The way forward

We are so strange. We are a generation of people probably more aware of our own failures and frailties and shortcomings than probably any other generation in history, because we are able to acknowledge them so openly. And yet our most important shortcoming is that we hold one another to impossible expectations of insight knowing that, given our propensity for lack of insight, we will likely fail those expectations. We make it remarkably hard for one another to own up for those failures, honestly, and then we persistently marvel that people do not take responsibility for their mistakes and failures of insight.

If Joe Nye, one of the most important, insightful, and serious thinkers in the world can come as close as this to believe in this war, then how in the world can we hold President Bush or Tony Blair or anyone involved to such an impossibly high standard of insight that we can't possibly forgive them when their (and our) insight fails them?

What makes us so self-flagilating that we just can't accept that peoples' humanity doesn't always give them the crystal ball into the future that we would like? Same goes for me, as I angrily deride liberals and conservatives for making the same fundamental mistake as the President in this war: arrogantly believing that others can be persuaded merely by force or pressure or bullying of your better policies and good intentions. They cannot be persuaded by force. Not really. And that goes for liberals as well as conservatives.

Force must be used in extraordinary circumstances. But it must be used as little as possible. And using it beyond that minimum undermines its credibility and undermines the authority that it is predicated upon. And, more importantly, it undermines the self-governance and self-determination that are at the heart of both liberal democratic values and are needed for self-actualizing, self-determining people to genuinely embrace and internalize values that sustain us.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower argued well (and as Andrew Sullivan posted on his blog, today):

"Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace."

I know what it's like to make serious mistakes and to not be able to take them back. I think most of us do. If we say we don't, we are generally lying and likely much more dangerous than those who acknowledge differently, because such claims are designed to make us appear more lacking in frailties than any human being can actually ever be, no matter how they might rationalize otherwise. It doesn't make us bad people or people worthy of flagilation, by ourselves or others. It makes us perpetually, and without any other alternative, human. Frail, lacking perfect or omniscient insight, foolish, failing, full of any number of shortcomings, and human. The President is no more and no less human than any of the rest of us, no matter how much he may, at times, appear, to believe to have a direct line to God. He doesn't. Which should make us more understanding and compassionate toward him and his foolishness, not more hateful or harsh.

This foolish, small-minded, narrow way of looking at the world has us locking ourselves in this unecessarily and counterproductively harsh way of dealing with the world and ourselves. It does not solve the problems we wish it to solve. And, generally very plainly if we could look on life without having to defend our and its failures, it makes many of our problems worse. But we are too afraid and too lost in defending it to consider its failures. We embrace contradictory arguments - that we are lost without strict authority and rules and the pressure and means and will to enforce them and we are lost without mercy and with too strict an overreliance on rules and a dependence on authority to resolve our problems. We think that if we embrace a nebulous "middle ground" between those two positions that we have, in fact resolved the matter. When what we are persistently doing is rationalizing whatever decisions we make in the name of whatever middle grounds that we claim (much of the time which we actively manipulate) rather than thinking harder and deeper about how and under what circumstance force should be used and what presumptions we should have for its use.

What we need, as opposed to what we will rationalize in the moment, is a clear presumption against the use of force and pressure, as much as possible, instead of the regular rationalization of its use which is so popular today. What we need is an clear embrace of liberal democratic principles - meaning principles that appreciate the underlying premises for freedom and a more democratic culture, as much if not more than more democratic institutions - and which presume against the use of force, including the force of law, to resolve important questions of conscience between us. As much as possible, our problems, as liberal democratic peoples, need to be resolved by free, independent and interdependent grown-ups, without resorting to bullying and intimidation, and force to resolve problems that are deeply involved matters of conscience.

