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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.

Law and Disorder: Blame and Redemption in the American Justice System

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A pair of stories in this morning’s New York Times offers an instructive glimpse into the mentality of the officials–judges, prosecutors, police officers–who preside over America’s criminal justice system. And I don’t mean that in a good way. Both stories concern criminal cases in New York–one in Manhattan, the other in Nassau County on Long Island. One describes a miscarriage of justice, the other what seems and probably is a just verdict and just sentence. And yet both reflect poorly on the system and the people who sit at its helm.  The first story concerns the exoneration of the so-called “Central Park Five.” The second concerns (if I can put it this way) a run-of-the-mill murder case.

The headline of the first story tells the tale: “Settlement Approved in ’89 Jogger Case; City Deflects Blame.” Feel free to read the whole thing for  details.

The gist of the story is this: Sometime in 1989, a woman went jogging one evening in Central Park, was viciously raped and beaten there, and left for dead. Suspicion immediately fell on five teenagers, all of them black or Hispanic, who were described in the media back then as “wilding” in the Park around the time that the jogger had been attacked–i.e., “going wild,” and thus presumptively the suspects in the case. (The jogger was white.)

I remember the case, and followed it pretty closely in real time. What I distinctly remember about it is the rhetorical work done by the slang term “wilding” in discourse about the case, an aspect of it now largely forgotten. No one (in the suburbs where I lived and went to school) really knew what “wilding” meant, and no one bothered to ask. What was axiomatic was that the term was an example of the newest urban slang, that everyone ought to know what it meant, that anyone who knew what it meant knew that “if x is wilding, x is a plausible rape suspect,” and that only a white-bread suburban dork would ask for a definition of “wilding” or query inferences in claims about it. Wilding just seemed like the kinda thing that happened in the urban jungle across the river–and to be fair, New York was a more dangerous place in the 80s than it is now–and everyone knew that the kinda thing that happens in urban jungles is the kinda thing characteristically engaged in by idle black and Hispanic youth. From there, it was just a few simple steps to a verdict of guilt. Where you have a rape victim, and you have wilders in custody, you have rapists, and once you have rapists, you convict and sentence them. QED.

It’s hard to recreate the atmospherics of the time: its hysterics, especially its racial hysterics, were sui generis, and all seemed to lead inexorably to the certainty that the Central Park Five were guilty, that the legal system was babying them, and that the law was taking too damn long to find them guilty and sentence them. The indignation expressed for the Central Park Five really felt like something out of E.M. Forster’s Passage to India—like the English reaction to Aziz, the Indian doctor who’s suspected of having raped Adela Quested, the newly-arrived English visitor. (I don’t mean to be implying, by the way, that whites were the only villains and blacks the only victims in the racial atmospherics of the time. It was a complex, sickening dynamic involving both parties. One of the great merits of Forster’s book is that it lays bare the pathologies and complexities involved in racial animosity, undermining the pious common belief in self-evident verities about it without licensing facile moral equivalences, either.)

But I digress. So the Central Park Five were convicted of the rape and the beating. In fact, they confessed to the crime. Even at the time, if I remember correctly (and I may not), there were stray whispers in the press about the possibility that the confessions were coerced, but this conjecture was lost in the hysteria of the moment, and eventually just forgotten altogether in the amnesia that settles in after any case is officially decided. But they did confess, and as a result they each served between seven and thirteen years in prison for the crime.

As the story about the settlement makes clear, it turns out that they were innocent.

In 2002, the convictions were vacated after the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, found DNA and other evidence that the woman had been raped and beaten by another person, Matias Reyes.

The Bloomberg administration had fought the [Central Park Five’s] lawsuit, which was filed in 2003; after Mr. de Blasio took office, the city reversed its position.

What I find remarkable about the story, and instructive about our legal system, is this statement, which is part of the settlement:

The City of New York has denied and continues to deny that it and individually named defendants have commited any violations of law or engaged in any wrongful acts concerning or related to any allegations that were or could have been alleged.

