Rational Philosophy

(My computer erased my first attempt at this post. A circumstance I’m trying not to take to heart.)

In writing yesterday’s post (”The Joy of Sexual Reproduction“) I came across the work of Herbert Spencer, who apparently first coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” after reading about Darwin’s theory of “natural selection.” While Herbert Spencer’s ideas seem to have much soundness in some respects (that all organic and inorganic stuff must exist according to the principles of space and time, for instance) they are run through with an idealistic belief that evolution has an end point, at which life will have reached a state of perfect equilibrium. A thrust that comes across implicitly in his spin on Darwin’s theory of natural selection in his misleading use of the absolute term “fittest.”

(I love Wikipedia’s choice of this marvelously sinister-looking photograph of Spencer.)

I didn’t set out to write about Spencer. It occurred to me though that a parallel may exist between the Spencer-like utopia of a perfect evolutionary end point, and the common belief that markets should be left to freely find their form; that a theoretically perfectly free market (which is impossible) would ultimately most benefit society. I don’t want to get stuck in attacking or defending absolutes, just examine whether flawed idealism might be doing us a disservice.

It’s easy to pick on George Bush, but in this case (as in so many others) he serves as a great example of what may be wrong with freely advocating a free market. While it’s hard to imagine that he ever had anything to do with actually writing a book, he did put his name as Author to one called “A Charge to Keep.” Herein we find a quote that will be perfect for our discussion: “A free market promotes dreams and individuality.” (I must add that I found this quote elsewhere; I didn’t read the book. But I can readily imagine Bush subscribing to this perspective.)

It’s easy to point to failures in the market — for instance the recent shakiness caused by subprime loans. But it’s also easy for a free market proponent to point out that poor choices cause these problems and that they are actually examples that indicate that the market isn’t yet operating transparently or efficiently enough. As Alan Greenspan argued: “the securitization of home loans for people with poor credit - not the loans themselves - were to blame for the current global credit crisis.”

If we get into debates between free market advocacy and free market opposition, we’ll never get anywhere (that’s just politics as usual).

Instead, I’m wondering whether there may be a philosophical basis for understanding whether a free market is necessarily good or bad. I’ll try to explain what I mean. If we consider the free market as a concept it must rest on the two concepts of impulse and friction. Market changes require impulse or friction. An impulse initiates a market motion or activity based on an expectation of return or profit. A friction or counter-impulse provides inhibition to the momentum of the market in a particular direction. I’m being deliberately abstract. But we quickly determine that nowhere in the concepts for a free market do we come across any concept of virtue or goodness, other than the reflexive concept that freeness is virtue.

To be more specific. Let’s say a person engaging in commerce spies an opportunity for profit. He or she pursues that opportunity freely, responding to the impulse to benefit from the profit. And let’s say that in a perfectly free and transparent market, another person or group responds to that action by providing friction, thereby reducing or sharing in the profit, or generating an alternate profit for themselves.

A free and transparent market consists of a multitude of such transactions. Each person operates always according to impulse or friction. Never, in free market terms, does any subjective desire to act virtuously enter the equation.

Now, if we look again at Adam Smith (the father of the free market concept?) we find that he firmly believed that selfishness was immoral and that the individual would a act in accordance with the good of themselves and the good of all, since society is required for the market to exist.

But I go back to this idea of impulse and friction. People have coopted the concept of the free market as a virtuous mechanism. But a perfectly free market just “is.” People act and it responds, not according to any virtue, but according to its internal structure (which can never be perfect).

As the real market (synonymous in some ways with the stock market) becomes more abstract and more remote from the worldly barter and trade that Adam Smith witnessed, we lose the very connection to humanity that transforms a morally neutral market into a socially responsible market.

People love to tout the idea of the free market because it notionally frees them from worrying about the fiscal responsibility of the government in ensuring that markets operate responsibly and sensibly. Bush may be right in saying that a free market promotes dreams and individuality, but if we think that’s a good thing, we should perhaps think again.

Why sex makes sense.

Yesterday I posted a piece on new or renewed questions about why organisms reproduce sexually (as opposed to asexually). In short, no current theory can explain why organisms have evolved to reproduce sexually. Theories have been proposed — such as the desirabilty of high gene mutation rates to aid adaptation and resistance to parasites — but these theories haven’t been borne out through scientific analysis.

