Monday, December 22, 2014

Let's Fathom Pseudocracy

       
They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.
Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but the governments
Of the great nations; men favorably

Representative of massed humanity. Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.


Robinson Jeffers 1939

             

In a recent post at "The Dish" Dr. Andrew Sullivan took apart the response of former Vice President Richard B. Cheney to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture.  Please do not be put off by its title.  "The Depravity of Dick Cheney" portends about as much new information as "The Insanity of Charles Manson" or "The Fecklessness of Barack Obama" would.  I argue below that Dr. Sullivan's post interests me most by what Dr. Sullivan misunderstands or at least misstates.
               
Consider how Dr. Sullivan begins:

Perhaps the only saving grace of this sociopath formerly in high office is that he understands that his legacy could well be as a war criminal unlike any in American history before him. That’s my only explanation for why he has to be out there day after day, year after year, attacking his successor, lambasting America’s return to civilization, and insisting that hanging people from shackles, freezing them to near-death, near-drowning them so that their abdomens are distended with water, anally raping them, breaking their limbs, and keeping them awake so long they hallucinated … is not somehow torture. Ask yourself: have you ever met someone who believes that? Outside the professional criminal classes, that is.
             
Any reasonable or disinterested observer must assess Mr. Cheney as a crackpot, so Dr. Sullivan's first paragraph may seem unexceptionable.  For exactly that reason I take exception to Dr. Sullivan's opening.  Mr. Cheney need not be worrying about his legacy or how history will remember him.
  • First, the obliviousness of Americans to history is the legacy of our mass mediated polity. Most Americans will not pick Cheney's name out of the possibilities on "Jeopardy" five years after Mr. Cheney dies.  That, of course, would not matter to Mr. Cheney, who is indifferent to what most Americans think [and do not know].  The lake in "Deliverance" does not cover [up] as well as our mass media cover [up].  Vice President Cheney knows that.  It follows that he is not worried.
  •  Second, educated, mindful minorities of Americans consist of many partisans and ideologues who will believe what their dogmas and past actions demand.  What supporters of Mr. Cheney or former President Bush [43] must believe or what they long to believe to rationalize their support of indefensible decisions, they will believe.  They, too, will cover [up] for Mr. Cheney's crimes or sins; some even will praise criminal, sinful, and psychopathic/sociopathic acts and statements as patriotism, these days among the first refuges of scoundrels.  Vice President Cheney knows that.  It follows that he is not worried but confident.
  • Third, Mr. Cheney operates like most modern U. S. politicians -- by means of short cons. Why would a savvy operator deploy some long con when he knows my first and second points above?  Denial almost always suffices until obliviousness [point one supra] and hive-mind [point two supra] kick in. Mr. Cheney, it seems obvious to me, is temporizing until political amnesia and political loyalties conduct him to the Grim Reaper.  While Mr. Cheney had better discount the theological beliefs many of his evangelical supporters lest Mr. Cheney's "longer run" include a hotfoot, Vice President Cheney is not worried here and now.
  • Fourth, Mr. Cheney knows that other reports and issues will supplant the torture report soon enough. Even if forgetting what you prefer to forget [point one], denying what you prefer to ignore [point two], and stonewalling a short con [point three] did not work as well as they will, MSNBC and Fox News will give the torture report up once the Main Stream Media start blathering on other topics.
                             
I do not quite endorse Dr. Sullivan's claim that the following was most revealing or most telling of Mr. Cheney, but I agree that the quotations below are stunning:
             
I’ll tell you what my definition of torture is: what nineteen guys armed with airline tickets and boxcutters did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11.
Torture is what the al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11.
     
Vice President Cheney knows that he is misusing "torture" and knows he will get away with it.  Even the dull normal American smells this red herring.
             
I agree with Sullivan's assessments in the following passage:
What I take from these statements is that the torture program was, for Cheney, partly an amateur thug’s idea of how you get intelligence, but partly also simply a means of revenge. Yes: revenge. This was a torture program set up in order to vent rage and inflict revenge. It was torture designed to be as brutal to terror suspects as 19 men on 9/11 were to Americans. Tit-for-tat. Our torture in return for their torture; their innocent victims in return for ours. It was a program that has no place in a civilized society.
         
And I agree with Dr. Sullivan's quotation of yet another irrational howler from the former Vice President:
The problem I have is with all the folks we did release who ended up on the battlefield … I have no problem [with torturing innocent people] as long as we achieved our objective.
These two sentences mislead the unwary who believe that many released prisoners returned to the battlefield, but they permit Vice President Cheney to live down to his crackpot identity.
    
I disagree when Dr. Sullivan then intones, "It doesn’t get any clearer than that. The man is a sociopath. He is a disgrace to his country. And he needs to be brought to justice."  If Mr. Cheney sincerely believed any of the quoted language, he might thereby mark himself a sociopath or a disgrace.  But I invoke anew a premise I introduced above.  Vice President Cheney is a political operator whose experience spans at least four decades!  Why would two fellows with advanced degrees in political science [Dr. Sullivan and Dr. Haltom] take the former vice president to mean anything he says?
                   