Legally speaking, that may all be correct, but in moral terms, it sounds like a lot of incoherent bullshit. How is it possible to coerce confessions out of teenagers, imprison them for years, agree that you imprisoned them for a crime they didn’t commit, spend years disdainfully rejecting the idea that the confessions were invalid, fight their lawsuit, effectively lose the suit, pay a $41 million settlement to settle their claims, but not have done anything wrong?

Two lessons here: (1) Clearly, the gap between legal and moral language, and legal and moral judgments, is a yawning chasm. Even if the City of New York bears no legal liability for what it did, it bears a heavy burden of moral liability, so that if we focus on the legal at the expense of the broader moral issue, we’re completely missing the real significance of the case. (2) Anyone who believes in the legitimacy of government (as opposed to being an anarchist) has to accept that there ought to be some asymmetry between the legal rules that apply to law enforcement officers in the course of doing their jobs, and of ordinary citizens confronting law enforcement as suspects in a given case. The question is what that asymmetry amounts to, and evidently in this case, it amounts to the City’s right never to have to to say that it’s sorry no matter what it’s done, and no matter what, by its actions, it’s implicitly conceding. You don’t have to be an anarchist to think that we can do better than that.

Now consider the second case, “Man Gets Life in Prison for Killing Officer and a Driver.” Strictly speaking, there’s no legal miscarriage of justice here, and not that much of a moral miscarriage, either. The case concerns two murders committed by one Daniel Fuller. The crimes are heinous, and it’s almost certainly the case that Fuller committed them. The evidence isn’t summarized in the article, but it seems to have satisfied the “reasonable doubt” standard, and Fuller himself doesn’t dispute that he committed the murders (and the rest of it: read the article for details). There’s no evidence that he was coerced into acquiescence in the verdict, or coerced at any other stage of the case. Morally speaking, it doesn’t take much acumen to see that Fuller’s acts were evil, and that the man himself is evil. Still, I question the moral right of the judge in the case to say the sorts of things he said to Fuller in court.

“There is absolutely nothing redeemable about you,” Judge Jerald Carter of Nassau County told Mr. Fuller after several of the victims’ relatives, some in tears, stood to extol their loved ones and denounce Mr. Fuller. …

The judge forced Mr. Fuller to look at photos of his victims, including one borrowed from Mr. Facey’s widow. He called Mr. Fuller “despicable you.”

Then he imposed the sentences and said they would be “a prelude to the hell that may await you.”

Since Fuller received a double life sentence, the reference to “the hell that may await you” is a reference to Hell, the supernatural location.

It is possible that there is nothing redeemable about Fuller. It is clear that he is despicable. But is it the place of a criminal court judge to make these assertions in a court of law?

Obviously, court verdicts and sentences are moral judgments of a certain kind. I’m not a legal positivist, so I don’t think that legal interpretation can entirely be divorced from moral judgment. That’s particularly obvious in the criminal context, and perhaps most obvious in the case of sentencing. A judge engaged in sentencing has to make a judgment about what the offender deserves. Sentencing guidelines guide that decision but can’t determine it. Ultimately, part of the judgment is a moral judgment, and it’s up to the judge.

No quarrel there. But sentencing is a specifically legal act, and what the offender deserves has, at some level, to be specified by law. What legal purpose is served by turning a courtroom into an all-purpose forum for moral judgments that go well beyond what the law requires? You can say that an offender deserves a life sentence without describing him as irredeemable. The length of the sentence has nothing to do with irredeemability; it has to do with the moral turpitude of what the offender has done. The one judgment concerns the future, the other concerns the past. They’re different kinds of judgments and nothing ties them together in any obvious way.

Whether they accept this or not, judges are not experts in moral philosophy, counseling psychology, or psychiatry. Their knowledge of human psychology is, at best, anecdotal and sometimes not even that. Most philosophers, psychologists, or psychiatrists would hesitate before pronouncing a verdict of “irredeemability” on someone. A person’s acts may be evil, but since his future lies ahead of him, he may well have the capacity to change his character so as to become a different kind of person. Who could know what the future might bring? What evidence or argument could justify a judge in offering judgments about the future? And what legal purpose is served by doing so?

