Rational Philosophy

On tradition and legacy: Thanksgiving, turkey-pardons, and barbarism.

As an English national I’m supposed to feel ambivalent about celebrating Thanksgiving (not as ambivalent as I am supposed to feel about Independence Day, but ambivalent nevertheless). I’m sure that many people would have to pause if you asked them what we’re supposed to be celebrating on Thanksgiving. Although, does it really matter? It’s a holiday. We get together. We eat. We drive.

In Rome yesterday archaeologists unveiled a cave thought to have been adorned by the Roman emperor Augustus who believed it to be the place where the wolf nurtured Romulus and Remus after fishing them from the river Tiber. The idea of this cave, two thousand years old, fifty two feet inside the Palatine hill, lovingly decorated with seashells and marble, inspires a sense of connection to a rich and vital past state of humanity, one in which myth and reality intertwined. But there’s a brutal aspect to the reality and legend, too, just as the slaughter of turkeys can put a damper on the idea of Thanksgiving. As the story about the Paletine cave mentions, Romulus, for whom Rome is named, went on to kill his twin brother Remus in a power struggle.

The story of Romulus allegedly killing Remus reminds me of two pieces related to Bush this week: Firstly, his Thanksgiving witticism (yes, it was actually funny) in which he skewered his boss, I mean his vice president. In announcing the winners of the emancipated-Turkey naming contest, Bush quipped that the winning names “May” and “Flower” were much better than those proffered by Cheney — “Lunch and dinner.” (What’s behind that mean-spirited reference to Cheney’s voracious appetite, one wonders?) The second Bush tale is less amusing. Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, in publicizing his new book, reveals that when Bush pressed Scott to announce that Rove and Libby had nothing to do with the Plame leak, it wasn’t true. Scott stops short of accusing Bush of lying, but the indictment of the administration is clear. The question remains whether this administration’s historical legacy of deception and audacious egotism will be recognized by posterity.

Another story today turns up another dark aspect of tradition. A young Saudi woman has had her sentence increased from 90 lashes to 200 lashes. Her crime: Going out in public with a man to whom she was not related. It gets worse. Her crime came to light in the first place because she was the victim of abduction and gang rape.

We may find this punishment abhorrent. I do. But our reaction is mostly a matter of timing. Up until recently, corporal punishment was considered an entirely appropriate punishment in most corners of the world for many crimes. And in this country going back less than two hundred years many slave-owners thought nothing of beating men and women alike for crimes real and imagined, and society in general accepted it.

Tradition, history, and legacy work as a double-edged sword. They can help to maintain some of the best traditions, remind us of great moments, movements and passges in our history, and it can help maintain some of the worst. Without thoughtful reappraisal and rational questioning of why we hold onto certain laws or patterns of behavior, we will inevitably hold onto bad laws and patterns of behavior. For this reason, I think, we are right to question even those seemingly innocent and well-respected traditions. Today’s cause for celebration, after all, may be tomorrow’s cause for shame.

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.”)