VS.

As I tried to clear my mind for meditation this morning on my subway ride to work, it occurred to me that perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why evolution led to such a broad and successful range of sexual reproducers, would it make sense instead to ask “why not”?

I’ll try to explain what I mean.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is often misparaphrased as “survival of the fittest.” (I almost did it myself, before I researched the origin of that phrase; Herbert Spencer coined it after he adopted, adapted and misused Darwin’s theory for his own purposes). If we look around us we see that the world is far from filled with absolutes. Instead, the various paths that life and evolution have taken have led to an enormous and bewildering array of living things. The number of types and subtypes of plants, animals, insects, etc., is dizzying.

Bdelloid Rotifers do very nicely without sex, but that doesn’t mean that we all need to. We’re not competing with Bdelloid Rotifers, we’re all just doing what we do until something comes along to stop us.

To couch this in more scientific terms, theories of gene mutation don’t need to explain why sexual reproduction is better than asexual reproduction as an evolutionary fork in the road. They just need to explain how it is that sexual reproduction is a viable evolutionary fork.

Mathematically, a new species will only fail to survive if the threats to its survival outweigh its ability to adapt and thrive. When the number of threats is low, the species doesn’t need to be a super-survivor, it just needs to be good enough.

The same is true within human society. We can’t all be superstars, supremely attractive, incredibly smart, strong, mature, creative, resourceful. But that doesn’t mean we can’t survive and lead a fruitful life, reproduce, create a genetic legacy. Just one clear look at the world around us demonstrates the futility in seeking to understand why, from an evolutionary perspective, a particular trait has survived. Why not? What was the force that would have stopped it from being perpetuated?

And given the amount of time most people spend thinking about sex and participating in it or wanting to participate, there would have to a fairly major turn of events to stop us continuing down this particular alley.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Reports from a team of Cambridge scientists last week presented a theory explaining how an asexual organism (a tiny invertebrate pond-dweller, the bdelloid rotifer) has been able to survive 80 million years without sexual reproduction.

In a related article scientists from the University of Sussex show that the rate of mutation in a range of sexual organisms is lower than it would need to be if sexual reproduction occurs to guard against the harmful effects of mutation.

All of which seems quite new and interesting to those of us who haven’t been keeping up with the theories of evolutionary biology. But apparently the elusive evolutionary benefits of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction have been much hunted and seldom in clear view for quite some time.

I also read the first two parts of a fascinating essay by Errol Morris “Which Came First, The Chicken or The Egg.” Although it’s about photographs from the Crimean war, the Morris piece reminded me, as did the two science reports, that evidence and hypothesis make a far less solid foundation for our understanding of the world than it sometimes seems. Morris’s article also makes a powerful case for the importance of careful, methodical, skeptical inquiry. It may be a long time before we know as much about the wending path of evolution as we once thought we did. And for this reason what we think we know can’t tell us as much as we might hope.

But if we look through the other end of the telescope things become a little less dizzying. We can ask the question: Do we need to know the details of each stage and step of evolution to know that organisms evolve? If organisms evolve, what can this tell us about the purpose of evolution?

For the past few mornings when I’ve walked into my office and pressed the light switch, the lights have flickered on and then off. Only after repeatedly pressing the switch off and on again have they remained “on.” Through my experience I know enough about electrical circuits to deduce that there is a loose connection somewhere.

I don’t know very much about electricity. As far as I understand it, there’s a flow of electrical current (electrons). I couldn’t design a generator. I would be able to replace a light switch, but that’s about it. My point is that I don’t need to know about electricity to turn on a light. When I press the light switch, the lights generally come on.

The concept of evolution says that living organisms tend to improve their ability to survive by becoming better adapted for survival over time. Using the parallel of the light bulb, understanding that this happens doesn’t require us to know exactly how it happens.

I’m immediately struck by the thought of extinction. (Yesterday I was reading Mo Willems story about Edwina — the dinosaur who didn’t know she was extinct — to my son; highly recommended.) Species that become extinct at first seem to be counter-examples of evolution. But when we think again, we realize that they instead provide evidence that a species won’t survive if it is not well adapted to its environment.

