Category Archives: big picture stuff

Morality and Wingnuts

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This relates to the last post, on the psychological and neurobiological factors of morality. It’s also about the psychological defenses people use to see the world the way they want to see it.

The New York Times today has an article on violent crimes committed by veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It suggests that trauma and stress of war are factors.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction. …

…Few of these 121 war veterans received more than a cursory mental health screening at the end of their deployments, according to interviews with the veterans, lawyers, relatives and prosecutors. Many displayed symptoms of combat trauma after their return, those interviews show, but they were not evaluated for or received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder until after they were arrested for homicides.

The writers, Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez, make no personal judgments, but the article overall is sympathetic to the soldiers and suggests that returning veterans could use much more support in their transition back to “normalcy” than they are getting.

Now, let’s look at reactions from some rightie bloggers. Here’s one:

NYT’s Vet Bashing Series (UPDATE)

The New York Times starts a new series, called “War Torn”: “A series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.”

The first installment, 6253 words, is a considerable investment of ink, with more to come, by the New York Times to create negative impressions of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and by extension the missions they served.

As related to the last post — obviously, the Sontag-Alvarez article triggered the blogger’s loyalty sphere and elicited an emotional, defensive response. Instead of concluding that more could be done to help vets deal with war trauma, the blogger concluded that the New York Times is disloyal to vets. Also as discussed in the last post, this reaction also may be from a strong “mentality of taboo.” I’ve written in the past that some right-wingers think it is taboo to acknowledge that soldiers are flesh-and-blood human beings and not plastic (or galvanized steel) action heroes.

Perhaps this emotional and illogical overreaction comes from wingers having to deny to themselves that their beloved war in Iraq was a big mistake, and lives are being lost and ruined for nothing. That’s some heavy-duty denial, folks. Yet they’ve kept it up all this time. No wonder they’re twitchy (the wingnuts, I mean).

This blogger (who tags his post “NY Times liars scoundrels scumbags”) calculates that 121 homicides among the number of returned veterans is actually below the national homicide rate of the general population — “one-half to less than one-third as much.” But the blogger calculates that there are 1.99 million Iraq/Afghanistan veterans, and I don’t believe that’s accurate. (Note to wingnuts: By saying “I don’t believe” I acknowledge that I don’t know what the number is and could be mistaken.)

This article from March 2007 says that 690,000 veterans had served in Iraq and Afghanistan combat zones (a lower number than the total number deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m sure). It may be that the higher number represents total deployments, not total individual soldiers. Given the high number of repeat deployments, the deployment number doesn’t tell us how many individual soldiers served.

However, I would like to know how the real homicide rate of the vets compares to non-vets of the same age group, particularly among males, who commit nearly 90 percent of homicides. It’s possible that the rate among the vets is pretty close to average. Even so, that doesn’t mean post-traumatic stress wasn’t a factor in some of the homicides committed by vets. For example, one soldier who killed his two-year-old daughter was recovering from a brain trauma.

The article does not say that all returning veterans are twitching homicidal time bombs. I figured (correctly) that righties would react as if it did.

I’ve noticed over the years that if I make a statement like “some brown dogs have fleas” or even “about half of brown dogs have fleas at some point in their lives,” someone will comment that their brown dog does not have fleas, therefore the statement is wrong. I’ve seen this bit of illogic so many times that I have concluded some people cannot wrap their heads around the concept of some. Some is not all. Some is not necessarily most.

It’s also a common phenomenon for people to hear a couple of sensational news stories about X and extrapolate that X is a new and growing problem, when in fact the rate of X has not increased over the years. I remember after the Andrea Yates episode threw light on infanticide, there was a public perception that the rate of infanticide was growing at the time. But I checked; it was not. If anything, it had gone down slightly.

So, there will be some people who read this article and conclude that all returning vets are twitching homicidal time bombs, which is not true. Still, few is not none. Just because infanticide is rare doesn’t mean it was OK to leave five children alone with a psychotic mother who had just been taken off her meds. Even if the homicide rate among veterans is close to the average for their demographic group doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be better screening and support for the effects of trauma.

And calling attention to the tragic consequences of war trauma is not “bashing vets” to anyone thinking rationally.

Rightie blogger reaction to Friday’s anti-Guantanamo protests was all “loyalty sphere” stuff also. (Malkin called the protesters “unhinged.”) To me, of course, the detention center at Guantanamo is a betrayal to everything this country used to stand for, and opposing it is an act of patriotism. But wingnuts cannot see that; their “loyalty” and “authority” spheres override any other moral senses (including any understanding of the principles of democracy versus totalitarianism) that might yet linger, crushed and ignored, in the depths of their ids.

This confusion of group loyalty and authoritarianism with morality is a big part of why wingnuts are screwing up America. I’m not sure what can be done about that, though.

Brain Wiring

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There’s a fascinating article on morality by Steven Pinker in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Research on brains and behavior is revealing that morality has psychological and neurobiological foundations. Here’s a snip:

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”

The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”

This was particularly fascinating to me:

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.

I suggest that the “moralizers” here have formed an ego-attachment to their vegetarianism. It isn’t just something they do; it’s something that defines who they are. And from there they set up the ol’ Us-Them dichotomy and designate all meat eaters as the Other.

