"Denial makes the world go round"

A fascinating article in today's International Herald Tribune that definitely matches my experience, better, of the quiet facts of life that often obscure the more honest facts of life.

Denial makes the world go round

I do this all the time. The places in my life where my and most people's integrity is most lacking, I think, have all been largely due to this fact of life.

And the larger fact than all of that is that we are all learning, about all of this, including about how to be more honest with ourselves and others about our failings and our integrity and being more honest.

Twain and Mencken were two of the best observers of their respective times of this phenomenon, I think. I'm a pretty good observer and have a fairly strong intuition of this fact of life, too, I believe.

And the sure sign of someone who is more honest about the world is their capacity - which for all of us is always limited - to be open about their flaws; their willingness to be vulnerable. That's why I trust people, better, who are more vulnerable to me and to others. Because other people have more to hide, and they've just gotten too used to the habit of doing so.

This is also a flaw of mine. But I don't hold myself up as a model of ideal virtue. Just someone who takes working on it seriously. I work at getting more honest. It's good for us. It's good for me. And being dishonest works in the other direction.

I guess working on it is all any of us can do. And that is why it is important to give everyone as much space as possible to do just that. That is how conscience is developed. And those who really believe that politics or criminal justice or even civil justice are the sources for the most honest checks on this tendency have not watched those systems closely enough recently enough. Cops and prosecutors and judges and bureaucrats and politicians can all be honest. But they are also average people subject to the same average foibles that all people are subject to, and often more so, depending on where the popular winds are blowing and to whom your comparing them to. When the popular winds give authority figures - judges and prosecutors, mostly, right now, in America, and journalists in a less formal governing role - the impression that they are more messianic than the really are, that is when trouble brews. And it is worst when figures like Bull Connor take on folks more honest than himself like Martin Luther King (who happened to be more honest than most, if not all, of the cops and judges and lawmakers of the time and today). And repression and the threats to hurt people that make it up make all people, even the best people, less honest, with themselves as much as with one another. That's how repressive periods happen: average people get dishonest with themselves and one another about what life really looks like because they are afraid of violating the repressive code.

It's all so sad and foolish and counterproductive. And creates all the more reason for repressive forces to do their worst. Which creates more repression and the ugly behavior repression is meant to eliminate. Which gives license to repressive forces. Which creates more repression and the ugly behavior repression is meant to eliminate. Which gives license to repressive forces. Which creates more repression and the ugly behavior repression is meant to eliminate.

And on and on and on until you have Palestine or Cuba or Iraq or North Korea. Or Soviet Communism or Nazism or imperialism or the Spanish Inquisition.

Denial makes the world go round. Until everyone becomes clearer that it has stopped spinning forward. In which case something has to change to move in a better direction.

The authors and the researchers for this study suggest forgiveness is that critical quality that gets us through it all. We can't go anywhere without it. And its absence makes much bigger liars of us all. Because we start lying about what thoughtless pricks we become. All of us. And we lose track of how much we fuck up the world with that tendency.

I don't care how much we pretend like being assholes isn't what is constantly fucking up the world. It is. And I don't give a shit how many times we try to warp that into something more noble than it is. It isn't.

But you know what does and has always offered me the most hope?

We always move forward, eventually. Without exception. Even in the most repressive times and with the most repressive governments and societies. Free peoples and liberal democracies move forward more quickly. But all societies move forward and give up the vestiges of inhumanity and illiberalism with time. Today is no different. And tomorrow will be better, the more people face up and, consequently, governing leaders can, as well.

What confuses the reality and creates all the denial is the repression, both repressive measures being used and being threatened and the repression of all of the bitterness, anger, hatred, hostility, and all of the various emotions that we are ashamed to admit are our own, that keep repressive policies and governments in place.

As we become more free, we become more honest. And as we become more honest, the more we want our freedom. And so on and so on, as a virtuous circle replaces the vicious cycle that repression breeds.

It takes more understanding and more honesty and more courage.

But those things are in greater supply the more freedom there is to express each of them and their less attractive and sometimes ugly alternatives.

Fact creates value creates fact creates value, as Maslow would say. And all of it creates means of carrying on more honestly, decently, compassionately, and productively, once we begin to tell the difference, better, between the fact and the fiction. And that is something we do best when more honest and decent people are more honest and decent with themselves and with us.

I only hope people in my life will be honest and decent with me as I get better at these qualities. More importantly, I hope I will get more honest and decent with myself and others so that I can be a much better man tomorrow than I was today.

Wishful thinking on Palestine

The Economist has yet one more wishful thought, among so many right now, for how to break the logjam in Palestine during the summit in Annapolis.

Mr. Palestine

Mr. Bush, the Economist reasons, must take charge and tell the Israelis and Palestinians what's-what on a workable peace plan.

"In this speech Mr Bush needs to set out forthrightly America's own plan for dividing Palestine. That would mark an historic change. In the past—in Madrid in 1991, for example, and at Camp David in 2000—the Americans asked the Israelis and Palestinians to thrash out their differences on their own. But they can't. The gap is too wide, and even when their respective leaders want to narrow it neither dares move towards the other for fear of the uproar from the ideological bitter-enders at home. The existence of an American blueprint that commanded international support would, however, immediately transform the political dynamic of both societies, fortifying the moderates and pushing the hardliners to the margins.

