Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

Evidentialism: Who Needs It? L’affair Klinghoffer

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I’ve been blogging, teaching, and thinking, about evidentialism lately, so this item caught my eye:

Several hundred protesters gathered outside the Met before the performance of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” for a noisy demonstration calling for the company to cancel its production of John Adams’s 1991 opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which is to have its Met premiere next month. That opera depicts a 1985 cruise ship hijacking by members of the Palestine Liberation Front, and the killing of a disabled Jewish American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer. …

On Monday morning, Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, in the Bronx, led a small group in prayers for Mr. Klinghoffer on Monday morning in a small park across from Lincoln Center. He said that he “absolutely” hoped that the Met would cancel the production. Like many opponents, he said he had not heard “Klinghoffer”: “I’ve not seen it, but I’ve heard enough about it and I don’t want to see it, frankly.”

P.S., October 22, 2014: Another classic contribution to the literature of obscurantism and fallacious argumentation by would-be opponents of “The Death of Klinghoffer.” This one is from a letter in today’s New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Protests Greet Met’s Premiere of ‘Klinghoffer’ ” (front page, Oct. 21):

It has been widely reported that many of those who protest “The Death of Klinghoffer” have never seen the opera, as if that disqualifies them from passing judgment.

To me, whether John Adams’s opera is great art or not is irrelevant. To those who disagree, I ask: How would you feel about an opera about 9/11, sympathetically describing the motivations of the terrorists who brought down New York’s twin towers, as well as the almost 3,000 innocent victims whose lives they ended so brutally?

Certainly, the Metropolitan Opera has a right to stage the opera, but for what purpose?

And why now? Some events are too raw, too sensitive, too wrenching, too immoral to be depicted evenhandedly and without judgment.

And if this opera seeks to communicate some larger truth, some cosmic message for our times that justifies its being performed now, trumping the pain that it causes, what is it?

MARK R. ARNOLD
Gloucester, Mass., Oct. 21, 2014

So not having seen an opera doesn’t disqualify you from passing judgment on it, because whether you’ve seen it or not, nothing stops you from confabulating a tendentious and question-begging description of what it must a priori contain: a “sympathetic” description of the motivation of the terrorists. It seems pointless to point out that a depiction is not a description, that neither a depiction nor a description is an endorsement, and that there is no conceivable way of knowing whether the opera is sympathetic if you haven’t seen it, and don’t intend to.  We seem to have gotten to a point in the Klinghoffer debate in which willful, culpable ignorance has become a virtue, while the desire to know the facts first-hand has become a vice.

As for Mr Arnold’s rhetorical questions:

1. I would feel very badly about an opera about 9/11 that “described” the motivations of the terrorists: operas should be sung, not narrated.

2. The most obvious reason for staging an opera is that the opera company staging it thinks that it’s a good opera, which is what the leadership of the Met Opera happens to think (not that I can judge one way or another, not having seen it).

3. As for “why now?”: to paraphrase Hillel, if not now, when?

For decades, we’ve heard sanctimonious lectures from “the West” about the moral insignificance of the “pain” caused to Muslims by artwork like The Satanic Verses and the so-called Muhammad cartoons. Grow up, Muslims were repeatedly told (for decades), and learn a lesson or two about free speech and toleration from us enlightened Western folk. (Don’t forget, incidentally, that the main character of The Satanic Verses was  named “Mahound,” i.e., the name for the Prophet Muhammad given him in The Song of Roland, the epic poem of the Crusades. If the death of a single man decades after the fact “causes pain,” should a joking literary allusion to the carnage of the Crusades have elicited joy?) Now that a different ox is being gored (if it is), the double standards leap to the fore. Call it the pseudo-moral triumph of misology.

As for the claim that we ought never, ever to make excuses for force, or place responsibility for it on anyone but its perpetrators, hearken to the words of Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld:

Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, who was the rally’s master of ceremonies, said he did not expect protesters to react inappropriately. “But you can’t be responsible when the Metropolitan Opera advocates terrorism and incites violence — you can’t know what will happen,” he said. “And anything that happens, that has besmirched this Metropolitan Opera, and besmirched Lincoln Center, is to be laid at the foot of Peter Gelb.”

Evidently, you can know what an opera contains without seeing it, but you can’t  “know what will happen” when you place responsibility for the disruption of an opera on those suffering the disruption…even as you exculpate the crowds engaged in the disruption. Classic.

Postscript 2, October 23, 2014: More from Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, arch critic of the advocacy of terrorism and incitement to violence:

Several hundred protesters, led by City University of New York trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, picketed outside Lincoln Center before the Met’s opening night last month.

“You will be made to destroy that set,” Wiesenfeld said at the protest. “We will demand it. It doesn’t belong in this city. We are going to be back here — everyone here and many, many more — every night of the Klinghoffer opera until the set is burned to the ground.”

Most of those protesters say they’ve never seen Klinghoffer, and don’t want to. They argue the opera is anti-Semitic because it humanizes — and therefore glorifies — the terrorists. But the opera’s defenders say that’s a fundamental misreading of the work.

Considering Wiesenfeld’s disgraceful performance, in this case as well as in the 2011 case of his attack on Tony Kushner, isn’t it time to protest him rather than “The Death of Klinghoffer”?  Isn’t the real question how such a thug manages to become a trustee of the City University of New York, and achieve the unearned prominence he’s somehow managed to acquire?

Postscript 3, December 3, 2014: I just happened to notice Paul Berman’s “Klinghoffer at the Met” in The Tablet magazine, by far the most intelligent contribution to the Klinghoffer controversy I’ve so far read. I appreciate Berman’s criticism of the thuggish quality of the protesters, and assuming the accuracy of his descriptions of the opera, his commentary on it seems sensitive and apt. The criticisms made of him on the comment board at The Tablet strike me as contemptibly idiotic. But I have a criticism of my own to make.

Berman mentions, but doesn’t make very much of, the Met’s agreeing, under pressure from the ADL, not to simulcast “Klinghoffer” in the theaters, as it does for all of its other operas. Apparently, in this case, an exception to standard policy was deemed necessary. I would have thought that the implications of the Met’s acquiescence deserved a bit more comment. Americans do not generally accept the idea that Muslim (or Christian) religious sensibilities may permissibly set the terms of secular cultural activity. Why should Jewish or Zionist ones do so? A hundred years ago, readings and performances of The Merchant of Venice were regularly banned in the U.S. because the play was thought anti-Semitic. (And no, I don’t think The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic. Some of its characters are anti-Semitic, but the play is not.)  In fact, contemporary critics–if one can call them that–still insist that The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic, and insist that performances of it ought to be protested “without whining.” What we’re seeing is the recrudescence of the same attitude in a different context.