I prefer to explain politicos by what news media and discourse will permit them to get away with. Moral cretins created a poster of a man falling from one of the towers on 9/11:
         


If I must detail the willed stupidity, obtuseness, and vacuousness of this caption, please read someone else's blog.  I do not concern myself about those incapable of learning or thinking.
   
Still, if Mr. Cheney is sociopathic, so are our media and our citizenry, many of whom would find the irrationality of the poster above no disgrace.  Some of our colleagues might find the poster "affective learning," if they could overcome their tendency to locate depravity solely in opponents or enemies.

The foregoing strongly suggests but does not prove that Richard Bruce Cheney, instead of going to graduate school in political science, ought to have pursued aan advanced degree in ethics.  [See the immediately previous posting -- 13 December 2014.]

The foregoing does require us to edit "The Soul's Desert" by Robinson Jeffers.



      
They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.
Beware of taking sides; only watch.
These are criminals, hucksters, and little journalists, governors
Of nations great in might but weak in right; men
Representative of mass murderers. Observe them. Wrath and laughter
Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time
To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert
And look for God--having seen man.


           
                    

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Recalling Haltom's Third Law: No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any

"No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any" = Those who speak loudly about ethics soon fail of ethical scruples.

Longstanding reader(s) will vaguely recall Haltom's Laws. Some reader might even recall Haltom's Third Law :  "No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any."  I seize my keyboard today to rehearse what I mean to claim with my hopelessly overstated "law."
 
I phrased Haltom's Third Law in graduate school when I discovered how many proponents of moral or ethical theorizing failed miserably of what ordinary people deemed decency.  I did not yet suspect that I was at once over-generalizing and under-generalizing.  I was over-generalizing because I soon ran into moralists and ethicists who earnestly behaved as scrupulously as they could as often as they could even when it cost them dearly.  I was under-generalizing because academics as a class are disposed to pose as people of probity and honor while engaging "backstage" in perfidies and perversities.

I should rephrase my third law as a tendency or as a probabilistic statement, but then my law would lose impact.  In keeping with our regnant pseudocracy, then, I leave my third law misphrased.

I recently experienced anew the shock that led to my third law.  A sententious, moralizing, pedantic, empty-headed ideologue, given to stylish causes and silly pronouncements delivered with practiced sincerity and projected seriousness, disgraced herself in front of colleagues.  Her fall from grace would disgust if undertaken from cynicism.  However, she has neither the wit nor the intellect to be a cynic. She strikes me rather as a failed Machiavellian.  She is perfectly willing to repeat any blather that aligns her with fashionably left [sic] positions.  [This is the University of Puget Clowns -- thanks, President PieRce -- so the fashions are decades out of date.]  She wants to pursue her political ends but lacks the cunning to pull it off.  So, like a demented Prince[ss] taking advice from an erstwhile bureaucrat, she inflicts pain without achieving any victory.  She dishonors herself and others without achievement or advance.

This professed moralist and would-be Machiavellian attempted a McCarthy-like attack on a blameless person who was not present or even aware of her defamation.  At that moment I knew she was a living embodiment of my stereotype of the academic ethicist:  someone who preaches what she or he cannot practice when her or his interests intrude.

Note that this does not make the professional scold a hypocrite.  When we speak strictly and adhere to denotations once expected of users of English, the moralizer and would-be Machiavellian may believe in the scruples and strictures she invokes.  The hypocrite conjures principles in which he or she does not believe.  Since each of us routinely fails of standards we endorse, we are all hypocrites if we surrender to the modern abuse of "hypocrisy."  The moralizing Princess Machiavelli believes in the principles she blares;  she is no hypocrite.  Indeed, she believes so deeply in some of her ethical precepts that she is willing to lose possession of herself in pursuit of those precepts.

From all of the above, I reiterate that those who speak loudly and often about ethics will soon and solidly betray those ethics in pursuit of whatever ethics they feel most imperiled.  Almost anyone who professes "ethics" will over-pursue some ethical end and thereby violate other ethical ends resoundingly.  I do not know if this law is as true of those trained in ethics within Philosophy as it is of those who claim to have been schooled in another discipline.  One of the earliest malefactors from whom I generalized my third law was trained in Philosophy, so Philosophy itself is no prophylactic. However, many disciplines acquire normatively inclined practitioners who profess to be ethicists but are instead polemicists using ethics as a mask.

Still, to keep matters simple, presume that "No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any."
      

Friday, December 12, 2014

"Enhanced Interrogation Technique(s)" Spins Torture



Andrew Sullivan collected some tweets and other contributions that cut through the blather:
         
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/12/11/an-orwellian-acronym/