Rational Philosophy

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.”)