I wonder whether Berman has detected the double-standard here. For the last fifteen years, we’ve been conditioned–by intellectuals like Berman himself–to believe that Islam poses the most significant threat to our shared cultural space. To suggest that political Judaism does so is to risk being called an anti-Semite. But when was the last time that Muslims managed to pull off a coup, at least in the U.S., on par with the ADL’s blackmailing the Met over “Klinghoffer”? The truth is that they haven’t. In 2010, Berman published a controversial book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, complaining about American intellectuals’ abdication of their moral responsibility in criticizing Islam, as exemplified (he said) by the widespread adulation they lavished on the media darling of the moment, Tariq Ramadan. Well, Tariq Ramadan has, as far as the American cultural scene is concerned, vanished like breath off a blade (and good riddance)–but Abraham Foxman shows no signs of doing so. Is it perhaps time for a companion volume to Berman’s book, one about a different cultural and intellectual threat?

Actually, such a book appeared in 2007, as a kind of prequel to Flight of the Intellectuals– namely, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book of far greater precision and rigor than Berman’s own (than any of Berman’s own, and I’ve read them all). What did Berman have to say about The Israel Lobby? He certainly didn’t agree with it. He certainly didn’t regard it as an account of the other half of the story he was telling about “the flight of the intellectuals.” No, Berman, who had managed to find a conspiracy in American intellectuals’ failure to condemn Tariq Ramadan, ended up likening The Israel Lobby to the ur-text of psychopathic conspiracy theorizing, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not a sophisticated document; but Walt and Mearsheimer’s book “The Israel Lobby” is (in some people’s view) a sophisticated document. And the sophisticated document makes the unsophisticated one seem like it is on to something. By reasoning in this fashion, people end up concluding that Hamas’ doctrines have a purchase on truth – something that quite a few people believe. But they choose not to say it because they don’t want to look unsophisticated or coarse.

Presumably, then, those who agreed with The Israel Lobby were apologists for Hamas and purveyors of blood libels and czarist conspiracy theories. Nothing psychopathic about that set of comparisons. But then, Berman was the guy who had written, in Flight of the Intellectuals, that verbal criticism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali was tantamount to Stalinism, anti-Semitism, and mob violence (pp. 263-64). It didn’t seem to occur to Berman, or bother him, that in writing in this drunken, gauzy, irresponsible way, he was cheapening the currency of the phrase “anti-Semitism,” and exploiting the irrationality of those who might want it cheapened.

Here is the problem: an author who indulges in indiscriminate, scattershot defamations of the preceding sort is really not in a position to criticize the know-nothing fools who show up in Lincoln Center and want to burn the Met down over “Klinghoffer.” Whether they’ve read him or not, they’re simply following his lead. And whether he admits it or not, that “lead” leads to a moral abyss via double standards of the sort that he himself has been exemplifying for awhile.

I wrote a long review essay for Reason Papers of Flight of the Intellectuals back in 2011, and invited Berman to respond to it. We had a brief, and on his end, non-committal email exchange over whether he’d do so. It’s been three years since the invitation, and at this point, I think it’s safe to say that he has no intention of responding. But let me renew the invitation: when the issues are timeless, after all, it’s never too late to address them. To paraphrase Victor Hugo, if we wrote only for the moment, we might as well consign our word processors to the flames.

While I’m at it–waiting for a response that will probably never materialize–let me offer some unsolicited advice. If you’re going to make accusations of something as serious as anti-Semitism, then for God’s sake stop making them in the form of coy, half-asserted and half-denied innuendo like the passage I’ve quoted above. Have the courage of your convictions and say what you really mean in sentences with identifiable subjects, identifiable predicates, and identifiable connections between the two. Stop taking refuge in circumlocutions like “the sophisticated document makes the unsophisticated one seem like it’s on to something,” when what you mean is “The Israel Lobby is a sophisticated version, in intention and effect, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  Don’t write things like this:

The campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented–at least since the days when lonely refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press (where the dissidents were accused, by the way, of whipping up right-wing fervors, exactly as is Hirsi Ali…  (Flight, p. 264).

When what you really mean is: “Those who have criticized Hirsi Ali are Stalinists in a new guise.” Don’t compare mere criticism of Hirsi Ali to “the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003.” Don’t think that having done so, you can extract the sting and the venom of the remark by reducing the supposed similarity of two wildly different phenomena to an indeterminately vacuous property they supposedly have “in common” (namely: “These are developments that, even ten years ago, would have seemed unimaginable” [Flight, p. 264]).

Writing of this kind is corruption of language–the virtual but visible “flight of an intellectual.” Indulge it long enough, and you shouldn’t be surprised when the populist version of your attitudes shows up in Lincoln Center, barring your entry into the Met, ticket in hand or no. It may sound like a cliche, but at that point, you’ve met the enemy–and believe it or not, it’s you.

Postscript 4, December 4, 2014: The New York Times reports this morning that Louis Head, the stepfather of Michael Brown, has–albeit under the pressure of a police investigation–apologized for inciting violence after a grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for having shot Brown. Head had apparently shouted, “Burn this bitch down” at a protest near the Ferguson police station, referring to the police station itself. No comparable apology seems to be forthcoming from Jeffrey Wiesenfeld for comparable remarks about burning down the Met. Granted, Head’s remarks coincided with actual violence (rioting and arson took place shortly after his saying what he said), but then, in mitigation, his remarks were a response to the actual and relatively recent death of his stepson. Wiesenfeld’s remarks led to no actual violence, but were a response to confabulated outrage about the death of a stranger decades ago, and were directed at an institution that had no responsibility either for the death or for adjudicating events connected with it. File it under “Moral Luck and Double Standards.”

Friedman and Frederick on Nozick; Sadler on Plato

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Reason Papers 36.1, which came out a few weeks ago, included a nice review essay by Danny Frederick of Mark Friedman’s recent book, Nozick’s Libertarian Project. Friedman has now responded to the review on his website, with a short rejoinder by Frederick in the comments.

