eric’s list point by point….

1. There is no truth, only competing agendas.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m an evaluative subjectivist. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that Absolute Truth either does not exist, or is not recognizable by us in our subjective contexts. Hey, no problem; I understood this before I was old enough to drink.

But evaluative subjectivism alone does not really do very much. An evaluative subjectivist can’t appeal to Absolute Truth to judge things, but so what? There are plenty of other ways to judge things.

It’s a non sequitur to say that the lack of Absolute Truth means that everything is equal. Even if there is no truth and only competing agendas, that certainly doesn’t solve the hard problems of how to compare agendas, and it definitely does not entail any sort of moral equivalence between agendas.

2. All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

On one level this is simply an ad hominem attack writ large.

That said, it should be obvious that any possible Western moral superiority is not an inherent thing. There’s nothing in the water over here that magically makes us better human beings. Bill Whittle puts it so well:

There is no corner on virtue, and no outpost of depravity. Human hearts are indistinguishable and interchangeable. Anyone who claims otherwise is, without further argument or statements necessary, a complete God-damned idiot.

But there are more choices than “blind hubris” or “paralyzing self-doubt”. We can — and should — have a realistic view of our strengths and weaknesses, our successes and failures, our triumphs and tragedies. That’s called “wisdom”.

Wisdom is not a simpleminded belief that Western culture is a “city on a hill” that all should simply imitate. But wisdom is also not a simpleminded belief that Western culture has no redeeming virtues and nothing to teach the rest of the world.

Fools of all stripes have one thing in common: they’re not nearly confused enough.

3. There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

As an evaluative subjectivist, I implicitly think that evaluative subjectivism is better than absolutism. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t be an evaluative subjectivist; I would be something else. But why is evaluative subjectivism better than absolutism? What criteria am I using to make that judgement?

Well, I sure can’t say that evaluative subjectivism is Absolute Truth. That’s a contradition: evaluative subjectivists don’t believe in Absolute Truth! But I could say that evaluative subjectivism explains the world better than absolutism, or that the arguments for it are stronger, or that it’s a better way to relate to other people.

What about inter-cultural relations? Can an evaluative subjectivist argue against, say, oppressive patriarchy in another culture? If you believe that gender equality is an Absolute Good, then the argument is easy: “gender equality is an Absolute Good, your culture treats women unequally, therefore your treatment of women is evil”. That’s not an argument that an evaluative subjectivist can make, but there are plenty of strong arguments that evalutive subjectivists can make: fairness, liberty, or the (relative) indistinguishability of gender in the noosphere.

Once again: judgements don’t have to rely on absolute standards, so the lack of absolutes does not render all judgements invalid.

4. The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

People who know economics don’t make claims like this.

However, plenty of economists complain about US trade protectionism and agricultural subsidies. Our economic policies toward the Third World are not the “ruthless exploitation” that economically illiterate pseudo-intellectuals claim. That doesn’t mean that our economic policies are perfect.

All it means is that you should never trust literature majors with numbers. Or with money.

5. Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

6. The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

There is a significant social component to crime. Children of abusive parents tend to be abusive parents themselves; children who are taught disrespect for the law will teach the same thing to their children. The sins of the parents really are visited upon their children. Breaking this vicious cycle takes Herculean effort, and we haven’t really figured out a good way to do it. Incerceration is certainly not an ideal solution: prison turns petty criminals into hardened criminals, which is not the transition we should be encouraging.

However, none of that negates the importance of individual responsibility. Society does not make our choices for us. Bad choices should have bad consequences; shielding people because “they don’t know any better” encourages infantilism, which is not a solution to the problem either.

Individual responsibility does not trump social factors; social factors do not trump individual responsibility. Effective crime control must address both.

7. For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

We should enter war reluctantly, with heavy hearts and sober spirits. But people who absolutely refuse to use violence under any circumstances implicitly believe that there is nothing good, nothing true, nothing right in the world that is worth fighting for — an opinion with which I vigorously disagree.

8. When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

Tactically, terrorism works — meaning that the best response often is to make concessions. That is, of course, presuming that the terrorists are intending to extract concessions. Maybe they’re not; maybe they just want to destroy you.

There was a piece in the New York Times a while back about parts of the Iraqi insurgency fighting each other. On the one hand you have the nationalists, former Saddam cronies who want political power back. But you also have the jihadists, typically foreign fighters who want to bloody the nose of the Great Satan. (Emblematic of the media’s strategic cluelessness, the undertone was the typical “Will We Ever Understand This Horribly Complex Insurgency Which Is Composed Of Not Just One But Two Groups!”)

One of these groups of insurgents is trying to extract political concessions. One of them is not. One of these groups can be reasoned with. One cannot be. One of these groups will respond to concessions by reducing their attacks. One of them will respond to concessions by increasing their attacks. If you can’t figure out which is which, please do the rest of us a favor and go read a book until you get a clue.

We need to take a long, hard look at our policies toward terrorist-exporting societies and see what we can do better. But we also need to accept the fact that the liberal social order we treasure is the exception, not the rule, both historically and today. We also need to accept the fact that the liberal social order is a profound anathema to many traditional cultures.

A very wise man said that if you have a problem, conservatives will tell you that it’s your fault, while liberals will tell you that it’s society’s fault. (My corollary is that the conservative and the liberal will then lose interest in you and proceed to beat the snot out of each other.) The frustrating, tragic irony is that the liberal and the conservative are both right, but each only half right.

If we only listen to one perspective, we’ll only have half a solution.

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