Another possible counter-example: Genetic weaknesses. Genetic weakness that can be produced by in-breeding (either by cultural or social practice or by design). But this again supports the general concept that evolution works more effectively when such circumstances don’t interfere.

Generally then, we can say that as time passes organisms tend to become incrementally better adapted to their environment. This is actually a much narrower conceptual risk than to accept the specific details of the evolutionary process itself.

But I believe we can even take another step away from the whole question and ask whether the principles of space and time provide a philosophical basis for the concept of evolution. (An approach I pursue in my book LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive.)

The principles of space and time show us that things will continue to exist in space if their form remains stable over time. If we think about fundamental particles and the way the stuff of the universe has persisted we can understand that stable particles and stable conglomerations of matter predominate. The same is true of living organisms. The more stable and persistent organisms, the ones that evolve, survive, and adapt, tend to predominate over time. Extreme circumstances can produce counter-examples, but then statistics will take over again and evolution will tend to win out over time.

While it’s helpful to be skeptical, methodical, and careful, and remember that we know a lot less than we’d like to think we do; we also perhaps know a lot more than we sometimes care to imagine.

‘They just shoot at anything and everybody,’ says one of the interviewees in a CNN story today on chronic youth violence in parts of Philadelphia.

Responding to Al Gore’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, Rob Edwards of Woodbridge, Connecticut is reported as saying: “It is a sad world in which we live when bad science (and even a lack of any data at all on many points) leads to so much hype or accolades, especially the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. The IPCC is a farce. View the CBC documentary from 2005, which is backed up by clear and reproducible science, to understand how wrong the IPCC and Al Gore actually are.” (Which prompted me to go look up the CBC documentary.)

And on logic matters today (a philosophy blog,) a post questioning whether there “isn’t something inelegant about stocking up on assignments of objects to variables only not to use infinitely many of them?” I couldn’t understand a word of it. I don’t mean to pick on this post; I wouldn’t understand most of them, I’m sure.

Which brings me to the question of what is reality, and whether philosophy can help us answer it. If we live in a world where kids shoot each other mindlessly, what use is the study of model theory? And if Al Gore’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize raises a scornful response from many quarters, some of them apparently well meant and well informed, are we to trust our understanding of the world around us, or the understanding of others?

Our perception of reality itself of course is somewhat of an illusion. We see and feel and hear things because we have evolved to see and hear and feel them in that way. Our eyes respond to a thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, our ears to a narrow portion of the frequency spectrum. Things are solid for us because we perceive them at as solid, but at the smallest perspective, subatomic particles are smears of energy spread out relatively huge distances. Smaller particles can just go whizzing through us.

Reality is perception. Consistency in that perception can reassure us of consistency in the world around us. Logic can help us build models that may or may not prove reliable. And progress can only be measured with hindsight.

Where does that leave us?

President Bush today in referring to his desire to meet with the Dalai Lama says that he hopes that China will one day see the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader and someone who wants peace.

I guess that could just about sum up the mind-boggling futility in seeking out logical consistency in the world around us… But then I think about Plato. Plato said: “It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.” And this kind of philosophy seems to give us courage and a reason to continue to think.

In what was perhaps a slip-up, perhaps not, the picture that accompanies the NY Times article “House Panel Raises Furor on Armenian Genocide” comes with the caption “Survivors of the Armenian Genocide.”

Although perhaps the matter is not whether the Turks committed genocide, but whether America now officially uses the genocide label.

Parsing the furor I’m left wondering how to sift through the sea of conflicting emotions and motives to reach some kind of reasoned analysis. Modern Turkey seems attached to the idea that labeling the killings genocide offends Turkey. The motives of the house panel seem to be perhaps politically reactive (responding to the press from the Armenian community,) perhaps genuinely well-intentioned (aiming to let the world know that genocide won’t be swept under the mass killings rug,) perhaps a little of both. And the motives of the White House and other home-grown opponents of the genocide label seem to be strategic — to avoid risking the loss of Turkey’s support in Iraq.

On Tuesday, the Science Times section of the NY Times published a fascinating piece on the thinking processes of baboons. One aspect of the story pointed to the terrible statistic that more infant baboons die from infanticide than from anything else. The reason being that the dominant male in the troop changes every seven or eight months. The new alpha male (usually from another troop) kills the infant baboons in an effort to force the females back into a new reproductive cycle so that he can mate with them before he is ousted.

