Politics and the realities of war

Thomas Ricks writes a very impressive lead article for the Washington Post, today, that gets right to heart of the problem in the Iraq war debates in Washington, right now.

Politics Collides with Iraq Realities

The headline really captures the problem. Political debates in Washington that demand too much of realities on the ground and which impact realities on the ground, as insurgents and Al Queda hope to outlast the political will of the American people.

It's not Republicans who are out of touch with reality. It's not Democrats who are out of touch with reality. It is all of us who are always less than ideally aware of the realities we need and want to understand. Because life is just not ever so simple that anyone ever has all the right answers. That goes for politicians too. Though the truth is that politicians and average Americans are constantly demanding that everyone know more and better than they ever really could know. And certainly more and better than any of them know or ever really could know.

Here's the bottom-line in Iraq: a reasonable security must be created in Baghdad and in the rest of the country. We have no control or any real influence over a political resolution. We wish we did. We may try to use the threat of a pull-out to pressure for influence.

But the truth is we have very little influence other than hoping that Iraqis can negotiate exactly what Maliki and most Iraqis hope for, which is a political resolution that can end sectarian warfare and insurgent resistance and create a climate of legitimate political authority which can help to create a presumption that the Iraqi government and the American military will effectively monopolize force and bring a reasonable security to Iraq.

If we run tail after starting this thing and think that we are getting out without being or taking any responsibility for both starting this thing and not seeing it through, and if we think that somehow the Iraqi people or the international community is going to look at this mess and think, "Well, that's all on George Bush. All the rest of those Americans, especially those liberals, are goddamn saints who tried to prevent this damn thing," we are fuckin' deluded.

We will hope that Iraqis arrive at a political resolution and we need to stay and help them secure their country until they do. We created this mess. Not George Bush alone. The by-far-majority of Americans who supported this war when it started and who have grown weary with that decision since then. All of us. I didn't support it going in. I opposed it publicly. But I know better than to cut and run when the going gets tough just because things aren't exactly as I would like.

This is our mess. And we need to clean it up. It's the least we can do for the Iraqi people whom, when we dig deep and give up all that bullshit cynicism that animates too much of the political conversation about this war, we know that we should be looking out for here.

This is not about the politics of gay marriage or wealth inequities or abortion or the environment.

This is about making sure that we do the responsible thing, here, and help the Iraqi government, which wants and has made clear that they need our help. This is a mess we are responsible for. And we need to stay and make sure it gets cleaned up.

If Democrats can't get clear about that, then perhaps John McCain, who wrote about The War You're Not Reading About, in today's Washington Post, should lead this country until they do.

The biggest problem with this war is too many egos pretending they know more than they really do about this situation. It should be humbling for all of us.

And what we so desperately need, right now, is a humble discussion and debate about how to handle this war. No leader can make us do that. We have to, all of us, grow up together and have a mature and thoughtful discussion of what is happening and what we are going to do.

Right now, I have to say that John McCain's cautious optimism and his efforts to make Americans aware of moderate progress in Iraq are persuading me of his serious leadership potential and capacities. And what I really respect about John is that he voted for the war and instead of whining about how he was deceived - as Hillary Clinton has been doing and which makes so much clearer why she would be such a bad leadership choice, at this point - he is trying to make things right. And that is exactly what we should be doing, right now.

I respect Barack Obama for honestly opposing and criticizing this war, up front, which more sitting Senators should have done until a stronger debate and discussion could have been engaged about what to do in Iraq and if war was the option chosen - over strengthening sanctions, removing sanctions, etc. - then a better debate and discussion should have taken place in the lead up to that war. I do believe there was a very strong case that a war to remove Saddam Hussein was the only best option, even as I opposed the war, up front. But to make sure that was the case we should have had a stronger debate about how to engage that war in a way that would have more effectively included Iraqis.

The best option I've arrived at was collaborating with Iraqi opposition parties and alligned militias to let them lead the effort backed up by overwhelming force from the American military to undercut the insurgency, politically, and to reassure Iraqis in good faith that we were there, genuinely, to liberate them not to occupy them and to provide the firepower that Iraqis who opposed Saddam Hussein lacked to succeed in a revolutionary effort.

Had we had that debate and discussion, I am confident we could have arrived at better options for handling this war. But we did not have that kind of substantive debate or discussion. Nor are we now, really. What we are really doing right now is exchanging self-righteous political volleys between groups convinced that they've already figured out the best plan, not an engaged discussion and debate about what a best plan might look like and brainstorming options for that purpose.

Right now, I respect the shit out of John McCain for keeping America focussed on what is going well and keeping us on track with our responsibilities, here. His cautious optimism and his presence of mind to use the media to maintain our sense of responsibility for this war and our sense of hope in the positive signs that we are seeing, knowing the political realities of insurgents using American despair about the war to strategize for victory, is both brilliant and a sign of genuine leadership. I think, perhaps, I may be voting for him, this election, unless a Democrat or another Republican shows comparable leadership, now, not just 4 years ago for Barack or 5 1/2 years ago for Rudy Guliani.

This is the kind of leadership we have needed during this war. President Bush has done a fine job despite his many mistakes, as far as I am concerned. Barack Obama impressed me with his leadership in openly opposing and criticizing this war, up front. Rudy Guliani impressed me on the day after September 11th. Ron Paul interests me for what I think he can bring to the political debate in the Republican primary and the general election in 2008. Hillary Clinton has really disappointed me and followed the political winds far too much and betrayed a lot of poor leadership instincts, I believe.

But this is the first time I have seen leadership during this war that has really impressed me. I disagree with John McCain on a lot of issues. I agree with George Will and oppose campaign finance regulation and John McCain's leadership on that issue - despite what I am clear are many very good intentions on the part of folks like John McCain, Bill Bradley, Russ Feingold and all of the very good people who have supported that effort - for the very same free speech reasons that George consistently cites. I favor abortion rights and am more shaky about McCain's commitment to this freedom than I am, say, Rudy Guliani or Barak Obama.

But I have to say that this is first time that I have been really impressed by the leadership of an elected representative during this period. And I am impressed because it is a sign, to me, that John understands the very, very complicated political realities that are at play in this war, which he and David Petraeus uniquely, likely, understand, John because of his service in Vietnam and David because of his extensive study of how Vietnam shaped post-Vietnam political and military realities. These terrorists are some crafty sons-a-bitches, I have to give them some serious credit. We have to be smarter. And John is doing a fine job, right now, if doing just that.

I thank God I live in a democracy, right now. Do you realize how much stronger our individual and general understanding and capacity for absorbing political and military blows that all this diversity of understanding and perspective and open debate and discussion make our strategizing, politically and militarily, over the course of this war? Democracy makes that possible. Goddamn. I totally take it for granted.

Not anymore.

By the way, if you haven't seen Flags of Our Fathers, yet, I definitely recommend it, especially for this political period.

Love,
Ben

Education markets

Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Education Freedom, writes one of the best articles on the better direction for education reform that I have read in a long time in today's Washington Post.

Education Standards are Not the Answer

And unqualified, "Exactly."

Why is it so easy for us to trust freedom, markets, and the marketplace of ideas to create competitive standards for achievement in almost field in our lives except for education?

Particularly, as Milton Friedman argued well, when the strongest area of American education - higher education - is so great precisely because of all of the qualities that Andrew highlights as the potential for our K-12 education system.

It is so nice to read someone say this without having to cowtow to the current popular fascination with Big Brother solving all of our problems.

Love,
Ben

A really beautiful sentiment from Marvin Olansky

Marvin Olansky, I have to say, is a conservative very much after my own heart. And he has a really beautiful piece I read on Townhall.com, today, that very much exemplifies why I am so endeared to his thinking and his work.

