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Saturday, March 15, 2003
Synapses
I've been trying to catch up with the blogging I've missed over the past week, and I've discovered a post entitled"Consciousness" from Jim Ryan in which he says, among other things, that "consciousness is nothing more than synapses firing." Apparently Jim thought he could slip this item in while I was away, realizing that no one else is willing to challenge this nonsense. I am ashamed of you all, naturally, but I am glad too to find how much I am needed.
Let's take a closer look at Jim's argument:
Consciousness (i.e., all mental states) is just states of the brain, functional states, like software being run, but nevertheless physical like software, rather than non-physical. The program running your web browser right now is physical, and, by the same token, so is the consciousness in your brain.
Jim then goes on to point out that we cannot imagine a human being that is physically alive and functioning without consciousness; therefore, consciousness must by physical.
Let me begin by saying that I think Jim's thought experiment fails on its own terms. My inability to truly imagine a zombie, i.e., a human being who functions without consciousness, only proves that consciousness must somehow be connected to the physical nature of the human being for the human being to function in normal ways. Note that the body can function minimally without consciousness. The question then would be how a non-physical entity can interact with a physical entity, which many philosophers have taken up. I don't care to take it up myself, but I don't see the idea as obviously nonsensical.
The point I do want to take up is somewhat different. I am happy to concede that consciousness has a material basis. In other words, without certain material conditions in place, consciousness does not occur. I am happy to concede furthermore that there may indeed be physical processes, such as firing synapses or brain waves or whatever, that can be mapped onto particular mental acts. The question, however, is in what sense consciousness can be identified with these physical processes.
Notice that the way Jim puts it is that "consciousness is nothing more than synapses firing." A mapping between two entities, however, does not necessarily privilege one form over another. Why not say that synapses firing is nothing more than consciousness? Why not treat consciousness as the fundamental entity and explain all of the related physical processes in terms of it? If it is because we think we understand synapses and brain waves better than we understand consciousness, I beg to differ. We have been studying consciousness for quite some time, and have interesting things to say about it.
Or is it because the language of modern science just seems more accessible and demonstrable than the language of philosophy and psychology? Perhaps so, but herein lies the problem. Whatever confidence we have that there is a correlation between certain states of consciousness and certain physical processes, the language of the one simply cannot be reduced or explained by the terms of the other. Again, we may be able to match them up ("when I think of Aunt Mae, my brain wave spikes with an amplitude of 3 and a period of 4 pi"), but the one doesn't explain the other.
As I stated way back when, we can't even pull this reduction off with our familiar definition of water as H2O. Try as you might, you cannot predict the properties of water by examining the properties of hydrogen and oxygen, and there are no rules about the combination that will do so either. Thus, our concept of water is not identical to our concept of H2O. We can establish a correspondence, but not an identity. And note here that we are establishing a correspondence between two physical entities.
The desire to think of consciousness as beyond the physical stems, in part, I believe, from the realization that none of our language of the physical is really adequate to explaining consciousness itself. Our understanding of the physical may help create medicine to fight depression, but it cannot explain what depression is or why it is something that needs fighting. We will have to find those explanations through older, more familiar paths.
Eddie 9:56 PM
Double Standards
Eugene Volokh writes about the the hypocrisy of TAPPED claiming that the right is peculiarly responsible for the shrillness of current political discourse after having just engaged in such discourse himself. I believe the point is even worse than Eugene has indicated. TAPPED seems to be making an argument analogous to the one that excuses racial ill-will from blacks, on the grounds that only whites can truly be racists since whites disproportionately wield power. In this case, since there is no equivalent on the left to conservative media outlets, the right must take most of the blame. Perhaps he would do better to make an analogy between FOX News and BET, which are both efforts to provide an alternative to regular network programming.
Eddie 4:51 AM
</vacation>
Well, I'm back from my trip to Orlando (including the Universal Studios theme park and Disney's Animal Kingdom) and St. Petersburg (including a Phillies-Blue Jays spring training game). As they say, I need a vacation to rest up from my vacation. It is good to be back, though.
Eddie 4:27 AM
Sunday, March 09, 2003
Vacation
I'm about to leave for Florida and won't be back until Friday. Maybe I can post something midweek from my in-laws, but I won't count on it. Thanks again for stopping by.
Eddie 9:12 AM
Saturday, March 08, 2003
Imagine
This is from Shelby Steele's A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America:
Suppose America decided that black people were poor in music because of deprivations due to historical racism. Clearly their improvement in this area would be contingent on the will of white America to intervene on their behalf. Surely well-designed interventions would enable blacks to close the musical gap with whites. Imagine that in one such program a young, reluctant, and disengaged Charlie Parker is being tutored in the saxophone by a college student volunteer.
The tutor learns that Parker's father drank too much and abandoned the family, and that his mother has had an affair with a married man. Young Charlie is often late to his tutorial sessions. Secretly the tutor comes to feel that probably his real purpose is therapeutic, since the terrible circumstances of Charlie's life make it highly unlikely that he will ever be focused enough to master the complex keying system of the saxophone or learn to read music competently. The tutor says as much in a lonely, late-night call to his own father, who tells him in a supportive tone that in this kind of work the results one works for are not always the important ones. If Charlie doesn't learn the saxophone, it doesn't mean that he isn't benefiting from the attention. Also, the father says, "What pleases me is how much you are growing as a human being."
And Charlie smiles politely at his tutor but secretly feels that the tutor's pained attentions are evidence that he, Charlie, must be inadequate in some way. He finds it harder to pay attention during his lessons. He has also heard from many that the saxophone -- a European instrument -- really has little to do with who he is. He tells this to the tutor one day, after a particularly poor practice session. The tutor is sympathetic because he, too, has recently learned that it is not exactly esteem building to impose a European instrument on an African-American child.
Finally Charlie stops coming to the program. The tutor accepts his failure as inevitable. Sadly he realizes that he had been expecting it all along. But he misses Charlie, and for the first time feels a genuine anger at his racist nation, a nation that has bred such discouragement in black children. The young tutor realizes that surely Charlie could have been saved had there been a program to intervene earlier in his life. And for the first time in his life the tutor understands the necessity for political involvement. He redoubles his commitment to an America that works "proactively" to transform and uplift its poor, and that carries out this work with genuine respect for cultural differences.
The following fall, back in college, he tells his favorite history professor that he finally understands what "Eurocentrism" means. "Can you imagine," he says, shaking his head in disbelief at himself, "teaching saxophone to a poor black kid from Kansas City?"