It reminds me of a wise woman I met years ago at a Zen center. Her diet was mostly vegetarian, she said, but she ate meat now and then just so she couldn’t call herself a vegetarian. Way Zen.

Anyway, Pinker goes on to explain how we as a culture moralize and un-moralize various activities. Smoking has been moralized, for example. Divorce has lost its stigma and has been un-moralized. But the list of things we get sanctimonious about seems very arbitrary.

I’ve noticed that as a culture we often will fixate on one activity and blow it up into a big bleeping deal disproportionate to the actual harm it does. Disposable diapers come to mind. When they first came out they were met with outrage by baby butt purists. They were bad for babies and taking up too much space in landfills, the purists said. But they weren’t bad for babies, and there are all sorts of other non-biodegradable items taking up even more space in landfills that no one gets outraged about. (And, anyway, washing cloth diapers puts phosphates into lakes and rivers!)

Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.

… But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.

By means of thought experiments that Pinker explains in detail, psychologists have shown that moralization often is irrational.

People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

Yep, ain’t it the truth?

Researchers have found a few themes or “spheres” universal to human cultures that determine whether something is “moral” or not. These are whether an act causes harm; whether it is fair (although cultural ideas about “fairness” vary widely, I suspect); whether it shows loyalty or disloyalty to one’s designated group; whether it respects authority; and whether the act is “pure” — “they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.”

There’s all manner of evolutionary biology figuring into this, of course.

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

Pretty much what George Lakoff has been saying for a while.

Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.

I’m skipping big chunks of this; you really ought to read the whole thing, if you have time. I thought this paragraph fascinating:

The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

Maybe it’s because I think like a Buddhist, but I don’t understand how something that’s a product of brain wiring is less “real” than something that’s not a product of brain wiring. And I think pretty much all aspects of human culture are a kind of collective hallucination. Economies, for example, are created by our thoughts, are they not? Money only has value because we all agree it does.

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.

Moral reasoning can be rational:

Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.

One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.

The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.

Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.

This resonates nicely with the Buddhist view of morality, which basically is that true morality is based on compassion, and true compassion comes from the wisdom that dividing the world into self-and-other is delusional. Morality that is based on an external set of rules is, to me, a crude and flawed kind of morality.

The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

Craving and ego-attachment are the source of all evil and suffering, the Buddha said.

Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I think I will save them for tomorrow.

Head Boxes

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I want to address a post by Grim, at Blackfive. To be clear, this is a Right Blogosphere blog, but I don’t intend to snark or disagree with the post as much as look at the same issue from another angle.

The issue is post-traumatic stress (PTS) or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), of which Grim writes from the perspective of a combat veteran,

What you need to know, first and last, is that so-called PTSD is not an illness. It is a normal condition for people who have been through what you have been through. The instinct to kill and war is native to humanity. It is very deeply rooted in me, as it is in you. We have rules and customs to restrain it, so that sometimes we may have peace. What you are experiencing is not an illness, but the awareness of what human nature is like deep down. It is the awareness of what life is like without the walls that protect civilization.

Those who have never been outside those walls don’t know: they can’t see. The walls form their horizon. You know what lays beyond them, and can’t forget it. What we’re going to talk about today is how to come home, back inside those walls: how to learn to trust them again.

There is a sense that combat changes people, but it really doesn’t. It brings out parts of yourself that were always there, but that you hadn’t encountered directly. Those parts are in everyone else as well. No one has clean hands. No one is different from you. That is important, so let me repeat it. Everyone around you is just like you. They don’t know it, but they are. You are not sick; you are not broken. Everyone else is just the same.

One’s opinion of whether PTSD is or is not an illness probably has less to do with PTSD than with how one understands “illness.” There are a range of conditions — physical, mental, emotional, behavioral — that are or have been labeled “illnesses,” “disorders” or “diseases,” and the labels in turn tend to color how we understand these conditions. When the condition impacts one’s thought processes, emotions, or behaviors, people can disagree sharply over the labels. The very fact that we make a distinction between “physical” and “mental” disease is a problem, says the Mayo Clinic.

Why does stigma of mental illnesses continue? For one thing, the term “mental illness” suggests that it’s not the same as a medical or physical illness. To some, the word “mental” suggests that the illness is not a legitimate medical condition but rather a problem caused by your own choices and actions. People may blame you and think your condition is “all in your head.” They may think that a mental health disorder means that you’re weak or lazy. They may think that you should just “get over it.” And you may begin to think these things about yourself, too.

In reality, mental illnesses have very complex causes, often a mix of your genetics, your biology and your life experiences — most of which are beyond your control. Neuroimaging studies, for instance, show physical changes in the brain associated with mental disorders. And studies show that some mental illnesses run in families, suggesting that they may be due in part to your genes.

Grim says that PTSD is a normal condition for people who have experienced war, and I respect that. But most illnesses are, in a sense, normal reactions to something — germs, toxins, injury, aging. I believe what he’s saying here is that the soldier experiencing PTS or PTSD is not unnatural or flawed of character. I’d like to think we can all agree on that, even if we disagree on how we label it.

We tend to treat language as if if were something solid and precise that cleanly transmits bits of reality from transmitter to receiver. But in fact language is liquid and messy. Words themselves are weighted down with centuries of connotation that color understanding. And language does not convey reality, just concepts and ideas about reality. People very often get hung up on words and miss the reality, and I think that’s what is happening here.