How Some Conservatives Hurt Conservativism

Marvin's view of government and self-sacrafice and helping others is very similar to mine. It is the ideas of folks like Marvin which are the strongest among conservative ideas to take on various social ills, especially poverty. It is a stronger model, long term, I think, than is Big Government approaches to dealing with wealth inequities on so many levels.

It is closer to home and to the people it is helping. It is far more likely to encourage voluntary giving from a very robust economy where people will give if they have institutions they think are worthy of the giving (When was the last time you heard the Red Cross or the United Way complain it couldn't pay it's bills? When was the last time you heard a public school make that complaint?) It is a more sustainable model for individual and community improvement since it is predicated on capacity built and not just demands made. It is a more diverse route that allows people who disagree with one another to create institutions that don't necessarily have to look the same or carry the same philosophies. It avoids the "One size Big Government fits all" mess that public schools find themselves in and the various federal mandates, state regulation, and district control that now severely limit their autonomy and thus their ability and willingness to take responsibility for their failures and take real credit for genuine successes, and to have the freedom to make decisions of conscience around what choices will best improve situations (the mindless repeat of the refrain to "force out" all problems is just one of the many very troubling mantras that undermine our ability to think through and arrive at diverse approaches to resolve difficult problems in schools and non-profits and community groups). It involves more responsibility both on the part of those building and manning community institutions and those being served by them, rather than the very easy and less responsible route of advocacy and demands with little accountability to the actual successes and failures in institutions.

And, best of all, ideally, it removes much of the politics that currently plagues public school and social service efforts that are constantly being leveraged by whatever political action and pressure group that has something that it wants, noble or not. In reality, non-profit groups will be subject to pressure from government and activist groups and those they serve and just about anyone who wants to apply the pressure. That's the beauty about pressure groups. You don't really need to be right to pressure to get what you want. Just willing to make peoples' lives uncomfortable enough that you can get your way.

For some people, that is progress, I suppose. Makes you thank goodness for progress, don't it?

Marvin Olansky reminds me that there are people in the world who have genuinely robust ideas of what a better world might look like and they don't necessarily involve putting the screws to your neighbor.

Would if only there were more Marvin Olansky's in the world.

Love,
Ben

Destroying the village in order to save it

I'm beginning to see that so many of our problems are because we take our problems and our feelings and opinions and our political wrangling about our problems too seriously.

I don't mean that we shouldn't take them seriously, obviously.

I just mean that we hurt so many people in name of helping people.

Constantly destroying the village in order to save it. And yet it's always on fire.

The NPR report on the drug war, this week, is a serious example of this problem, and an important reason that so many young people look at life so differently than so many older people.

And older people think that if they can just knock some sense into those kids then they can save them.

Constantly destroying the village in order to save it.

Just once it would be nice if maybe we could just save the village in order to save it.

Love,
Ben

The law and conscience

I just had about the hundredth conversation with my principal about "the law".

It's becoming clear to me just how romantic people are about the law.

And why it was just so easy for the Nazis to do what they did.

Without any historical consideration, the law can be a pure, romantic arbiter of everything good and evil in the world.

But there is too many of the world's evils that have been rationalized in the name of the law. Naziism and the Holocaust. Communism. Slavery. All of the worst forms of political repression and state and privately sponsored violence against people.

Terrorism is rationalized in terms of the law both as terrorists and their sympathizers indict those they oppose based on arguments about their legal behavior and as they use terrorism as a means of political pressure to guarantee political and legal outcomes that they prefer. I have talked with political advocates, personally, who have rationalized the use of murder and terrorism as a political tool to guarantee legal and political outcomes they favor, nevertheless studying the larger swath of terrorist movements who have this as an explicit strategy, generally, and at least an implicit or unspoken strategy.

Political and legal negotiations, when military options cannot possibly win an open war, are THE rationalization for terrorism. And it is the reason why radicals of every stripe feel more comfortable with legal language and outcomes associated with their activism - often very violent and threatening activism - and propaganda associated with their causes: because they are pressuring for legal and political outcomes - in the form of legal agreements - that they prefer.

Legal arguments typically having infinite elasticity limited only by the judgments and proclivities and arguments of those engaging the political and legal battles that define their limits, at least for the moment. Many political advocates argue otherwise. And then proceed to argue for relaxing or strict enforcement or leeway in more punitive or forceful enforcement of a law based on their sympathy for parties and causes involved. It's more typical than not, really. Everyone just pretends that they are more objective in their concerns than they really are. And so many people get caught within that crossfire.

Lawyers and judges and legal experts will argue until nightfall about the objectivity of their enterprise, about the letter of the law, or about the integrity of their effort.

But the clear reality of legal history and proceedings, from the beginning of civilization, from Solomon on down, is that judgment, not some mythically clear and objective notion of the letter of the law, has always been the final deciding criteria for all legal renderings. Lawyers and judges will hem and haw around stricter or less obvious advocacy for a cause driving their arguments or their decisions. But the bottom-line is that their many, many diverse, often contradictory, often mutually exclusive - hence the need for an appeals process - often unpredictable decisions, by judges, juries, legislators, courts, executive interpretations, and the many other multitude of ways that law is interpreted and applied carries any particular day in any particular way.

To their credit, legal professionals and those who interpret the law in democracies generally try not to interpret the law in arbitrary ways (though that is a very low standard, indeed, for the fairness of a society and its enforced judgments). And they can and often are very generous, lenient, merciful, forgiving, and otherwise genuinely concerned.

What they and the political and legal process is not is perfect or always fair or decent and certainly many, many laws that we are faced with enforcement around are often arbitrary, wrong-headed, counterproductive, undermining of more values critical to more important, honest, genuine, decent, supportive human relationships. And often, far too often, the legal and political process is used as a means of settling scores, exacting revenge, enforcing inhumane and indecent majority opinions or minority preferences.

And the law, worst of all, is often used to rationalize just whatever people please. It is used to rationalize oppression, in the case of thousands of years of slavery and so many of history's most repressive regimes and their social mores of the times, even genocide, in the case of the Holocaust, of groups and individuals, to enforce draconian and often ugly worldviews on a people, to satisfy a politically popular notion of a moment, and all of so many of our worst human instincts.

The law is hardly an arbiter of everything good and evil in the world. Indeed, it is often the facilitator of so many of the world's most serious evils.

That does not indict the law inherently. It is clearly necessary to provide political and legal and moral authority to protect us against murders and rapes and arbitrary invasions of our personal, professional, and jurisdictional self-determining concerns. But that is where lies the rub. From that point is the rationalization of the law for any number of incursions on the freedoms of others, even if those incursions are unjust or unfair or counterproductive or overreactive or otherwise wrongheaded.

And that rationalization and the fear and intimidation that the law is regularly meant to instill became the basis for the evil legal regime imposed by the Nazis which passed laws depriving Jews of property and mandating their reporting to ghettos for starvation and death and mandates that Germans report Jews they knew of with similar threats to enforce such grotesque laws. Similar legal regimes underpinned and underpin, currently, the horrors of political, economic, cultural, and legal repression, even mass murder, sadly, in the name of Communism. They underpin the evils of theocratic and secular autocracies around the world and throughout the world's history. They underpin many of the world's most serious evils in more and less mature liberal and not-so-liberal democracies and republics.

Law is used to rationalize most of the worst evils that society faces, generally, is the truth. It is hardly the arbiter of everything that is good and evil in the world.

It is the means by which the worlds most seriously and horrifically oppressive regimes, activists, cultures, and other groups have enforced their worst forms of oppression and often violently-backed beliefs and preferences, since the law inherently involves coercion and often has involved violent police action - on populations.