Eddie 12:57 PM
Thursday, March 06, 2003
Voyeurs
In the movie "Being There," Chance the Gardener, or Chauncey Gardiner as he comes to be known, tells people that "I like to watch." Specifically he means television, although others interpret him otherwise (including Shirley MacLaine's character who understands him in a wonderfully naughty way), but it seems clear that the film intends the statement more broadly. Played by Peter Sellers, Chauncey is a kind but vacant character, in whom others "discover" some kind of higher folk wisdom. His emptiness is filled both by an aping of what he sees and by the desires of what others want to see in him. Apparently, the film was a personal project of Seller's, who thought the main character a perfect expression of himself: "Sellers described himself as being 'like a microphone—I have no set sound of my own. I pick it up from my surroundings.' "
We all like to watch, and for the same reason, even if we are not as literally selfless as Sellers. We find ourselves drawn to the lives of others, especially when those lives are portrayed as art, and we find ourselves drawn to the lives that others see in us. In both cases, these lives have been validated as interesting, even if they are inherently no more remarkable than our own.
It is not hard to find fault in this tendency towards voyeurism. For one, we are finding value simply where others find value. Also, we have reason to fear that our own life slips away while being so preoccupied with the drama beyond us. This is a danger of the storytelling arts in general. Plato and Rousseau, among others, have warned us of these dangers. Should our lives be an image of an image?
Without abandoning art, one lesson perhaps to draw is that we should learn to see our own life with the same sharpness of perception as the novelist sees his characters. Alain de Botton credits Marcel Proust with the genius of finding all the great themes of human existence within a seemingly unremarkable existence, Proust's own life. Rather than lament our lack of heroism, and the accompanying lack of bards to sing that heroism, we should learn to become our own bards, even if we are just singing the song to ourselves.
This is good advice, I believe, but it is not enough to turn us from being voyeurs, nor do I think it should, for there is still a fundamental uneasiness about our lives for which we need some consolation. That uneasiness stems from the recognition of the many satisfying but mutually exclusive possibilities within our reach. The choices we make open up other choices but close others off, and there is no going back. We cannot be content simply to acknowledge that these possibilities are equally good, so that we are not losing anything by choosing one at the expense of others, because each of these possibilities brings with it different experiences of the world and the opportunity to develop different aspects of ourselves. For example, I am attempting now to learn an instrument, but I will never develop the ability of one who has made music his life, especially if he started so much earlier than I have. It is hard to reconcile yourself to this fact of your mortality. Even if I'm not going to live forever, I would at least like to find out all that I have inside of me, but this is not to be, and it is not to be for any of us.
There is no fully satisfying resolution for this problem, but there is consolation. I believe part of why we enjoy being voyeurs is that we enjoy getting a glimpse of the lives we let go. This watching need not be the consequence of selflessness (in the sense used earlier), but can be instead a limited form of self-discovery. We watch not out of envy or regret but out of friendship, like when we meet up again with people we knew earlier and discover where life has taken them. It is a melancholic pleasure, to be sure, but it is not false. It is not self-betrayal.
Eddie 11:47 PM
Wednesday, March 05, 2003
Nakedness
Den Beste posts today about the nature of honest intellectual debate en route to responding to an ungenerous assailant. Most of his characterization of honest debate is familiar, but it is well-considered and worth a read.
I would add to his points an emphasis on the peculiar way in which honest debate is confrontational. Most forms of confrontation involve the hiding of weakness. Argumentation, however, when done properly, exposes weakness to others. By giving our reasons for our beliefs, we make ourselves vulnerable to refutation and even ridicule. This display of vulnerability is, oddly enough, a form of confrontation itself. It ups the ante. Whoever we are engaging in discussion must decide to become equally vulnerable or make it clear that the stakes are too high.
It reminds of the game of chess. I enjoy chess, and even the study of chess and its history, but the game scares the crap out of me. To play a game of chess is to be fully naked in front of one's opponent. If you lose, you have nothing and no one but yourself to blame. I find the game so draining that I rarely play it, preferring instead games with dice and cards and whatnot. It is easier to enjoy yourself when you think things could have worked out otherwise with only a few changes of luck.
I don't really buy Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates, but he makes an interesting point about Socrates in The Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche questions how a strange man like Socrates, who spent a lifetime wandering around getting into contentious discussions with people, ever became such an important person for the Athenians. He decides that Socrates was able to tap into the Athenian love of competition by offering them a new game: dialectics. Indeed, Socrates does liken himself to a wrestler, trying to pin down whoever is willing to engage him. And, of course, the Athenians wrestled naked.
Eddie 10:50 PM
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
No Bull
Top 10 Reasons I Should Have Been Asked To Blog For Raging Cow ("milk-based product with an attitude"):
10. I am within 2 standard deviations of the target demographic. (I think.)
9. I am willing to try this.
8. I am only slightly lactose intolerant.
7. I am using one of the sportier standard templates from Blogger.
6. Although I wasn't part of the consumer testing, I too want "new, exciting dairy drink products."
5. The mountain of scorn poured upon me will greatly increase my readership.
4. I'll put my metaphysics up against this guy any day of the week.
3. I think one of those cam girls on the home page is my student.
2. I know the truth behind cow-tipping.
1. My nine-year-old tells me I'm not as embarrassing as I used to be.
Eddie 10:58 PM
Allowing Harm
Jim Ryan has posted on the moral difference between doing someone harm and allowing it. Jim believes that leftists have a tendency to morally equate the two, whereas we should recognize that doing harm is always worse than allowing it, even if allowing it is sometimes wrong too.
I agree that there is a moral difference, but it isn't clear to me that doing harm is always worse than allowing it. For example, my brother and I sometimes play sports together, and a few times he has come close to getting into a fight. If a fight broke out and he was getting hurt, while I just stood by and watched, I believe that my inaction would be morally worse than the action of the person fighting my brother. It is likely that my brother helped provoke the fight, minimizing the other guy's culpability, and I believe I have a special obligation to look out for my brother, so my inaction is particularly egregious.
In every situation, then, where we see active harm and/or the allowing of harm, we ask these questions: "what kind of person would do that?" and "what kind of person would let that be done?". I'm guessing that "the kind of person" in the former is usually quite different from the latter, and probably the former is more often morally worse, but I don't see that we can make any strong generalizations about it.