The better course is not to run away from the word “illness,” but to get over our medieval attitudes about illness. In medieval times to be ill was to be morally evil or malevolent. Sick still carries that meaning sometimes, as in “That pedophile is one sick puppy.”

The word disease originally meant, simply, “without ease,” and came to be a synonym for illness or sickness over time. The words disorder or disturbed suggest chaos, something out of control or out of place. And I would argue that while PTSD may not be a sickness, it is a disorder, in that it’s something out of place. Behaviors and habits of mind essential to surviving on a battlefield are out of place in peacetime, and vice versa.

Another word for out of place is deviant. To be deviant is to be abnormal and possibly dangerous. Although the word disorder is relatively clean and clinical by comparison, the connotations of deviant cling to it stubbornly for some people. My calling PTSD a “disorder” is an attempt to be helpful, but someone else might perceive it as threatening or stigmatizing.

In social animals such as we there is a deeply hardwired urge to eliminate deviant individuals from the pack. I suspect that from the point of view of evolutionary biology, this urge is useful. It isolates those animals carrying infectious diseases and prevents an animal with unfortunate characteristics from reproducing. This trait lingers in humans and, unfortunately, accounts for some of the worst of our behaviors. We have all manner of ways, some subtle and some not, to isolate and expel people whom we judge to be “weird” or “different from us” from our society. Only those who can rise above their programming see how unjust and how stupid this is.

There is no logical reason why a mood, emotional, or cognitive disorder should be any more stigmatizing than a broken bone or a bullet wound. A lot of people have crusaded to get PTSD recognized as an illness so that people with PTSD will get the treatment, compassion, and respect they require and deserve. I can commiserate, because I’m on a similar crusade regarding clinical depression. It’s still common for people, including doctors, to dismiss the depressed as whiners. In this case the point of the label “illness” is not to stigmatize people, but just the opposite.

What’s “normal”? What’s “abnormal”? Grim speaks of “what human nature is like deep down,” as if there is a fixed baseline “normal” and all other aspects of human nature can be judged by degrees away from the baseline. Over the ages countless philosophers have tackled this question, and they’ve come up with countless answers. I suggest it’s more pragmatic to judge what’s “normal” entirely in context of circumstances. “Normal” is responding appropriately to what’s going on around you. If something is getting in the way of appropriate responses, then it’s a problem no matter what label you slap on it.

Intense experiences, good and bad, can leave considerable residue. After an intense experience, good or bad, often someone will say, “Wow, that was real.” Whenever you bring whole body-and-mind focus to anything, the experience takes on a bright clarity that makes “ordinary” experience seem dull and muddled. People who have shared that intense experience know what’s “real,” and everyone else seems to be sleepwalking. After this intense experience it can be terribly disorienting to leave the company of those who shared it with you and move among those who have not. The ones who weren’t there may care about you, but they don’t “get it.” They don’t “know.” You can tell by their questions and comments that what they imagine you experienced is light years away from the reality. You find that trying to explain it to them is futile.

What’s worse, you may not yet be ready to leave that experience; you may want to linger in that clarity awhile longer. But the ones who weren’t there seem to want to drag you out of the clarity and bring you back to their fuzzy, mundane world, and this makes you angry. You have acquired several new layers of behavioral conditioning, and you no longer conform to the expectations they have of you, and that makes them angry.

This phenomenon is well documented as common (but not limited to) soldiers returning from war, going back at least to the Civil War and probably earlier. Yet it still catches us by surprise. It shouldn’t. It’s normal.

Further, I argue that war is no more or less “real” than cooking soup or sorting socks. It’s what you bring to the experience that makes the difference, not the experience itself.

I’ve never tried to wade through Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and there seem to be hundreds of diverse and conflicting interpretations of what Kant was getting at. However, I was struck by something Mark Lilla wrote:

According to Kant, thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Hume had a crude notion of how the human mind works. While they were right to think that the “faculty of understanding” (Verstand) can deal only with objects of possible experience in space and time, they failed to see that the “faculty of reason” (Vernunft) has a very different function. It not only draws inferences from evidence, it also places a kind of “architectonic” order on them by means of ideas, making sure they cohere. These ideas are not themselves drawn from experience; they are useful notions that the mind employs to organize what it does experience in space and time. … One of reason’s functions is to develop fictions like this and employ them to regulate the employment of our understanding, which is limited to what can be experienced in space and time. [Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 135-136]

The way I understand this — borrowed heavily from talks by my first Zen teacher — is that we all have mental filing cabinets in which we sort everything we learn and experience. These filing cabinets may or may not be organized in any logically defensible way, but logical or not they are artificial. Construction of the filing cabinets begins as soon as we are born as our parents imprint upon us the norms and common assumptions of our culture. We are so accustomed to using our heads this way we don’t see the artificiality of it, but generally when somebody says something is self-evident or common sense, he’s saying “this nicely conforms to my mental filing system.”

So when we sort PTSD or anything else into “normal” or “abnormal,” “illness” or “not illness” files, we’re using an artificial construct. Ultimately, arguing about whether PTSD is an illness or not isn’t arguing about PTSD, but about an artificial classification system. Advocates for home birthing will tell you that pregnancy and childbirth are not illnesses. Deaf people often are militant about not being called “sick” or “diseased.” Again, these arguments are not about the realities of childbirth or deafness; they’re about the artificial classification system.

