We Should Live - Ben Bateman

A Harvard history professor observes on Jewish World Review that life expectancies have fallen recently in Russia and Scotland, mostly due to life-shortening behavior choices. He observes that these people are not poor in any historically meaningful sense. He also acknowledges that a lack of education is not the problem here: The Scots and Russians know full well that excessive smoking, drinking, and eating will shorten their lives.

So why do they do it? Perhaps they don’t realize how long they’ll live, he muses, or perhaps they somehow don’t value future happiness as much as present happiness.

Just as he is within reach of his answer, he turns instead to some a very stale twentieth-century view. They’re just stupid, somehow:

Either way, this can hardly be regarded as intelligent behavior. I would therefore like to suggest a new designation for these parts of the world where people are deliberately opting for ill health. To distinguish such places from the Third World, where people have maladies thrust upon them by nature and by poverty, I propose referring to them collectively as the Thick World — as in thick-headed.

His literal words suggest that the Scots and Russians are ‘thick’ in the sense of being stupid. But he knows that they aren’t of below-average intelligence in any objective sense—and even if they were, he wouldn’t dare say so in public. He means to say something else, but he can’t quite find the words.

This is a case of the dog that didn’t bark, or the elephant in the room. Pick your tired metaphor. What fascinates me in this column is how this obviously very intelligent man steps right up to a profound conclusion, and then turns away at the last minute. He has the brainpower but not the emotional fortitude to draw a conclusion that is quite outside of his usual thinking—and the thinking of his entire culture.

These people don’t want to live.

I don’t mean that they want to commit suicide. They don’t actively want to die. But neither do they actively want to live: The cost of life is pain and foregone pleasure, and these people don’t consider it to be a worthwhile trade. Is it worth giving up cigarettes and junk food to live a little longer? If you’re willing to try to answer the question, then you can’t decide it in the abstract. If you view your life as hopeless and full of pain, then a very pleasant life-shortening cigarette habit might be the logical course of action.

That chain thought simply isn’t possible in our culture, other than in psychiatric or end-of-life situations. We assume that everyone wants to live. Everyone wants to be happy. We might quibble over definitions of ‘life’ or ‘happiness’, but the idea that large numbers of seemingly sane and rational people might not take a keen interest in their own lives or happiness (however defined) doesn’t compute in the Western mind. It violates a premise too deep for most people to identify, let alone examine or change.

This is ironic, as hordes of Western intellectuals spent the entire the twentieth century introducing ideas (or memes, to use the fashionable term) that systematically undermined the assumption that everyone wants to live, and is right to do so. The little assaults are too numerous to list here, and too diverse for me even to draw for you tonight a coherent map of the general categories. But a few that come immediately to mind are abortion, euthanasia, drug legalization, hostility to children, the redefinition of marriage, assaults on religion, moral relativism, scientific materialism, multiculturalism, and assaults on gender roles.

Each of those is a blog post or two in itself, so please don’t take offense that I can’t expound on and explain the items on that list that crinkle your brow in confusion. Each of those is coated in a thick slime of ad hominem attacks, bizarre but unexamined assumptions, and key words cruelly twisted and stretched to the point that they convey only allegiance, not information. So let’s leave those details for a later date.

The point for today is simply that intellect is little help against what the West faces today. People who don’t want to live aren’t stupid. They don’t underestimate their life spans. They don’t suffer from a lack of information or education. They perceive reality quite clearly, and they’re able to think about it logically. But no quantity of reason can convince a man that he ought to want to live. There is no proof based in formal logic that you can give him. There is no scientific evidence to consider. Logic and science are great at telling a man how to get what he wants, but it can’t tell him what he ought to want.

Logic by itself is little help here. What we need today is the ability to think in moral terms—an ability that intellectuals of the last century considered pointless, and even harmful. This ability is used so rarely today that even a history professor from Harvard cannot articulate a very basic moral observation. His lexicon and thinking patterns aren’t practiced at producing those sorts of sentences. So the best he can do to condemn these Scots and Russians is to say that they’re dumb, which he knows is untrue.

What the professor meant to say was: The Scots and Russians, and a great many others in the West, don’t want to live. And that’s bad.

March of this year will mark the second anniversary of the terrorists’ greatest coup to date: the toppling of a European government. The bombs went off on March 11, 2003, three days before a national election. The voters swept the Socialist Workers’ Party into power, ousting the more conservative People’s Party. True to its campaign promise, the new government withdrew its troops from Iraq to appease the terrorists, with the last Spanish soldier leaving on May 21.

Withdrawal and appeasement is precisely what most American Democrats want, so we might reasonably want to study Spain’s example: How did appeasement work for them?

FrontpageMag.com has the story, which should surprise no one. Attacks on Spanish troops in Iraq increased during the six-week withdrawal. Those behind the 3/11/03 attack planted another bomb on a train line in April of 2004, but it was discovered and defused in time. Since then, the Spanish have discovered what was likely a plot to destroy Spain’s two tallest towers, and a plot to destroy the building in which Spain’s highest criminal court sits.

Initially, I’m baffled at how anyone could claim to expect any result from national surrender other than slavery and death. How could it, even in the wildest utopian pipe dreams? By what process does the leftist imagine that a terrorist will pass up the opportunity to demand more from a supine and defenseless victim?

I think that it’s a lack of empathy. Note that empathy, as I use it, is very different from sympathy: Sympathy implies a sense of goodwill or affection. It’s an emotion. Empathy is the intellectual capacity to perceive and understand another person’s emotions and thought processes. This is what the appeasers miss: They don’t understand the terrorist’s worldview.

Everyone, save for a few hard-core insane, must attempt empathy. Each person uses some theory of mind to try to understand others’ thoughts and feelings, and thereby predict their actions. No one does it perfectly. Some have talent; others lack it. Most can improve with practice. But for now the key point is that beliefs can take over a person’s theory of mind, and prevent them from refining it.