The law was the rationalization for the ugly treatment of Mohatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King and their civil disobedient followers. Indeed, civil disobedience was a concept first coined by Henry David Thoreau and studied by Ghandi and King in response to societies where law was used to overwhelmingly oppress those with minority opinions, even ones that history has judged as the most seriously just of their times. In fact, many if not most of the most seriously just movements and causes in history have challenged some law or another or some politically or social enforced more. Hence the aversion to repression - political, legal, social, personal, or otherwise - amongst liberal democratic peoples. Because such repression has been commonplace in the law, in the politics, and in the cultures of most civilizations since the dawn of humanity.

And, yet, consistently, each generation treats its rules and laws, that have often oppressed and quashed even the most just dissent as more sacrosanct than they every could be. Law has been used to resist important change for purposes of justice like civil rights and civil independence. And so many laws have consistently been used to rid the world of the various evils only to fail. Alcoholism, adultery, sexual deviance like homosexuality or sodomy or contraception among heterosexual, often married adults, religious heresy (of those of the most serious religious courage in the cases of figures like Jesus of Nazareth, Martin Luther, and many other religious heretics of their times), abortion, civil unrest in the case of legal harrasment of civil rights and independence movement advocates, and so many of the too-many-to-count examples of perceived evils of a time have been legally sanctioned, many, though not all, of which turned out to be much higher goods than societies at the time ever imagined.

And worst of all, law is the most salient means of manipulation by groups like Communists and the Nazis to impose their worst moral crimes against humanity. And it is so salient and powerful a means of manipulation for exactly the reason that democratic peoples are romanticizing it today: because they treat it as so sacrosanct.

Meaning, it is the very attitude that prevails today that made the Holocaust and mass murder in the name of so many political, religious, social, and cultural causes possible. Nazis, Communists, and other political groups have most certainly had the upper hand, in terms of the use of force. But it was the compliance of their populations, in contrast with the courage of too many peoples in those cultures and times - Pope John Paul II, Jewish resistance movements, the underground railroad, civilly disobedient protest movements, conscientious objectors, dissidents and underground resistance movements - so many of the most courageous people of the 19th and 20th centuries nevertheless the long history of humanity - have been so BECAUSE they were willing to break laws that others were too afraid to break, thus rendering so many majorities of people compliant and complicit in the terrible treatment of the people at which those laws were directed or for which laws well-intentioned but nevertheless destructive against those who they were directed.

The law is one of the most powerful means to enforce cowardice on a population and enforce socially or politically popular thinking about groups, thereby scaring into submission those who might otherwise challenge their immorality or inhumanity or wrong-headedness. Jim Crow was codified by popular support and legal and political frameworks and Naziism and Communism and genocide and political repression of all sorts and all of their ugly repurcussions experienced and experience considerable popular support in countries that sponsored them.

Clearly, the law is not always used for these purposes. And many well-intentioned laws, and most wrong-headed laws, often are genuinely designed for higher, better purposes.

And the road to hell and to much of the political, legal, social, and cultural repression over the history of humanity is paved up and down with good intentions.

And yet, still, despite all of that, so many people still look at the law not as an imperfect instrument that is strengthened and more authentically credible and morally sound and persuasive the least possible that it is to resolves difficult matters of the human condition and human heart or to correct perceived or real harms. Despite this torrid and ugly history that follows legal and political means of resolving our most difficult human questions, even peoples in liberal democratic countries, with cultures educated and infused with values borne of the ugliest experiences with political and legal repression, still romanticize the law as more useful or credible a moral arbiter than it really is or ever could be. Clearly, some problems - though far fewer for which law and politics is actually used, these days or ever in human history - can, as a matter of fact without alternative that I can imagine, at least, only be resolved by law and government. But the great majority of human questions are best resolved with the highest of liberal democratic values: the freedom, conscience, self-determination, and self-governance of independent and interdependent individuals, through honest engagement, appreciation, and concern for shared interests and for one another as individuals. We will fall short of that ideal, surely and often. But we fall short as a rationalization for our more petty, self-centered, less empathetic and compassionate, and baser impulses and priorities at our own risk to our humanity and of living into perpetuity with problems that would often, generally, be better resolved by free peoples acting freely and with good faith with one another and with better faith toward those act in bad faith.

And we risk rationalizing and giving support to the rationalizations into perpetuity, even inadvertantly, of the ugliness of evils like terrorism, Communism, autocracy, political, religious, social and other forms of repression, and so many of the world's ills that are predicated on the righteousness of their cause and the need to reconcile the law and governance to such a cause, the use of violence and political pressure to bring that reality to bear, and the belief by many who favor such causes that liberal democratic peoples are really like themselves, only too afraid and cowardly to fully enforce their views. It is the modern evil of radicalism that democratic peoples consisently support and fall victim to, never fully reconciling themselves to the ugly consequences of such support.

So when my principal gets a head full of steam about what "the law" is, it is somewhat difficult for me to treat that kind of reasoning with more seriousness than it really deserves.

Conscience, not law, is, always will be, and always should be the final arbiter of all things good and evil in this world. And if anyone associated with the politics or the law tells me or anyone else differently, it is clearly, to my mind, because they do not take their consciences nearly seriously enough.

They certainly do not take their consciences as seriously as I do. And, as has always been true, they certainly do not deserve to be taken more seriously than those who take their consciences more seriously.

Because taking our consiences more seriously than the law and anything else in our lives is and has always been the most serious undertaking that any generation of liberal or not-so-liberal democratic or not-so-democratic peoples have ever engaged in.

And anyone who tells you differently, as far as I am concerned, has not and does not take their consciences and the judgments it renders nearly seriously enough.

And that is the most serious tragedy of human history that liberal democratic values have been meant to rectify.

Love,
Ben

I'm really tired of horseracing in politics

David Broder, the dean of American journalism, writes more boilerplate Presidential horseracing in today's Washington Post column.

Presidential spring training

I'm really fed up with this shit. And all of the cynicism in the press that intellectual and leadership virtues are less important than who gets the crowd on their feet, even if the crowd needs to be challenged to think, more, about resolution of the nation's most serious problems.

Hence this terse response to David's article that I posted on the comments section:

"Sadly, pitching staffs don't make for good policy ideas or leadership instincts, two things that Hillary Clinton seriously struggles with. Would that it were true, because then good policy would be something that could be handled by Major League Baseball, and all the hard thinking could be spent on cancer research and the longer lasting battery.

Alas, the substance of candidates' policy thought and their capacity to act with genuine leadership when it is needed are what distinguish politics, in degrees, from baseball.

Barak Obama has the strength of someone who thinks bigger than most of the major candidates and who speaks in tones that seek to transcend traditional liberal and conservative divides even as he is a conventional liberal in many ways. He also is someone who has the courage and foresight to speak honestly when he thinks a policy is wrong. When the Iraq war was declared, Mr. Obama didn't hem and haw about deferring to Presidential authority even when the President's judgment was clearly flawed. He opposed the war and he criticized it openly, a mark of courage that Hillary Clinton cannot count among her virtues. And when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Barak was talking about how to transcend our traditional schisms along racial and class lines to come together to address the needs of those hit by the hurricane, while Hillary Clinton vowed to open a Congressional investigation which neither accomplished anything for people on the ground and which likely undermined the recovery effort by putting emergency personell already under enormous stress and pressure on the defensive and certainly did not one iota to improve that effort.

Stronger thinking and leadership ability doesn't necessarily win elections. Bill Bradley offered both in 2000, but was beaten back by the power-lust and bullying of the Gore-Lieberman campaign and the Democratic Leadership Council. But stronger thinking and leadership should win elections. And better journalists, in the future, should focus on the qualities that make for better Presidents and support candidates who offer them, not just horserace elections into mindless support for leading candidates which reflect the mindless voting of an electorate too intellectually lazy to consider better policy nevertheless better angels.