What things are is one thing, and how we understand them is something else entirely. Don’t get hung up on the labels.

Sorta kinda related: In a different context, Ian Welsh considers “how do we know what we know?”

Evil

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At the Guardian web site, Theo Hobson writes,

I’d like to see Halloween develop a more serious aspect, alongside the kids’ stuff. I’d like more grown-up reflection on the question of evil, and on how art and religion seek to confront and banish it. We should also reflect on the serious danger involved in the artistic representation of evil – that we might start celebrating it for its own sake, rather than in the context of its overcoming. So let’s develop a Halloween for grown-ups too.

If we’re going to contemplate the nature of evil, we ought to come to some agreement as to what it is, or even if it is. There’s an urban legend easily found on the Internets that claims a young Albert Einstein told an atheist professor that just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God, and therefore evil does not exist. Albert Einstein didn’t say this, but it’s an interesting story anyway. It argues that because darkness is the absence of light, and cold is the absence of heat, that darkness and cold light and heat do not exist. But I believe — I could be mistaken — that physicists consider darkness and cold to be phenomena, or observable features of matter and energy. Philosophers, it says here, consider phenomena to be anything that can be perceived, and this includes perceptions of the mind. Evil may not have observable matter and energy, but it can be perceived. Therefore, philosophically speaking, it is.

It’s common to objectify evil and think of it as if it had weight, substance and even fixed positions. Evil lurks. It dwells. The ever exasperating David Brooks once said (pretending to be President Bush), “Some liberals have trouble grasping evil, and always think that if we could take care of the handguns or the cruise missiles or the W.M.D., our problems would be ameliorated. But I know the problem lies in the souls of our enemies.” Some people are just bad, so it’s OK to shoot ’em.

Once you start thinking of evil as a substance or quality or attribute that some people have and others don’t, you’ve just given yourself permission to do terrible things to eliminate the evil ones. As Glenn Greenwald says,

Those who have become convinced that they are waging an epic and all-consuming existential war against Evil cannot, by the very premises of their belief system, accept any limitations — moral, pragmatic, or otherwise — on the methods adopted to triumph in this battle.

Efforts to impose limits on waging war against Evil will themselves be seen as impediments to Good, if not as an attempt to aid and abet Evil. In a Manichean worldview, there is no imperative that can compete with the mission of defeating Evil. The primacy of that mandate is unchallengeable. Hence, there are no valid reasons for declaring off-limits any weapons that can be deployed in service of the war against Evil.

Thus, evil wins again.

I argue that evil is a volitional act with harmful consequences. Evil is as evil does. I argue further that the volitional act is not necessarily a consciously malicious one. In fact, it’s very common for people to persuade themselves that the harm they do is somehow in the service of a greater good.

Los Angeles County officials announced today that the recent California fires were started by a boy playing with matches. The child may not have intended to burn 38,000 acres and destroy 21 homes, but carelessly playing with fire is a volitional act, and it sure as shootin’ had harmful consequences, so the act fits my definition of “evil.” However, I am less interested in casting blame or handing out punishment than in impressing upon people to take care. Not taking care is a volitional act.

I argue that volition is what sets evil apart from other kinds of misfortune and makes it human responsibility. A wildfire started by lightning may be horrific but not evil. On the other hand, if global climate change did play a role in the fire, then willful neglect of the planet by a great many people — arguably, all of us — was responsible.

Theo Hobson mentions artistic representation of evil and worries that we might celebrate evil for its own sake. Artists know — even if David Brooks doesn’t — that evil is seductive. It promises some kind of gratification. In novels and films, “bad” characters often are beautiful, fun, wealthy, glamorous, and powerful. Plots turn on a main character slowly discovering that the seductive Other is evil. At the climax of many a horror movie the attractive villain is unmasked and revealed to be ugly.

We want “good” things to be fresh, sweet, and lovely. We want “bad” things to be decayed, repulsive, and ugly. When Hannah Arendt saw Adolf Eichmann at trial, she observed he was not an utterly loathsome beast but an ordinary man. By describing him as he was Arendt offended readers and even lost friends. But evil has no form, sound, smell, taste, or tactile qualities. It doesn’t “dwell” anywhere, nor is it a a quality anyone possesses. When we objectify evil and identity it as someone that exists in others, we absolve ourselves of evil. And that’s a foolish thing to do, because all of us do or say things that cause harm, even if unintentionally. Yes, there are people who choose to do harmful things, which is why there is a legal system. What someone else does doesn’t relieve us of responsibility for what we do.

I’m not saying we should all go about feeling guilty. The concept of sin comes into play here and complicates matters. Our culture encourages us to think that people who go about doing evil are sinners, and sinners are bad. We speak of people as sinful, as if transgressions exist as matter. And we are supposed to feel guilty about sin. The point is not to feel guilty but to take care, pay attention, and accept responsibility. I don’t like people who talk about other people’s evil but won’t accept responsibility for their own.

WaPo‘s “On Faith” site has some commentaries on Halloween. I like especially the Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite’s post. See also “The Real Meaning of Halloween.”

Where Next for Conservatism?

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Gary Kamiya has an excellent article in Salon that asks if American conservatism can heal itself.

