Limited Government and Liberalism

Julian Sanchez has a knack for saying things that I wish I’d thought to say first. To wit:

A polity can establish broad and general principles specifying the conditions under which government may or should act, or it can vote on individual policies and programs on a case-by-case basis (with many gradations in between, of course). Both are clearly in some sense “democratic”; the proper balance between them will depend in part on one’s theory about how democratic deliberation confers legitimacy, just as the weight an individual gives to different types of “choices” will turn on a view about the nature of rational autonomy. Limited government is sometimes painted as constraint on democracy—an obstacle to what a majority might favor at a particular time. But political elites, like marketers, understand how the frame and scope of a choice may radically affect what the very same person or polity would choose—and claims by either that only one counts as true “choice” or “democracy” ought to be viewed with due skepticism.

I’d actually go a bit further here and suggest that this is the distinction between democracy and liberal democracy. A democracy can be (and sometimes is) full of majorities who do fairly unpleasant things to minorities. In (relatively) progressive democracies, those unpleasant things include prohibiting some minorities from getting married or from smoking in bars. In other places, majorities sometimes prefer to throw rocks at women who have the audacity to survive being gang raped.

Liberal democracy is about setting certain kinds of constraints on what a polity can and cannot do. It rules out certain classes of actions, even (or perhaps especially) when those actions are wildly popular.

It’s also the distinction that should make us wary of undertaking regime change. Establishing democracy isn’t particularly difficult to do. Kill off some dictators, hold some elections, and you’re good to go. Establishing liberal democracy — one where people agree in advance to some first principles that rule out some of the things that majorities might otherwise impose on minorities? That is considerably harder.

Fate

I don’t believe in fate.

The human brain has a remarkable ability to draw patterns. We think thousands of thoughts each day, experience countless bits of stimuli. A flash of red out of the corner of your eye, the faint odor of cut grass, and our brains are whisked away to childhood and our first bicycle and spending summers riding it to our friend Jeff’s house, and swapping Hardy Boys books, and fifty-cent cans of orange soda, and Jeff’s dad who got a new job that summer at…was it Aberdeen Proving Ground? And it all passes through your head in microseconds. And then later, when someone mentions having studied at Aberdeen, we think, “wow, Aberdeen keeps coming up; what a coincidence!” But it could just as easily have been a colleague wheeling a red bike up the stairs, or meeting someone named Jeff, or any of a million other things that are marginally related to any of the million other thoughts we have during a day.

I don’t believe in fate.

The last night in London. Walking home after dinner, not wanting to take the same route back to the hotel. We turn down a random street. Neither of us knows the name if it beforehand. But we know we’re near the University. And we think that this is the part of Bloomsbury that the trusty guide says is known for all its media types. Another turn, another random street. And there it stands. It’s the Jeremy Bentham pub. I had told Caroline about it just that morning. We really must go, she said.

I don’t believe in fate.

Humans are storytelling animals. It seems like such a simple truth, but it is one that has stuck with me since my first semester of graduate school. I didn’t agree with much that Alasdair MacIntyre had to say, but that part is certainly true. We make sense of our lives through the telling of stories. We pick out details because they are relevant to our story. The color of the shirt Caroline wore on our first date (something inhabiting the part of the spectrum between hot pink and a dusky rose) didn’t play any real role in the world. It is a random event, one of a million details available to an impartial observer that night. But it is part of my story – important because I have made it important.

I don’t believe in fate.

It’s 2006. I’m a young academic. Or so I still told myself, though in truth 34 isn’t really young, however much you might be trying to relive your 20s. I’m in London for the weekend at the tail end of a summer research trip to Wales. I’m sitting in the Bentham, not yet realizing that my remaining days as an academic could be counted on one hand. Soon I’ll be setting out on a new adventure. A new city. A new career. Then another new career. Then another. But that’s all in the future. For now, I’m a young academic. One with the better part of a book manuscript tucked away on a laptop back in a tiny hotel room.

I don’t believe in fate.