For myself, I know that I allow harm often out of respect for the autonomy of others and out of a recognition of my own ignorance. A shameful moment for me came about 15 years ago when I was visiting a friend in London. (The real London, Jim.) It was New Year's Eve and we were wandering the city and came upon what appeared to be two young punks beating up a police officer. A crowd had gathered around to watch. We hadn't been there long and I found myself summoning my courage to step forward to do something about it. My friend probably sensed it because she grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the crowd. (I attribute the bulk of whatever misogynistic tendencies I have to this moment.) To my everlasting regret, I let her. Why? I'm not sure, but I think it was probably because of uncertainty. I was young, I was in a foreign city, there were all these other people standing around not doing anything, and my friend was pulling me away from the action. At bottom, I think that I just wasn't sure what I was seeing and what the implications of my involvement would have been. I wish I had acted differently in this case, but I think this motive explains a great deal of our inaction in the face of apparent harm. We just don't always know what we are seeing, and so we leave people to work out their own situation.
We also allow harm sometimes to let actions have their consequences. One of the worst things we can do for someone is to rob their actions of their consequences. In doing so we remove them from reality and delay their maturity. As Jim points out, some people are wicked or lazy, and harm befalls them as a consequence. To not let that happen shields them from the truth of their behavior.
On average, then, I would guess that allowing harm is morally superior to doing harm, but I don't see that this is true as a matter of principle.
Eddie 12:32 AM
Sunday, March 02, 2003
Exile
A quick thought: isn't it a shame that exile is not really an option for punishment anymore? It seems so humane. An exile might even have special status in a foreign land. On the one hand, people might fear wondering what the exile had done; on the other hand, everyone has enough ill-will towards other nations to think well of someone who managed to get himself kicked out.
In class the other day, while discussing Rousseau, I made the point that I don't remember ever having agreed to be a citizen of this United States. What right then does this country have to assume that I am bound by its laws? My students told me that if I didn't like it I could leave. (Have I mentioned how much I love my students?) Anyhow, I'm not sure the point is really true. I could leave, but there are no unclaimed pieces of land, as far as I know of, where I could make my abode. What's the point of leaving one set of rules just to enter into another? This is why exile is impossible too; for the United States to send someone into exile, they would necessarily be sending the person into another country, which is obviously problematic. We certainly don't like it when Castro does things like this.
There are a lot of good stories about exiles, especially in the Icelandic sagas, but hardly any about people who spent their life in prison. I think we've lost something.
Eddie 1:04 AM
Friday, February 28, 2003
International Law
Mickey Kaus has finally hopped off of the fence regarding Iraq and is, alas, defending the position that we should only attack Iraq if we can get the Security Council to play along. Apparently our commitment to international law, according to Kaus, justifies delaying even a just war until cooperation can be found or matters become so bad that self-defense requires us to act.
Someone needs to remind me what international law is and why it is important. I think I've forgotten.
Treaties and alliances I understand. These kinds of acts are statements of our intentions. They are not, however, binding in any important sense. We should fulfill our promises, but there is no means to enforce them. If we fail to abide by a treaty, we may have failed politically and morally, but legally it seems to me that we have simply declared the treaty null and void.
Kaus seems to think that we strengthen international bodies when we abide by them even when we don't want to. This is true, however, only if it persuades others to do likewise. When it fails to persuade, we have simply been taken advantage of. The only international law we should recognize then, as far as I can make sense of, is law between countries that show a willingness to abide by it. Iraq, however, has failed on this score. It seems to me then that we should not consider our relations with Iraq to be subject to law at all. With Iraq, we are back in the state of nature, and the opinions of France and Germany should no longer matter. (There may be good political reasons for playing the UN game, like giving Blair cover, but I don't see good legal ones.)
There are a great number of competing political theories on the nature of law, but the political theories that shaped our own history the most see the law as grounded in the will of the sovereign. The sovereign is not necessarily identical with the government; it is that which gives government its legitimacy. In a democracy, the people are sovereign. The people, as sovereign, makes law to bind individuals (including government officials), but it can never bind itself, because it is unthinkable that it could pass a law that it couldn't later revoke.
For their to be true international law, by this reasoning, there would need to be a corresponding sovereign. Clearly there is not. International law then is law only by analogy, and I think the analogy is strained. I am happy, however, to be instructed otherwise.
Eddie 9:59 PM
Reader Mail
I often forget to check down to see if anyone has left comments on posts more than a few days old. Anyhow, I ran across a comment to my Exit Strategy post from Sunday. The comment was lengthy and thoughtful, albeit somewhat ungenerous, but I've decided to respond here rather than in my comment box since, if others are like me, they aren't likely to see it. The comment begins:
OK, so you want to think about "exit strategies." As a first step, shake your head vigorously to clear out the cobwebs and talk radio shibboleths about "the left" wanting us to be "ashamed" of America.
I don't listen to talk radio much at all, so I hope that eliminates the need for any vigorous head shaking. As to the shibboleth, I said not that the left wants us to be ashamed of America generally, but that it wants us to be ashamed of "our use of power". I don't find this claim terribly controversial, especially in relation to the Vietnam war, but maybe I'm mistaken. (Note: I do not identify "the left" with the Democratic party.)
Finished with step one? All right, let's take a look at those commonly accepted lessons of the Vietnam war. You list several: not a policeman, full support of those we fight for, clear objectives, exit strategy. You also skip a couple. One, helpfully insinuated by your first commentator, is that you need full domestic political support to wage war. Another is that the armed forces can only win if they are free to fight as they see fit, without political meddling and second-guessing.
He's right. Let's continue:
Who is responsible for these dogmas? Well, not the left. In fact, our military leaders have been the foremost proponents of these ideas. (In fact, almost the whole lot could be lifted straight from Colin Powell's essay in Foreign Affairs back in 1992.) And the American military has been, at least in a limited sense, aligned with the right in American politics.
I agree that our military leaders, especially Powell, seem to have significantly bought into these ideas. They may even be the "foremost proponents." Nonetheless, it seems odd to claim that the left does not use Vietnam as an argument against military action. They did it with Afghanistan and they are doing it again with Iraq. (They employ many other arguments as well, so I don't want to overstate the matter.) They argue that we will become bogged down in urban warfare, or that we will be watching body bags again on the nightly news, or that we will need to maintain a large military presence to control an angry Iraqi presence.
Now just because military men dispense this conventional wisdom doesn't make it infallible. The respect we have for our military leaders shouldn't put their ideas about warfare beyond question. Clemenceau was right: "War is too important to leave to the generals." There is even more reason than usual to be skeptical in this case, because this set of dogmas has the odor of special pleading and excuse-making for our military failure in Vietnam. The fact is, our military leaders never faced up that failure, and these ideas are the shield they built to fend off any serious thought about it. This way, they never have to admit that, despite having brave and capable soldiers, our forces were poorly led, tactically inept, and undermined by petty inter-service rivalries.