The judge, we’re told, forced Fuller to look at photos of the victims. In and of itself, I see nothing wrong with that. But was it a formal part of the sentence? If not, is it legitimate for a judge to depart from the sentence in any particular and force the offender to suffer ad hoc punishments simply because doing so expresses the righteous indignation of the moment?

Finally, should a judge who operates under the U.S. Constitution be permitted to make reference to Hell in a court proceeding pertaining to the sentencing of a criminal offender?

I think the answers to my semi-rhetorical questions are fairly obvious. No legal purpose is served by offering judgments about irredeemability, and it’s not even clear what evidence would suffice for such a judgment, much less that judges are equipped to offer it. It’s not legitimate for a judge to add ad hoc punishments over and above the ones actually described in sentencing. And to my mind, a judge who invokes the supernatural in a sentencing proceeding is violating the First Amendment: there is no more obvious “establishment of religion” than the invocation of God’s will and judgment in the sentencing phase of a criminal trial (even when the person invoking God hedges his bets by using the word “may”). First Amendment lawyers may or may not agree with that, but if they disagree, it seems to me that they’re flouting the obvious meaning of the words that constitute our Constitution as its citizens understand it. What they’re defending at that point is specialized sophistry, rather than something recognizable to citizens as constitutional law.

Above all, these cases leave us with a sense of the problematic moral incongruities of our vaunted legal system. Consider the deference accorded to members of the legal profession. Is it really earned? The President of the United States does his work in ordinary civilian clothes. Meanwhile, judges do their work in robes. Why, exactly?

The President is held accountable for virtually every word he utters in public. Is that true of the average judge? I once stood before a judge who had the audacity to tell me that I was guilty of a traffic violation (failing to stop at a stop sign) because he knew the intersection in question “very well,” and “knew” that “no one” stopped at that stop sign–no one, that is, besides him. So he concluded that I hadn’t stopped because I was no different from anyone else in town (besides him). Uh, not exactly a valid argument, your Lordship. Not that one could say that.

The same judge had, twenty minutes earlier, chided a different defendant in a different case for invoking his (the defendant’s) previously spotless driving record as a defense against the charge that he was currently facing. “Your previous driving record is not at issue here, and not a defense against the charges you’re facing here and now,” the judge piously intoned. The blank, hypocritical incoherence of this combination of claims was lost on His Honor, and was not something for which he would ever be called to judgment. Not that one could say that, either.

The kind of loose talk indulged in by my judge is the currency of practically every courtroom in the land, and it happens every day, dozens of times a day. We’re obliged to refer to judges by titles (“Your Honor”), as though they were some kind of self-appointed aristocracy.  But in what way is being a judge more intrinsically honorable a profession than being, say, a janitor? I don’t think it is, and yet: who would think of bowing and scraping before a janitor, and referring to him by title as he mopped the floor? (“Your Honor, I see that you are mopping thine floor; do I have permission to tread the floor and pass?”) Incidentally, academics and physicians have the same disease as judges and lawyers in this respect–we’ve all encountered the person who insists on being called “Doctor So-and-So”–but that’s a different topic and different post.

But take it further back: consider how lawyers get made. As the pre-law advisor at Felician College, every week I get advertisements for law schools inviting students to study law at this or that law school and “change the world.” In seven years of doing the job, and of having to peruse the unbelievably self-congratulatory literature of Law School Admissions (and of having to attend equally self-congratulatory Law School Admissions Forums), I have yet to read a blurb or an article written by a law school admissions officer or law professor that suggests that there are limits–strict moral limits–to what lawyers and judges ought to be allowed to say or do in their cosmic quest to “change the world.”  I always feel like responding: Instead of dreaming of new ways in which you might force people to do your bidding in the name of “justice,” how about recognizing how much harm you’ve done in the world, and thinking about how you might ratchet back the force you wield just a bit? Unfortunately, a message of that sort would fall on deaf ears–whether of law school candidates, law students, law professors, lawyers, or judges. After all, few people go to law school to diminish the power that lawyers have over the rest of us.