Barak Obama is not a perfect angel. But he is a better angel than Hillary Clinton. And it does get wearisome to consistently hear the press beat back better candidates in favor of more politically connected media darlings.

Otherwise, the best that we can hope for is that worse and more power-obsessed candidates can be effectively checked by the power-obsession of opposing parties. What a depressingly low expectation of democratic politics.

Perhaps we can aim a little higher."

Love,
Ben

Illustrating the political moment

I have yet to see a better, simpler illustration of this political moment entire, between Iran and the West, in Iraq and international affairs, generally, and domestically in the U.S., the West and the more politically repressive and regressive trends in the world at large, right now.



Flex your muscle enough and all problems will go away.

That is the tragic and regressive trend of thought that is dominating the contemporary political discourse. And like the imperial and repressive political trends at the beginning of the 20th century, the central problem of this political trend is the failure to acknowledge its failure.

"Don't you THUMPA, THUMPA me!!"

I can't think of a better motto for the last 6 years of political action and activism.

Love,
Ben

A very promising development in scholarship

Tonight, I'm finishing up a ton of paperwork that I'm behind on and I hear this really terrific show from Studio360, the late night NPR show about culture and society.

I love Studio360. They were the first to alert me to the monkey slam poetry video that lampoons the human race and how much it thinks it has evolved. Really creative stuff on this show.

Tonight, I was listening to this really terrific story on African Americans defying the politically correct push of the 1990's by the likes of August Wilson to only do African American roles and to embrace Shakespeare as their own and this really beautiful Shakespeare reading from Maya Angelo.

And then they bring on this really awesome and encouraging story about the most recent book by Yale law professor, Kenji Yoshino, called Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights.

Now, honestly, this is not the type of book that would usually get me excited. Law books, generally, have to be really rigorous and ready to go beyond the more narrow world of law and politics to seriously interest me since I think of too much of the law springs from a narrow world view that too often ignores the human consequences from its often lengthy and involved and far too often cold logic. Ronald Dworkin writes law work that I very much appreciate. As does Richard Posner. And what both of these writers and other law writers (Alan Dershowitz is someone I've grown up reading) have in common is that they go beyond the law to look at the human consequences of their thinking.

And listening to this Studio360 interview with Kenji Yoshino convinced me that this guy's book is well worth checking out, that he writes very much like me - with scholarship and personal sharing intertwined - and in a way that is really touching, that his thinking on matters of race, gender, and identity are really wise and not at all in line with the politically-correct identity politics that characterizes far too much of the thinking and writing in this area of political discussion, and that his ideas are some of the most remarkably consistent with my own that I have ever read.

And this dude is a law professor at Yale Law School.

I would say that's a very healthy development for the life in my own ideas and thinking.

I'm very excited to check this guy's book out at the book store the next time I happen by. It's been a long time since I read a book that said something genuinely new that I could shake my head in agreement with since this whole political period has been one long head nod amongst a lot of people saying the same thing without having to say much at all, really, in my view.

Who would have thought I would have found such a fellow traveler in a law school faculty?

I didn't. That's for sure.

And that is why this is such a promising development.

A welcome suprise.

Love,
Ben

Dissent

Do you know how hard it is to dissent from popular opinion that is socially, politically and legally enforced and pressured to the contrary to your thinking?

Really hard.

I may now and always be wrong, but not a goddamn soul can accuse me of cowardice, that's for goddamn sure.

And, yet, ironically, I am regularly thought of as just that.

Too soft. Too nice. Care too much.

And this is the first time in my life that I've ever been accused of not being rigorous enough. Physically lazy I have been many, many times in my life. Intellectually lazy is the last thing I ever thought I could be accused of, given how much people are constantly complaining about how I drone on and on about some complex line of reasoning about this matter or that.

I am learning that when people believe something strongly enough, they will believe a lot of things about you if you disagree.

I am learning what it means to be on the other side. On the other side of liberals. On the other side of conservatives. On the other side of Christians. On the other side of Muslims. On the other of whatever group sees itself as the righteous cause and the other group as the major obstacle to their prevailing ideals.

I am learning what it means to be on the other side of everyone.

It's a strange feeling for a guy who has largely fit in with almost every group I've ever belonged to because I'm such a nice guy, to now often not fit in because of what a nice guy I am.

All while I'm being pressured and bullied and having whatever view strikes whomever as righteous (preferably with some claim on legal backing, these days, even when those claims are, far too often, these days, in the school I work in, in contradiction with one another) being enforced on me by whomever they can get the backing to do just that.

I spent my whole youth resisting peer pressure only to face the by far hardest challenge to that capacity by adults engaging in a far more forceful peer pressure.

Ironic, isn't it?

Thank god they all really do have the right cause, because what would this world look like if everyone was going around pressuring one another for whatever cause they thought worthy.

Or maybe, sadly enough, that is what the world really looks like today.

Do you know how hard it is to dissent and resist that kind of pressure in the kind of climate where everyone is strong-arming for their point of view?

It's a real bitch is what it is.

You can accuse me of a lot of things. People regularly do. But being a coward isn't one of them.

And that is one of many, many things that people have thought about me during this period that they haven't thought about nearly enough.

Isn't it ironic that we keep rationalizing pressuring and bullying people to have right causes will out and yet so many consciences seem to survive intact despite that pressure?

That's a sign of the most fundamental strength that freedom affords liberal peoples and a liberal society that we all take for granted, no matter how much many of us have studied everything that our predecesors went through to teach us through our horrific historical experiences as much as through affirmatively taught values around the importance of conscience and free will.

Surely our consciences must expect that we square ourselves with the contradictions and the hypocrisy and the more honest reality of our talk and our action around the matter of force and rules and law. It is this weakness that terrorists and bullies play upon when they do their dirty work and exploit our fear that we are too weak.

We are too weak. We are too weak to be more honest with ourselves about who we really are. And once we can be more honest with ourselves about that matter and about where our hearts really lie around this matter of force - meaning, how we actually respond to force, not just as we grapple for a means to make others do as we desire - we will find that what we thought was weakness was actually our most powerful strength. We care as much as we do, we are as generous as we are, we are as forgiving as we are, we are as decent as we are because of how strong we are to do all of those things and how weak and tempting and little our more frail, petty, small, unforgiving and forceful, aggressive instincts actually serve us.

How much we care is our strength, not our weakness. Our weakness is our fear that we care too much. And it is a weakness that we are all too tempted by these days. And ironically, it is the this weakness that we most have in common with terrorists and dictators.

And the only true path of strength is taking seriously our need to give a shit about the world and about other people. And forgiving what aggressive, mean-spirited, rationalizing pricks we can often be. The only real strength for us, individually and as a culture of liberal democratic peoples is on the other side of that acknowledgement, forgiveness, and willingness to square our consciences with who we really are. We all need forgiveness. And far too many of us are far too reluctant to give it. And yet, ironically, they all need it. And that is the weakness we must face if we are to be strong and not just perpetually afraid, for good reason, that we are weak because we refuse to face the path of real strength.

That strength comes from our failures as much as from our successes, I am learning, from experience and from more honest reflection on the world. It will come slowly. But it will come. Because though weakness can be tempting, it cannot sustain us.

Only real strength can sustain us. And that is why our highest liberal values are our most enduring legacy. Because it is in our highest values that we find our most sustaining strengths.