We have lots of different names for fate. We wrap it up in apocryphal stories about a dissident Jew and sprinkle in some letters from a misogynist Pharisee and tell ourselves that it’s part of A Plan. Or we tell ourselves that it’s really all just language and that the world around us is merely a construct of human invention. Or we strap on the pocket protector and say that it’s all collapsing wavefronts and observers. And maybe one of those is right. Perhaps there really is Truth and maybe we have found it. Or maybe we’re just making up stories as we go along. Seeing patterns in random events because that’s what we do. Because that’s what keeps us from despairing in the face of a universe that doesn’t give a fuck about our story. Because we just are the stories of our own lives, and stories need narratives.

I don’t believe in fate.

The Bentham is pretty unremarkable. Cramped downstairs. Upstairs slightly roomier, with a fireplace that could be cheery were it but filled with a fire, and rows of empty liquor bottles on shelves testament to days when the pub’s occupants were interested in more than just a simple pint. The ale selection is decidedly unremarkable. The burgeoning beer snob in me wants to remark that the Guinness is not quite as good as it was in Dublin last year, though what remains of the small-town kid whose first beer wasn’t until college whispers that I can’t really tell a difference. I sit in my chair, content in the knowledge that I can afford a second round without worrying about whether that will mean having to skip breakfast before my flight tomorrow.

I don’t believe in fate.

It’s unsurprising that we all ended up here. Bloomsbury. Books and scholars and history and a trace – just a trace – of Bohemia. Perfect for those drawn to academia. But also perfect for media types – especially new media types. Just an evening at the pub for the fellows who worked around the corner. And a stroll down yet another street in Bloomsbury for us. We hit nearly every block in the neighborhood. A perfectly unremarkable set of events. The sort of thing that happens every single day in cities across the world.

I don’t believe in fate.

Caroline leaves for a moment – even Guinness is rented, not purchased. A moment to reflect on the life I once had. The conversation at the next table turns – as these after-work drinks often do – to the job. I’m half listening. I hear random snippets of conversation: “JavaScript” and “can’t code for shit” and “still compiling.” Another moment to think about the life I have now. I see Caroline across the room. Our eyes meet. She smiles.

And just for a minute, I believe in fate.

Nostalgia

No one ever wanted to take the Sunday 3 – 6 shift in the writing center at Hampden-Sydney. Or at least they didn’t way back in the early ’90s when I was there. That was the time for curing the Saturday night hangover — usually by consuming a bit of the hair of the dog while watching the late game. (Because back in the day, there wasn’t any of this Sunday Night Football business. Primetime football was for Mondays, dammit. The way God intended. Or at least the way that God would have intended if She could be bothered to care about grownups playing games on an obscure planet in the corner of a tiny galaxy. Or if She existed in the first place. But I digress. Also, get off my lawn Sunday Night Football.)

Anyway, no one ever wanted that 3 – 6 shift. As a sophomore, I got stuck with it. What with Hampden-Sydney’s tradition of letting people choose things by class, and freshmen being excluded from working at the writing center, it was bottom-of-the-barrel for sophomores. So there I was, first semester sophomore year, in the writing center at 3 every Sunday.

Turned out, though, it wasn’t so bad. No one ever came in for help. I saw a bare handful of people that first semester (see above re: beer and football.) Occasionally my roommate John would come by to “shoot the shit,” a phrase that I probably haven’t heard since those days. But mostly it’d just be me, a handful of Mac Classic II computers and a 3.5″ floppy disk with MacWrite II (color screens and no boot disk FTW!), and three hours of enforced study time. Or, later on, the internet. Or, back then, the Internet — still capitalized, and pre-GUI.

Those Sunday evenings ended up being one of the highlights of the week. A time to reflect on the week gone by, maybe do a bit of work (less often than I should have, and certainly less often than I’d do if I had the whole thing to do over.) Or, more often, lounging on the (really awful) couch with a (usually even awfuller) SF novel. At 6 (or a little later depending on the novel), I’d walk across the courtyard to the dining hall. Sunday dinner was always social — in my circle, anyway. We would gather around our table and discuss our respective weekends. Sometimes that meant reliving the parties we’d all attended together anyway. Others it meant catching up after the Great Away Football Game Weekend Diaspora, hearing what everyone had done.