But maybe they should start. No one of law-school-level intelligence can really believe the puffery behind law school advertising, so what’s the point in indulging the bad faith involved in going along with it? Anyway, since we live in a regime that professes adherence to limited constitutional government–and professes eternal hostility to aristocracy–it might be a salutary exercise to figure out what those commitments mean for law students, and how to inculcate the next generation of law students in the idea there are limits to observe in the uses of law to effect social change. It might be nice, as well, to ditch the self-conception of lawyers as a kind of democratic aristocracy, and ditch the sense of noblesse oblige often conjoined with that assumption.

It’s a tall order, I realize, but it might prove redemptive for them–assuming that they are redeemable. Of course, unlike Judge Carter of Nassau County Court, I don’t pretend to know about redeemability in advance of the redemption or non-redemption itself. The wisdom I invoke is less cosmic than his: By their fruits ye shall know them. The proof is in the pudding. Etc. Our legal profession might give that homespun wisdom a try. It’d be nice to see some of them descend the Olympian heights they seem to inhabit, and come back down to earth.

Postscript, September 8, 2014: I couldn’t have invented a better postscript to this post than an article in today’s Times, “As Two Men Go Free, A Dogged Ex-Prosecutor Digs In.”

Civilization, Its Enemies, and the Dumbest Conversation about ISIS on the Internet

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Note added, September 3, 2022: To belabor the obvious–for those who need a belaboring–this post was a response to a post on a separate blog, then called Neo-Neocon, now called The New Neo. The original post was posted in 2014; I don’t know whether it still exists. Neo-Neocon was defending the idea of US military involvement in Syria (back in 2014), which I was opposing. A commenter on the original blog post on Neo-Neocon, “blert,” had attacked my views by doing a cursory Google search, finding what he thought were photos of me, mistakenly identifying me with a fashion model with the name “Irfan Khawaja,” and then offering an elaborate confabulation about how I was an out-of-the-closet gay academic jihad blogger (implying, inadvertently, that Irfan Khawaja the fashion model was one, too). Obviously, blert’s whole comment was premised on a series of really stupid, obviously false assumptions and fabrications. That hasn’t deterred people from making some more.

To be absolutely clear: I am not Irfan Khawaja the fashion model, and have never pretended to be. The references to Irfan Khawaja the fashion model below are obviously satirical references to the erroneous identification of us made by the commenter “blert” on Neo-Neocon. If I’m gay, I must be in the closet about it even to myself, and to all of the women I’ve ever married or dated. I know nothing about the sexual orientation of Irfan Khawaja the fashion model, have no interest in knowing, and have never made any assertions about it whatsoever. I don’t mind being called a “blog jihadi,” but I have no comment on whether Irfan Khawaja the fashion model is. I don’t sympathize with ISIS, and have no reason to believe that Irfan Khawaja the fashion model does. I posted his photo in the post to satirize the error of the commenter, blert. As my bio makes clear, I’ve never claimed to be a fashion model. All of the commenters below except Irfan Khawaja the fashion model grasp that I am not Irfan Khawaja the fashion model, and am not claiming to be.

I wouldn’t have to belabor these obvious points if Irfan Khawaja the fashion model hadn’t, eight years after this post was first posted, decided to misread it by identifying my views with blert the commenter, and then attacking me for what blert had said. The ludicrous results of this misreading are now in the comments. As Dwight Eisenhower put it, “There is no final answer to the question ‘How stupid can you get?'” Continue reading →

Reason Papers 36.1 is out

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I’m happy to announce that Reason Papers vol. 36, number 1 (July 2014) is now out, and has been uploaded to the RP website. You can access it in one of two ways. This link will take you to a large PDF of the entire 223 page issue. This link will take you to our Archive page, and to PDFs of individual articles.

There’s plenty of good stuff in there, but in light of events in Ferguson, I think our Waco symposium ended up being unexpectedly topical. In a previous post, I asked this question:

As a historical matter, why have the police become so militarized in the United States? As a normative matter, is there any legitimate reason for militarization?

The Waco incident was a watershed in the militarization of police work in the US, and all four of our Waco items end up dealing in some way with the preceding issue.