Although it would be too much to expect Mr Bush to unfurl a map at Annapolis, he could come quite close. For a start, he should make it clear that when America talks of a two-state solution, it has in mind a border based on the pre-1967 line. Three years ago Mr Bush said in a public letter to Ariel Sharon that it would be unrealistic to expect Israel to evacuate all the dense settlement blocks it has planted in the West Bank. Fine. But since most settlers live close to the old border, he can now tell Israel that it cannot keep more than a few percentage points—say 5% or so—of the West Bank, and that it must offer the Palestinians land from its own side in compensation. On refugees, Mr Bush should say, as Bill Clinton did, that their right to “return” should be exercised in the new Palestine and not in pre-1967 Israel: that is a bitter pill but it is the logic of a peace based on partition. And Israel too must accept a bitter potion: Jerusalem, the beating heart of both peoples, will have to be the capital of both.

If Mr Bush gives this speech, Mr Olmert and Mr Abbas will wax furious. They might agree with him in their hearts, but if only for domestic political consumption they will have to accuse the American president of setting an ambush, bullying the little guys, prejudging the final-status issues and riding roughshod over the views and rights of the people most directly affected. These fulminations can be safely ignored. Israel and the Palestinian territories alike are full of politicians who will tell you knowingly but off the record that only a deal along the lines described above stands the remotest chance of bringing permanent peace. It is high time the superpower and the rest of the world threw their weight behind such a plan. The photo-op at Annapolis may be just the place to do it."

It's a sweet idea.

But the truth is that the resolution of Israeli-Palestinian peace is both more simple and more complicated than all of that.

The details of a peace plan most definitely need to be worked out.

But that's not the real problem.

All that haggling reflects deep-seated bitterness, anger, hatred, and hostilities from the history of this long-running 60+ year Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If the parties were committed to forgiving that history and all its ugly realities and to seriously make a peace agreement happen, it would happen.

What is needed is for the Palestinian leadership, in Mahmoud Abbas, and the Palestinian people, and the Israeli leadership, in Ehud Olmert, and the Israeli people, including his more hawkish coalition partners, to genuinely commit themselves to peace and to figuring out whatever needs to be figured out to make that happen.

Statehood, borders, right of return, settlements, security and counterterrorism, Jerusalem. All of these issues can find resolution, and only find resolution, after the parties have committed themselves to peace. And no taking charge or strong-arming from the White House ever would, could, or should try to substitute for that more honest commitment. It just could never happen that way. Because the genuine cooperation of all parties will be needed for as long as that peace is to be expected to last, hopefully for as many generations as Israelis and Palestinians have future generations.

Everything else is wishful thinking by those with too much confidence, you might call it hubris, or arrogance, in the ability of authority, power, force, and aggression to resolve more problems than they really can.

You cannot have peace, like any other idea or matter of conscience that you want to sustain itself, without genuine commitment from those who are to engage peacefully. It's just not possible. If people are not committed to peace, or any other goal you have for them, they will perpetually undermine that peace or anything you want for them to be committed to and accomplish. The more you fight to force people to take on a good cause, no matter how good the cause, they will resist and fight you back for as long as you take up that route. And that is why freedom, conscience, and self-determination and self-governance, and not force, are the most serious animating ideas in the history of humanity. These are the ideas that are the namesake of liberal democracy and liberal democratic thought. And it is those values and those ideas, not the foolish notion of force as a governing philosophy, that will dig humanity out of the rut that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the larger repressive and regressive rut that the world faces today.

The writing is so clearly on the wall on this matter that I can hardly believe that anyone would miss it. Except that their hearts are often so cluttered with bitterness, anger, hatred, and hostilities that they just can't see anything else, sometimes. It is foolish. It is ugly. And it is just who we are, right now. Until we face this reality. And the destruction it has wrought.

But the destruction will not end until we begin to do so.

And no strong-man, not even George Bush, could possibly decide otherwise.

Goes to show...

...that some of best thinking that people do happens when they or their team is unpopular.

George Will has a very smart column with a terrible title on the strongest strain of conservative thought: humility about what government can do.

To be fair, Jim Hoagland seems to be more independent than conservative, these days. And this piece on the warmongering of Rudy Guliani and the humility and introspection of John McCain offers some welcome caution about the wisdom of Rudy's aggressive instincts.

It's so funny. Writers and journalists (and even many scholars, sadly) keep telling the politicians that they need to get tough, to use more force, and to aggressively march and pressure our way through every predicament we find. Politicians follow that terrible advice and then we have situations like the saber-rattling by Rudy and Republicans towards Iran.

The hubris of this moment - in American politics, in America's role in international politics, and of journalists, scholars, and other writers and thinkers, generally, in contemporary political discussions - is really quite the sight to behold.

Everyone cries for force. Then when they get it - from the Bush Administration, from Democrats in Congress, from the Giuliani campaign, from Burma, Georgia, Venezuela, China, Pakistan, or Iran - they cry fowl and scream, "But that's not what we wanted" (unless they favor the use of force from those teams, in which case they say, "Someone needs to really get tough"; it's Bubba politics at its best).

And all of those folks think quietly to themselves, "But that's what you said."

It's the most dysfunctional of worlds we have created, this world of aggression to resolve all of our deepest problems.

Because it is our aggression, and our failure to think and reflect nearly seriously enough about how and when we should use it, that is the heart of our problems.

Least possible necessary aggression. The least aggression we can muster when its needed. And freedom as a presumption. It seems like such a simple idea to me, these days. It just took a little think sweat, as a colleague of mine referred to it.

We are a funny little species. It's so comic, I could cry. If it would do any good.