I most remember those evenings — just three of them over the course of my entire H-SC career, when I would walk out of the writing center and discover that it was totally dark at 6 p.m. It would take me just a moment to remember where I was and what was happening. The time had changed. Fall was officially here. Midterms were just around the corner, and then a final sprint to Thanksgiving and the end of the semester. The blazer would feel downright comfortable at the last few remaining football games. Soon they might even have to turn the heat on in the dorms. Fall had arrived in full, and I would take just a moment — but, like with the studying, not quite as long as I should have, or as I would if I had it to do over again — to soak in my surroundings and to think to myself, there isn’t anyplace quite as nice as Hampden-Sydney in the fall.

Welcome back fall. It’s good to see you again.

Adventures in Neocon Land

I am currently plowing my way through the fourth installment of David Weber’s Safehold series. For those of you not already involved in this particular method of wasting time and brain cells in equal measure, the basic plot…doesn’t really matter. It’s mostly all a setup to allow Weber to stage elaborate 18th-century naval battles (though maybe it’s early 19th? I’m not enough of a naval historian to know) in a universe that also contains androids, BEMs, FTL travel, and semi-intelligent AIs. Like Weber’s Honor Harrington stories, the Safehold series is more-or-less an ode to Horatio Hornblower, only this time with actual sailing vessels and cannons.

The novels bounce back and forth between details about the political and religious climate of Safehold and ripping great naval battles. Those reading just for the latter can safely skip about 60% of the pages (and pretty much pass on vol. 4 entirely), but for those few of us who actually enjoy the world-building, the other stuff is interesting if for no other reason than that it shines such a light on Weber’s own political beliefs. Let’s just say that “subtle” is not a word that a sane person would use in describing Weber. And, like most of the writers who found stardom writing for Jim Baen, Weber leans decidedly rightward.

For starters, the omnipresent bogeyman in the series – one who is referenced on nearly every page, but who appears only rarely – is one Zhaspahr Clyntahn. Meanwhile, Weber’s great conquering general is Hauwyl Chermyn. The fourth volume revolves around an ever-larger collection of protagonists who are (a) living in what is pretty clearly the analogue of the British Isles and who (b) fight off an oppressive universal (dare one say catholic?) church by forming its very own, modestly reformed version, while (c) using their navy and marines to dominate the seas and conquer pretty much everyone whom they perceive to be a threat.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “You’re on volume four of that?” To which I can only say: Did I mention that Weber writes really ripping naval battles?

But all of this got me to thinking about what looks to be a pretty significant trend in adventure-oriented stories: Pretty much all of them (and certainly the best of them) seem to embrace a worldview that is fundamentally at odds with what we might think of as a liberal worldview. I’m talking about people like Forester, O’Brien, Kipling, Burroughs (the Tarzan one, not the Beat one), Tolkien, Heinlein, Lucas, Rowling – or we can skip modern(ish) examples and go all the way back to people like Homer and Mallory. In every case, there’s a single theme: All you really need to triumph over the forces of evil are a few heroic individuals and a band of ragtag but faithful followers who can be turned into a disciplined (and generally unstoppable) army. Our heroes win a battle (or, more often, a big-ass war), and then happily end their days engaging in a bit of benevolent despotism over the conquered barbarians. For the villains are nearly always barbarians – or, worse, decent people who are easily duped by a few truly evil leaders and who will require more benevolent despotism “for their own good.” In really extreme cases (see Tolkien and everyone who writes fantasy afterward. Also maybe Kipling.) a little bit of ethnic cleansing is necessary before we can get down to the really serious business of glorious absolute monarchy.

Even when our adventure stories take on what looks like a more quintessentially “liberal” worldview, these more traditional – conservative? neoconservative? – attitudes persist. I’m thinking here of Dances With Wolves and its three sequels (The Last Samurai, Avatar and District 9). Yes, you might be fighting against the forces of colonialism or racism (or a little of both), but in the end, you triumph by aligning the natives with the Power of Western Male Individualism. (Yes, sometimes there are technically females involved. But they are typically Heinlein-style Men With Perfect Breasts. I’ll leave the deconstructing of gender stereotypes to people who are better at it, though. The same goes for critiquing the trope of the surprisingly-Western “natives.” I’m self-aware enough to recognize the white male-centricness of the adventure genre, but am probably also too deeply steeped in that culture to have anything useful to say about it.)