American conservatism is at once absolutist and utopian, and reactive and aggrieved. Which state came first is a chicken-and-egg question, but they reinforce each other. Psychologically, conservatives want contradictory things — both pure freedom and an unchanging Golden Age. Pragmatically, they want things that are mutually exclusive — no social contract and an organic, connected community, untrammeled individual rights and a rigid moral code. The inevitable disappointment results in resentment. The reason that the American right always behaves as if it is an angry outsider, even when it controls all three branches of government, is that it is at war not with “liberalism” but with social reality.

When you’re talking about conservatism you’re supposed to clarify whether you are talking about libertarian conservatism, social values conservatism, America First conservatism, or some other critter. In a logical world, the libertarian get government out of my business conservatism ought to clash with social we’ll make you behave or else conservatism, but it’s not at all uncommon to find righties who take a libertarian view on some issues (e.g., taxes) and an authoritarian view on other issues (e.g., abortion; warrantless wiretapping). Untrammeled individual rights for me; a rigid moral code for everyone else.

Kamiya asks if “the conservative movement is foreordained to remain in its current debased form.”

There will always be substantive issues on which conservatives and liberals will have good-faith differences. It would simply be a more mature conservatism.

The history of American conservatism does not inspire much confidence, however. In spite of its moderate roots, it has succeeded mainly via absolutist, reactionary politics. This approach has enormous emotional appeal for Americans for whom the modern world is a source of confusion, anger and fear, or who simply disdain the social contract . And the Republican Party is now entirely in thrall to it. The current crop of GOP candidates hold uniformly hard-right positions, with the exception of the libertarian, no-chance Ron Paul. The leading GOP contender, Rudy Giuliani, is even more of a maniacal hawk than Bush on the Middle East and national security. These are hardly signs that the right is moving to the center.

FYI, Ron Paul is plenty far to the right on a great many issues.

But sooner or later, conservatives will have to change course or see their movement wither away.

The issues that have been winners for conservatives are fading. White resentment of federal civil rights laws is the ur-conservative issue, the engine that drove the right’s rise. Barry Goldwater, by reluctantly voting against the Civil Rights Act, permanently realigned the South and paved the way for Nixon’s “Southern strategy.” More recently, right-wing strategists successfully mobilized resentment over “values” issues like the “three Gs” — gays, God and guns. These issues still mobilize some conservative voters, but they aren’t nearly as effective as they used to be. Studies show that the electorate, especially younger voters, are moving left on these issues.

That’s the best one-paragraph summary of the past 40 years of American politics you’re ever likely to read. White resentment of federal civil rights laws, desegregation, Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs, and affirmative action were like a big boulder dropped in a lake, sending waves in all directions, and movement conservatism has been riding those waves ever since. “Values” issues like prayer in school and abortion and “security” issues like the communist threat (now the “Islamofacist” threat) made waves also, but IMO white racism truly was “the engine that drove the right’s rise,” as Kamiya says.

But, although racism is still with us, I think the racist wave is dissipating, and white voters don’t respond to the dog whistles the way they used to. And I think that’s because more and more whites are one missed paycheck away from disaster and barely hanging on to middle class status by their fingernails. A person facing potential financial ruin is not so likely to sneer about “entitlements” and “government handouts.” Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.

In the end, conservatism will have to decide if it wants to be a real party of governance, moving beyond empty labels to engage with real issues, or if it wants to remain a party of reaction, in permanent rebellion against modernity, proffering emotionally satisfying but incoherent policies. Conservatism claims to be a politics of authenticity, but it is actually a politics of impulse and instinct. It is based on unmediated emotions, erupting from the individual ego — Get big government off my back! Keep those civil rights laws out of my white backyard! Lower my taxes! This is ultimately an infantile or an adolescent politics, a failure to come to terms with a world that does not do exactly what the omnipotent self demands. Does conservatism want to grow up, or stay an angry teenager forever?

Preach it, Brother Gary.

The new conservatism would not be liberal. It would still tilt toward small government and lower taxes, would reject policies aimed at equal outcomes, would oppose affirmative action and unrestricted immigration. That’s why it would be conservative (and, anticipating outrage from liberal Salon readers, why I wouldn’t support it). But it would abandon its facile government bashing and appeals to raw emotion. Above all, it would aim at working to build an America that, despite political differences, would pull together, would feel like a united country. It would take seriously that old saw about one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

It’s hard to imagine the party of Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh moving to the center. But if Americans turn away from the politics of resentment and fear, the GOP may be forced to follow them.

Just as an example of Why Conservatism Is Screwed, consider Jonah Goldberg’s column in today’s Los Angeles Times. Goldberg is an unoriginal thinker and pedestrian writer who got to be a big shot columnist promoting the virtues of taking care of oneself because he is Lucianne Goldberg’s son. Who needs government handouts when you’ve got nepotism? Anyway, today Goldberg writes,

The problem is that conservatism, even Reagan’s brand, wasn’t as popular as we often remember it. Government spending continued to increase under Reagan, albeit a bit more slowly. Today, the U.S. population is 30% larger but government spending is 84% greater (adjusting for inflation) than it was when Reagan delivered his 1981 inaugural address. That was the speech in which he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and vowed to “curb the size and influence of the federal establishment.”