For other recent work on Nozick in Reason Papers, check out Dale Murray’s October 2012 review essay of Ralf Bader’s Robert Nozick and Bader and Meadowcraft’s Cambridge Companion to Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Also relevant is Lamont Rodgers’s “Self-Ownership and Justice in Acquisition,” from the October 2012 issue. Digging back in RP‘s archives, I was astounded (and a bit dismayed) to discover that the journal ran no review of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia when the book came out in 1974, though it did, in 1980, run a Nozick-oriented paper by Richard B. McKenzie, “Entitlements and the Theft of Taxation.”

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Lodi, New Jersey this Wednesday the 24th around 1 pm, and you’re interested in Plato and/or virtue–a small, self-selected population, I realize–you might want to stop by Kirby 206 at Felician College and hear Greg Sadler’s presentation, “Just What Is a Platonic Virtue?” The talk–officially a Current Research Workshop–is sponsored by Felician’s Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. Here’s a summary:

Plato’s dialogues talk quite a bit about the virtues — including the cardinal ones: wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage — but it’s not always clear just what these virtues are in his work. Do they exist in persons? Or are they Forms? In this workshop… I’ll be presenting my current research on the subject — aimed at clarifying the metaphysical status of virtue and virtues in Plato’s thought, and thinking how we would apply such a perspective in our own contemporary lives.
If you’re not in the vicinity of Lodi, New Jersey this Wednesday–never fear, I’ll blog it here (at some point). Incidentally, if you’re interested in doing a Felician Current Research Workshop, contact me at my Felician address (click the “Current Research Workshop” link for that), and I’ll try to  set something up.

Thoughts on W.K. Clifford’s Evidentialism (Part 1)

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I’ve been discussing the ethics of belief in my Phil 304 epistemology seminar at Felician. The strictly philosophical issues on that topic strike me as interesting in themselves, and also for the implications they have for current controversies (e.g., Ferguson, ISIS, etc.) so I thought it might be worth setting out some thoughts on it via commentary on W.K. Clifford’s classic defense of evidentialism, “The Ethics of Belief.”

Clifford famously opens “The Ethics of Belief” with this passage and example:

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.

Like many readers, Clifford’s example strikes me as exactly the right sort to clarify what’s at stake in the ethics of belief. But like many readers, Clifford’s example also strikes me as problematically ambiguous—as apt to clarify as to muddy the waters. The problem arises not with the example per se, but with the details of Clifford’s description of it. The basic question is the structure of the inference involved: how does Clifford get from the facts of the example to the wrongness of the shipowner’s actions? In this post, I just want to analyze the example and inference. In a later post, I’ll make some broader observations about the ethics of belief (in Clifford, Rand, and others), and about the use of examples in philosophy generally.

It might help to begin by asking what actions are being evaluated for rightness or wrongness. I take it that the actions in question are inferences, and that Clifford is assuming that inferences can be evaluated from a perspective that is simultaneously epistemic and ethical (or possibly a perspective that is a hybrid of both). The claim, then, is that the shipowner makes inferences that involve voluntary epistemic defect and (therefore) moral culpability. In other words, the shipowner is guilty of a form of culpable ignorance and culpable lack of epistemic justification for his beliefs. The overtly physical action of sending the ship out to sea follows directly from the sum total of the shipowner’s beliefs, themselves dependent on the inferences he makes from the facts. But the culpability of the action of sending the ship out to sea is parasitic on the culpability of the inferences made about its seaworthiness, so it’s the inferences, not the sending per se, that are the basic candidates for evaluation. What’s wrong with the sending supervenes on what’s wrong with the inferences.

The problem is, Clifford treats the inferences as a single uncontroversially culpable inference, as though the shipowner were making an inference like

(1) The situation of the ship is S.

Therefore,

(2) I’ll send the ship out to sea,

–where ‘S’ denotes a state of affairs that indicates obvious lack of seaworthiness.

In that case, the ‘inference’ in question would be:

(1*) The situation of the ship is S.

(2*) S indicates obvious lack of seaworthiness.

(3*) A ship that isn’t sea-worthy should never be sent out to sea.

Therefore (nonetheless),

(4*) I’ll send this ship out to sea.

And Clifford’s point would have to be—more cautiously: might very well be—that the shipowner’s conjoint belief in (3*) and (4*) is culpable. You can’t believe (3* & 4*) without experiencing severe cognitive dissonance. But if you experience such cognitive dissonance (the implication is) you have the obligation to resolve it. If you don’t, you’re epistemically-morally culpable; the higher the stakes, the more culpable you are.

If that is Clifford’s point, I think what he’s saying is true. Not that it’s uncontroversial. Many people might dispute the idea that we’re obliged to resolve every cognitive dissonance we experience as well as every apparent inconsistency in our beliefs. But I agree with Clifford—and, I think, Ayn Rand—that we do. The problem is, to produce the preceding interpretation, we have to cherry-pick the passage, ignoring the complexities of what it actually says. And what it says seems more ambiguous to me than it evidently does to Clifford. The problem is that the shipowner isn’t making one obviously culpable inference, but a series of inferences, some obviously culpable, some possible culpable, and some not-at-all culpable. Perhaps Clifford thinks that any set of inferences is culpable if one inference in the set is culpable. But he doesn’t say that, and his meaning is not transparently obvious from what he does say.

Let’s take each step in the shipowner’s reasoning in piecemeal fashion (acknowledging that we’ll have to consider the reasoning later on as a single integrated set of inferences).

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs.

The shipowner believes that the ship is old, and not “overwell built at the first.” The latter phrase is a bit coy, and a bit unclear, and requires some hairsplitting interpretation. Does “not overwell built” mean badly built? Or satisfactorily built on the whole, with some significant flaws? Or satisfactorily but not optimally built? I don’t know, but the details would matter. We also need to know how old the ship was, and what counts as excessive age in ships. Further, if the ship was repaired, we need to know whether the repairs fixed the flaws or not, and in general, whether “often needing repairs” indicates an unsafe lemon or not. The answers are all technical matters that a shipowner ought to know, but they’re not the kind of thing the average philosophically-inclined reader would know. That seems to me to present an expository problem for Clifford: the nautically ignorant will have trouble interpreting the example, and yet he couldn’t have intended the paper primarily for nautical experts.