My point (and yes, there really is one, buried under all the digressions) is that I wonder whether or not the myth of the heroic individual isn’t necessary to make a really good adventure story work. Maybe all good adventure stories need to turn on the existence of a small group of people with the courage/brains/grit/etc whose possession of said characteristics is the very thing that allows them to save the day. Maybe only a hero straight out of The Book of Virtues can really sustain an adventure worth reading/watching. I mean, what would a truly liberal cosmopolitan adventure story even look like? Goblins who realize that their life prospects are way better if they unionize and then collectively refuse to a (very brief) career of catching Legolas’ arrows for the (Saru)Man? Martians who engage John Carter to open up trade routes between Earth and Mars rather than perpetually stealing the princess he wants to marry? Stories of leaders who come to power because the citizens are really annoyed at high unemployment rates? That all sounds rather boring.

Or, rather, it sounds a bit like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Which is something that I hugely enjoy reading, but which is also (a) not adventure-like at all and (b) essentially unfilmable. Because, of course, pretty much nothing happens in any of the books. Or, rather, stuff happens, but it all happens off-screen while the protagonists have long conversations during the months it takes to travel between planets. And even the action that does happen is not the result of the heroic actions of a few rugged individuals. It’s generally the product of the forces of sociology and economics and basic human nature. That closer to a liberal account of how the world works.

But it makes for a pretty boring adventure story.

Angel in Mismatched Shoes

So, I’m riding the Metro home the other day, reading Facebook on my Droid (I live in the future!) when I come across Steve Johnson’s post celebrating “awkward and maladroit metaphors, like wild horses sneezing on the rocks.” As Steve invited others to join in, I spent a couple of entertaining stops writing up my metaphor. At this point in the story, I should tell you that, in one of those strange things that my brain tends to do, I had kind of been obsessing over Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden, a book in which, quite disappointingly, the best line is in the blurb. Nonetheless, I’d been a little bit obsessed with Bizarro fiction all day, and my metaphor reflected it. Eventually, I responded to Steve with:

Celebrates horses sneezing on the rocks, like a hunchbacked angel in mismatched shoes wandering the streets of Calcutta and drinking despair through a straw.

Yes, I know. Not really all that great. I freely admit that “inspired by” does not, unfortunately, equal “as talented as.” (Exhibit A: Lada Gaga. Madonna. Case closed.)

Nevertheless, the image nagged at that part of my brain that says, “Hey, write something about this.” I ignored that part of my brain (as I usually do of late), but it didn’t seem to work. So I tried sending it into a drooling stupor by watching some summer television. Still didn’t work. I even tried numbing it with alcohol. That made it worse.

So finally I just wrote the fucking thing. It’s below the fold. Probably slightly NSFW, depending on where it is that you happen to work. At the very least, it should convince about 90% of my friends to block all my posts. Assuming that all the philosophy crap hasn’t done that already.

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Flashforward and Circular Logic

So, Caroline and I finally got around to watching Flashforward. We’d been TiVOing since ep. 2, but we missed the first episode. And ep. 1 disappeared from Hulu before either of us watched it. So we collected about 7 episodes before we actually started the season. Since then, we’ve watched almost all of them in short order. Actually, it’s probably fair to say that I’ve been watching it obsessively, and Caroline has agreed to come along for the ride. I’m going to toss out a few thoughts about the show below the fold, so if you’re trying to remain spoiler-free, you should go read something else now.

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Terrorism, Acts of War, and Military Trials

As you’re probably already aware, there’s been some disagreement with the Obama administration’s plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York civilian court. Among the objections is the claim that trying terrorists in civilian court commits one to a “law enforcement” view of terrorism rather than a “war on terrorism” approach. Now as a general rule, I’m rather opposed to the rather overworked and almost always grossly misleading War on an Abstract Noun language. By and large, our WoaANs have effectively been wars on drug users and poor people – or most often, a twofer of poor people who use drugs.