To do otherwise demeans the conscience and the process of thought and learning and engagemement and debate and discussion that both undergird the highest liberal democratic principles and values that we have to offer and which are, necessarily, as a matter of reality, the foundation for any of our thought and action, no matter how well or poorly developed. No matter how well or not we have thought through the important matters that we face in our lifetimes, our thought and consciences are our only reliable guide, no matter how much we may wish otherwise. Even if we were to only and strictly follow the authority or guidance of others, we would still and always be subject to our own imperfect interpretations of their intent and will. There is no way out of this predicament of making judgments as a human being, nevertheless in a world that expects more independent and critical thought about the world around it.

And the saddest fact of all is that it has us now and perpetually in conflict with our family and friends and neighbors in ways that do not resolve such matters of conscience because they do not fundamentally respect that conscience and those judgments, which are much more fundamtentally important both for each of our development and ability to test and trust our judgment, and which are more fundamentally important to us than any of the particular judgments we might have to offer. This goes for those who give into cynicism about conscience and judgment as much as for those who aspire for something better (which is all of us, really, when we are honest with ourselves about that).

Our consciences are more important to us than the impositions of others for good reason. Because they are far more reliable and because they are our only real guide to the world, no matter how well or little reliable they may be in reality. Germans or others who submitted to Nazi authority on the question of whether or not to turn in Jews would be engaging in forgiveable but unspeakable evil to submit their neighbors' lives to try save their own. Free peoples who turned over slaves in 19th and 18th century America in the name of following fugitive slave laws are not acting morally in any recognizable use of that term. They are acting in a way that protects their interests and what the law deemed the property of others, not in a way that is most decent or good. Japanese internment or deplorable treatment of Native Americans or African Americans or the legally denied right to vote for women are not made more moral or defensible because they are or were defended by the rule of law. To the contrary, they all undermine the credibility of the rule of law as some guiding principle that can replace conscience as our most credible and trustworthy guide.

And we don't assert the supremacy of the rule of law, today, because we really believe that the law has reformed itself magically to replace our consciences, which the most honest of us know the law cannot, could not, and will not ever replace (nor has it ever in the past; which is how good people behave, generally, in reality, even if their rhetoric does not match their behavior). We assert its supremacy, today, because it serves our ends, even if we don't really believe it, down deep, or believe it selectively at best. We believe it when it doesn't include our own indiscretions, is the truth. And always has been. No matter how much we try to talk ourselves out of that fact of life.

This lie is one more in a long line of lies that we tell ourselves as good people to try to maintain that we are better than we actually are, rather than becoming better people than we actually are. It is more liberal democratic principles and virtues, more freedom, more self-reflection, more self-governance and self-determination, more investment in conscience and enlightenment rather than coercion and brute force, that light our way to genuine progress. What most people do today, including the most intelligent and thoughtful and self-reflective, is live amidst the contradictions, rather than search deep for a more consisent, thoughtful, integrated idea of how to resolve this serious question.

But living amidst the contradictions without resolving them leaves all of us more vulnerable to their confusion and thus more in need of one another's compassion and understanding and forgiveness, not more of its pressure and force and harshness and mean-spiritedness.

And living admidst the contradictions means that we need someone, as well as each of us, individually, to find a way through the mess and confusion, rather than pretending like its all really more resolved than it really is.

George Bush is not a perfect man. Nancy Pelosi is not a perfect woman. Neither is Joe Nye or Abraham Maslow or Amartya Sen or Francis Fukuyama or Milton Friedman or E.O. Wilson or any of the greatest minds. No leader, no thinker, no ordinary human being has more perfect insight than we would expect of them to avoid the pitfalls of judgment and life. And yet we perpetually demand of them that perfection and more, and worse, what we demand of them is that they just do what the hell we tell them, for better or for worse, even, often, if we make demands that contradict one another or our own professed goals or our whether we give or shit or not that they contradict the demands and force of other actors.

We just want what we want when we say we want it. And if our minds change, we want what we say that our minds have changed to what we want when we say we want it. It is ego run amok. And when it is a function of groupthink, very much as it was with the Nazis and the Communists and so many of the worlds' most serious abuses of power, we expect that no independent conscience will or should be able to resist it. Because if we all agree with it, it must be right. And that is the most dangerous of vanities that groupthink engages in when it wants its collective egos' appeased.