I suppose we could tweak the example. As it happens, my car seems to satisfy Clifford’s description of the ship in his example. It’s a 2001 model (an unlucky thirteen years old), and when I bought it (from a used car dealer), I knew it had some defects. It’s seen many New York/New Jersey Metro Area streets and highways, and has often needed repairs. The last bout of repairs, which cost me about $2,000, seems to have fixed whatever was broken. (Thus spoke the dealer.) Now the car runs great, and I drive it everywhere without worrying ” overmuch” that the brakes will suddenly fail and get me (or others) killed. Does that (according to Clifford) make me as guilty as the shipowner, or does it just make my car different from the case of Clifford’s ship? Of course, if the cases are the same, I might be as innocent as the shipowner.

To stick with Clifford’s example, I suppose we could stipulate that the shipowner knows that the ship is too old to be sent to sea, and that the repairs it’s needed indicate that it’s a lemon that ought not to be sent to sea, but I wonder if such stipulations start to trivialize both the example and the point Clifford wants to make with it. If we stipulate that the shipowner knows that the ship isn’t seaworthy, why not just come out and say that, and dispense with a drawn-out example? It’s an interesting question what the example is supposed to do for Clifford’s argument.

It’s also an interesting fact that Clifford writes as though evidence was required for entertaining a belief in the ship’s seaworthiness but not for doubts about the ship’s seaworthiness, or even beliefs about the ship’s lack of seaworthiness. Clifford doesn’t agonize at all, or have the shipowner agonize, about the evidence he has for the ship’s age, the conditions of its original construction, or its needing repairs over time. That knowledge is all taken for granted as knowledge; the shipowner obviously has sufficient evidence for it. That might seem like a pointless quibble on my part, but I think it bears on the epistemic status of the doubts that Clifford puts in the shipowner’s mind:

Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense.

Clifford writes here as though doubt is allowed to make its claims on us without having to earn a right to do so. Elsewhere in the same essay, Clifford is very severe about the impropriety of spreading ill-founded rumors, but the doubts he has in mind here sound very much like rumors. We’re told that the doubts “preyed upon his mind,” but not everything that preys upon one’s mind is worth taking seriously. There’s such a thing as paranoia, and it would be a mistake to assume that paranoia ought always to be acted on or appeased just because it’s there. We’re told that the shipowner thinks he “perhaps” ought to have the ship thoroughly overhauled and refitted, but we aren’t told why. You don’t just overhaul a ship because a fear has floated into your head that it might crash. Of course, Clifford has told us that the ship is old, wasn’t well-built at first, and has needed repairs, but that doesn’t obviously tell you—at least, it doesn’t tell me–that the ship needs to be overhauled, either.

Finally, Clifford says this in description of the shipowner’s inferences:

Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

This passage presents a rather confusing mélange of inferences, some entirely reasonable, and some obviously dishonest. Together, they make Clifford’s example hard to interpret.

Clifford says that the shipowner “succeeds” in overcoming his melancholy reflections, but there are two problems in this formulation. In describing the reflections as “melancholy,” Clifford himself is trivializing them–“melancholy” is meant ironically–but if they are trivial, why would it be wrong to overcome them? Further, in saying that the shipowner “succeeds” in overcoming them, Clifford implies that he feels no cognitive dissonance: “succeeds” means “succeeds in overcoming any residual worries that might arise by reflection on them.” That contradicts the “cognitive dissonance” interpretation I previously put in Clifford’s mouth (which seems to me to make his view more plausible than his own formulations do), and also raises the possibility that the shipowner’s inferences are good ones. After all, if he succeeds in overcoming his reflections, maybe he’s successfully rebutted his doubts (i.e., rebutted them with answers that were more plausible than the doubts themselves). In that case, where is the inferential culpability? The second sentence of the passage could well be part of a perfectly reasonable inference to the best explanation: surely a ship’s track record is part of the evidence of its seaworthiness; if its track record is good, why assume that it will crash this time, unless you have evidence to suggest that its surviving its last few voyages was a matter of dumb luck? And we aren’t given any.

The claim about Providence is of course a sufficient condition for inferential culpability—whether you believe in Providence or not. I’m inclined to think that a belief in Providence would fail evidentialist strictures from the start, but whether it does or not, the shipowner has no evidence that Providence is smiling on his ship now. The problem is, Clifford has inserted this belief in Providence into a series of inferences that aren’t nearly as problematic as the one about Providence. So there are two interpretive possibilities here. We could seize on the sentence about Providence to indict the shipowner’s inferences, or we could ignore it, and focus on the reasonability of the shipowner’s inferences bracketing the one about Providence. It’s not clear to me how to read the passage, unless we use it to generate sub-cases–ones in which Providence figures prominently in the shipowner’s reasoning, and others in which it doesn’t.

Here’s another one of Clifford’s ‘give-with-one-hand-but-take-with-the-other’ passages:

He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors.

Well, if the suspicions were really ungenerous, why is that dismissal wrong? I suspect that Clifford really intends ‘ungenerous’ ironically, but in that case, the irony gets in the way of what he’s trying to say.

And the last bit:

In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

This raises the point I made earlier about cognitive dissonance. If his belief was sincere, it’s hard (though not necessarily impossible) to pick out the culpability. ‘Comfortable’ is equivocal as between ‘complacent’ and ‘confidently self-assured’. The rest of the passage leaves  unclear whether he watches the ship with a sincerely light heart and benevolent wishes based on a scrupulous consideration of all reasonable considerations for their safety, or whether Clifford is writing ironically and means that the shipowner is callously and cynically indifferent to the passengers’ fates, deceives himself about the ship’s safety, fakes a light heart and benevolent wishes, and pockets the insurance money without tears. The problem ultimately is that “such ways” is equivocal between too many ways.

Given the ambiguities here, I don’t think Clifford’s moral verdict on the shipowner follows. Here it is, again:

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.

But it isn’t clear from the example that the shipowner acquired his belief dishonestly. Unless Clifford thinks that it’s wrong to suppress any doubt regardless of its nature, it’s a bit tendentious to use this example as one of “stifling” a doubt, where “stifling” implies that the doubt is itself legitimate. And of course, it’s question-begging to assume that it is wrong to suppress any doubt. Fundamentally, what is unclear is the nature of the exact “frame of mind” that Clifford means to be condemning.

In my next post, I’ll discuss some general issues brought to light by Clifford’s example.

(Thanks to Kate Herrick for helpful discussion, as well as to students in my Phil 304 seminar–Caitlin Baard, Chelsea Barrett, Dan Postel, and Julianne Matassa.)

