THE OLD WAYS ARE BEST

Two evenings ago, Susie and I went to a lovely early music concert at Cluny, the Museum of the Middle Ages, several blocks from our apartment.  A group of five women named De Caelis sang motets and plainsong from England of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.  The music was quite glorious.  The last number on the program was a five part composition, in English, written six years ago.  The music was complex and interesting, although not up to the compositions from the late Middle Ages, but the text was banal – sections were called “Purify,” “Teleology,” “Change,” and such.  As I listened, I was reminded of weddings I have attended between upscale college educated couples.  The two young people, as like as not, have chosen to write their own vows, which they recite to one another in place of the traditional wedding ceremony.  Their vows are heartfelt, earnest, and utterly banal.  They strive for poetry but achieve only the most mechanic of prose. 

Invariably, I find myself thinking how much wiser the couple would have been to opt for the traditional language:  “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God – and in the face of this company – to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony, which is commended to be honorable among all men; and therefore – is not by any – to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly – but reverently, discreetly, advisedly and solemnly. Into this holy estate these two persons present now come to be joined. If any person can show just cause why they may not be joined together – let them speak now or forever hold their peace.”  And so forth.

I don’t care whether you believe in God [which I do not], that is genuinely beautiful language.  What is more, it is the traditional language, and inasmuch as the fundamental purpose of a wedding is to situate a couple within the multi-generational traditions of which they become a part through the ceremony, writing one’s own language is about as sensible as the decision by the U.S. Air Force Academy, when it opened in Colorado Springs, to invent some “traditions” which it presented solemnly to the very class of cadets who arrived in 1955.

ONE LAST COMMENT

Enzo Rossi makes one last contribution to our on-going discussion, and though I agree with his general conclusion, I want to add one observation to the second of his examples.  Here is what he says:

“Do we know of any imperial regime that was successfully steered towards foreign policy changes through internal intellectual arguments?  Maybe the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, and maybe the changed means of US foreign policy (e.g. abolition of the draft) after Vietnam are examples of this sort of thing. But it's easy to retrospectively overplay the role of arguments in both of those developments. Empires don't mend their wicked ways unless they have something to gain or lose.”

He is quite right that empires do not mend their wicked ways as a consequence of intellectual arguments.  By and large, they mend their ways when they suffer a defeat or another empire on the rise successfully challenges them.  The abolition of the draft is an interesting case study.  The disaster of the Viet Nam War, fought by the United States principally with a conscript army, came close to destroying the American military.  Drug use was rampant and Second Lieutenants were being fragged by their own men as often as by the Viet Cong.  The senior brass quite rationally concluded that the institutions of the draft and a citizen army were operationally and politically unsustainable save in a time of total mobilization like that of the Second World War.  So they ended the draft, raised the wages of enlisted men and women, and turned military service into an attractive career for working-class Americans [for example, offering enlistees a chance to choose the specialties in which they were to be trained.]  The obligation to register for the draft continued, but young men were no longer subject to call-up.  As The Big Brass correctly predicted, this change drained all the energy out of the anti-war movement, freeing up the Administration to use the military as a flexible instrument of imperial policy.

The draft during the Viet Nam War had one curious side effect.  By law, men were eligible until twenty-six, or until thirty-five if they received student deferments, but the army really did not want to have to deal with draftees in their late twenties or middle thirties, so if you could get a series of student deferments until you were twenty-six, you were effectively undraftable.  Well, a law degree or MBA would only get you to twenty-four or five, but a doctorate could be dragged out at least until your later twenties, and so suddenly lots of young men discovered a calling for the academic life.  Since this was during the rapid expansion of public higher education, there were jobs to be had if you could finish the degree [and even, in the glory days, if you got as far as ABD.]  I got my doctorate at twenty-three, in 1957, and had to serve, but I think virtually none of my contemporaries spent time in the military.  The other unintended consequence of the draft was what we now refer to as grade inflation.  You could only keep your student deferment if you were a full-time registered student, which meant at a minimum passing all your courses.  None of us who were teaching then wanted to be responsible for sending a student to Viet Nam, no matter how poorly he was doing in philosophy 101, so we stopped giving failing grades.  That pushed everyone else up the curve, so that D’s became C’s, C’s became B’s, and B’s became A’a.  Like the reorganization of the college calendar, which was prompted by the fuel shock of the 70’s but persisted after gas prices came down, grades never returned to their pre-war levels.