Love,
Ben

Respect for the rule of law

I don't typically read Slate magazine, anymore, for the same reason I don't typically read the New Republic anymore: because they seem more polemic - smart polemic to be sure, but polemic nonetheless - than honest argument. I've learned more over the course of this war how that term is both meaningful and relative, though the relative distinctions are important to me, since neither of those liberal publications approach the intellectual integrity of liberal scholars like Joe Nye or Amartya Sen or Abraham Maslow.

But today I made an exception.

Jacob Weisberg did a very nice review of the most recent book by George Bush's favorite historian, Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. If Weisberg is even half-way accurate in his review of Roberts' book, it looks like a terribly self-serving effort by a conservative to affirm a number of long-standing and currently popular conservative views of conservative leadership and the world rather than to critically examine history and the world - from a conservative perspective or otherwise - and to bring the best integrity from conservative ideas and thinking to that challenge.

And reading that review got me thinking.

I've been frustrated with how "the rule of law" has rationalized all kinds of pressure, bullying, control, various strains of self-righteous thinking about the world (with not-so-open hypocrisy about why various groups support certain freedoms that other groups oppose and why their assertions of "the rule of law" are genuine appeals to a "right application" of the rule of law, while applications by opponents are abrogations of important freedoms; the illegal immigration debate comes to mind, here, as does the Lewis Libby affair, in very recent political discussions).

I've been frustrated with how I believe the rule of law has been used to justify all kinds of intellectually dishonest arguments to favor various causes and how a debate and discussion about the how much respect really should be accorded the rule of law has been overrun by a popular notion of the rule of law being rationalized for purposes of political pressure rather than a more intellectually honest discussion of the rule of law.

But it occurred to me that I need to engage that discussion with more intellectual honesty, as well, genuinely engaging the issue of respect for the rule of law with the integrity that this principle has brought to a number of issues, even as I often disagree that the law should, ideally, be used to resolve so many such issues, and very strongly believe that the use of legal means of pressure and coercion are often counterproductive, unnecessarily disruptive and destructive of peoples' lives, do not resolve many of the issues that they are meant to resolve, and create enormous confusion about such questions amongst ordinary people and are often far too intrusive in the lives of ordinary people that very much undermines respect for authority and the law which is a necessary and important principle around the most serious questions that democratic people face.

I am a liberal in the tradition of John Stuart Mill with a much more square presumption that life amongst free peoples' should not be regulated, as much as possible, and that free peoples should find more mature and the least aggressive ways possible (even in the rarest of circumstances possible when aggression is or may be necessary), to resolve important differences between them.

I have always had a generally stronger respect for authority than most of my peers, I think, despite often many legitimate and other times many petty concerns and differences with authority figures and the application of rules and law. I have a much stronger respect for law and authority the older I get, despite so many situations where I think law and authority are overwrought and overused and undermine their own credibility amongst people, except in those situations where they want to impose on their neighbor or when law and authority are, as a matter of fact more than a matter of opinion, necessary to resolve matters of physical violence and aggression between people.

So much of my writing is written within that context and the context of a political period where "the rule of law" is rhetoric and propaganda as much as principle being used and rationalized to pressure for all sorts of causes, many of which positions are in contradiction, but where all of the parties involved claim "the rule of law" as their ally (very much like how God and the Church and other appeals to popular ideas have been used to rally support to various causes; the danger of which is that advocates become increasingly convinced that there is no need to question if they are right or might be wrong about the causes or solutions they advocate and only must marshall sufficient means of persuasion to convince others of the rightness of their cause, which stifles and undermines more honest intellectual differences, debate, and discussion).

But reading this review made me very glad that I've waited to write my first book about my ideas since it reminds me that alternative ideas, even if I think they are being used for less than utterly noble or honest reasons, need to be treated with the respect that they deserve. And the truth is that the rule of law is a principle that has done much good for humanity as it has tried to leave behind its more barbaric past. And that principle deserves an honest discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of our reverence for this principle, especially in a liberal democratic culture which rightly is committed to freedom and honesty as two of its highest principles, but which both are worthy of critical examination of how much we revere these principles as well.

Reverence and adherence to principle can be healthy. And it can be overwrought. And especially revering a principle that gives us power, control, or coercive or aggressive presumption over the lives of others is and always has been a very, very dangerous idea that has been responsible for most of history's most serious abuses, ugliness, and bad deeds. That is why liberal democratic societies do and should take freedom most seriously among its values and why this period is a regressive political era, I believe, in so many important ways.

Things for me to think about as I write this book.

A reasonable, substantial debate

Two articles caught my eye, today.

E.J. Dionne wrote one of the more arrogant columns I have seen him write in the very long time that I have followed his work.

An Antiwar Tide on the Rise

E.J. doesn't even hold open the possibility that he might be wrong about the war. That there is still a substantial debate and discussion, on-going and which needs to be on-going, about what to do with the situation in Iraq. His column is one long screed about how he and and those who want to pull out are right and how President Bush must be brought to heel to see just how right they are.

Sounds a lot like a President I know, actually, doesn't it? Stubborness and self-righteousness doesn't distinguish between ideology, it seems.

Meanwhile, John McCain makes some really interesting comments today.

McCain: Progress is being made in Iraq

From that article:

"Using a color-coded map of Iraq as a prop, McCain said Iraqi army battalions have arrived for duty as called for, many at or above 75 percent of their programmed levels, bomb attacks and murders are down since the new policy was implemented and the number of civilians killed in Baghdad dropped from 1,222 in December to 494 in February.

He said U.S. forces have moved out of large bases to take up positions in small outposts as part of a shift in strategy. "Contrary to predictions, this has not increased U.S. casualties. And, not surprisingly, our presence has resulted in a dramatic increase in actionable intelligence about terrorists," he said.

McCain said the debate in the Senate had an Alice in Wonderland quality to it, with critics of the war attempting to "micromanage a conflict based on what the conditions were three months ago — not what the reality is today."

Ironic, isn't it? A Democratic Congress being criticized for being out of touch with reality on the ground in this war. I thought liberals had a monopoly on being in touch with reality and conservatives were all in denial? Or that's what you'd assume listening to so many liberals and Democrats, these days.

The truth is that I've not really thought seriously about supporting for John McCain for President, necessarily. I have been more of a Barack Obama, Rudy Guliani, Ron Paul sort of independent, with my eye on Barack because I like the tone he's set in terms of how political debate and discussion needs to take place. Barack seems more genuinely committed to lifting up the political debate, generally, and having discussions that transcend traditional schisms between right and left that I really appreciate, even as he has many views that are more conventionally liberal as I might hold. All of the candidates have views I don't like. Rudy's tough on crime attitude sours me, ironically, even as it endears so many to him. His effort to rid New York City of smut struck me as Puritanical and too nanny-state for my tastes, even as I appreciate that he is pro-choice, as am I, and in favor of gay rights, as am I, and has an unconventionally liberal view on gun control, even as I favor gun rights and take gun responsibility very seriously and am very aware and concerned about the dangers that guns in the wrong hands can pose in the world.

I am in favor of gun rights, ironically, for the very same reason that Rudy is in favor of gun control, I imagine: because I think it will make us safer and that people will be more responsible with guns and will have more responsible conversations among gun owners the more their freedom is respected. I'm also convinced that more dangerous folks like the militia-men and the slightly off-kilter Timothy McVeigh/Terry Nichols types will both more likely stay above ground and out in the open and feeling less threatened by government intervention in their lives the more freedom there is around this issue and, thus, less likely to engage in the most dangerous behavior around guns and do things like the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing the less they have to fear from government, which is their most typical and seriously-felt rationale for maintaining such gun-focussed paranoia.

