So there it is.  On September 30, the United States government succeeded in assassinating an American citizen living in Yemen.  Anwar al-Awlaki was a moderate Muslim cleric turned radical by US wars in the Middle East.  The US government has subsequently decided that he was a member of Al-Qaeda, despite the doubts of Yemeni officials that he had any contact with the terrorist organization.  In other words, Awlaki was an American targeted for assassination by the government of the United States for his religious expression.  The President of the United States now claims the right to execute American citizens without a trial on the basis of “national security,” which, since the executive has no judicial or legislative oversight in this regard, means whatever the President decides that it means.

Most Americans do not understand the implications of Obama’s action.  They will just say that they “don’t care about Awlaki’s rights,” just like Osama bin Laden before him.  In fact, when Obama informed an audience with the news, they applauded.  The error here is not just a failure of being a person, though there is that.  The failure is understanding that one’s rights are not something that one possesses for oneself.  Somebody might respond that just because Awlaki’s rights were violated, doesn’t mean that my own rights will be.  This is the lemming-like belief that just because those other lemmings fell off the cliff, doesn’t mean I will – I’m a special lemming.

But our rights are not something enjoyed individually, but socially, because they exist only in the manner that the institutions we share are organized.  We have the right to the freedom of speech only because our society does not prevent individuals from speaking, and those who do prevent free speech are penalized (let’s pretend, anyway).  In this way, Awlaki’s rights are our rights, and if he does not have the right not to be killed by the government for whatever reason that it does not have to prove, then any American is subject to the same extrajudicial execution.

Unfortunately, it’s always the case in these historical transformations that people don’t see, in fact applaud, their journey into authoritarian nightmares.  It’s happened to countless societies, and each failed to learn from history by thinking itself to be specially protected by its own virtues.  Marx said that when history repeats itself, it does so “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But when it’s your own country, it doesn’t feel very funny.

I was at a get-together in the last few months where I had a particularly nasty encounter. Because of the presence of an ex-Marine, several of the party-goers felt the need to profess their “love” of the military. I’m not sure that makes any sense, but that’s not the nastiness. The nastiness comes when one such party-goer, let’s call him Bill, starts advocating torture for the purposes of “getting the intel.” After all, if we had had the “intel”, the 9-11 attacks could never have happened. Absurdity, of course. Through all the long debates about torture over the past ten years, interrogators from the military and the intelligence services have both discounted the effectiveness of torture for gathering information from prisoners. Not that this could justify the use of torture – genocide, slavery, cannibalism or rape does not become acceptable when it is proven “effective,” even if for the greater good.

The response of Bill’s friend to Bill’s tirade was, “you can tell Bill’s a bit of a conservative.”

Is he? I find it hard to believe that such sentiments can come to characterize any genuinely political position. The advocacy of torture should not be considered the policy of some political philosophy – the advocacy of torture is evidence of something gone horribly wrong in a human being’s brain, an explicable but yet unfathomable moral degeneracy approaching psychopathy. Whether or not you think torture is permissible is not a sign of where you fall on the political spectrum, it’s a sign of whether or not you are a human being.

At the recent Republican Party presidential candidate debates, the idea that a thirty-year old who “refused” to purchase health insurance should be left to die brought laughter and applause. Again, this is an example of a lack of moral character so complete that one wonders if they are of the same species as homo sapiens. Again, this is not a blogpost about the politics of the Republican Party – hideous politics is a cancer that has metastasized across America’s political landscape. This is not some “liberals versus conservatives” thing.

The whole point is, is that some things just aren’t about politics, but merely about being a person.

Alexander Cockburn has a great piece of commentary on the apparently increasing trend in U.S. politics of ascribing our social woes to conspiracies.  Readers at the Helmet will recall that our understanding of how institutions drive human behavior is central to solving the real social problems of our country and our world.  However, it seems hard going to get people to understand that no particular person or group of people is causing all the problems, but the way that people interact through the social institutions that they inhabit.

Instead, Americans cling to the stories of angels and demons in the White House and Congress who will lead them to the promised land.  The same tendency towards conspiracy leads to the cult of personality that takes over every four years when it comes time to elect the president.  Last time it was Obama, angel to most though demon to some.  And he will probably be turned into some sort of angel-demon for the next election, through the political parties’ media engines of ideology.