What do these two disjointed stories have to do with one another?

I expect that if one were to be able to ask a baboon whether killing rival offspring is infanticide, he would balk at the label. I think the Turks don’t want the genocide label in part because they are attached to the idea that the killing of Armenians necessarily furthered the Turkish cause. Just as America balks at the label of aggressor or warmonger in the invasion of Iraq.

Whether it is expedient for America to apply to events that began in 1915 the genocide label is mostly, if not entirely, a matter of politics. The furor over the issue has done more to raise consciousness about the events themselves than a quiet and emphatic resolution. But, ultimately, there is an excellent reason to worry about the label and to be sure that we apply the appropriate label.

The Times quotes Rep. Brad Sherman as saying “if we hope to stop future genocides we need to admit to those horrific acts of the past.”

The right label is important not for America, nor for the Armenian survivors, but for modern Turkey and for others who would cling to the idea that killing to secure ethnic goals contradicts human goals. Contrasting genocide in humans with infanticide in baboons, humans have a critically important conceptual capacity — to distill and apply abstract concepts such as genocide. Male alpha baboons have evolved to feel a natural impulse to kill the weaning offspring of their rivals. Human beings evolved to feel fear of and protectiveness against other groups and tribes — for as long as humans have existed, they have killed one another in alarming numbers. But, unlike baboons, we have the capacity to understand that ultimately we do not want to continue to kill one another en mass, and, with the right will, we have the capacity to stop it, and to prevent one another from committing such crimes. We can have the will to be human and respect the rights of all people to share the world. If we refuse to apply the concept and shape the will, we will fail.

(Charles Darwin, as the Science Times article mentions, wrote this in his notebook of 1838 - “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”)

Lou Dobbs’ strongly worded commentary on CNN.com today begins with the words “lunacy among our public figures.” He’s referring to the likes of Katie Couric, Barak Obama, and Bill Moyers who have all expressed discomfort with the prevailing symbolism of the American flag.

Barack Obama has stopped wearing his American flag lapel pin, for instance.

Lou’s thoughts on the subject (if you can call them that) are so coarsely grained that I would have been inclined to shake my head and move on, but his knee jerk patriotism must be widely felt, and that makes it worthy of some analysis. After all, which of us hasn’t felt the tug of a strong, arbitrary allegiance at some point in our lives?

Patriotism reflects an identification with the nation of one’s birth or adoption. The idea of patriotism expresses the impulse or feeling that our nation should prevail over or is better than others. By saying: “I am American” or “I am Iranian” or “I am [fill in the blank]” we are also saying: “I am not anything else.” It seems simple enough, but the feeling of patriotism emerges from a complex and overlapping set of responses:

Fear of other people and other cultures, fear of the unknown, fear of threats to the nation real or imagined. Pride in one’s nation, its culture, habits, principles, laws, history. Familiarity with one’s surroundings — the weather, the habitat, the geography.

If we parse out these various complexities we start to see a pattern. Some of the impulses for our sense of patriotism are completely arbitrary and subjective such that arguing about it becomes a ridiculous matter (weather or geography or success at a particular kind of sport, for instance). And some we may logically defend — the extent to which a country upholds basic human freedoms, for instance, is not a subjective matter, and has led more than one person to change his or her nationality.

So, patriotism can be divided into two distinct concepts — an identification with the idea of one’s nation, or an identification with the ideals of one’s nation.

Dobbs clearly argues for the idea of America, regardless of its record on matters of such grave importance as human rights, war-waging, and international diplomacy. Couric, Obama, and Moyers on the other hand clearly want to make a point about the ideals of the nation, and the degree to which they support the way that those ideals are being upheld by the current administration, or not.

Monet’s “Le Pont d’Argenteuil” at the Orsay Museum in Paris - badly damaged by intruders Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007.

(You can see the 4 inch tear below the bridge.)

In a related article, the French Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, calls for better security and tougher sanctions against people who commit such acts of vandalism because, as she said “they are attacking our history.”

Another interesting aspect of the report is that it seems that the painting can be repaired. Presumably it would be impossible for a future museum visitor to know whether the painting had been repaired or not.