Here’s the Table of Contents for the issue:

Editorial–Irfan Khawaja and Carrie-Ann Biondi

Symposium: Robert B. Talisse’s Democracy and Moral Conflict
Précis of Democracy and Moral Conflict —Robert B. Talisse
Comments on Talisse’s Democracy and Moral Conflict —Joseph Biehl
The Paradox of Democracy —Chris Herrera
Responses to My Critics —Robert B. Talisse

Symposium: Waco Twenty Years Later
The Contested Legacies of Waco —Irfan Khawaja
The Branch Davidian Stand-Off Twenty Years Later —Michael Barkun
From Razing a Village to Razing the Constitution: A Twenty-Year Retrospective on Waco —Paul H. Blackman and David B. Kopel
Waco: An Incident Superseded —Dick Reavis

Articles
Plato and Aristophanes: Poets of Hope —Anne Mamary
Portrayals of Egoism in Classic Cinema I: Sympathetic Portrayals —Gary James Jason

Review Essays
Review Essay: Eugene Garver’s Aristotle’s Politics: Living Well and Living Together —David J. Riesbeck
Review Essay: Mark D. Friedman’s Nozick’s Libertarian Project: An Elaboration and Defense —Danny Frederick
Review Essay: Al Gini and Alexei Marcoux’s The Ethics of Business: A Concise Introduction —Gary James Jason

Book Reviews
Eric Marcus’s Rational Causation —Bernardo Aguilera
James Swindal’s Action and Existence: The Case for Agent Causation—Frank Scalambrino
Allan Gotthelf and James B. Lennox’s (ed.) Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand’s Normative Theory —Mark LeBar
Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right —C. Upendra
Edward W. Younkins’s Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society: Toward a Synthesis of Aristotelianism, Austrian Economics, and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism —Jared Meyer
Randal O’Toole’s American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership —Eileen Norcross
Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon
—William Thomas
Tom G. Palmer’s (ed.) After the Welfare State —Matt Faherty

Afterword
Randian Egoism: Time to Get High —Irfan Khawaja

The Non-Labor Theory of Value

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Here’s a thought for Labor Day: name the common denominator of these five articles, all from The New York Times.

(1) This one, from 2009, describes the gradual legalization of rainwater-ownership in Colorado.

(2) This one, from a few weeks ago, reviews the film “Dinosaur 13,” about the theft of dinosaur bones from federal land in South Dakota.

(3) This one, a column by Timothy Egan, extols the virtues of federal land policy in the American West.

(4) This one, from today’s international pages, describes the Israeli government’s declaration of a thousand acres of land around Bethleham as “state land” off limits to development by Palestinians.

(5) This one, from today’s national pages, describes California’s attempts to curb private drilling of sub-surface water tables in that state during a drought.

As a bonus, let me add a post I wrote last year on a (still-ongoing) controversy over the ownership of sightlines in New Jersey.

The common denominator of the five or six cases–in case you’re still laboring to figure it out–is the widely-accepted, but essentially unargued assumption that state ownership of natural resources is self-evidently legitimate, and self-evidently trumps claims of private ownership of the same resources.

In (1), Colorado seems to be assuming that it owns rainwater and the sky itself.

In (2), the federal government seems to be assuming that it owns whatever dinosaur bones exist underground, regardless of who exercises the labor to discover and unearth them.

In (3), Egan seems to be assuming that the federal government should have free rein to manage Western lands as it sees fit, regardless of claims of private ownership. A valley can “belong to you and me” even if neither of us have been there, and neither of us have lifted a finger to labor on it. Further, its “belonging to you and me” supersedes the would-be rights of those who have been there (who live and work there), and have labored over it and improved it. Going yet further: a valley can “belong to you and me,” and yet it can still be the case that neither of us has the right to exercise rights of ownership over it. (If that sounds convoluted, that’s because the idea it’s describing is convoluted.)

In (4), the Israeli government seems to making the same claim about the West Bank–a claim it’s made about a lot of the West Bank for a long time.