And what we want most of all is for all of that ego and self-centered orientation towards the world to be recognized as better than it really is. I do too, is the truth. We all do. It's just no good for any of us. Because it's not decent or respectful to those around us, and certainly not decent or respectful to their consciences, which are some of the more precious possessions they have, because it is who they are.

And we are going through a period where that kind of self-flattery and self-centered orientation around power is being glamourized and romanticized and popularized. There is no strong, thorough, consistent argument being made on its behalf. Nowhere that I have looked in the last 6 or 7 years that we have gone through this period have I seen such an argument. Not really. What has been going on has been one long assertion that flatters itself to think that it doesn't need defense because it has done us just fine all these years, even if it has been far from ideal and often terribly unfair, unjust, unforgiving, inhumane, indecent, repressive, and otherwise ugly in its application.

The truth is that the rule of law was and is an important progression from the law of the jungle. But it only progresses as it supports our growth and development as free and self-governing people, not as a regression to the rule of the jungle in the form of both the tyranny of the majority and legal, political, economic, and social intimidation to get our way in lieu of persuading others of our cause.

The rule of law is only meaningful insofar as it supports our highest liberal democratic values, not when it equates that principle in liberal democratic cultures and societies and governments with the rule of law in more repressive cultures and socieities and governments like Communist China or Cuba or North Korea or repressive Syria or Pakistan or even democratic but still repressive Iran with the just and moral rule of law in liberal democratic countries that take liberal democratic values more seriously.

Meaning, the important distinction between the most repressive and brutal regimes of the world and more liberal democratic cultures is not some minimum test that we aren't quite as brutal and repressive as they are.

The important distinction is the positive test that we take liberal democratic values, especially the values of free and open thought and discussion and debate and engagement and choices, as seriously as we can take them and as seriously as we and they deserve. And those fundamental liberal values should be taken more seriously than any other set of values, including the rule of law, since the rule of law makes no distinction between Nazi imposition and American or international or more liberal or democratic aspirations.

Our current political moment is one long rationalization for why what we say should go. It is not the highest values that liberal democracy has to offer.

And the first step to acknowledging that is acknowledging our own failures. In this war. In our overweaning thought and application of the principle of force during this period. In our motivations in using that principle. In our worthiness to enforce our will on others.

Lucky for us, future generations will forgive our stubborness and intransigence on this question. They will have to. What else can they do, if they wish to move forward? And they will help us clean up our messes. But these are the kinds of messes that are best cleaned up ourselves, since doing so would meet the basic responsibility that we are so persistently demanding of others, these days: to take responsibility. And best of all, doing so might actually resolve some of the more serious problems that we share, rather than letting them fester in our polarization and our self-righteousness and our petty parochialism and our desire to get those we disagree with or oppose and the rest of the distraction that obscures more serious, mature, wise and insightful thought and discussions that might seek resolution rather than make cynical excuses for our failures.

We should embrace more liberal values to support us as much for ourselves as for future generations that will be saddled with our unresolved problems and questions absent their resolution. It is us who has to live with the consequences of our failures until we are willing to face up to them. But we should also embrace them because each time we do, we avoid both such failures and the classic folly of every generation of liberal democratic peoples: believing that we have finally arrived when it is so clear to future generations just how far we have to go.

No generation or person ever does or can escape that fate completely. To do so would require an omniscience and perfection that noone and no generation is capable of, hence why they must always be forgiven their shortcomings. But we must and would be better served to avoid this mistake as much as possible. We'll be forgiven as we fail, of course. What else can future generations do but forgive us? Unless they want to live in a bleak and lifeless past as so many in Palestine or Cuba or other repressive countries must because their present is so overcast, as we all seek out nostalgia when the present has so little to offer.

But we cannot sustain ourselves on nostalgia. It is not substantial feeding. Which is why we must slowly but surely make our way forward. The past and present are littered with mistakes as much as blueprints.

And it is from those mistakes from which we learn, when we do.

Love,
Ben