I disagree with Rudy about how to get to better resolution of this serious issue. But I am sure that he supports gun control for the very same reason that I supported gun control all the way up past the 2000 election, when I supported Bill Bradley with nearly indistinguishable views from Bill on this issue and most issues: because he wants the world to be safer. It's the reason that George Bush invaded Iraq and that liberals want to withdraw and the reason why so many of our political discussions get so fucked up. Because we all want our fears about the world to go away and we are all sure that we have all the right answers to get us there.

Ron Paul was a name around my house when I was growing up because though my dad has been a liberal since his college days when he carried around petitions to impeach Nixon at his and my alma mater, Wichita State University, he had a very serious libertarian streak that he and my extended family has always had and that I have shared. It is the reason that he voted for John Anderson in 1980 (it may have been the libertarian candidate, Ed Clarke, but for some reason I remember him voting for John Anderson, the independent, that year) and the reason why he voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984.

My dad has never been a social conservative in any meaningful way (neither have I) except when he would awkwardly avoid sexual conversations when I was growing up and the fact that he wouldn't let us watch rated-R movies until we were actually 17 (something that my sisters and brother and I would routinely circumvent at my grandparents' house when they would go to bed on weekends and leave HBO and Cinemax to a bunch of curious, horny little teenagers). But he has always been a businessman and had a pretty serious libertarian streak in him, one of the more important things that my family, split unevenly between liberals and Democrats, like my dad and my immediate family, and conservatives and Republicans, like my grandma and grandpa and most of my uncles and aunts who have been red-state folks as long as Reagan has been President (my grandpa was very much like Reagan, as it turns out; both macho and gentile, but also a Roosevelt Democrat and a Reagan Republican).

I like Ron Paul and I'm interested in what his candidacy will bring to the Republican party. I'm concerned about whether he has genuine leadership and executive capacity (an edge I have to give to Rudy Guliani over all of the major candidates, I have to say, including Barack, largely because of his mayoral experience, and because he did a fine job, I thought, of handling the 9/11 crisis, in striking contrast to Ray Nagin's flailing performance in New Orleans when the hurricanes hit). But I'm very interested in what his candidacy will bring to the Republican party and general election political debates and discussions ahead of the 2008 election.

The point of this long-rambling post, though, is not to flush out my views on major Presidential candidates.

The point of this post is that it is becoming crystal clear to me that stubborn self-righteousness and the failure to engage more open-mindedly and open-heartedly serious policy debates, like the Iraq war, is not something that is monopolized by the President. Quite the contrary, I find the President refreshingly open-hearted compared to the drumbeat for withdrawal from the likes of E.J. Dionne, these days (seems E.J. may have more in common with the Vice President he imagines as so evil than he's likely reflected on).

The number of civilians who have died since the surge has dropped from 1,222 in December to 494 in February, McCain argues. Bomb attacks and murders are down.

All of which begs the question at this point in the war: who is not open to hearing that they are wrong, at this point?

I don't pretend to have any crystal ball about this war or any issue. I could be wrong about everything I've ever believed in my short little life, up until now, and could be wrong, still, in ways that I've never imagined. I probably am. I do think I have pretty decent political instincts, including about the limitations of politics and government and people who make choices about both. But I could be completely off-kilter myself (I've never wanted to blow up a Federal building. But I have had my own little disgruntled moments in life, even as most people probably think of me as Ms. Mary Sunshine. Of all of the contradictory things that people have thought about me, that would probably be the most ironic, if true).

And the one instinct I hold near and dear to my heart probably more than any other is that popular opinion is no reliable or necessarily reasonable guide to anything in this world and that the only reasonable guide to anything in this world is more thoughtful, engaged, open-ended, open-minded, open-hearted discussion and debate about important issues in the world. That is the reason why reason and education rather than the will of the majority are among the highest values in a liberal democratic culture. Because they are more reliable than the will of that majority that swings in the wind with every popular attitudinal swing of an ever-finicky and often brute and mob-like electorate. Popular political attitudes are like fashion: the hot thing, one moment, and not-to-be-caught-dead-in, the next.

And that is why a thoughtful, engaged, open-ended, open-minded, open-hearted discussion is the only one worthy of an open, free, liberal democratic people, society, and government.

Because noone knows anything with unfailing certainty. Noone. About anything. And anyone who tells you differently, no matter how liberal, how conservative, no matter how educated, how experienced, no matter how Christian, how Muslim, how American, how anti-American - no matter how much someone assures you that they have finally hit upon all unfailing wisdom about the world is exactly the Buddha in the middle of the road that you must at least engage in a healthy discussion if you're more averse to killing it.

A reasonable, thoughtful, more deeply-considered, substantial debate. That's all I ask for. I don't think that's too much to ask. All this bullying is counter to every reasonable impulse we have and it certainly doesn't do one iota to resolve either the situation in Iraq or any policy issue. Not for real. Perhaps some people don't care if issues get resolved for real and not just based on some self-righteous notion of how the world should be. But the most fundamental way that the world should be is that important matters like this war and any policy issues should be resolved on their merits, by reasonable, substantive discussion, rather than by brute force.

Let's hope that is where the discussion will head after this most recent effort to bully the conversation where certain folks want it to go.

Love,
Ben

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

Responsibility

When it comes to responsibility, we are all so awful, aren't we?

Why would our children want to follow our example, we have to ask ourselves, when we so reluctantly take the kind of responsibility that we demand from them?

The truth is that it is hard for all of us - me, especially - to admit our failures. I have quite a few, myself. All of us do, when we're honest. Yet, somehow, we often pretend that we got to where we are by trial and no error. We've spent the last 6-7 years making it that much more difficult for us to face up to ourselves, nevertheless to others, about those failures.

The only way forward on that is to admit the bigger failure around being so harsh and aggressive with people, nevertheless the smaller failures that we want ourselves and others to take responsibility for.

I've been really disappointed with Americans and liberal democratic citizens and governments, generally, around this issue for the last few years. But my most empirically-validated hope is that liberal democracies, better than most if not all other cultures and governing arrangements, tend to take responsibility for their failures, better, with time, than do less liberal democratic cultures and societies. We didn't own up to our treatment of Native Americans or slaves or for Japanese internment immediately. It took time. And the hope in liberal democratic societies is that big failures, like the one we're in the middle of, today, in how we hyperaggressively pursue accountability much more than the war in Iraq, is that we are the most likely of cultures, most if not all others which are far more brutal, harsh, aggressive, and punitive, to own up for our failures. At some point, at least.

Reading Joe Nye's somewhat harsh assessment of the justness of the war in Iraq and assigning responsibility solely to the President, responsibility that people like Joe and Andrew Sullivan and Peter Beinart, Hillary Clinton, and many of the Administration's harshest critics share since they supported this effort publicly before it was underway, reminds me that everyone, even people as smart as Joe, have a hard time owning up for their failures. All of us do. Which is why we all need more space to do so, not more aggressive, punitive, forceful efforts to bring us down.

Our model for responsibility - for ourselves and for others - is hardly the most effective possible, given all of its failures. What we need is more of the liberal democractic values that respect our free will and appreciate our humanity to create and extend a better model than the failed one we carry around today.

It is difficult for all of us to admit our failures, especially when we are afraid of looking bad or being treated badly.

It is also the only way forward. And admitting the biggest failure - our failure to provide the space for failures, even the biggest ones, to be acknowledged openly and publicly, if at all - is the most important acknowledgment of responsibiliy that will be needed for a more genuine progress on our most serious concerns.

Love,
Ben

Joe Nye and moral reasoning

Joe Nye, the international policy scholar who coined the term "soft power," has an interesting commentary on moral reasoning and the Iraq war worth perusing.