REFLECTIONS

The discussion I invited with my post “Three Cheers for Jeremy Bentham” has been vigorous and lively, drawling in an unusually large number of serious commentators.  I am certainly not going to attempt a summary characterization of the discussion, nor am I going to presume to offer a definitive response.  However, I do wish to respond to several of the things that were said by one commentator or another. 

Let me begin by offering my own assessment of the current situation in which we find ourselves in America.  The United States is now and has been for all of my adult lifetime [since 1952, let us say] an imperial power, pursuing a number of imperial goals, among which very prominently is making the world safe for capitalism.  It is not, so far as I can see, markedly worse as an imperial power than those that preceded it on the world stage or than those that that have been competing with it for half a century and more, but it is not markedly better either.  America, like other imperial powers, uses its military power to overthrow governments, capture and torture individuals, bribe regimes, protect the investments of its capitalists, ensure its access to raw materials, and prop up corrupt governments from whom it imagines it can gain some temporary advantage.  Like other imperial powers [with the possible exception or the Mongols], America cloaks its actions in self-justifying rhetoric, in its case claiming to defend democracy and promote justice.  Its claims are no more plausible than the analogous claims of the Roman Empire, the British Empire, or the Soviet Empire.

I have been opposed to America’s imperial project for all of those sixty-odd years, as have a number of folks whom I think of as comrades, but we have been completely unsuccessful in altering the goals and methods of America’s foreign affairs, and I see absolutely no prospect that this will change in the decades left to me.  What is more, I cannot even imagine a realistically plausible sequence of events that would result in imperialism itself giving way to some other form of international relations.  That is certainly a pessimistic appraisal of the world in which I live, but it is not at all unrealistic, so far as I can see.  I can certainly fantasize about an America that, as a world hegemon, pursues policies of which I would entirely approve [encouraging human rights and democratic forms of government, fostering socialism, embracing transparency and eschewing hypocrisy], but I cannot, even within the confines of my mind, imagine a pathway to a domestic politics that would support such policies abroad.

During that same period, America’s domestic reality has in some ways improved markedly and in other ways deteriorated.  I take as genuine, undeniable, important advances the several domestic social liberation movements – the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, and the struggle for women’s reproductive rights.  I simply do not recognize as a person I can usefully engage in conversation anyone who brushes those aside as unimportant or of purely secondary importance.  But with these victories have come sharply increased economic inequality, the gutting of the union movement which served as a bulwark of progressive policies, and a marked rise in religiously based no-nothing-ism that corrupts the public discourse.  I can imagine a path to an improvement in America’s domestic politics, always within the unfortunate constraints of capitalism, and in my very small way I do what I can to move us all down that path.

Because America is so rich and powerful, and because I am one of the privileged and protected in this country, I believe that I have an obligation to seek ways in which I can contribute to whatever marginal improvements are possible, all the while acknowledging [to myself and to others] that I am failing entirely to contribute to a fundamental redirection or redefinition of America’s foreign and domestic policy.

It is in that context that I posed the question that triggered the current discussion on this blog.

I thought Peter DO Smith’s remarks about political retribution were political retribution were very wise.  A cycle of punishment by each administration of its predecessor’s evil actions would have destabilizing consequences in American politics, and I am not so naïve as to imagine that in today’s America destabilization would favor the forces of the left.  Perhaps I am more haunted than I ought to be by the descent of Weimar Germany into the hell of Nazism, but I am painfully aware of the fragile institutional protections against fascism.  Those who are too quick to say that what we have in America today is fascism would do well to take a look at the historical reality of real fascism.