In (5), California is assuming that sub-surface water is the property of the state, not of those who drill for it. (This case, incidentally, seems to me the most plausible of the examples of state intervention I discuss here, in part because it involves government management rather than outright ownership of aquifer water, and in part because it’s far from obvious that farmers own sub-surface aquifers, especially if the aquifer extends beyond the farmer’s surface property line. But plausible or not, what needs a justification is how California comes to have the authority to control sub-surface water supplies simply because they’re there.)

I think of the cluster of assumptions at work here as “the non-labor theory of initial appropriation”: non-labor confers strong claims of ownership, but only by the state.

If you read the philosophical literature on initial appropriation of unowned resources by private individuals, you’ll discover that ownership is a deeply fraught activity even for those who expend the ingenuity and labor to own previously unowned things. According to this literature, private individuals cannot claim strong rights of world ownership even when a given individual uniquely labors over unowned resources in novel and circumscribed ways. Such laborers labor under a heavy burden of proof before they can demonstrate bona fide ownership over the valuable items that their labor has brought into the world. Even so, they are always at the mercy of collective claims of “need” to their would-be property, no matter how obvious it is that they’re the ones to have created the relevant value, whereas the collective has not.

The classic account of this, to my mind, is A.M. Honore’s brilliant fish-hook thought-experiment in “Property, Title, and Redistribution.” For many people, the upshot of the thought-experiment is that you don’t own a fish-hook even if you’re the one who (without anyone else’s help) invented the fish-hook and has created the only fish-hook in a given village. Others have a right to your fish-hook because their access to it would (in material terms) improve their condition, even if your having it and having created it doesn’t harm theirs. In a literature littered with pointless and extravagant thought-experiments, this one is an exception: it clarifies all the essential issues in all the right ways.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no comparable literature on initial appropriation of unowned resources by states. The assumption seems to be that states are just entitled to show up, survey all of the resources within their domain, and, by fiat, declare those resources to be the property of the state. Woody Allen said somewhere that showing up is half of life. As far as the state is concerned, showing up is all of ownership: showing up and saying “ours” is all the state needs to do to own (literally) anything on Earth (surface, sub-surface, water, or air) or even beyond it (i.e., outer space). If ever you’re tempted to accept the claim that libertarians and their ilk fetishize private property, consider the sorts of claims made by the champions and practitioners of state ownership. According to them, by doing nothing, you come to own everything.

The fact of the matter is that initial appropriation is a fraught and difficult subject whether the appropriation is made by private or public agents. It isn’t obvious or clear how it is that we come to own the bits of the world we own, whether “we” are private citizens or agents of the state. The real lesson of Labor Day is not what we “owe” the labor movement. (I generally like the labor movement, but for reasons I can explain some other time, I’m inclined to think that it owes me more than I owe it.) The real lesson is that we need to clarify our thoughts about the relationship between labor, non-labor, and ownership. We can’t owe the labor movement anything if none of us owns anything. And we can’t own anything if the state owns everything, including us. That last clause may seem implausible, but if the state doesn’t have to do anything to own something, it doesn’t have to do much to own us. In the Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch’s guards chant, “All we own, we owe her.” It kind of seems like a joke. But it kind of isn’t one.

Surrender, But Don’t Give Yourself Away

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By Kurt Keefner

(This post is a response to one by Carrie-Ann Biondi, just preceding it below.)

As part of a discussion on Facebook, my friend, philosopher Carrie-Ann Biondi, defended the occasional positive connotations of the term “surrender.” At first this idea stuck in my craw. I knew she did not mean “turning the other cheek” or “Resist not evil” or any such New Testament notion of being submissive, but I was concerned that surrender inherently meant splitting oneself in two, into the part that surrenders and the part one surrenders to. Carrie-Ann assured me that this was not the case and later wrote an essay about usages of the term “surrender” in The Fountainhead. After further consideration, I think I pretty much agree with her about the positive connotations. I’ve written this follow-up essay to elaborate on and extend her ideas. I don’t claim to have captured everything that Carrie-Ann meant, but I think I’m on to something worthwhile regardless.