My Lesson for this Anniversary

I agree with Joe's general argument - that moral reasoning is both more complicated, in reality, than many moralists suppose and that means and consequences are as, if not more, important in reasoning through the "goodness" of an action as intentions.

I do agree, with many conservatives, though, that many liberals are all about appreciating the complexity of moral reasoning and being compassionate about peoples' mistakes, except when a conservative is involved, a reflection of the polarizing times as much as ideological differences, I think. And as I wrote in my comments to Joe, the irony, of course, is that so many of the Administration's harshest critics about the war supported it up front, including Joe. I did not support that war, and was disappointed to read the New York Times article reporting Joe's meeting with the President and supporting the war (Joe has since indicated in communication on his blog that that February 2003 New York Times article was not correct when it indicated that Joe supported the war and that his March 2003 Boston Globe column indicates his opposition to the war), as well as the support of so many of the President's harshest critics, today, including Andrew Sullivan, Peter Beinart and the editorial board of The New Republic, and so many Democratic leaders, with special inclusion of Hillary Clinton, who supports the war, when it is popular, opposes it, when it is popular, and wants credit for "courage" in her political and moral leadership.

The saddest fact of the current political period around the issue of moral reasonsing for any honest observer is how aggressively this period is touted as a period of accountability, and yet how infrequently anyone takes responsibility, as a consequence of the aggressive efforts to secure accountability, much of the time, I am convinced, even and especially the advocates of those efforts. Joe, like others who advocate both this harsh concept of accountability and who are now critical of the war, when so many of its failures have become clearer and when it is unpopular (Joe's significant credit is that he became critical of the war's mistakes long before it was unpopular, though after his initial advocacy of the war; not something to be ashamed of, but a mistake to be responsible for and which should offer some compassion for the situation of the President who is in a similar boat).

The truth is, as I wrote in my comments to Joe, that accountability, we all seem to cynically reason during this time, is for someone else's actions, not for our own. The same critics who advocate harsh judgment, oversight, and accountability for the President for engaging in this tragic mess are not measures that these folks want for their own work, despite the fact that so many of them came to the same conclusion as the President at the war's outset.

And, consequently, we live in this bleak, harsh period of blatant moral hypocrisy, where the only thing that seems to matter, most of the time, is to take someone's, anyone's, head to end all of our problems. It's not an original idea. To the contrary, is the one of the most consistent policies of humanity for more two millenia. It has never worked. And that has never daunted us.

The following is my discussion with Joe about that matter and why I'm clear, at this point, that we have created our own failure, here, no matter how reluctant we might be to admit it.

"I definitely agree, Joe, that means and consequences need to be considered in moral reasoning (as well as classical moral virtues like forgiveness when people make mistakes).

But to be fair, Joe, you and many political observers who are now harshly judging the President's decision today supported this war publicly up front. I remember reading it in the New York Times and being disappointed because I opposed the war and thought it was a mistake that needed more discussion and debate to create a policy that included Iraqis (covert discussions with Iraqi opposition groups and alligned militias, likely) that could have developed a more coherent policy that shared risks with Iraqis for leadership if a revolution was something Iraqis were prepared to undergo (which, in all likelihood, given the desperate situation and the support from many Iraqis, they likely would have been prepared to do, in theory, had they been consulted, though unprepared to do, in reality, without the overwhelming force of the U.S. military).

The irony is to me is that at a time when it was very difficult to dissent from this war because the popularity of the war was very strong, many current critics were signing on, only to repudiate not only their support at later points when it became clearer that this war was a far more difficult venture than originally considered, but that so many have been harsh with the President over a policy that they share responsibility around.

At this point, as far as I'm concerned, we have a war that I did not support but which is a present reality to deal with and that has the potential to create some kind of workable democracy (more or, likely, less liberal), which would undoubtedly be a significant improvement over dictatorship. I think we engaged the policy wrong, and, more importantly, I think we engaged the discussion about the policy wrong, up front.

But having said that, we now have thousands of troops in Iraq that may be on the verge of a political resolution given adequate security measures to open up space for a political resolution. An oil agreement has been negotiated and the current Iraqi government has asked that we stay until they are ready to take over security for themselves (a completely reasonable request, I think, given that we, inadvertantly, created much of this mess and that our help might be needed to help try to clean it up).

It is somewhat shocking and very frustrating to me, frankly, that so many in Washington and around the country so blithely less critically supported this war, also convinced, as I was at the time, of its good intentions, and then are all washing their hands of their responsibility in the war in that way and then both laying it all at the President's lap and letting him hang for it, as if his fate is more important than the fate of the Iraqis whose security we have responsibility for in the advocacy of this war.

The real lesson in moral responsibility around this war, I think, is that when any person or any group is wrapped up in its self-righteous reactions to the world, it becomes justification for washing their hands of their own responsibilities and of persistently pecking at the splinters in the eyes of a scapegoat, even one who is ultimately responsible, and ignoring the beams in their own.

Hillary Clinton does not have the courage to oppose the war, up front, but she wants credit for having "courage" to harshly criticize the President and the war after it is unpopular?

That hardly looks like courage to me. And it certainly doesn't look like responsibility.

And during this era of accountability, it strikes me with regularlity how rarely anyone actually takes responsibility.

Accountability is for other people, we are all cynically reasoning during this period. It is not for our own advocacy or actions.

It's a sad reflection on the times, when the most important wisdom that the man who inspired our most dominant religion - that we should stop plucking the splinters from our neighbors' eyes and pluck, instead, the beams from our own - is both ignored and its opposite is treated like a moral virtue.

The best lesson in moral reasoning and responsibility, this political season, is very much a lesson in means and consequences.

This effort to aggressively hold others accountable both betrays our own general unwillingness to take responsibility and it is, generally, its source, since noone wants to face responsibility that is harsh and punitive. Contemporary critics of the Iraq War want to hold the President accountable, but none of the President's harsh critics are willing to face the same accountability for their own support of the war, up front. Which is quite reasonable, because noone wants to be treated in that manner. And that is exactly what undermines our propensity to take responsibility.

The most important lesson in moral responsibility for the current period is that the highly aggressive manner in which we have sought accountability has clearly not created a culture of responsibility that we have sought. To the contrary, not even its advocates wish to take responsibility during this cynical period. And that is a failure of moral reasoning based on means and consequences that will only reverse itself when we face what is the only true path to moral responsibility - freer independent and interdependent moral reasoning that seeks to enlighten rather than to take people down.

Today, we live with the rather bleak consequences of its popular alternative. It's strange that some of us might call it "progressive" when it has created so little real progress. And that is our most important lesson in moral consequences of our reasoning during this period."

That is the moral lesson that needs most learning, right now.

I can only hope that future generations will not be so harsh with us about our failures, in this regard, as we are with one another.

Love,
Ben

Being realistic

If there is one thing that I am most sick of hearing at my school, it is people trying to be "realistic" about a kids' future.

The reason why it fuckin' drives me crazy is not because there may not be realistic choices that kids and adults will make in their lives or realistic options that will be available given various developed intelligence, abilities, talents, etc.

What drives me up a fuckin' wall with this discussion is that it is generally one long discussion betting against kids' and their futures and all for the sake of rationalizing both a) their jadedness in a world full of disappointment, now and forever, b) their failures as teachers and as people, and c) some sense of expertise they lack diagnosing limits in kids that they have no way of knowing without kids testing those limits, and even then those limits are not known with any certainty, ever.

It's drives me crazy, because the whole thing is one long excuse for why they gave up on a kid and why they were right to give up on a kid.

And that is exactly why kids and parents should have and should take advantage of as much freedom as they have available to choose better teachers and better schools if and when they have teachers betting like this.