Rand Paul on Syria

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This comment (reported here) by Rand Paul offers a nice counterpoint to yesterday’s featured quotation from Samantha Power:

Amid the interventionists’ disjointed and frankly incoherent rhetoric, the only consistent theme is war. These barnacled enablers have never met a war they didn’t like.

I’m not sure that Samantha Power has barnacles, but I still think it works.

Bomb First, Testily Allow Questions Later

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This high-level rationalization for “expanded airstrikes” on Syria really defies commentary, from a News Analysis in this morning’s New York Times:

The American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, on Tuesday struck a testy note when asked whether there was a legal basis for airstrikes on Syria.

“We believe we have a basis for action,” she said, declining to describe what they were, because, as she said, it would depend on the action taken and under what circumstances. “In the event that action is taken, believe me, we will have plenty of time to engage on it.”

We believe you! Sorry for asking!

Debating Syrian Intervention

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Check out the conversation on Syrian intervention at Notes on Liberty, “A Few Remarks on Interventions in Syria and Iraq.” And feel free to check out last year’s conversation on the same subject here, from the now-defunct Institute for Objectivist Studies blog (11 posts). If I can change one mind on the subject, I’d count my efforts as a success.

P.S.: In an earlier post, I described Bruce Ackerman as a strange bedfellow in the debate over Syrian intervention. But I think I’d have to kick Howard Friel, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Herman out of bed, despite agreeing with them on the narrow question of the need for a Congressional vote on Syria, and on the potential applicability to the case of Syria of the War Powers Resolution. In a letter published in today’s New York Times, Friel, Chomsky, and Herman casually (but dogmatically) assert the following:

While the president must request and receive congressional approval within the strictures of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, as both Mr. Ackerman and your editorial rightly demand, neither Congress nor the president is free to violate the United Nations Charter’s prohibition “against the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Individual nations are bound by their international obligations regardless of their constitutional law. Thus, the reach of law here goes beyond the War Powers Resolution to the United Nations Charter.

It’s a claim to confirm the most paranoid fears of the most paranoid right-winger: the United Nations Charter supersedes the U.S. Constitution. On the face of it, I don’t see how the United States (or any other country) can be “bound,” whether legally or morally, to adhere to the terms of a document when doing so would violate its own constitution. The perplexity is increased when you consider that it’s obvious how and why the U.S. Constitution is the law of the land, but not obvious that international “law” is law at all.  Though it’s a bit of a distraction from the issue directly at hand, I’d be curious to see an argument for their claim.

Thoughts on “Atlas Shrugged, Part 3: Who is John Galt?”

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I just got back from watching the matinee showing of Atlas Shrugged Part 3 in Times Square with a few friends (and a girlfriend). Times Square is of course the qibla–the teleological Mecca–of Objectivism, but you wouldn’t have known it from this showing. Though the film opened just yesterday, no one in midtown Manhattan seemed interested enough to come to see it the afternoon after it opened. Kate and I walked right past the theater showing the film without even noticing that it was playing there. And we were specifically looking for it! As it happened, the film itself was playing in theater 23 of 25 on the abandoned sixth floor of the theater, and was attended (in our showing) by about a dozen people. Neither today’s nor yesterday’s New York Times ran either a review or even an ad for the film. In other words, unless you were looking for it, you’d never have known that it was playing. If that’s an indication of the film’s impact in Objectivism’s holy city, I don’t think it’s going to have much impact outside of that city. Sad but true.

Though I haven’t read it cover to cover in more than twenty years, I regard Atlas Shrugged as a great but flawed novel. And though I enjoyed part 1 of the Atlas Shrugged film sequence–mostly for the chemistry between its Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling) and Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler) characters–I don’t think any of the three films did justice to the novel, and didn’t enjoy the second two films at all. That’s not to say that any of the films deserved the savaging they got at the hands of hostile critics, but the bottom line is that they weren’t particularly good films. You might understand, appreciate, and enjoy them to some extent if you were familiar with and admired the novel, or if you had doctrinal sympathies with Objectivism or libertarianism. But otherwise, it seems to me that the films would strike the uninitiated viewer as uninteresting, uninspired, or preposterous. It pains me to say that, because I happen to know the filmmakers and I appreciate and respect the sincerity of their efforts. But the bottom line is, as a strictly aesthetic matter, the films–or the three films considered as one piece of art–are a failure.

Why uninteresting, uninspired, or preposterous? In the case of part 3, the following flaws leap to mind:

  • John Galt was, to my mind, badly miscast. I didn’t find him forceful enough to be believable. (Some of my friends disagreed.)
  • Huge amounts of plot were excised. (To avoid spoilers, I won’t elaborate.) Some of the scenes that were included seemed to have been included in a pro forma way, out of a sense of fidelity to the plot of the novel, but were so abbreviated and elliptical as to be unintelligible to anyone who hadn’t read the novel.
  • Putting aside Laura Regan (who played Dagny Taggart), the dialogue was uninspired–preachy, pedantic and badly-delivered stuff that sounded more like standard-issue libertarian anti-government ranting than the actual dialogue of the novel. To a certain degree, I’ve had the uncomfortable feeling that all three films were made, not for a general audience and not for aesthetic purposes, but to turn the novel into a propaganda vehicle for the Rand-friendly elements of the Tea Party. I’ve also gotten the uncomfortable sense that the praise I’ve heard of the film (meaning the earlier two parts) is movement-motivated, an instance of circling the wagons rather than objective appraisal.
  •  The villains came across as cartoon-character buffoons rather than as adversaries worthy of the heroes’ struggle. That made the villains look stupid and contemptible (and all of the actors portraying the villains did a fairly good job of it), but also diminished the achievement of the heroes and adversely affected the credibility of the film itself. How could villains this preposterous achieve the positions of prominence that these villains had? And how hard would it be to defeat them if one were in the position of the heroes? (To be fair, this problem originates with the novel itself, but my point is that the film made it much worse.)
  • There are virtually no scenes in the film depicting the suffering of the average person in the street.
  • The film is, on the whole, far too “talky.” At least a third of the film takes place in Galt’s Gulch, and consists of dialogue. Huge parts of the rest of the film consist of dialogue. A narrator voices over large swatches of plot progression. But the novel is an action-packed thriller. As far as the film is concerned, there’s no action and no thrills. The dialogue plods along as a narrator tells you what’s supposed to be happening in the physical world. I felt uncharitable thinking this, but I couldn’t help remembering a line from the novel. In it, John Galt tells Dagny: “In this valley, Miss Taggart, we don’t tell, we show..” But in this film, Galt and his companions do just the reverse. They don’t show. They tell.
  • When they do act–e.g., when they stage their famous revolt near the end–the resistance they get from their would-be adversaries is feeble enough to inspire incredulous laughter in the audience. In interests of spoiler-avoidance, I won’t elaborate, but if you see the film I think you’ll know what I mean. I think you’ll also see that the ease of the heroes’ defeat of the villains mirrors the facile picture that so many Objectivists, libertarians, and conservatives have of the political left: as a bunch of reality-fearing, reason-evading weaklings and losers, incapable of thinking straight, making hard decisions, or managing even the smallest enterprise. (I’ve recently been reading the blog Neo-Neocon where this fatuous point of view gets a vigorous daily airing.) But surely this raises the question: in that case, why are these reality-averse liberals in power and defeating the political right at virtually every turn? Despite its best efforts, Atlas Shrugged 3 leaves the answer to that question a mystery, as do the sorts of people who spend large swatches of their time fulminating about “Barry Hussein Obama” and how much they hate his foreign crypto-Islamic ways.
  • There are some minor plot incoherences as well. How is it that as the world is crumbling and falling to pieces, everyone’s cell phone works perfectly and it’s still a cinch to hail a cab?