That said, the war metaphor might not be as problematic in the case of international terrorism. Certainly many terrorists invoke war language to describe their actions. So should we take terrorists at their own word, and accord them military trials (which generally entail fewer protections for the defendants than do civilian trials)? Matt Yglesias says no, claiming that if you do so:

you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder.

But not so fast, says Norm Geras.

The opposition Matt sets up here between war and crime – between ‘a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people’, on the one hand, and murder or mass murder, on the other – is too sharp. War may (sometimes) be legally and morally acceptable, but that doesn’t mean there is no criminality within war. There is – as defined by the laws of war. One is not therefore bound to choose between treating individuals as participating in a war and treating them as criminals, if that is what they are. Under the assumption of universal jurisdiction, international humanitarian law allows for war criminals and those responsible for crimes against humanity to be prosecuted in the civilian courts of any country. And terrorism is murder even when it is ‘a kind of war’.

Now I’m inclined to agree with Geras to a degree. The line between terrorism and war crimes is not as bright as Yglesias makes it out to be. I am personally inclined toward the view that terrorism is best defined as the deliberate targeting of noncombatants to achieve a political objective. That makes the 9/11 attacks and the Ft. Hood shootings both acts of terrorism, albeit on different scales. But that definition also makes the allied firebombings of Dresden and (at minimum) the atomic bombing of Nagasaki acts of terrorism. The latter two acts are also rightly defined as war crimes and should have been treated as such. (And, yes, I am fully aware that only the losing side is ever actually tried for its war crimes. It doesn’t make such acts any less criminal.)

But not all acts of terrorism are acts of war. I think one would be hard pressed to give any sort of plausible story that portrays Tim McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City as an act of war. The same goes for the Unabomber, the DC Sniper and the Ft. Hood shooter. Terrorists, yes. War criminals? Not so much.

KSM and 9/11 is a tougher call. Indeed, I think it’s something of a judgment call. I could probably get on board with either side – or, at the very least, I’d say that it’s a question about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree.

Still, I think that there is a serious risk of inconsistency present for many of those who are now arguing for treating KSM as a war criminal. As Geras rightly points out, international humanitarian law does in fact allow for war criminals to be prosecuted in the courts of any country. That specific international humanitarian law is the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 146 specifies that signatories “shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts.” Those “grave breaches” are defined in Article 147 as:

those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.

That pretty well describes the 9/11 attacks and KSM, and I think that anyone wanting to try KSM as a war criminal is legally in bounds to do so. But if one does wish to use the Fourth Geneva Convention to define KSM and company as war criminals, one will also probably need to pay attention to the last sentence in Article 146, which reads:

In all circumstances, the accused persons shall benefit by safeguards of proper trial and defence, which shall not be less favourable than those provided by Article 105 and those following of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of 12 August 1949.

In plainer English, that means that if you want to try someone as a war criminal, you have to treat him as a prisoner of war. Meaning no “cruel treatment and torture,” and no “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Which pretty much rules out waterboarding the dude 183 times.

So here’s the deal. If you think that the Geneva Convention’s prohibitions on torture somehow don’t apply to KSM, then it’s a bit hypocritical to argue now that he’s a war criminal. If you’re going to charge someone with war crimes under international law, then that same law also requires that you treat them as prisoners of war. In other words, a war criminal gets the full set of Geneva Convention protections, not just the ones that happen to best fit your preconceptions (or, perhaps more to the point, not just the ones that best line up with the agenda of your favored political party.)

*Note: Just to be clear, I’m not accusing Geras of inconsistency. He actually supports trying KSM in civilian court and has argued that those who tortured KSM should be prosecuted. I don’t know of anyone specifically arguing both for torturing KSM and for now treating him as a war criminal, though I do recognize that there is one particular political party whose members by-and-large were okay with torturing suspected terrorists at Gitmo and who are now outraged at the decision to try him as a civilian. It’s unclear to me how many members of that subset are interested in attempting to justify that split on any sort of rational grounds and how many of them are simply okay with whatever Their Side does and displeased with whatever The Other Side does.