If you are betting against kids, you should not be teaching. Period. It is the wrong career for you. There are plenty of other more lucrative careers that you should explore and leave teaching behind.

Sadly, many, many of my colleagues bet against kids all the time. Teachers, administrators, staff. They confuse their disappointment with the reality that many kids fail in school and in life, and that many kids fail badly, with prison or serious crimes or death, with some kind of wisdom that the kids in front of them are going to fail similarly. And they don't just bet against kids to themselves. They do so openly. And they do so, frequently, against kids who need them to bet for them the most. Kids who are either already betting against themselves, or kids who have no clue how tough life is going to be for them without choosing to take seriously skills that they will need to be successful in the world.

It makes me ill is what it makes me. And it completely validates for me why kids and parents need to be able to choose better and other schools, especially when they find themselves in a situation where people are betting against them. Especially when so often what adults are rationalizing is why they can't control kids, which is exactly the problem so much of the time.

There are so many controls in schools that are counterproductive, that it becomes very difficult, over time, even as a very smart adult, to know, always, when you are compromising and when something is really a concern for kids. So often, there are so many rules for adults and kids in schools that seem to be more an excuse to control adults and kids, which I'm becoming more convinced is actually the case, much of the time. I am learning that there are many, many petty adults in schools, in groups that regulate and control and lobby schools and legislators and regulators, and in the world at large, who seek to control adults and kids often for its own sake, I'm coming to believe. Some people who don't do anything important with their lives become convinced that controlling others is some kind of worthy substitute, I'm coming to believe, as well as a rationalization for what cynical, scared people that they have become that limits their pursuing bigger opportunities. It's such a sad, sad way to live life. And it is a reality that cynical adults create and then tell you how realistically there is no other option. It's like watching Stalin kill your family and tell you how, realistically, there is no other life for you, anymore, except for one without your family.

It's so fucked up. And it is exactly why education needs a free market. So this shit doesn't get rewarded or held afloat. And so teachers who want better for kids can come and kick the living shit out of sad, pathetic schools and teachers who engage in such bullshit. You don't want to believe in something better for yourself or for kids. Well, then you can face your failure more squarely and stop trying to put it off because you're such a fuckin' whiny loser.

I grew up with a million like-minded people in the poor, white trash neighborhood and poor, white side of town I grew up in, in Wichita, Kansas. Adults who had given up on life telling their kids how dreams really can't come true. All so they don't look like the losers they were, doing the worst thing that an adult can do to any kid: kill their dream or bet against them, all so they don't have to face their own failures. It's disgusting. It's forgiveable, definitely. Everything is and must be if you want any kind of happiness in life, I'm convinced. But it's a load of shit that kids shouldn't listen to anymore than they should listen to anyone bet against them or their dreams. But parents and teachers who bet against kids' dreams are the saddest adults alive, as far as I'm concerned.

Jaded folks in the world need to get something straight. Your jadedness is your own business. It is not reality. Reality is what happens outside of your distorted worldview. And, in reality, people are defying your jadedness every day of fuckin' week, generally, if you would open your eyes and stop confusing your cynicism with something better than it is.

And why people with that kind of jaded, distorted outlook think that they should be able to impose it on others and never have to take responsibility for their failures as a consequence of actions taken on behalf of their jadedness, I have no clue, except that they are too cynical to be responsible for even this.

Luckily, back in reality, people don't put up with that shit for too long. You can be jaded all you want, but someone, inevitably, has hope for that area of the world that you have decided you just can't bring yourself to have hope for anymore and they don't give a shit that you've given up. And they don't give a shit about your excuses for why you've given up. And they don't give a shit about whatever ways that you've tried to control the situation so that you never have to face your excuses for why you've given up or your failures as a consequence of giving up.

Eventually, in my experience, no matter how much someone who is being a shithead and a loser decides that they want to hold back stronger, better folks, stronger, better folks find a way around their bullshit and to be successful despite them.

And that is the challenge of teaching in a school like the school I work in. It's not starving children or basic needs going unmet. Typically, my kids' basic needs are met and they are not starving. The biggest challenge of teaching in a school that has a lot of kids who live below the American-interpreted poverty line is that they are living amidst adults - parents, teachers, and others - who have given up, on themselves, and often, on kids.

Many of the advocates for such schools and neighborhoods have given up on them, is the truth. Or they are betting against them. And that is exactly why kids should be skeptical of such teachers and parents and adults. And why kids and parents should be able to choose different schools when they sense that people are betting against them so that they don't have to face their own failures.

That is what killed Jesus and Ghandi and King. A fucked up human race betting against them while they sought to help them, better and more lovingly, face their failures, honestly and with forgiveness.

What a shitty, petty little species we are sometimes. And one of the shittiest and pettiest things you can do in such a sad little life is bet against the dreams or opportunities or possibilities or futures of a child or an adult just so you can be right that your jadedness really is the way the world is and not some unresolved disappointment with a world that doesn't always live up to your expectations.

Fuck jadedness. You disappointed with the way the world turned out? Sit down and shut up and stop pretending like your jaded prognosticating is reality just so you don't have to find the courage to let go of the pain and disappointment that is the source of your jadedness.

And certainly, you shouldn't expect that anyone should follow your lead. Because anyone with half a brain most certainly should not.

So you definitely shouldn't be demanding or forcing it upon anyone. Because you don't deserve it. No matter how deluded you might be that the right to command people is rightfully yours.

People are stupid enough to give into that, at times, sadly. But not for long. And, no matter how long it might go on, they will eventually get it figured out. And your name will be mud, rightfully, with more historical light shed on your petty tyrrany.

Being "realistic" in this way is a code for quitting. And quitting is no basis for genuine realism. Quitting isn't the basis for anything. Quitting shouldn't be listened to at all, even by quitters. The only thing worth quitting is quitting. And people who give up on humanity or others or life should not be taken seriously as wise about anything at all, nevertheless the dreams of a child or an adult.

Jadedness is being disappointed with reality. Realism is coming to terms with realities and finding ways to aspire beyond realities that don't serve us and creating realities that serve us better. Jadedness is giving up on all of that, which is why it should be seen for the charade that it is.

And the truth, I realize, after dealing with far too much of this kind of "realism" than I think I can stomach, much of the time, especially since it impacts the lives of so many very real children and their very real futures is that is that this is exactly why I nor any person, child or adult, should give more ear to jadedness cloaked as realism than it deserves.

Fuck jadedness. And people who try to use it to rationalize why not only they have given up on life, but why you should too. There is nothing more ugly in my mind than infecting your children with your cynicism because you're too fuckin' pussy to face up to your own fuckin' choices and failures.

My kids all did better on their final state assessments than they did on their practice assessments (though most of them were on a substantially modified - easier and shorter - test than the test we practiced with). And contrary to the trend among many of the teachers I've seen - who have many kids lose ground on district tests - my kids, with one exception, all improved on their district assessments from their first testing. And that one kid we put on a faster, but more genuinely realistic track, and he improved substantially on his final state assessment. The same was true of the collaborative class I work with, substantially better than the other classes this teacher I work with teaches, she said.

Realism is looking at a fucked up situation and thinking, "Somehow we have to fix this shit and make it better." Cynicism is looking at a fucked up situation and saying, "That shit will never get better and anyone who tries will fail. Trust me."

And the sad irony is that cynicism should never be trusted. No matter how much it masquerades as realism.

Here's a big fuck you to all of the jadedness in the world. Either give that shit up or keep it to yourself, I say. Have some balls and live with this world and make it better rather than bemoaning why it sucks and tearing down people who are trying to improve things for real and not just validate your cynicism.

I've got to go drink a beer and think about what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. Have a nice spring afternoon. I know I will:).

Love,
Ben