Peter DO Smith’s sketch of a system of international accountability is pleasant reading but is utterly unrealizable, as I suspect he knows.

There is a good deal more I could say by way of response, but perhaps it would be better for me simply to thank one and all for their participation in the discussion, and cast about for some new topic to blog about.

THOUGHTS ON THE DISCUSSION

The discussion I sought to initiate, using as my starting point a column by Paul Kruger, seems to have gone in two directions, neither of which I anticipated.  The first is a free-form expression of disapproval of the Obama administration and of Obama himself; the second is an open-ended discussion at a very high level of abstraction of a variety of competing theories in the field of ethics, most notably utilitarianism, capabilities ethics [which I assume refers to the writings of Amartya Sen], and virtue ethics.  With regard to the first, it would seem that some readers of this blog are so angry at Obama that they cannot consider, even as a hypothetical, the nature of the deliberations that might have taken place within the Obama White House.  [Parenthetical aside: I would strongly suggest that those folks not consider trial law as a career.  “Your Honor, I cannot bring myself to ask whether the law is being properly applied to my client because I find him so morally reprehensible” is not a line of argument likely to have much success in a trial court.]  The mere mention of Obama’s name triggers a flood of condemnation.

With regard to the second, it would appear that participants in the exchanges cannot easily think their way, even hypothetically, into the mind of someone engaged in actually making a decision as opposed to judging it from the outside.

Since the contributors to the discussion are all quite obviously both highly intelligent and philosophically well-informed, I am forced to ask myself why I have failed to provoke the discussion I was hoping for.  After brooding on this for a bit, I have a tentative answer.  Theoretical justifications of Democracy as a form of polity typically argue that those governed have the right and the responsibility to participate, through their representatives, in the enactment of the laws by which they are bound and in the making of the executive decisions in accordance with which state agencies act.  But in an enormous nation like the United States, neither of these claims has more than the most distant relation to reality.  There are no doubt some circles in which the experience of actually enacting laws or making high level executive decisions is sufficiently common to make meaningful the sort of discussion I was seeking to stimulate.  But those of us who meet on this blog almost certainly have never travelled in those circles [save for William Polk, whose writings have on several occasions appeared as guest posts here.]

Interestingly, at least to me, my son Tobias, who has over the past six years played an important role in the evolution of the Obama administration’s position on LGBT-related matters, has repeatedly been compelled to make exactly these sorts of choices, taking into consideration the complex political forces at play in an area about which he has the very strongest possible moral convictions.  In my eighty years, I think I have never once been faced with such a set of factors.  This has liberated me always to speak my mind and act on my conscience, but of course to little or no effect.

 

PATERNAL BRAGGING

Recently, the Supreme Court decided not to issue writs of certiori in a group of same sex marriage cases coming to it from Federal Appeals Courts, a fact that surprised Supreme Court experts and dramatically changed the landscape in the marriage equality world.  I have just finished listening to a fascinating hour long discussion of the implications of the High Court's decision that can be heard here.  Two of the participants are lawyers in private practice with long experience litigating LGBT cases.  The third is Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff of the University of Pennsylvania Law school, my son.  I encourage interested readers to check it out.

CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION

My blog post generated a vigorous discussion, which I should like to rejoin via this post.  Chris, I am sorry to hear that you are under the weather, and that you have been burdened with medical bills that ought, in a well-run country, not to be laid upon you.

I have not been entirely successful in my effort to pose a question for discussion.  First a comment about Noam Chomsky’s moral truism about universality, which Jerry Fresia reads as an injunction not to be hypocritical.  No doubt, but universality in this sense is not a policy, Kant to the contrary notwithstanding.  Looking back at the thirteen men who have held the presidency during my life, I imagine I would judge that only two of them have not been hypocrites in Jerry’s sense – Eisenhower and Carter.  But all of them actively pursued what might be called America’s imperial project.  They would have been less irritating if they had acknowledged openly what they were doing when they did it, but I do not think they would then have done much of anything differently.