In 1964, two political psychologists, Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, famously asserted that Americans were ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. Americans loved Barry Goldwater’s rhetoric about yeoman individualism, but not if it meant taking away their Social Security checks or farm subsidies. “As long as Goldwater could talk ideology alone, he was high, wide and handsome,” they wrote. “But the moment he discussed issues and programs, he was finished.”

The flaw was not necessarily Goldwater’s. As Gary Kamiya wrote in the Salon article linked above,

Conservative ideals are laudable: Who is against freedom, tradition or the preservation of community? The problem is that while they’re beautiful in the abstract, it is difficult to base a coherent governmental policy on ideals alone. Once these principles enter the real world of politics, governance and society, a world that requires compromise and the curtailment of individual freedom for the common good, they are useless as guideposts. If they are taken as moral absolutes, they cancel each other out: The apotheosis of the individual leads to the destruction of community and tradition.

When Kamiya writes “a world that requires compromise and the curtailment of individual freedom for the common good” I believe he’s using the word freedom in the sense of being unrestrained, as opposed to political freedom. But on the Right the word freedom has been drained of all meaning; it is merely ceremonial. We lefties who still care about the Bill of Rights are dismissed as “civil liberties absolutists.”

Goldberg continues,

Liberals have an inherent advantage. As long as they promise incremental, “pragmatic” expansions of the government, voters generally give them a pass. And every new expansion since FDR and the New Deal has created a constituency for continued government largesse. …

… “Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace they’re building,” writes William Voegeli in an illuminating essay, “The Trouble with Limited Government,” in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Committed conservatives, meanwhile, find themselves at a disadvantage: They advocate smaller government for everybody — when Americans generally (including most Republicans) want smaller government for everybody but themselves.

In Goldberg’s view, people support liberalism because they are greedy. They want largesse. They demand entitlements. But notice that Goldberg defines “smaller government” purely in terms of domestic spending. He famously supports war, war, and more war, and the government spending that goes with war. He has advocated warrantless police strip searches of children. He is OK with criminalizing abortion. “Big government” is fine when it interferes with other people’s personal lives. Goldberg just wants to keep it out of his pocket.

Under all-Republican rule, the federal government got bigger and more intrusive even as it became more corrupt and less competent. I believe that is symptomatic of the inherent incoherence of movement conservatism. Right wingers want to control because they don’t know how to manage. The Bushies in particular seem to think that if they can just get enough control and operate without public scrutiny, they can force events and the world to bend to their will. Then to prove he’s against “big government,” Bush vetoes S-CHIP.

Just call ’em “totalitarians for freedom.”

Update: See also Busy, Busy, Busy.

Nice While It Lasted

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Tim Watkin posts at The Guardian web site:

America is out of touch and behind the times on climate change and economic reform. It is mired in a stagnant war that the rest of the west has abandoned or is abandoning. American global influence is in decline, the country having lost the respect of allies and the credibility to lead. As we’ve seen yet again in last week’s brinkmanship by Turkey, American diplomacy has all the vim and vigour of Fred Thompson. For now America remains the world leader, but it’s moving steadily from superpower to first among equals. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sciences. …

… Overseas institutions and companies are increasingly competitive, and federal and state funding for science and engineering has fallen significantly, to just 0.8% of GDP. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are sucking up federal money, with President Bush last week asking Congress to raise the war budget for 2008 to $196bn. That’s quite an opportunity cost.

As Tom Friedman put it in his New York Times column on Iraq recently: “Can we pay for it and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century?” The answer, judging from speakers at the TechNet summit at Berkeley earlier this month, is no.

Watkin cites a report titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future,” which was authored by The Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP), a joint unit of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.

It’s hard to ignore the scientists and business leaders who wrote the Gathering Storm report when they write, bluntly: “We are worried about the future prosperity of the United States.” As the US slides, other countries are catching up too rapidly. I think Americans will look back at the second half of the 20th century as the pinnacle of American power and influence.

The comments to this post are almost more alarming than the post. A number of American wingnuts responded, claiming that Chinese engineers can’t be compared to American engineers because Asians have no creativity, and hey, we landed on the moon.

We’re doomed.

The notion that America and Americans are intrinsically superior is so deeply ingrained on the Right that no amount of empirical evidence to the contrary is likely to flush it out. Also, American conservatives by nature will ignore and deny an impending problem until it bites their butts, and then they blame Democrats for not solving it.

You’ve probably had this experience yourselves — mention the mere possibility that the U.S. could be less economically dominant at some point in the future, and if there’s a wingnut present he will laugh at you. Nope, not possible, he says. The way things have been in my lifetime is the way they will always be, forever and ever, amen.

American economic dominance grew out of several factors. The United States was one of the few large industrial nations to emerge from World War II without massive war damage and with its manufacturing base intact and productive, for example. Mortgage subsidies helped the new married couples of the Greatest Generation to purchase homes, and the GI bill sent a large part of the population to college, and in turn those college graduates started businesses, developed new technologies, created new products. America dominated the second half of the 20th century partly by circumstance of war and geography and partly because we invested in ourselves.

These days college is prohibitively expensive. Our manufacturing base is moving overseas, and the current POTUS seems to think this is a good thing. A major American city suffers massive damage from floods, and two years later the federal government continues to show a remarkable lack of interest in setting things right. About one in six Americans lacked health insurance for all of 2005, and our elected “leaders” look the other way and talk glibly about fictional “market solutions.” Anti-government conservative ideology so dominates American politics that we can’t even have sensible discussions about using government to address our growing problems.