This reminds me of two other incidents: One from a New Yorker article, and one from my own life.

The New Yorker, September 24, 2007, article on Marie-Laure de Noailles - The Surrealist’s Muse, at one point describes how one of Marie-Laure’s lovers — a Spanish painter named Oscar Dominguez — made money by by copying Marie-Laure’s Picassos and selling the originals, leaving his forgeries in their place.

My wife bought me a lovely old Alfa Romeo “Spider” sports car for my birthday. It turns out that the car’s floor is rusted, a fatal problem. But in the course of investigating what could be done, if anything, to repair the damage, I discovered that, with old cars, enthusiasts value authenticity, including authenticity of a repair, so highly that an inauthentic repair (using a modern, custom-shaped floor panel rather than an original panel) would render the car practically worthless.

Is Albanel right in saying that an attack on a work of art is an attack on history? If a clever forgery can fool its owner, does the value of a work lie in the art or its pedigree? And if a car looks and drives as if it were intact, does the knowledge that it is patched with a modern piece of material diminish its inherent value?

All of these questions seem interrelated. The core question seems to be how and why do we attach the concept of value to an object or the idea of an object?

We may have several reasons for perceiving value in Monet’s painting of a bridge: We find the painting itself aesthetically pleasing. We find Monet’s work generally pleasing and therefore value this work as part of the body of his work. We value the effort and skill exerted in producing such a work of art. We find value in the work of art as a component of our cultural history… I’m sure there must be several other distinct reasons for perceiving value in the painting.

Likewise with my Alpha Romeo. I value it because I like the way it looks and drives. An enthusiast may value it for its authenticity and degree of intactness. A scrap metal merchant may value it as a heap of smeltables.

The concept of value in a forgery is a little trickier. Before we know it is a forgery, we may believe we value it for its place in a body of work, or for the skill of the original artist. But knowledge of its true pedigree makes it impossible to value a forged Picasso as a Picasso. (Although we could still value it as a skillful copy.)

All of which results in two important clarifications: When we think or talk about the value of a thing, it helps if we’re clear about the ground of the value, what is it based on from our perspective, allowing that others will have their own perspectives. The second clarification is that when we attach our sense of value to the idea of a thing (its pedigree, its place in a greater body of work, etc.) we are no longer valuing the thing itself, but an idea of the thing.

This second point, I believe, resolves the paradox that we can at one moment believe something very valuable, only to realize a moment later that it is worthless. The thing itself hasn’t changed, but our idea of it has.

For a work of art to have inherent value for us, then, that value must be attached to something immediate, such as its aesthetic impression.

This brings me back to my original conundrum. While I feel the emotional tug of the sentiment expressed by the French Culture Minister, that those who damage works of art should be more heavily sanctioned, I can’t find the logical support for it. What the idiots did was to damage a painting. Any attack on history resides only in the minds of those who perceive the idea of Monet’s painting as a part of French cultural history. Should criminal sentencing be influenced by something so subjective?

I’m not happy today. I don’t know why. But perhaps this is a good place to begin in thinking about the philosophy of happiness. I was going to write about the philosophy of depression, but that seemed too, well, depressing.

Arthur Schopenhauer (by all accounts, generally not a happy man) had this to say on the subject: “Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.” Goethe expresses a similar idea, but more gently: “Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.”

Happiness of course is a mental construct or concept that we use to describe a set of complex feelings, and this concept forms part of a spectrum that spans all degrees of happiness and unhappiness. As Carl Yung put it: “The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

John Belushi said more or less the same thing as Jung — “I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time” — but he pushes back toward the pertinent question of happiness as something that may have a purpose.

The study of happiness has received a lot of attention recently. But, as with most matters of psychological interest, those doing the questioning tend to be psychologists. One such study from a few years ago brings focus to the eternally false expectation that things will make us happy; returning to Goethe, we like to chase the ball of happiness, but when we catch up to it, we kick it off again. 

(I had a striking example of this in my personal life just last week. When we were expecting our first child three years ago, my wife and I discovered that we both carry a gene mutation for cystic fibrosis. When we became pregnant again over the summer, we therefore knew that there was a one in four chance that the baby would have cystic fibrosis. The worry about this consumed us. Yet last week when the tests showed that the baby would be fine, the all-pervasive happiness of the relief was quite short-lived. Here I am again, already depressed about something else.)