I could go on, but I won’t. The truth is that I don’t think anyone could have done better than the filmmakers did, and I think they deserve respect for having made what ended up being a quixotic attempt to produce the film. But I don’t think Atlas Shrugged can successfully be made in the early twenty-first century, and it probably won’t successfully be made for the next forty or fifty years, if that. Atlas Shrugged is, to my mind, too complex and idiosyncratic a novel to be made into a film right now; we simply lack the cultural synapses for such a film for the foreseeable future. Those of us who appreciate the novel do so because the author gave us 1,082 pages of nine-point print to lay out the complexities of plot, theme, and characterization. She also wrote two previous novels and a shelf’s worth of non-fiction to clarify what she had in mind–and she didn’t entirely clarify it.

But a film can’t do that. A film version of a great novel has to depict the author’s vision but leave implicit all of the background assumptions and inferences needed to make the film coherent and emotionally resonant. If the culture lacks that, the film simply won’t get off the ground. No actors will be found who are capable of depicting its characters’ personalities or expressing their dialogue. No scriptwriters will be found who can streamline the novel in a way that makes it a coherent film while doing justice to the original text. No composers will be found who can compose music adequate to its moods. No funding source will exist to capitalize the film project in a way that does justice to the epic vision of the novel. No audience will be found that can follow the plot of the film, appreciate its characters, grasp its theme, or revel in its sense of life.  And no critics will be found that can appreciate any element of what the film got right. What you’ll get, instead, is an unintentionally comic effort at creating an epic film on the cheap, which is what has happened in the case of Atlas Shrugged. For all these reasons and more, I think the Atlas Shrugged film project was practically destined to fail. Like so many things about Objectivism, it was half-baked, over-hyped, and premature.

The problem, incidentally, is not that Atlas Shrugged’s message is “politically unpopular.” Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was politically unpopular, too. But Passion of the Christ was a brilliant film that provoked the culture into a rage. By contrast, Atlas Shrugged is a dull film that has gone entirely (and justifiably) ignored. The difference is that we all, as a culture, know how to process the story of Christ’s rise, prophecy, and crucifixion. We know who Christ was, and what he stood for; we also know how we’re supposed to react to the vicissitudes in his life, and to those who persecute him. Whatever we think of the Crucifixion, we grasp what it symbolizes, and we’re familiar with the symbolism itself. Even those hostile to Passion of the Christ had to admit that they were, while watching Gibson’s film, in the presence of a work of art that in some sense did justice to the Gospels; the film had a gravity appropriate to its subject matter.

Atlas Shrugged lacks all of that. Almost no one knows how to process the story. No one knows who John Galt is, and no one has reason to care. Almost no one has any sympathy for the trials or tribulations he or his comrades endure, and no one can quite conceptualize who his persecutors are supposed to be aside from floating abstractions and rhetoric about cartoon-like “government regulators.” (Since we obviously need some government regulations, “government regulators” in the abstract do not usefully function as villains.) The symbolism of Atlas is too pagan to have caught on in our residually Christian culture. The result is that the film version of Atlas Shrugged lacks the gravity and intensity appropriate to its subject matter. The filmmakers took on a project that was too overwhelming in its scope and dimensions for almost anyone to have been able to pull it off–at least right now.

My suggestion to Rand-friendly film-makers would be to leave The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged alone, and try to make a successful re-make of We the Living, the only Ayn Rand novel that has so far successfully been turned into a film. It shouldn’t be that hard to go to St. Petersburg nowadays and do the job, even under the reign of Vladimir Putin. It would, obviously, be a more modest task than a film version of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, but that’s why it would have more of a chance of success. Few people in the world put any stock nowadays in Soviet socialism. We all hate the Soviets intensely enough to be receptive to a well-done anti-Soviet film like We the Living. The plot, theme, and characters are familiar enough to be depicted in early twenty-first film, but idiosyncratic enough to remain a challenge and retain their interest. Anyway, we’ve been beating the Nazis up in cinema for decades now. The time has come, at last, to beat up on the Soviets–and not Stalin’s Soviets, but Lenin’s, the ones closest to the Bolshevik Revolution itself. The original We the Living film is moving and beautiful, but it needs a specifically Russian update.

And if you regard We the Living as somehow philosophically light-weight, I’d suggest reading it again, asking some hard questions about the relationship between Kira and Andrei. Are they friends? Lovers? Would-be lovers? Are her feelings for him genuine, or entirely fabricated? If genuine, why? If fabricated, how is that possible? There’s a lot more there than has been discussed in the so-called “literature,” and a lot more than meets the eye.

Anyway, I can’t recommend anyone’s watching Atlas Shrugged, Part 3, or indeed any of the Atlas films, with the possible exception of part 1. (And of course, there’s no point in watching part 1 and leaving at that, so perhaps there’s no point in watching any of the films at all.) Fans will want to see it, if only to see what’s been made of their favorite novel. But I’m afraid no one else will, and no one else has good reason to. I doubt it will become an “underground sensation” in the way that Rand’s books have. I have a feeling it will just wither on the vine and fade away. That’s sad but inevitable, and the only thing we can do about it is ask why–which is what I’ve tried to do here.