I agree with the first half of the paragraph and don't know enough to dispute the second half. Let's continue:
That said, we shouldn't just ignore what the generals say, either. There are good reasons to worry about open-ended commitments to using military force. There are costs and dangers to consider. Those costs and dangers are likely to be especially high in Iraq. In Iraq and its neighbors, many people -- and probably most people -- will be hostile to any long-term occupation. Many will be eager to attack us. The sacrifices involved will be far greater than for our generally welcomed presence in Japan and Western Europe.
So the military leaders, who are aligned with the right "in a limited sense", have been responsible for these "dogmas," except now it turns out that they are right. It looks like the right somehow gets the blame for both the Vietnam syndrome and for not recognizing the truth of these dogmas in the particular case of Iraq. What luck! As to the hostility expected from the Iraqis, I guess we'll just have to wait and see, but somehow I doubt it. It is hard to imagine a people being subject to the likes of Hussein being "eager to attack us." Why aren't they attacking him?
Moreover, the Bush administration has done exactly nothing to prepare Americans for the sacrifices involved. They are selling a quick war and a fast get-away. This is a recipe for disaster. I hope they are lying. (Their record for doing so is pretty reliable.) But, if so, it's going to be tough to maintain support for it domestically when the administration hasn't been upfront about it in the first place.
I see signs over the past week of this problem changing, but I sincerely hope, as I said in this post, that the anti-war left will be there to hold Bush to these commitments. I hope, in other words, that the left can hope for something other than Bush to fail in this endeavor.
Eddie 12:29 AM
Thursday, February 27, 2003
Graveyards
I can't remember the last time I enjoyed being in a library. I go to them only when I have to, which is about once or twice a year.
When I was in college and shortly thereafter, libraries simply intimidated me. I remember making lists of the books that Needed Reading, which was intimidating enough, but I was determined to be a learned person. When I went to the library, however, I just had the overwhelming sense that the battle was lost. I would be lucky to read everything on my list; I certainly wasn't going to read even a tiny fraction of the university library's holdings. Occasionally I would just pull a book off the shelf to see what was inside, as if to keep the books on guard. I couldn't read them all, to be sure, but that didn't mean I wanted to be taken for granted!
It has been a long time since I've made a reading list, having reconciled myself to the fact that there are some wonderful books that I will simply never get to. I attempted James Joyce about 15 years ago, fell short, and there is a real possibility that I might not make it back. I saw the movie The Hours last Friday, but I may never actually read Virginia Wolf. Even in philosophy there are quite a few important books, and authors generally, that will probably escape me, such as Lucretius and Sartre. I consider Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche to be three of the authors most important to me, and each of them has works I've never looked at. I haven't even read all of Montaigne's Essays and I teach him nearly every semester.
If I can reconcile myself to these losses, it isn't very hard to overcome not reading the cutting edge of stoichiometry or books on Latin America written in the 1970s. These days, my dread of libraries has a different motivation. When I enter them, I feel like I'm entering a graveyard.
We all die twice, first physically and then from the memory of others. For most people, it is enough to be remembered by the people we immediately leave behind, and maybe one or two generations beyond us. Authors, however, seem to want more, and I don't have it in me to give it to them.
In calling a library a graveyard, I do a disservice to graveyards. I actually find some satisfaction in real graveyards, especially the older ones with interesting monuments and statues. These graveyards mark the lives of individuals, but the individuals don't demand a lot of attention, allowing the graveyard to speak more generally to a fundamental fact of our being. Books, however, are very demanding, because there is a sense in which the author is not dead while his book is still alive. I accept that we have obligations to the dead, but only in measures.
A couple of weeks ago a student of mine who works in the library was giving me a hard time about the fact that I hadn't returned some books due last November. I told her I didn't think there was any great demand for any book I might be reading, and opened up each one to the page where the library assistant stamps the due date. As I expected, one of the books was last checked out in 1990, the other in 1988. At another time, I went looking for some books on 19th-century hymn writers. (Don't ask.) Anyhow, the books I found had not been checked out for forty years! Some of the books had pictures on the front page or back cover of the author smiling.
This is too much. Even my own personal library is too much, and I would pare it down a good bit if my wife were to let me. (I've tried to institute a policy that each book that enters the house must be matched by a book leaving it, but she doesn't share my thoughts on this matter.) There just aren't that many authors that I can keep alive at one time, and I don't need to be reminded of the ones I've let go. I have reached the point where I would usually rather read a book again than pick another one up for the first time. Even when I do look at a book for the first time, I find myself increasingly inclined to just read parts unless compelled to do otherwise. If I limit my familiarity, maybe I won't feel such a sense of betrayal later.
Eddie 4:45 AM
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Backdrop
What do you do if a friend is dating someone you consider a real loser? Do you speak your mind, or just not talk much about it one way or another? I would normally choose the latter, for fear that my criticisms would have the opposite effect intended. It seems to me that the human psyche has a natural tendency to contribute to common opinion whatever seems to be lacking in emphasis. In the case of my friend, I suspect that, hearing only negative comments, my friend would naturally be disposed to make the argument for the loser. Having put the argument forth, my friend might become attached to it and thereby find it even harder to see the bigger picture.
It seems to me that a fair number of disagreements can be explained by this phenomenon. We share, more or less, in a common wisdom with others, but we never find that wisdom to be wholly true. Rather than seeing those disagreements as irregular deviations from the norm, however, we find our minds drawn to them because we have a sense that our insights will vanish if we are not there to support them. The rest of common opinion is secure, in that many others hold to it, but our particular deviation has special need of us. Blessed now with a mission, we are gratified as well to find a source of identity.
Identity, however, is a dangerous matter, since it encourages us to fix ourselves for public consumption. Those who disagree with us will challenge our convictions, pushing us to hold on even tighter. If only the agreement of others provided a useful countereffect! Sometimes, in fact, it does; in the midst of your compatriots, the psychic urge to balance the unbalanced might actually lead you to consider other points of view. It seems, however, that most groups of like-minded people finds ways of keeping the enemy "alive" in order to promote solidarity and increase conviction. Thus we get it coming and going.
Not only do we find identity in these idiosyncratic views, but we also let others take responsibility for parts of the common wisdom that we are not eager to defend or promote. A committee, for example, may inadvertently expect its minority member to "represent" minority views generally, thus freeing the rest of the committee from giving those views much consideration. The other members of the committee might even believe the minority member to be too narrowly concerned with minority issues, not realizing that it has put the member in this role to begin with. Of course, it can also work out that the minority member assumes that "white people will take care of themselves," thereby becoming free from the psychic dissonance caused by considering the point of view of the "privileged".