The problem with the study of happiness from a psychological perspective is that it tends to reveal more about the symptoms of happiness than it does about the purpose of happiness. To understand that purpose, we need to consider the concept from first principles.

Back to Schopenhauer. His definition of happiness as freedom from pain is compelling, because it is neat. “[Pain] is the positive element of life,” he says. A thought we can happily unpack to mean that pain compells us to do things that help us survive.

This is certainly part of the puzzle. We evolved pain receptors to help us refrain from doing things that would damage the living organism. And psychological (emotional) pain is simply an extension of the same phenomenon. To the extent that we can anticipate painful situations we tend to try to avoid them.

But it is surely not the whole answer. What Schopenhauer sought to exises from our analysis by referring all of happiness back to pain, was the potential for a positive purpose for happiness.

Camus evoked the concept of harmony to describe happiness: “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”

As life evolved, the more successful organisms would have been those that were able to effectively balance the functions within the living organism itself and between the organism and the outside world. Every evolutionary step or change succeeds or fails according to whether it brings about a more advantageous balance for the organism. This tendency toward balance reveals itself in all kinds of ways — the physical form of the organism (the giraffe’s long neck balanced with the height from the ground of its food), and the internal functioning of the organism (the short life span of the fruit fly, for instance, which allows it to mutate and adapt rapidly).

In human beings, the mental function takes this process of tending toward balance to a new place. Our mental functions, our processing of impulses and conscious decision making, tends to improve our ability to survive if it helps us to achieve balance. Happiness, however fleeting, is the evolutionary reward for achieving harmony and balance — a good meal, a pleasant experience, making love — all of these things produce the chemical reponse that we call happiness so that we will tend to want to do them again. Happiness is evolution’s form of positive feedback.

Why then have so many great minds decided that happiness is merely pain waiting to happen? Bertrand Russell perhaps can shed some light on this: “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

 

 

�
�

Senator Larry Craig today reversed his promise to resign from the senate if he couldn’t retract his guilty plea on charges of disorderly conduct (after he allegedly propositioned a plain clothes officer in an airport bathroom). As CNN reports: “On the House side, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, said Friday that elected officials have a responsibility “to exhibit behavior that upholds the dignity of the office.”"

In the wake of David McSwane’s four word column: “Taser this: F**k Bush,” Colorado State University’s Board of Communications decided to admonish the editor-in-chief of its newspaper for unethical and unprofessional behavior rather than fire him. College conservatives, who had sought the editor’s ouster and called for advertisers to pull their ads, were disappointed.

And in the midst of the new furore (see yesterday’s post) about the administration’s legal machinations to allow the CIA to continue with severe interrogation of detainees, President Bush again reiterates his claim that “we do not torture.” Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, comments: “I suspect that former Deputy Attorney General Comey will again prove to be right in his prediction that the Department of Justice will be ashamed when we learn more about all that they have done.”

Elected officials, those in positions of influence and responsibility, and those with ethical obligations have been doing bad things for as long as such positions have existed. Craig’s alleged behavior wouldn’t have even made it as a footnote in the history of the senators of ancient Rome. It may sometimes seem as though there’s far more wrongdoing now than ever before, but I expect it’s just that we get to know about more of it.

But while at first it seems to be resonant and solid, the phrase “to exhibit behavior that upholds the dignity of the office” becomes fuzzier and fuzzier the more I think about it.

Surely nobody can always exhibit dignified behavior, whenever any of us visits the bathroom, even if not propositioning for sex, we are not at our most dignified. And it the phrase refers more to upholding appearances, then is it really an important benchmark for an elected official? It seems more important that our elected officials and those in positions of responsibility think and act responsibly as they carry out their responsibilities. The CSU editor, for instance, perhaps should have weighed his words a little longer before going to print. And the current president, perhaps, should have weighed his motives a little longer before running for office.

Dignity is an odd concept. I found this quote from John Stuart Blackie - On Self-culture 1874 - quite helpful: “The real dignity of a man lies not in what he has, but in what he is.” The OED defines dignity as the quality of being worthy or honorable. Which of course presents us with a question about the concept of worthiness and honor.