There seem to me to be several kinds of surrender that are healthy. They are diverse, but they have a similar underlying emotional dynamic. The overall pattern seems to be that one exerts a kind of control that one gives up in favor of allowing oneself to be vulnerable to something or someone. When I say “vulnerable” I mean allowing oneself to be affected by something without the attempt to protect oneself from it or manage it, so that you’re “giving yourself” to whatever it is.
Here is my heart, open to the world.
I prefer the metaphor of vulnerability to the metaphor of surrender, but “vulnerable” does not have a verb form, so I will use “surrender” with the caveat that what I mean is “allow oneself to be vulnerable.” Let’s examine some of the forms of control and surrender and look for deeper commonalities.

A first and basic kind of control is what we might call self-management. In this variety a person is focused on a goal and drives oneself to achieve it. One’s actions and even one’s mental states are planned and disciplined. This form of control is most prominent among ambitious people, but it can be found to varying extents in almost anyone who is not completely impulsive. People who self-manage to a high degree can have trouble letting beauty or tenderness into their lives, and to do so they have to learn to relax and surrender to the moment instead of always living in the future. We see an example of this in the scene in Atlas Shrugged where we first meet Dagny and she hears the melody of Halley’s Fifth Piano Concerto. She tells herself “Let go—drop the controls—this is it.”

Randy Elrod's portrait of Dagny Taggart
Randy Elrod’s portrait of Dagny Taggart, available at http://www.randyelrod.com/dagny-taggart-atlas-shrugged-my-latest-watercolor-between-the-pages-series/

Second, we have the control of reserve. Even very open people do not completely expose themselves to strangers. One has to get to know and trust a person before one “surrenders” to them by “letting them in.” To let someone in is to allow oneself to be vulnerable to them. This form of surrender can range from friendship to romantic love. This is the paradigm example of surrender as trust.

Our third kind of control is sexual. One does not let just anyone in—to one’s bed or body. While I do not wish to overstress this matter in the way Ayn Rand does, I would say that this is a somewhat asymmetrical situation, that men do most of the pursuing, women do most of the resisting (controlling) and surrendering. Women are more physically vulnerable to men than the other way around, although men and women are of course both emotionally vulnerable where romantic love is concerned.

Fourth is what I took Carrie-Ann to mean in an earlier discussion of surrendering. Here the form of control is refusing to admit that you are wrong when at some level you know you are. What is necessary here is to surrender to reality, or, to be exact, to give up the false belief you have been clinging to in favor of what you really know (at whatever level). Maintaining the false belief dis-integrates the self, because you are holding your deeper knowledge at bay and compartmentalizing yourself. Surrender in this situation heals the breach. Note that even in this epistemological situation there is still an element of vulnerability because you take a chance on your ability to survive without the false belief.

A quote from Eugene Gendlin is appropriate here:

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

Fifth and last for this essay is the desire to overmuch control one’s experience that in Killing Cool I label “Pretending.” What one Pretends is a false self defined by a pseudo sense of life, as when one tries to be hip or chronically ironic or inappropriately seductive. When one Pretends, one falsifies reality and reduces other people to convenient cartoon figures. In the book I develop several methods of addressing the problem of Pretending. One of them, which I call centering, involves letting reality in and thus could be said to be a form of surrender or allowing oneself to be vulnerable.

Due out September 2014

There is a sixth form of control and surrender I wish to discuss, but it would take a disproportionate amount of space, so I will save it for another essay. I’ll say this much about it: It has to do with the nature of focus. Focus, or paying attention is how we cognitively engage the world. But as it turns out there are several ways of focusing one’s attention and they have different effects on the organism. It may be advisable to stop focusing in the typical Western, problem-solving way sometimes for the sake of mental health. Doing this may also be experienced as a kind of surrender.

So what is the common emotional dynamic to all these forms of surrender? I would say that it is trust. Trust means letting your guard down and allowing yourself be vulnerable. Normally when we think of trust we think of trusting another person, but trust more fundamentally means trusting yourself. Before you can “drop the controls” or admit that you were wrong, you have to trust that you can handle the situation, that being vulnerable won’t get you killed or badly hurt emotionally. Even when one is sure of this, there can still be a raw edge to the experience of vulnerability that makes the experience that much more piquant and valuable, much like love—for there can be no love without trust, no trust without vulnerability, no vulnerability without surrender.