In Rousseau's philosophy, there are two seemingly disconnected ideas that end up having more in common than is first apparent. One of these ideas is the idea of authenticity, although Rousseau doesn't use this term. In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau complains that, while savage man is within himself, civilized man is always comparing himself to others to determine his happiness. This constant need to evaluate one's success relative to others is the origins of vice, injustice, and discontent. The other idea I have in mind is Rousseau's belief that, to be legitimate, a political order must look out for the welfare of all of its citizens. Rousseau places this demand on each citizen individually; we must all consider the welfare of everyone else, even if we can be counted on to understand our own welfare the best.
What do these two claims have in common? Well, it seems to me that both claims assert a need for us recognize our idiosyncratic views for what they are. That doesn't mean rejecting those views; it means rather being mindful of the much larger shared backdrop of common opinion. Our desire for identity, to be distinguished from each other, is also the source of the misery we inflict on ourselves (by isolating ourselves) and on others (by separating them from us). We reach maturity when we make our inheritance our own, but this means all of it, at least all of it that we can ultimately affirm. As long as we hold tight to that which makes us look different, we will prolong our adolescence.
I have noted this adolescent tendency in myself regarding the issue of Iraq. Deep down, I understand the concern of many about American overreach. It is certainly a possibility, especially if we decide that the international community is not trustworthy enough to take seriously. This concern, however, even when I examine it openly, does not give me sufficient grounds for opposing war. The problem is that I find myself pushing the concern away because it connects me to people I'd just as soon not identify with. This is short-sightedness. Assuming that there is a war with Iraq, and that it ends in the destruction of Hussein and his regime, we will need to make a commitment to the rebuilding of Iraq. Nation-building, however, was not a popular concept among American conservatives prior to 9-11, and it is the pro-war liberals who have been rightfully reminding us of why these kinds of entanglements are important. Those who are opposed to war like to make this argument as well, claiming that we are not even taking care of Afghanistan, so the prospects of our taking care of Iraq are even lower. I don't buy this as a good reason for inaction, but we will need to take this argument seriously later on. Will those opposed to the war, however, find it within themselves to be a part of a post-war order they didn't want to begin with? Will those who have supported the war find it within themselves to listen?
Eddie 11:04 PM
Monday, February 24, 2003
Testing
The past couple of years I have not given very many tests in my classes. I have given papers instead for a couple of reasons. First, I consider writing to be a real skill (and art), whereas the thought of sharpening someone's test-taking skills leaves me a little cold. Second, I believe that you learn philosophy mainly by doing it and not just reading about it. To some extent, there is no alternative but to reinvent the wheel, using the writings of others afterward mainly for comparison. (I discovered this in spades with my dissertation; I thought that I would be developing ideas from a few sources of interest only to find by the end of the dissertation that everything I came up with was already in those sources. I just hadn't understood entirely what I had been reading.)
This semester I am covering a class in political theory to help out our political science department, and find myself using a textbook and giving exams. The first exam was this past Friday, and I was struck this weekend by the distribution in grades. It was a classic bell curve. That might not sound unusual, but I don't normally get a distribution like that with papers. With papers, I get a few that are fairly strong, a great many that are reasonably good, and then a smaller number that have real problems. Basically, there just isn't the separation with papers as there is with tests. My wife has had the same experience.
I have been puzzling over why this is the case. My best answer so far is that I am looking for very different things with papers than I am with tests. My papers are never just research papers; they always involve the student defending a position of his own. On the other hand, tests are mainly an exercise in showing one's familiarity with a certain amount of material that originates in the minds of others. If this is the significant difference, it suggests that students really are not that far apart in what they understand for themselves, but only in what they have borrowed.
My own experience with this blog corroborates the conclusion. I spent a year reading blogs before I tried it for myself. What brought me into it was the increasing sense that I had something to contribute to the conversation. Interestingly, however, I realized quickly that, in fact, I had actually very little to add to many of those discussions. I had a lot of ideas floating around in my head, but, when it came time to make a post, I realized that most of those ideas were borrowed from others. (This is a little disconcerting. How many other opinions am I convinced of that I have never worked for?) I noticed even that my reading patterns changed as I started paying more attention to blogs that were concentrating on topics I had more experience thinking about. Before they had seemed too familiar for me to linger over.
Anyhow, I don't know whether to be reassured or dismayed at the possibility that my students are not as far apart as I had believed.
Eddie 11:42 PM
Sunday, February 23, 2003
Exit Strategy
I have never really studied the Vietnam war and I was too young (born in 1966) to remember the war as it was happening. Not studying it has probably been a mistake. It is like an Israelite being born in the land of Canaan shortly after the exodus from Egypt and wondering what the big deal is. You lose cultural meaning and perspective on something whose presence is everywhere.
I did, of course, learn the common lessons from that event. The US shouldn't be the world's policeman. You can't win a war without the full support of the people you are fighting for. You must have clear political objectives that translate into clear military objectives. You must have an exit strategy.
As far as I can tell, this common wisdom has made its way into the American canon, since my students, born in the 1980s (yikes!), are still drawing the same conclusions from that war. It is interesting to me how much more real the Vietnam war is to them than the Korean war. The country has moved a great deal to the right over the last 30 years, but, interestingly, our historical imagination has not. The themes of the American left still dominate: anti-anti-communism was more important than anti-communism, the civil rights movement fully defined American politics, plus the conclusions about Vietnam already mentioned.
I need to study these matters in greater detail because I increasingly have the sense that I have much to unlearn. Over the past two years, I have begun to unlearn the significance of exit strategies. Beyond the particular case of Vietnam, I suppose that the idea of exit strategies is important to a world superpower not interested in becoming a true colonial power. I support this desire, but the effect is an emphasis not on finishing, but merely ending, what has been started. What folly to think that we can foresee the future so clearly that we can set concrete limits to our involvement. And how disastrous it is to stir matters up and then back away before true resolution. Our abandonment of the south Vietnamese is the lesson I'm now learning, not unlike our abandonment of the Iraqis whom we encouraged to revolt.
At the forum I went to Thursday night, someone asked if we were willing to maintain a presence in Iraq for four or five years, with the obvious implication that such a result would be terrible. But we have maintained a military presence in Europe and southeast Asia for the last 55 years, and the results are largely positive. If it will bring accountability to the Middle East, I am prepared for us to invest another 50.