We’re strangling ourselves with our own stinginess to each other.

Our Cold Civil War

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In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the State.

– Alexander Solzehnitsyn

Earlier this month, when General Betray-Us was among us, Larisa Alexandrovna posted Our Cold Civil War at the Huffington Post. It caught my eye, and I filed it away for a better time to write about it. Lucky you, that time is now. Her thesis is two-fold:

  1. There are two wars going on, the one overseas, and the one domestically. The domestic war is between the oligarchs of this country versus We, The People. In her view, the domestic war far overshadows the overseas war in importance.
  2. Move-On’s General Betray-Us ad represents a major pushback in this domestic war – not because the ad was so great, but because roughly 3 million MoveOn members were able to pool their resources and have an effect – of getting Bush, the Senate, and others to rebuke it.

I don’t agree with everything she says – she doesn’t get why we’re still in Iraq (here’s a clue), but she expresses ideas both new to me and also ones I’ve long held but don’t often see in print. Examples:

…The attacks of September 11, 2001 were not the singular, all-transforming event that changed everything. Rather, it was the Supreme Court decision of 2000 that changed everything, a consequence of that single monumental failure to protect the Constitution…

The robber barons needed their figurehead, and so their allied fourth estate bosses fixed the propaganda around the myth, creating substance where there was none. The propaganda worked to create an image of a war veteran candidate Bush with a stellar educational background, an experienced and successful businessman, and an honest Texan raised on a farm. Those lies led to more lies and since then, we have essentially been held hostage by an ever expanding parade of liars.

—

The corporate interests of America are now almost entirely at one with the political interests of America. The people are either relegated to the outskirts as unimportant bystanders or are caught in the cross-fire as casualties of a hostile corporate takeover by American and even foreign corporations. We "the people" do not matter in a country where corporate profits are tied to state policy, which then uses those same corporations to tell us what is real and what is fabricated, what is true and what is false.

—

If a voice of dissent should manage to slip through the heavily corporatized and politicized public censors, as we saw happen in the case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a cadre of purchased truth tellers, reporters, and grassroots groups are ready in the wings to react swiftly, to silence and discredit back into the shadows not only the lone whistle-blower, but any other person considering coming forward.

This is not something that happens in a democracy. This type of political character assassination in which the assassins are so much of the mainstream does not happen in a democracy. It only happens in countries under the control of something other than the people, but not in a democracy.

In a nation where corporations control the government, the military, and every possible freedom that can be afforded to a people (voting rights, access to basic life sustaining resources, etc.), a thing such as "democracy" is merely another marketing strategy or product brand, worn like one might wear a tiny American flag on the lapel of a dinner jacket.

Such corporate control and merger with the government and military has been in modern times called fascism. In America, we call it "privatization," so that the jagged edges and unpleasant concepts of a nation where no choice is our own to make can be much more easily digested.

—

In America we now have designated areas where people may protest, conveniently far away from news cameras and the people they are protesting – so out of sight…they have been rendered largely invisible. The right to congregate, as with other constitutionally protected rights, would have been almost entirely dismantled by this administration if not for the Internet. So armed with a new printing press, a global printing press at that, it would not be long before the public awoke from the lies that led to the Iraq war.

And even when those lies were finally exposed, and we – the public knew that we were all being lied to, we watched is stunned horror as the corporate owned/state sponsored "news" outlets attempted to convince us that we simply did not understand the reasons given for the war in the first place. It was WMD; no, it was the spreading of Democracy; no, it was something or other; but whatever it was, it was always "we the people" who were at fault. We simply did not get it, is what we were told. The entire administration set off on a tour of the US hoping to convince us that we simply did not get it. What they did not realize, however, is that we simply no longer bought it.

—

It has slowly become more and more obvious that we are fighting a domestic war, as yet unnamed, but is palpable to any of us who pay attention. Although it is important today as ever that we hold the Bush administration accountable for cooking intelligence that led us into a war of choice against a nation posing no threat to us, the most immediately important questions surround the reasons for why we continue to be held hostage to that war.

Understanding the nature of the domestic battle can only lead to a single conclusion. Whatever the myriad of lies that have led us into Iraq in the first place, we now only continue to remain in Iraq as a distraction from the real war at home and likely for the worst kind of political abuses.

Divide and Conquer:

Yet those villains [the oligarchy] would have us believe we are fighting each other, a nation divided by its own political and social views. The same corporate interests who are robbing us blind would have us believe that we are a deeply divided nation: pro-choice vs. anti-abortion, taxes vs. no taxes, God vs. godlessness, gays vs. heterosexuals, and on and on it goes, pitting us against one another on the basis of every conceivable human attribute, position, and whatever differentiates any one person from another.

Does it not seem odd that differences that have for so long existed and co-existed, even with some tension, would suddenly now be strong enough to split this nation apart over the policies of George W. Bush? I have yet to meet a sane and rational person, regardless of political affiliation, who believes anything positive about Bush, Cheney, and the rest of their administration. When I talk to everyday people in everyday context, they don’t bring up pro-choice vs. anti-abortion, nor do they bring up the mantra of gays taking over the country. No, everyday people I talk to are appalled, embarrassed, and frightened of this cabal.