An extreme example is the movie Grizzly Man, which came out last summer. Its subject was a disturbed young man who believed that he had a special affinity with grizzly bears, and spent years in the wild, communing with them. He believed that he understood the bears, and so he was confident that they would never harm him. He had a theory about his their minds worked.

He was wrong, of course. While he was lucky to survive his many close encounters with grizzlies, one eventually ate him and his girlfriend in October of 2003. As many people might have told him—and no doubt many tried—his theory about the minds of grizzlies was nothing more than a projection of what he wanted to believe about them. In essence, he was projecting his own mind onto the bears.

The liberal ideology includes some fairly detailed ideas about how human minds work, and this political theory of mind fundamentally handicaps them in thinking about terrorists. Like the grizzly man, they seem to believe that every is essentially just like them. Those who don’t act just like liberals are handicapped; fear, prejudice, and irrational beliefs prevent them from joining the joyous community of liberals. The liberal project, therefore, is to stamp out fear, prejudice, and irrational beliefs wherever they can be found.

If you accept this theory of mind and believe that it applies to terrorists, then surrendering to terrorists makes perfect sense. The terrorists are mired in fear and hatred, so fighting them will only generate more fear and hatred. Only by showing love to those who would kill us can we break the cycle of violence by showing them that we mean them no harm.

The maddening paradox here is that the liberals believe themselves to be sole possessors of Objective Truth, in juxtaposition to the ignorant and benighted, such as religious believers. Yet the liberal theory of mind is itself difficult to distinguish from any religious belief: No amount of contrary evidence can shake the believers’ faith. The fact that it flies in the face of history and experience becomes a point in its favor, as the ability to believe it in spite of contrary facts demonstrates the intensity and purity of the believer’s faith. If you don’t believe that tolerance and a refusal to make judgments are the path to personal and worldwide happiness, then that just shows what a bad person you are.

Nothing as simple as facts and reason can reach them, because their religion declares itself to be a non-religion in which all non-believers are, by definition, irrational and not in possession of the facts. (This is hardly unique among religions.) You can ask when a country has ever been made safe through surrender—except to become slaves. You can ask why they expect that a terrorist, like a grizzly, will not take whatever food is available. You can even show them letters written among terrorists leaders, with sentences such as: “I ask almighty Allah to make our religion victorious and to bless the mujahideen all across the world and to disgrace the infidels, destroy America and its allies soon without any delay.”

You can do all that, but I doubt it’ll accomplish much. Religious beliefs, after all, are designed to stand firm in the face of painful contrary facts. Nothing will move the true believers. A hundred million civilians killed wasn’t enough to change all the Communists. Why should a couple dozen blown to bits shake the faith of this new suicide cult?

But here’s some good news: There are many fence-sitters who are unwilling to drink the kool-aid. Many will watch the bodies pile up and eventually turn away in disgust, suddenly willing to consider that perhaps further displays of tolerance and kindness will not magically transform those who wish to kill us.

So if you find yourself speaking with one of those fence-sitters, with an opportunity to save some remnant of Western Civilization one person at a time, it might be useful to know the details of Spain’s surrender, and what followed.

If you haven’t read this piece by Mark Steyn, then go read it. Right now. It’s long, I know. Ready it anyway.

Then read Lileks commenting on it. It’s not nearly as comprehensive, but has James’s lighter touch.

If you’re too busy or lazy to click the links, then here’s the summary: Europe is dying. A century from now the real estate will still be there, but the cultures will not. Muslims hostile to European culture are immigrating in droves and reproducing much faster than the native population. The problem isn’t a testament to the brilliance and appeal of radical Islam, but rather the natural result of the West’s own refusal to desire its own perpetuation. They aren’t killing us; we’re killing ourselves.

The good news for Americans is that we can watch the Europeans. We can’t save them, and I pray that we will have the sense not to try to do so when a wave of European riots in the not-too-distant future becomes full-scale civil war. American troops could of course beat back back the forces of darkness in Europe and postpone the imposition of Sharia. But I suspect that our brave troops are not trained in how to force young native Europeans to procreate and thereby perpetuate their culture. We can’t force European culture to want to survive.

But we can learn from their example. We can battle multiculturalism at home. We can encourage immigrants to assimilate to our culture. We can have more babies. We can roll back the European socialism that has crept into innumerable nooks and crannies of our law. We can decide that we want our culture to live.

Of course, we can also disagree on the details of what counts as “our culture.” Cultures always change over time, and vary from region to region. But at this level, those differences are relatively minor. The key point is that our culture cannot include elements that lead to its own destruction. Our culture cannot include self-hatred. Our culture cannot declare itself inferior to all other cultures. Our culture cannot refuse to distinguish between live babies and dead babies. Our culture cannot pretend that shattered homes are equivalent to nuclear families. Our culture cannot tolerate the argument from despair, in which the current state of decline justifies further decline, and stands as an insurmountable obstacle against improvement.

In a previous post, I noted that certain contractions are ambiguous because the reader can’t immediately know which verb has been contracted. For example, “he’s” could mean “he is” or “he has.”

The apostrophe-ess on a noun can creat a further ambiguity, in that it could also indicate a possessive. Consider “Mike’s”, which has three possible meanings: “Mike is”, “Mike has”, or the possessive of “Mike”. The context often clarifies the meaning. but not always:
1. Mike’s aggressive. (Mike is aggressive.)
2. Mike’s aggressive tendencies. (Aggressive tendencies owned by Mike.)
3. Mike’s been aggressive. (Mike has been aggressive.)

So be careful in contracting a verb into a noun. It’s more likely to create confusion than contracting a verb into a pronoun.