The doctrine of exit strategies is, I suppose, another expression of the inconstancy of foreign policy in a democratic state. I won't pretend to have an answer for it. It may help, however, for us to become more knowledgeable of our own history to combat the stories the left holds so dear, especially the stories designed to make us ashamed of our use of power. We do have things to be ashamed of, and these are all cautionary tales, but we can't become paralyzed or, worse, half-hearted in our endeavors.
Eddie 5:17 PM
Crosslisting
It bothers me to see a language developed for one kind of entity employed to describe another kind of entity without careful consideration of what would make that employment legitimate. Some examples:
1. This past week, I was engaged in defending a certain German philosopher not to be named here who talks about the state in organic terms. The state is not an organism, nor is it a machine, as some of the Founders thought of it. There may be useful analogies to develop, but it is a mistake to use the terminology of biology or physics as a base for making sense of politics. The state is also neither a village (Hillary) nor a business (Perot).
2. The family is not the state in minaiture. It is also not a business (homemaker as occupation), nor is a business a family. In fact, I take offense at all things called families that are not families ("come be a part of our family!").
3. A business is not a sports team. Colleagues are not teammates and, unless a business has great need for employees with adrenaline pumping, there is no call for "spirit-building". Sports teams, alas, are businesses. Nor is a business a military unit, and business strategy is not military strategy.
4. A syllabus is not a contract, although it probably involves contractual obligations.
5. Waiters, waitresses, sales clerks, and so on are not your friends unless they actually are. Friends are not "friendly".
6. A brain is not a computer chip and human memory is not a hard drive. Talking is not interfacing, and speech is not code.
I could go on, but I'm sounding too pedantic already. The problem I am pointing toward is not metaphor; it is forgetting what is metaphor and what is not. After 2500 years or so of something we might recognize as civilization, the human race has developed terms appropriate for particular realms of discourse. We should know what goes with what.
Eddie 12:42 AM
Saturday, February 22, 2003
Inconsistency?
Case #1: A neighbor of mine has two bumper stickers: "No War on Iraq" and "No one is free when others are oppressed".
Case #2: At the forum I attended the other night, I heard people arguing that we need to lower our dependency on foreign oil and that we shouldn't go to war for the sake of the Iraqi people. But if we really did develop alternative energy sources to replace oil, wouldn't the effect be to greatly diminish the value of the one commodity the Middle East has to offer the rest of the world? Wouldn't this return the Middle East to its earlier poverty? I have no real problem with such a development, since it would make the area less dangerous for the rest of us, but it is hard to see how this would contribute to the well-being of the people of the Middle East.
Eddie 10:41 AM
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Decisions
It looks like I'll need to move my computer soon, and my wife and I can't decide whether to move it into the upstairs hallway or downstairs into the "parlor". Any suggestions?
Eddie 11:07 PM
Forum
Well, the forum at my university to discuss pros and cons of war with Iraq wasn't too bad. I was the only non-student to speak out in favor of military action, but that isn't very surprising I suppose, given the normal political leanings of college professors. All in all, a civil affair. Thanks to those who suggested articles to read in preparation. I think I made a decent showing.
Eddie 10:53 PM
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Hegel Pt. 3
...has been mercifully left in the comments section at God of the Machine. Venture forward at your own risk.
Eddie 10:38 PM
Evidence
On Sunday I posted my reservations about trying to punish our allies for not backing our foreign policy objectives. Well, France's clumsy efforts to intimidate the eastern europeans seem to be helping me make my case. Taking the high road doesn't really satisfy my desire to see others suffer, but I guess it is the best way after all.
Eddie 10:10 AM
Materials
Although I usually avoid campus events like the plague, I will probably attend a gathering Thursday night to discuss pros and cons on the possible war with Iraq. I would like to go armed, so let me know of any articles or speeches that you think would be particularly helpful for the event. I am planning to find something from Hitchens, Powell's speech to the UN, and Blair's speech last week.
Eddie 8:38 AM
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Hegel Pt. 2
The defense of Hegel resumes! Having responded to Aaron's initial post, let me now turn to a remark from his comments section.
C. Bloggerfeller writes:
I don't know much about Hegel but I know enough to avoid him. He seems to be a big favourite with totalitarian thinkers of the "historically inevitable" persuasion. Hegel is one of those philosophers who is so complex and obscure (i.e. he can't write for toffee), that it seems to me people who study him seriously have no option but to become Hegelians, otherwise they would have to accept they'd spent five or ten years of their lives in vain (see also, Heideggerians).
I think a lot of people find reason to not read or think about Hegel. He has some bad press, and I've come reluctantly to admit that he is indeed a terrible writer. (He could actually write very well, as evidenced by some of his early pieces, but apparently he thought he would be taken more seriously if he confused the hell out of everyone. I don't consider this point to his credit.) However, as an undergraduate student said to me today, there are some real moments of excitement in between the dense unintelligible paragraphs. And, as I've discovered, the number of paragraphs that are dense and unintelligible diminishes with each reading.
As to the big favorite of totalitarian thinkers, I doubt it. Maybe Bloggerfeller is thinking of Marx? As to historical inevitability, Hegel's claim ultimately is that truth unfolds in time. This doesn't mean that we can't forget the wisdom that has been learned, or bomb ourselves back into oblivion or whatnot. It means that certain truths only become accessible when society somehow stumbles into them. This is not such a fantastic notion. Try to find the modern notions of science, freedom, and equality in ancient philosophy.
Next let's look at Arthur Silber's post, written in response to Aaron. Arthur begins by quoting Hegel from the Philosophy of Right:
A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims his life, the individual must surrender it.
I would hope all of us warbloggers would recognize the truth of this claim, since we are defending a policy that will almost certainly lead to American soldiers giving their lives for the "ethical whole". I presume even classical liberals recognize the value of sacrificing for one's nation.
As to the single person being subordinate to the whole, I think it right to say that Hegel is not exactly a liberal like Locke. Hegel argues that our lives can only take shape within the ethical order. The ethical order educates us and provides the means and context of our life's work. Freedom is not absolute; it is determinate, and therefore finite. (Translation: We can't do just anything we want, so we must make choices that the community can abide and support; in making these choices, our lives take on a determinate shape, giving us our identity.) We can be truly free only within the ethical order, so we must place its protection above more private pursuits. Totalitarian states, by the way, have extremely diminished ethical orders, because the dictator smashes the bonds of custom that typically unite citizens. As I wrote about in my last post, Hegel was a supporter of the French Revolution, although he recognized that it dissolved into the Terror because of the demand for absolute freedom.