I return to the question I posed originally:  When a politician is forced by political reality to sacrifice one policy he or she wishes to pursue in order to pursue another, how should he or she deliberate about which one to sacrifice?  None of us who are participating in this discussion face that question personally, because none of us is a politician in a position to make such choices [assuming for the moment that Vladimir Putin is not one of the readers whom Google identifies as being located in Russia.]  And it may also be that many of you feel, as Chris seems to, that because you hate everything about Obama and his policies and his actions, you either cannot or will not even think about how he ought to make the choice I describe.  It may even be that there is not now, and never has been, any political figure about whom Chris does not feel that way.  O.K.  Then ask the question of an imaginary man or women who at some time in the future is elected to the presidency or premiership of a democratic socialist nation.  If you think that such a person, should there ever be one deo volente, will never face such choices, that it will never be the case in the socialist nation of the future that a president will have to scurry about assembling a voting coalition to enact a law and will be faced with a problem of the sort I posed, then I really think you are being hopelessly naïve and unrealistic.

The closest I have ever come to such a decision was the question posed to my grandfather, Barnet Wolff, in 1918.  He had been elected to the New York City Board of Aldermen on the Socialist ticket in 1917 – the high water mark in the electoral efforts of the New York Socialist Party.  He and the other Socialist Aldermen – the Seven Honest Men, as they were called in Socialist circles – were pushing for a program of free lunches in the elementary schools for the many scores of thousands of desperately poor boys and girls suffering from malnutrition at a time of the great flu pandemic that killed thirty-five million worldwide.  [You can read the full story of Barney’s political career by going to box.net via the link at the top of this blog.  My account is excerpted from a book I wrote about my grandparents.]  The proposal brought them into conflict with a committee of wealthy philanthropists who were pushing for a system of two cent lunches.  Each of the Socialist Aldermen received a letter on fancy stationary from Mrs. Simon Guggenheim [yes, that Guggenheim – the Guggenheim Museum] asking that they withdraw their proposal for free lunches and join them in working for the more manageable two cent proposal.  [The original of her letter to Barney is in my file cabinets at home.]  Barney and his comrades held firm; a $50,000 trial program for two cent lunches was approved, debated, withdrawn, re-approved and eventually, I believe, dropped.  I do not know whether Barney ever deliberated in the manner of the hypothetical I outlined in my original post on this question, but he might well have done so.  Since he was an elected official [albeit a quite powerless one in the corrupt milieu of early 20^th century New York politics] he would have had no choice but to make a decision one way or the other.  It does not seem to me that Noam’s truisms would have been much help.

One last observation.  The question “Shall I bring Dick Cheney to justice or win health care for five million?” presents us with what might be termed a syntactical dilemma.  English being what it is, “Dick Cheney” and “five million” are both expressions formed from two words, and so it is fatally easy to treat them as quite naturally of equal weight.  But suppose we spoke a language in which it was grammatically incumbent upon us, in forming that sentence, to identify each of the five million by name as we had Dick Cheney.  The effect might be something like what Tolkien tells us is spoken by the Ents in Fangorn Forest, in which sentences are interminable and discussions take days, but perhaps we would be led ineluctably to assign greater weight to the needs of the five million, simply by having been syntactically compelled to name them all.

LET ME TRY ONE MORE TIME

Ten days ago, I tried [see THREE CHEERS FOR JEREMY BENTHAM] to provoke a discussion about a question that has long concerned and puzzled me, viz How should we evaluate actions or decisions with large-scale consequences affecting, both positively and negatively, now and in the future, scores or hundreds of millions of people?  I offered a cheer for Jeremy Bentham because he, virtually alone among the great moral theorists, took this question seriously and offered, in Utilitarianism, an answer.  I noted that Utilitarianism has major, perhaps even crippling, logical failings on which professional philosophers have dined out for two centuries.  But the philosophically less questionable alternative moral theories that have been offered fail entirely to engage with and answer this pressing question – and I include Kant’s elegant moral theory in this negative judgment.