This tendency to understand outcomes in terms of human agency seems to be fundamental to the human brain.  But just as nature’s workings are devoid of any intention, so human institutions have their own operations at least partially independent of any person’s will.  Just as we improve our lives through dispensing with the belief that nature has its own will, so we must be jettison the idea that our social problems are the results of sinister men behind the scenes, if we are to solve them.

Because we at Philosophyhelmet have discussed the Haitian disaster before, I thought it appropriate to direct my readers to this comprehensive update from Bill Quigley, courtesy of Counterpunch.

Nudge Nudge Wink Wink, Say No More

In Nudge, the behavioral economist Richard Thaler and political scientist Cass Sunstein describe the various ways that people behave irrationally because of the cognitive biases and the seemingly irrelevant contextual cues that influence our choices.  Their solution is what they call “nudging,” or promoting rational choice without limiting one’s choices, through “choice architecture,” the organization and design of choice presentation.  Since human beings’ choices are influenced by seemingly irrelevant environmental circumstances, Thaler and Sunstein see no harm in organizing those environmental circumstances to nudge people to make the best choice, so long as they still have the option of the less good choice.  In discussing Thaler and Sunstein’s book, I’ve divided my comments into three parts: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Continue reading →

Song to the People of America (with apologies to Shelley, for butchering his meter):

People of America, why work
For the rich who lay you low?
Why weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Why feed and clothe and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat -nay, drink your blood?

Why, People of America, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?

Have you leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is it you buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?

The seed you sow another reaps;
The wealth you find another keeps;
The robes you weave another wears;
The arms you forge another bears.

Sow seed, -but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth, -let no imposter heap;
Weave robes, -let not the idle wear;
Forge arms, in your defense to bear.

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells;
In halls you deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains you wrought? You see
The steel you tempered glance on ye.

With plough and spade and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
America be your sepulchre!

(The original poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Song to the Men of England” can be found here)

There is a frequent misconception that the freedom of the individual implies a lack of duty to others.  Usually this comes in the form of raging against the provision of “welfare,” or pooling private funds into a social insurance fund like Social Security.  Such claims should go further, to demonstrate against payments for policing and public safety, fire control, the paving of roads, etc.  And some, to their credit, take just this tack to its logical conclusion.  That conclusion is, basically, that social requirements, or duties, of me to which I did not explicitly commit are an infringement of my right to freedom.  To understand why this is nonsense, let us first look at the nature of rights.

The most successful definition of a right is in relation to a corresponding duty (this is not universally accepted, I admit).  That is to say, if I have a right, then you have a duty to uphold the content of that right.  For example, my right to the freedom of speech» entails that you have the duty to protect my freedom of speech.  And if you also have that right, then I have the same duty in regards to you.

Thus, if I have any right to freedom» , then you have the duty to protect that freedom.  In a free society, all persons have the right to freedom, and all the rights that are entailed thereby; thus, all persons have the duty to protect one another’s freedom, and all the duties that are entailed thereby.

But – aha! – what is the content of those duties?  Those who reject their social duties claim that those duties implied by rights are those of non-intervention.  That is, that my right to the freedom of speech entails that you have the duty not to prevent my speech – if anybody else does prevent my speech, well, it’s not your problem.  Similarly, you might say that my right to be unharmed means only that you have the duty not to harm me, but not the duty to protect me from violence.

The difficulty with this view is that it separates having rights and duties from actually being able to follow through on them.  If your duty is non-intervention in my enjoyment of a right, then my inability to attain those rights is inconsequential.  We have parliamentary procedure so that everyone may have an equal opportunity to exercise their right of the freedom of speech in an assembly.  If, however, your duty is to non-interference with my right to free speech, then I have only the right to be heard above the shouting of others also trying to be heard in the assembly.  After all, you have no need to see to the realization of my rights as I choose to use them, only not to keep me from speaking.

Under this formulation of right and duty, my claim to my rights becomes counterfactual at best.  I could speak freely, if I can manage to be heard.  I could remain safe, if I can manage to defend myself.  However, if we want our rights to be actually realized, we must accept that we have more thorough duties to fulfill those rights.  Namely, we have the duty not only to not interfere with the pursuit of one’s rights, but the actual positive pursuit of those rights.  We do not merely have the duty not to prevent speech, but to provide equal time for any and all who wish to speak to do so – thus we have parliamentary procedure.  We do not merely have the duty not to cause harm, but the duty to protect one another from violence – thus we have publicly-funded police.

In any case, the centrality of freedom to social organization does not entail the absence of duty.  The question merely becomes what kind of duties do we then have?