Next Arthur quotes Leonard Peikoff:
Hegel's collectivism and state-worship are more explicit than anything to be found in Plato's writings. Since everything is ultimately one, the group, he holds, has primacy over the individual. If each man learns to suppress his identity and coalesce with his fellows, the resulting collective entity, the state, will be a truer reflection of reality, a higher manifestation of the Absolute. The state in this view is not an association of autonomous individuals. It is itself an individual, a mystic "person" that swallows up the citizens and transcends them, an independent, self-sustaining organism, made of human beings, with a will and a purpose of its own. "[A]ll the worth which the human possesses," writes Hegel, "all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."
This is such a poor reading of Hegel that I don't know where to begin; as I just wrote, Hegel believes we find our identity in the ethical order. That we place the good of the whole over our own individual welfare doesn't quite add up to there being "a mystic 'person' that swallows up the citizens and transcends them...." The only substance to this quotation at all is that Hegel believes that no one individual captures the full spirit of his age. We each participate in that spirit partially, but Hegel believes that there is a coherent whole that can be found among us. Thus there is an intelligibility to the whole of culture (spirit) that cannot be located in any of its individuals. I don't find this claim terribly shocking.
Arthur next quotes Peikoff again:
Hegel ... seeks to undercut any individualist opponents, by proclaiming that statism represents a passion for human liberty. A man is free, Hegel explains, when he acts as he himself wills to act. But since "the state is the true self of the individual," what a man really wills, even though he may not know it, is what the state wills. Liberty, therefore, is obedience to the orders of the government. Such obedience guarantees true freedom for the real self, even if the illusory self is being sent to Auschwitz.
"What a man really wills... is what the state wills" would be a reasonable, albeit awkward, summary of Adam Smith's thought too. As individuals we tend to pursue, for the most part, purely private aims. But those aims only are possible if recognized as legitimate by others and if we find a way to contribute to others' well being so that they can contribute to ours. We thus promote the state even when looking out for ourselves. Most of us miss this point, and believe that we are doing social good only when we do things and don't get paid for them. This is a mistake; our primary contribution to society can be found usually in our primary occupation. That we are paid is a testament to our social productivity, not an indictment against it. Hegel does think it progress when we become conscious that we intend the welfare of the ethical order and not just our own private ends. As to the Auschwitz reference, this is beneath contempt.
Finally Arthur says:
And Hegel's "heroes," who were "agents of the World-Spirit," include Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. Even though these "heroes" might have caused the deaths of millions, they are not to be judged: [quoting Hegel's Philosophy of Right]"For the History of the World occupies a higher ground than that on which morality has properly its position....[M]oral claims that are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment. The Litany of private virtues...must not be raised against them."
So Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon are villains? Are we to judge human progress only by counting bodies? Hegel does hold to a controversial position here that history progresses because a few world-historical individuals push it forward, usually through war. (Hmmm, warbloggers, does this sound familiar too?) As to world-history being above morality, Hegel's argument, I believe, is that morality is always to be found within particular ethical orders. These generals, however, were bringing these older ethical orders to an end, so it doesn't fully make sense to judge them by those terms. Lincoln, for example, shouldn't be judged by the standards of a slave-holding South. If they are to be judged, it is by the terms of the new ethical order, but usually it is in such infancy at these times that it would be difficult to even articulate what the moral principles would be.
And, finally, if you are still with me, I will give Jim Ryan's post:
Some bloggers were talking about Hegel today. All his nonsense about living for some vast historical scheme - bah! We're living in nothing more than a sea of rock, space and fire, to which nothing matters. We may have a historical scheme if we want, or we may do otherwise, instead. There is not more rationality in a history than in a person. History is not a mind or person. We alone matter. While there is an exhilaration in living a very good life that is something akin to living for something beyond oneself, it's nothing more than the feeling of being very glad to exist. And maybe also partaking of a great historical culture is very good. But there is no scheme.
Cosmologically, I have no argument with Jim. I doubt the universe cares about my existence. But as to human history, is it really implausible that we have inherited a standard of civilization that has steadily progressed from the original tribal structures? (I believe Islamic fundamentalism is a vestige of the tribalism, so it is still with us, but not as the most powerful or persuasive social form on the planet.) Yes, we may do otherwise, but why deny the goods we have inherited just to assert our freedom? As a fellow conservative, I know Jim believes we must become good custodians of what has been bequeathed to us. And there is no necessity to what human beings will choose, but there may be a necessity to what would be good for them to choose.
OK, that is more than enough. And let this be a lesson to the rest of you. If you write nasty remarks about Hegel, I will respond with really, really long posts just to make you suffer!
Eddie 9:17 PM
Monday, February 17, 2003
Hegel
Last week, Andrew Sullivan called the German philosopher Hegel "one of the great liberals." Since Sullivan is my first read in the morning and Hegel has been highly influential upon me, I cheerfully took this as evidence that all was right in my little intellectual world. Lo and behold, however, God of the Machine puts the smack down (with a quotation from no less than Schopenhauer, one of the finest specimens of resentment available!), followed by nasty remarks in the comments. And then Jim Ryan piles on for good measure. And I was just starting to think of these guys as friends!
Well, I won't let this challenge to a great philosopher go without retort. I'll will try to deal with the criticisms individually, but let me begin by saying some of what draws me to Hegel. First, Hegel is one of the last philosophers to really try to speak to the whole of reality. At his point in history, the specialization of knowledge already precluded anyone from being more than an amateur across the arts and sciences, but still Hegel attempted to draw together these vast domains into a single philosophy. Perhaps this is overreaching, but we ought to contemplate what knowledge means if all anyone can hope for is to have hold of just one piece of the puzzle. There is something invigorating about the development of a philosophical language that can stretch from nature to aesthetics to politics to psychology. Second, Hegel's generosity as a philosopher is second to none. For him, as for Parmenides, all speech must be a speech about something, even if that something isn't entirely clear to the one speaking. Thus, there are no utterly false philosophies; the trick is to rescue the insights that motivate those philosophies and set aside the ways in which such philosophies are partial. There is still a kind of condescension involved, in that Hegel tells everyone else what they really mean, but it is an approach far superior to the polemical approach that looks to "refute" all competitors. Related to this point is Hegel's idea of dialectic; intellectual development occurs because of the gap between what we say and what we meant to say. By seeing the task of philosophy as reconciling insight and articulation, Hegel manages to answer the traditional problem of how it is possible to match ideas to external reality. (The problem, in short, is that we cannot get beyond our own experience, so how do we compare our ideas to external reality to begin with?) Rather than trying to reach "outside" experience, Hegel tries instead to reach "inside" to the truths that we originally intuit but struggle to put into words.