Now, my son Patrick has sent me a link to a long essay by Paul Krugman in Rolling Stone evaluating the Obama presidency, and on reading it, I find that it poses the question I failed to make compelling, this time in a manner that may be easier for us to engage with.  Krugman takes Obama’s greatest accomplishment to have been the enactment into law of the Affordable Care Act, now universally known as Obamacare.  [To get some idea of what a bad idea it was for the Republicans to try to destroy Obama’s reputation by tying his name forever to that law, think how it would sound today if every time you got a Social Security check it was referred to as an FDR check, and every time you handed in your Medicare card at the doctor’s office it was referred to as your LBJ card.]  Krugman suggests that the biggest disappointment for liberals with the Obama administration was its total failure to bring to account those who launched the Iraq war and made torture the official policy of the United States of America.  For the sake of this blog post, let us simply accept those two judgments, positive and negative, as true.  If you reject them, then think of this entire post as an example of what Law School professors call a Hypothetical.

Now I am going to make an assumption that I suspect is true, but for which I have no direct evidence.  I am going to assume that in the Obama White House in the early days of the current administration, there was an active discussion about calling Dick Cheney and others before the bar of justice, and it was decided that such an act, thoroughly justified both morally and in law, would be so politically controversial that it would make passage of serious health care reform impossible.  Recall, if you will, just how difficult it was to pass even the deeply flawed bill that finally became the Affordable Care Act.  There was nothing like broad support for a Single Payer system.  The death of Teddy Kennedy and Martha Coakley’s loss of his seat to the egregious Scott Brown forced the Democrats into all manner of compromises to assemble the sixty votes needed to invoke cloture.  Whether or not such discussions ever took place in the inner circles of the Obama administration, I am completely convinced that such a judgment would have been correct as a matter of vote-counting political reality.

Which brings me, once again, to the question that provoked my paean of praise for Bentham.  Assuming all the above [my “hypothetical”], by what process of reasoning should we weigh the benefits of bringing the architects of the Iraq War to justice as against the benefits of passing the Affordable Care Act?  We must remember that while we automatically take into account in such a deliberation the present and future benefits of extending affordable health care to tens or scores of millions of Americans, we must also try to estimate the effect on the actions of future administrations of a successful show trial of Cheney and company.  How many hundreds of thousands of deaths in future unjustified wars would be saved by the chilling effect of the incarceration of Dick Cheney?  [Or his execution, but that is probably just a liberal wet dream.]

I do not have an easy and comfortable response to this hypothetical [which I myself believe to be an actual, if I may put it that way.]  I invite anyone who wishes to do so to weigh in.  But let me issue one caveat:  I am not interested in high-minded condemnations of war crimes from those who are unwilling to say why they would be willing to forego the benefits of extended health care to tens of millions.  Or in political chest-thumping from those who cannot explain where they would get the sixty votes for cloture in the aftermath of a Justice Department indictment of a former Republican President or Vice-President.  Let us recall that every Democratic administration since Harry Truman tried without success to pass health care reform, including the effort by the woman who is almost certain to be our next president.

If you come down on the side of the Affordable Care Act, then you must explain what you would say by way of justification to the next person tortured by the American government.  And if you come down on the side of indicting Dick Cheney, then you must explain what you would say to parents whose child died because they could not get the health care that the ACA would afford.

If that seems like a needlessly provocative way of posing a theoretical question, I will just note that exactly such questions are the daily exercise of anyone who is elected to run the government of a wealthy and powerful nation of more than three hundred million people.

I look forward to some interesting responses.