(Thanks to Kate Herrick, Carrie-Ann Biondi, and Ray Raad for seeing the movie with me, and discussing it over dinner. As is probably obvious, I’ve expressed some of their observations here as though they were my own. None of them, however, is responsible for anything I’ve written in this post.)

AUMF, ISIS, and Imperialism

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I rarely if ever agree with Bruce Ackerman on political matters, but the politics of warfare, I suppose, makes for strange bedfellows. What Ackerman says in this Op-Ed, pointedly titled “Obama’s Betrayal of the Constitution,” seems to me exactly on target:

Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written.

This became clear when White House officials briefed reporters before Mr. Obama’s speech to the nation on Wednesday evening. They said a war against ISIS was justified by Congress’s authorization of force against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that no new approval was needed.

But the 2001 authorization for the use of military force does not apply here. That resolution — scaled back from what Mr. Bush initially wanted — extended only to nations and organizations that “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the 9/11 attacks.

Mr. Obama is rightly proud of his success in killing Osama bin Laden in 2011 and dismantling the Qaeda network he built up. But it’s preposterous to suggest that a congressional vote 13 years ago can be used to legalize new bombings in Syria and additional (noncombat) forces in Iraq.

To suggest that a Congressional vote 13 years ago responding specifically to the 9/11 attack can be used to legalize new warfare in Syria is to flout the plain meaning of the words of the original Authorization of the Use of Military Force, and to suggest by implication that words have no meaning. It’s about as obvious a violation of the rule of law as can be imagined–a paradigm case of violation staring us straight in the face, while masquerading as law. It also marks another sad milestone in the United States’s childish, eyes-wide-shut descent into imperialism.

Ten Lessons of 9/11

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We’re just a few days away from the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from the last thirteen or so years of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list minus examples to illustrate what I’m saying. But I have a feeling that the lessons will ring true enough for many people, and that most readers can supply appropriate examples of their own.

(1) The inevitable gap between normative theorizing and political practice
A war can be justified in principle as a proportionate response to unprovoked aggression, have a rational object, have clear and publicly stated conditions for victory, and still not be worth fighting because there is no guarantee that the war will be fought on the grounds that were publicly given for fighting it. Even if a war seems perfectly justified on every conceivable matter of principle, remember that wars are fought in the real world, not ex hypothesi in thought-experiments, and that every theoretical simplification you make in thinking about a war will be more than matched by some unforeseeable complication that arises in the fog of war. Those complications may well be significant enough to nullify everything else you managed to think of, and destroy the best theoretical case for “going.”

(2) The perpetual opacity of post bellum considerations
It’s always easier to grasp the immediate and supposedly urgent reasons for going to war than to conceive, in detail, of the post bellum conditions that the war is supposed to bring about–much less to predict those conditions. But in confronting any suggestion that “we need to go to war,” try to imagine and predict how things will go in the end game, starting with the best-case scenarios and moving to the worst. I predict that you’ll find it hard even to imagine how to bring about the best-case scenarios (at least in any fine-grained way). The harder you find this, the better the case for not going.

(3) The crudeness of just war theory
The conceptual apparatus that philosophers bring to bear on the conduct of war consists of a set of extremely crude tools for dealing with the actual conduct of warfare. This being so, we face the following dilemma: either we should go to war in the knowledge that our best tools for dealing with it are so pathetically crude, or we should, if possible, avoid going to war in the knowledge that our best tools for dealing with it are that crude. I think it’s obvious that the latter fork provides the better way out of the dilemma.

Some examples of the conceptual crudity of some commonly-invoked ‘principles’:

  • The so-called non-initiation of force principle merely tells us that for any x, if x is an instance of force, x ought not to be initiated. It doesn’t give us any indication of the permissible range of values for x, and doesn’t tell us what to do if we face an instance of initiated force.
  • The so-called ‘last resort’ principle is, on its own, merely a directive to appeal to war (or ‘force’) as a last resort; it gives no criterion of ‘lastness’ in resorts, and gives no criterion to determine what counts as a ‘use of force’ (often conflating ‘force’ with ‘warfare’ in confusing ways).
  • The so-called principle of proportionality appeals to a quasi-mathematical metaphor that is in practice very hard to make literal or apply in any determinate way.
  • The so-called principle of discrimination tells us to target combatants but not non-combatants; it doesn’t define ‘combatant’ or ‘non-combatant,” much less apply that distinction to hard cases, or tell us what to do when non-combatants are innocent shields of combatants. Nor does it deal with the obvious but little discussed fact that ex post facto reports of ‘civilian’ fatalities in battlefield conditions are extremely imprecise, and more easily fabricated than reported with accuracy.

(4) The inevitable unreliability of allies, both moral and strategic
Either you go to war alone or you go with a coalition. If you go alone, you fight the war isolated from the rest of the world, so that your adversary can count on active or passive allies throughout the world. If you go with a coalition, the problem becomes that you can’t control what your coalition partners do, no matter how insane or immoral they turn out to be. To this day, it’s unclear whether we should have allied as closely as we did with the Soviet Union during World War II; it’s also unclear whether we should have allied so closely with right-wing dictatorships during the Cold War to fight the Soviet Union, Communist China, and their proxies. The same unclarity extends to the alliances we’ve more recently formed to fight Islamist terrorism.

(5) The inadvisability of ‘reconstructing’ another country, whether for your good, theirs, or both
A country that still suffers race riots over its own legacy of slavery and racial discrimination probably can’t be relied on to reconstruct other countries that suffer from their problematic historical legacies—especially when those engaged in reconstruction are hated as imperialist interlopers, don’t know the history of the countries they’re reconstructing, lack the resources to engage in reconstruction, are confined for security reasons to well-fortified barracks, don’t speak the native language, and are politically hostage to a public back home that is totally uninterested in what they’re doing. It tends not to help that the problematic legacies of countries that are candidates for ‘reconstruction’ arise in large part from ill-conceived prior attempts at reconstruction produced by centuries of imperialism.