OK, let me respond to the criticisms.
Aaron says:
Andrew Sullivan calls Hegel "one of the great liberals" (as in classical liberal) today. This is Hegel he's talking about, theorist of the apotheosis of the State, official Prussian court philosopher and lickspittle to Friedrich Wilhelm III.
Let me quote in response from T.M. Knox:
The question whether Hegel was a man of cringing disposition is relevant to a consideration of the charge that he truckled to the Prussian government. To answer such a question a whole biography would be required, but reference may be made here to some of Hegel's actions during his Berlin period (1818-31) when he was at the height of his powers and fame, and when he was being accused of servility by Fries and others who were jealous of his success. In youth he had been an enthusiast for the French Revolution as the assertion in practice of man's natural right to freedom. In 1826, on the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, he drank a toast with his students in honor of the event; 'he explained its significance and said that a year never passed without his celebrating the anniversary in this way.'
Aaron says next:
Hegel, who proved, philosophically, that there was no planet between Mars and Jupiter, that magnetizing iron increases its weight, and that Newton's theories of gravity and inertia contradict each other. What is Sullivan thinking?
First, this doesn't address Sullivan's comments on liberalism. Second, I don't know what Aaron means by proving these matters philosophically. At the time, modern science still went by the name natural philosophy, so there is no problem there. If Aaron means that somehow he argues for these matters in an a priori fashion, I'll let him supply the evidence. (But be careful: it is common for early modern philosophers of nature to speak of finding the principles of nature through induction, but then deducing the phenomena of nature from those principles. This doesn't count as strict a priorism.) Finally, I think that scientists contradict themselves all the time. Perhaps there is a precision in their mathematics, but there sure as hell isn't precision when they put those results into more ordinary English. Metaphysically, scientists are some of the sloppiest thinkers I have ever encountered, mainly because they aren't ultimately concerned with this kind of sense-making.
Finally, while I love Schopenhauer and appreciate Popper, these aren't exactly the best critics one can find. Schopenhauer hated Hegel for his popularity. As for Popper, he is an important voice in the philosophy of science (not the philosophy of nature), but he is a moron when it comes to the larger philosophical tradition. His treatment of Plato's Republic is a particular embarrassment. I'd no sooner trust his perception of Hegel than I would Bertrand Russell's.
I'll pick up some more tomorrow, even if I am the only one who cares about this.
Eddie 5:35 PM
Sunday, February 16, 2003
Allies
Den Beste has written lately that the US should punish France and Germany for their sustained efforts to frustrate our efforts regarding Iraq. By punish he means diplomatic and, to some extent, economic payback. I am still undecided.
As far as France and Germany are concerned, I have little but ill will toward them, so my qualms are not with whatever misfortune might come their way. My concerns are with the effect such a policy would have on our other more serious alliances. What would they think?
It should be recognized by everyone that even our closest friends have reason to be concerned about how we throw our weight around. Even if you believe, as I do, that American foreign policy has historically been largely a force for good, there is no guarantee that tomorrow will look like today or yesterday. Our military strength means that we currently have no real equals, and no amount of good will can cover that up. The lion may lie down with the lamb, but the lamb is still a lamb. Add to that basic insecurity a new foreign policy that legitimates preemptive strikes, and insecurities can only increase.
It is hard to believe then that even our true friends will not worry about the possibility that American displeasure might some day be turned towards them. Nobody agrees forever, and you wouldn't want to work under the assumption that agreement is always necessary. How then would our allies respond to this punishment for challenging American policy?
Occasionally I have students who are truly an obstacle to what I want to accomplish in class. Some are disrespectful to me; some become so fixated on a point that they won't let the discussion move forward; others discourage conversation by treating the comments of others with disdain. Fortunately, I do not have more than one or two of these students a year, but, when I do, it puts me in an awkward position. If I don't do anything, there is a chance that the problem will go away on its own, but there is also the chance that it will not and that the students I am trying to reach will tune the whole experience out. If I try to respond, however, I am taking a risk as well, because students have a natural tendency to sympathize with the person on the receiving end of my reprimand, even if they believe the reprimand to be fully deserved. I've noticed that often when I make a reprimand of this kind that everyone becomes silent and it becomes difficult for me to reestablish the open discussion my teaching style demands.
I fear that if the US punishes France and Germany, a similar chill will be felt throughout all of our relations. Is there anything to justify or remedy this tension?
I think it safe to say that we would never want to send the message that any disagreement with us will lead to retribution. If we were to act in such a way, it would be necessary to make clear that this situation is somehow different from other international events. We would have to frame the argument to make the situation with Iraq unique or at least one instance of a fairly narrowly defined pattern.
Perhaps such a position can be established. Certainly the danger of international terrorism has changed the rules of the game. It is not enough to wait for someone to strike first, because the terrorists make it difficult to know where to return fire. This undermines traditional deterrence theory and the international codes of conduct based on that theory. We do need to develop a coherent theory of preemptive strike, and bring as many other nations on board as possible.
It isn't clear to me, however, that this will be enough, and I don't think we've done it yet anyway. To act as if we have would be a shot out of the blue and could make all sorts of people needlessly nervous.
Rather than punishing France and Germany, I think we need to keep making it clear, as Rumsfield seems to be doing, that their continued intransigence is increasing our conviction that they are not allies at all. Notice how we don't have the same anger towards Russia and China; we don't have the sense with these countries of there being a betrayal. Rather than adjusting the attitude of France and Germany, then, we should adjust our own and act accordingly. Here are some (not very deeply thought out) possibilities:
1. End NATO as it is currently formulated, and develop a series of bilateral relations with the countries we can work with. The US has always been the main force of NATO anyway.
2. End the UN as it is currently formulated, and begin working toward a new international forum for dispute resolution. At the very least, stop incorporating third-world dictatorships into parliamentary procedures that these dictators have no inherent respect for. Letting people play at being civilized actually makes it harder to distinguish respectable speech from petty machinations. Furthermore, France and Germany don't deserve anything like the status they have on the Security Council.
3. Move all American military forces out of France and Germany and any other place that is undependable. Let them fend for themselves.
Basically, I think we need our international relations to become more honest, to reflect changes that have occurred over the last 50 years. The world is not ready for anything like world governance. We would do better, I believe, to not act as if matters were otherwise.
Eddie 7:44 PM
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