Taking these two ideas together, dignity lies in doing that which one feels is right. Dignity is not in the office because the office may stink. If Craig feels it is right for him to continue to work in the senate, because he can continue to be effective, more effective than a replacement, as he says, then his actions have dignity.

Likewise, a fellow editor at CSU’s paper praised his boss’s handling of the situation and his general leadership. Some dignity then rests with him. But what about the college republicans who called for the newspaper’s sponsors to pull their ads?

And what of our fearless leader, Mr. Bush? Does dignity rest with him? All indications are that Bush is doing one thing and saying another. He hides his actions behind his words. He would claim that he does this because what he is doing is right. But perhaps he does it because he knows that others would feel he is wrong.

 

�

The New York Times article today on Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations is both appalling and fascinating in its thorough exposure of the administration’s dogged efforts to encourage and enable the CIA to use a wide range and combination of brutal interrogation techniques without having to worry about their legality. But beyond the pertinent questions of what constitutes torture and in what ways the administration blurred the line between branches of government, and, once again, abused its executive power, I was struck by the universal themes of courage and cowardice that sprang out of the circumstances of the story.

The Times reports on a White House meeting involving James Comey, deputy attorney general: “Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.”

Sitting at home reading the newspaper or watching events on TV it’s easy to regard the administration as laughable and not worthy of respect. But to be in its midst, as Comey was, surrounded by powerful supporters of the White House, with your job on the line, his boldness took real courage.

The Times also reports that within the circle of unswervingly loyal Bush insiders “there was a sense that Comey was a wimp” on national security matters.

I’m reminded of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. In criticizing Comey’s moral stance, the administration defines a specific instance of “courage” as the ability to follow through on severe methods of interrogation in order to get valuable information. Socrates would never let them get away with that kind of rhetorical sleight of hand.

It’s notable that at no point in the several years that this story has been unfolding has the administration appeared to betray any compunction about using severe interrogation methods. This may be an extreme thing to say, but one gets the impression that the administration does not view the detainees as human or deserving of human rights, and, therefore, feels that torturing the detainees couldn’t possibly be inhuman.

And perhaps this is their true perspective. It would explain a great deal.

Let’s suppose for a moment that some within the administration don’t feel that the detainees retain any human rights; that any form of torture is justified if it achieves results. Is this a form of cowardice? Is it courageous?

Courage and cowardice are concepts. They have meaning only as formulated through mental processes. A tree is not courageous because it holds fast against the wind (unless it appears in a poem, at which point it becomes a conceptual tree).

The concept of courage is directly opposed to the concept of cowardice. And the concept of courage has as its root two other concepts — fear or an awareness of risk, and strength — holding one’s course despite the fear. Fear is a direct emotional response to a situation of real or perceived danger. Strength or resistence to fear is a result of our conscious faculty, holding back our natural urge to give in to the fear, the power of the conscious mind to control our more immediate fight or flight responses.

Cowardice, in contrast, arises from the concepts of fear and capitulation. We feel fear, we are aware that we do not want to or should not give in to the fear, yet we give in to it anyway.

Going back to my working premise that maybe some in the administration don’t view the detainees as deserving of human rights. If this is correct, then to condone and enable torture of the detainees requires no courage on their part. But neither is it, in itself, cowardly. (Since they are not, in holding this stance, capiltulating to any fear; they feel no fear of the consequences of this approach.)

However, at the risk of extending my conjecture too far, the perspective I’m presuming exists in Cheney and others itself rests on cowardice. — Whenever we decide on a course of action and act, we risk error. If we don’t recognize the possibility for error, it is because we are afraid we will have to admit our failure. Refusing to admit failure, of course, is a hallmark of the current administration. This then, is cowardice at a deeper level.

To build this logic back up: The White House chooses to pursue a policy of severe interrogation that denies the detainees their human rights. The White House refuses to accept that this premise and the course of action being followed may be wrong. In refusing to accept that it may be wrong, the White House acts out of cowardice.

Others in the story betray a more simple and obvious form of cowardice: Gonzalez and Yoo, for instance, who defend the administration’s tactics for their own ends, to please their masters, or just so they don’t have to say ‘no.’