Indeed, on the most important issues of our time and despite our many individual differences, the majority of us agree on the basics of what is currently wrong with this country and its leadership.

So why are we being constantly bombarded with the idea that we are a nation divided? And just who spending billions on propaganda to make us believe it?

—

In our cold civil war, the enemy is not a part of the country called the "red states," as conveniently manufactured. Nor is the enemy a phantom right wing "wing-nut" or left wing "liberal loony," although there are some people who fall very much under those definitions. On the whole, however, there are simply not enough delusional and/or corrupt Americans to fill the manufactured stereotypes of the typical this or a typical that, even if the label is color-coded for political fear tactics.

The image of a divided nation at war with itself is a false one, as false as the reasons for this war and the general war on terror, which is more of a reign of terror than anything else. But who is it trying so hard to divide this nation and for what reason?

Perhaps the most obvious answer lies in that same question reworded thusly: Who benefits? Consider this question in yet another way: So long as we are standing face to face and not standing shoulder to shoulder, who is benefiting? The answer of course is the same corporations and their lackeys masquerading in the garb of government. They need to distract us, divide us, spend billions of dollars trying to convince us what we need, what we hate, what we love, who is evil, who is good and everything in between.

She eventually talks about how the MoveOn ad demonstrated 1) strength in numbers, and 2) who in the power structure is for us and who is against us, by their reaction to the ad. Read the whole piece.

I first became radicalized to her point of view, during the 2000 election cycle, back when I was a Green, marching in the streets of Los Angeles during the Democratic National Convention. I was reading Jack London’s The Iron Heel – which, combined with these events, connected the dots for me, and changed my view of American politics forever.

Mighty Links

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What every loyal American should read today:

Frank Rich, “The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us.”

Rod Nordland and Mark Hosenball, “Blackwater Is Soaked.”

Kagro X, “Congress suckered on surveillance. Telco immunity, next?“; Glenn Greenwald, “The Beltway Establishment’s contempt for the rule of law“; and a New York Times editorial, “Spies, Lies and FISA.”

Rosa Brooks, “Too Much Cloak and Swagger.”

The new and improved Tom Friedman takes another tenuous step into Reality World — “Who Will Succeed Al Gore?”

On the other hand, George Will is still stupid after all these years — he complains in “Code of Coercion” that colleges of social work are dominated by liberals determined to promote “social and economic justice” as a response to “the conservative trends of the past three decades.” Even worse, George says, students are required to learn to recognize “oppression and discrimination.” Wow, I’m so … not outraged. This column demonstrates why “conservative social work” is an oxymoron.

For more on why contemporary conservatism and the good of society don’t mix, see Christopher Lee, “Vote Nearing in Battle Over Kids’ Health Care.” See also Mark Trahant, “A subsidy so workers can start ‘winning.'”

Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin, “Untraceable e-mails spread Obama rumor.” This could be subtitled “Debbie Schlussel is the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy.”

This headline belongs in the “Irony Is Dead” department — “Rice Worried by Putin’s Broad Powers.” See also The Carpetbagger.

Something I didn’t know — the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize was Theodore Roosevelt.

Update: After you’ve read Frank Rich’s “Good Germans” column, read this right-wing rebuttal. Rich talks about Americans sitting idly by while our government embarks on a pattern of torture similar to that of the Gestapo. Rich presents several paragraphs of examples, with links.

So what’s the rebuttal? The rightie takes offense at the comparison to Nazis, then says,

I believe that when the history of this war is written, it will be seen that our nation waged it in accordance with some of the highest ethical standards ever observed in a major conflict. Yet Frank Rich paints our government as adopting Nazi tactics, and average Americans as akin to passive supporters of Hitler’s regime. Were it not ever-so-gauche to do so, you might call that unpatriotic.

And that’s it. He doesn’t refute a single fact presented in Rich’s column. He just says that comparing the actions of our government to the Third Reich is unpatriotic.

This is a perfect example of exactly what Rich is talking about, and also what Hannah Arendt was talking about when she referred to “the banality of evil.”

Update 2: After you’ve read today’s Tom Friedman column, you might — if you have a strong stomach — check out what that verbal pestilence known as “Jules Crittenden” says about it. Keep Pepto Bismol handy.

Among other things, Friedman wrote,

Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush each faced a crucible moment. For Mr. Gore, it was winning the popular vote and having the election taken away from him by a Republican-dominated Supreme Court. For Mr. Bush, it was the shocking terrorist attack on 9/11.

To which the pestilence replied,

Friedman ventures deep into myth and legend in his latest, suggesting Gore was deprived of his crown by a Republican Supreme Court, failing to note that objective counts have in fact conceded that, according to the rules that govern our elections, Bush won.

Um, what courts would that be? Is he saying that lower courts somehow, in some mystical manner, affirmed the SCOTUS decision? I dimly remember that the SCOTUS expressly forbade lower courts from using Bush v. Gore as a precedent for anything. Am I forgetting something?

Well, never mind. I misread “counts” for “courts.” I’m sure I’m not the only 50-something who struggles to read on a screen.

But the “counts” is an even bigger laugh. The Supreme Court stopped the counts, and subsequent investigations all pretty much concluded that Gore won.