(6) Truth as the first casualty of war
Truth really is the first casualty of war, in large ways as well as small. Once war begins, wait for the lies and half-truths to proliferate—from all sides, about all things. And don’t assume that you’ll have the luxury of sifting truth from falsehood during wartime, either. The informational imperatives of wartime are simplicity, digestibility, and coherence with one’s own war effort. If reality doesn’t fit that template, reality will be sacrificed to wartime imperatives, and it will be decades (if that) before anything like a more rational or objective equilibrium is restored. (If you’re interested in ‘getting involved’ in the efforts behind a genuinely justified war, ditch the idea of a military draft or compulsory national service and try an anti-rumor campaign: induce people to stop believing rumors, to stop spreading them, and to criticize any rumors that come their way. You’d be amazed how much harm is done by rumors, and how hard it is to counteract them.)

Incidentally, one casualty of war on the side of those who don’t want war is truth about the nature of foreign aggression. Dogmatic pacifists have a problematic tendency to pretend that foreign aggressors either don’t exist, or are not really aggressing because they’re responding to legitimate grievances. That attitude is too obviously false to be usefully employed in any successful anti-war effort. So don’t.

(7) Domestic liberty as the next casualty of war
The next casualty of war is domestic liberty, along with the ever-present temptation to declare ongoing states of ‘emergency’ demanding ‘emergency measures’—in part by expanding the scope of the concept of ‘emergency’ to cover anything and everything, at whim. Try coming up with a serviceable definition of “emergency,” and try to stick with it.

(8) Civil defense as an alternative to war
If you really want to avoid being attacked by foreign aggressors, seriously consider the possibility of coming up with a civil defense policy that (a) blunts the force of any aggression, (b) costs fewer lives than a war would, (c) gets the whole population involved in the “war” effort, but (d) doesn’t sacrifice domestic liberty in the process. A tall but not necessarily impossible order–no more impossible than the proverbial war that leads smoothly to victory. Your civil defense policy will inevitably have to apply at the borders of your country and be integrated with your border/immigration policy. If you confront dogmatists who insist on ‘open borders,’ ask them whether open borders as they conceive of them require a nation to allow foreign aggressors into the country without challenge. Then ask them how respect for rights would be served by such a policy.

(9) Speak up, speak out
If you oppose the idea of going to war on a given occasion, say so–a lot, to everyone, including your political representatives. People may well regard you as a monomaniac, but in this case, that’s a good thing. Better a monomaniac than a cipher.

A proviso: if you’re going to speak out against war, try not to trespass, vandalize, assault people, or blow things up in the process. It makes you look stupid and hypocritical, and it won’t stop the war.

(10) Patriotism
If you regrettably find yourself in a war, don’t bother to show your patriotic spirit by flying a flag or putting some stupid, bellicose bumper sticker on your car. Find a support organization for injured or debilitated veterans, and support it—financially or otherwise. Nothing clarifies the nature of warfare more powerfully than time spent with combat veterans. And nothing makes it clearer that even the ‘best’ wars are an enormous waste of lives, limbs, blood, effort, time, materiel, and money. If saying that doesn’t count as ‘patriotism’ where you live, say it anyway. Or find somewhere else to live.

A bonus meta-lesson: It’s perfectly OK to come up with outright excuses for not going to war, as long as the excuses don’t obscure the need to go to war in the rare case when war is justified.

The consideration to bear in mind was once nicely articulated to me by a paramedic I met in a medical emergency (I was the emergency): “Look,” he said when I asked him not to move me, “I have to move you. If I don’t move you, things are going to suck. If I move you, I realize: things are going to suck. Basically, no matter what happens, things are going to suck. But they’ll definitely suck more if I do nothing than if I move you. So I have to move you, OK?” He was absolutely right, and after he moved me, put me in a contraption to get me down the stairs, loaded me into the ambulance, and got me to the ER, I managed to get some painkillers into my system–whereupon I agreed with him 100%.

I’m not a pacifist, so my point is not that we should never go to war. It’s that when we do, we should be able to articulate the reasons why in just the way that my paramedic did. It rarely happens. But if volunteer paramedics can do it, so can armchair generals. Something to remember for the next 9/11.

Postscript 1, September 10, 2014: As if on cue, here’s a glimpse into the level of argumentation prevailing among hawkish Republican politicians:

Mr. Cheney, who was among the chief proponents of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq based on the flawed assumption that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction and was tied to the Sept. 11 attacks, might have seemed an unlikely messenger of the moment.

But Republicans, for the most part, embraced him anew.

“We can argue over whatever about the Iraq war, but most of our guys believe Bush left in 2009 with the U.S. in position to win” the conflict, Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said after the session. Mr. Cole added that six years into the presidency of Barack Obama, “at some point, it can’t be Bush and Cheney’s fault.”

Mr. Cheney’s brief talk during a closed-door meeting of the House Republican conference was mostly about the need for Republicans to push to maintain a strong military, but he also argued that his party needed to stop the establishment of a terrorist state in the Middle East.

He did not discuss the fact that many ISIS leaders were former Iraqi military officers who were imprisoned by American troops, nor did he dwell on the sectarian divisions and bloodletting since the 2003 American invasion. The crux of his argument, in fact, centered not on Mr. Obama, but on the isolationist voices on the rise in his party ahead of the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican lawmakers said.

“We can argue over whatever about the Iraq war, but most of our guys believe Bush left in 2009 in position to win.” There’s intellectual leadership for you. A sub-headline to today’s lead story: “Beheadings are Said to Push U.S. to Act–Speech Tonight.” Two war correspondents were beheaded in a war zone–so we have to go to war. If only I were making it up. Perhaps I should revise (6) to say: “Intelligence as the first casualty of war.” And the last.

Postscript 2, September 10, 2014, 8:25 pm: Read this before you buy the President’s argument tonight that he has the authority to order air strikes on Syria–and before you let your Congressional representatives shirk their responsibility to call a vote and make a public decision over it.

Postscript 3, September 11, 2014: From “Struggling to Gauge ISIS Threat, Even as US Prepares to Act“:

Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a “farce,” with “members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified.”

“It’s hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic, with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells, that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas or that the group will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems — all on the basis of no corroborated information,” said Mr. Benjamin, who is now a scholar at Dartmouth College.

Mr. Obama has spent years urging caution about the perils of wading into the Syrian civil war, a position that has led critics to argue that his inaction has contributed to the death and chaos there. Now, he faces criticism that he has become caught up in a rush to war with no clear vision for how the fighting will end.