We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Xrlq has an excellent post on the common rhetorical maneuver of declaring the other side’s argument to be a logical fallacy. This maneuver is just a cheap shot at the other fellow’s emotions designed to shut down debate. And it’s quite effective at that, because the attack is so concise, and formulating the correct response requires a lot of thought and explanation. Now Xrlq has done the thinking and written out the explanation, so the rest of us can benefit from his effort.

Xrlq points out two problems with criticizing an argument as a logical fallacy. The minor point is that it trades unfairly on the different meanings of the word ‘fallacy’. In ordinary usage, it refers to an untrue statement. But in this rhetorical maneuver the speaker is relying on the word’s technical definition within formal logic, which is very different. Even if the listeners understand that the speaker is using ‘fallacy’ in this technical sense, it still has a negative emotional association. The speaker usually understands this, and slip the word in as often as possible which attacking the argument.

Emotional impact aside, the deeper problem with declaring an argument to be a logical fallacy is that it assumes that people can and should think in terms of formal logic. But that’s impossible, as Xrlq explains at some length. The world of formal deductive logic is extremely limited. It’s designed to generate proofs that guarantee the truth of the conclusion, given the truth of the premises. But the real world doesn’t work that way. In the real world, we deal far more with inference and probabilities.

For example, militant gays and their supporters hate the argument that same-sex marriage will lead to the decriminalization and legitimization of other minority sexual practices, such as polygamy. Their favorite attack on that argument is to call it a logical fallacy called the slippery slope.

First, this argument is that it implies a basis in formal logic that doesn’t exist. Within the world of formal symbolic logic, I know of only three true fallacies: denying the antecedent, affirming the consequent, and the fallacy of the undistributed middle. If you look at those three, you’ll get a clear idea of what it means in the formal-logic sense to call something a fallacy. As for the other techniques that are commonly called logical fallacies, such as those listed here, you won’t find them in any books on formal logic. What most people call logical fallacies are really just rhetorical techniques that can easily be abused.

The second problem is that the logical-fallacy attack demands deduction and an extremely high level of certainty where neither is appropriate. The argument that same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy isn’t a guarantee that polygamy can be proven to inevitably occur as a matter of deductive logic. Anything that follows as a matter of deductive logic should be so obvious that no one would waste time discussing it. The SSM-polygamy argument instead calls on the listener to infer that polygamy is significantly more likely given SSM and various other premises that usually go unstated.

So when you’re in a debate, don’t feel the least bit intimidated when someone tells you that your argument is a logical fallacy. See it for the rhetorical cheap shot that it is.  The best response is to politely tell your opponent that he doesn’t understand formal logic, and he should perhaps learn some before basing a criticism on it, but you would prefer to discuss the subject at hand. And it’s a pretty safe inferential bet that your opponent in fact knows nearly nothing about formal logic, because few people who have actually studied the topic would so grossly misuse the phrase ‘logical fallacy’.

Free Amateur Breast Exams

Blogger Alessandra relates a discussion on another blog about this story in which a con man went door to door, pretending to be a doctor offering free breast exams. Some (probably most) of the commenters viciously ridiculed the victims. Alessandra fought back:

What is “stupid?” Are you suggesting they had mental retardation? Have you not heard of the tens of thousands different scams that humans have successfully invented as they pass off as someone or other ? Many work based on psychological manipulation.People’s minds go far beyond their intellectual abilities and this is where psychology comes in, and quite often completely overrides rationality.

People aren’t born with knowledge or the capacity to know everything and to suspect correctly everything, you must be completely snotty to think if someone somewhere hasn’t acquired the same knowledge you have, it is because of a low IQ.

Three cheers for Alessandra.

The Cop Who Shot Himself

I had a similarly disturbing experience on La Shawn Barber’s blog in a discussion of a police officer who accidentally shot himself while lecturing some schoolchildren on gun safety. Most of the commenters had the same attitude that Alessandra found: They viciously ridiculed the man who got hurt. I said that I felt sorry for the guy. He was obviously a very tough cop who was trying to do a public service, and got distracted while in the unfamiliar role of public speaker.
La Shawn replied: “Nervousness, lack of public speaking experience, and unfamiliar surroundings certainly don’t excuse his carelessness.” She didn’t see a distinction between pitying someone in an unfortunate situation and excusing them from the consequences of their actions.”

The cop was careless. For his carelessness he got shot, and his error was immortalized and distributed all over the internet. Isn’t that enough punishment? If not, then how much more does he deserve? If a million people worldwide laugh at him and call him stupid, then will that be enough punishment? Or does it need to be a billion people?

Law School

These discussions remind me of Contracts class in my first year of law school. The professor decided to postpone until the second semester the lectures on the relatively simple law of how contracts are formed and breached. The first semester we spent exclusively on the subject of damages: Assume that there was a contract, and assume that it was breached. How much should the breaching party pay?

That’s a far more difficult question than it first appears to the non-lawyer, and it was very difficult for us first-year law students. We all wanted to figure out who was the bad guy and who was the good guy. If the good guy had breached the contract, then we invented various reasons why he shouldn’t pay much. But if the bad guy had breached the contract, then we wanted him not only to pay damages, but to be punished somehow. In my view, the major goal of the first year of law school should be to beat those impulses out of the students, to grind into their heads the idea that whether someone is a good guy or a bad guy should not determine the extent to which he receives punishment or compensation from the legal system.

But most people don’t go to law school, so most people don’t understand that. Most people, like La Shawn, think in terms of good guys and bad guys, rather than recognizing that the distinction is continuous rather than discrete, and we’re all somewhere in the middle.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

It’s sobering to realize that few people on the Right agree with, or even understand, the basics of Christian morality. I’m no theologian, but at least one basic idea seems awfully simple: Each person is a child of God, meaning that each person is special, morally important, to be treated as an end rather than a means, or however you want to put it. Either people have moral worth simply because they’re human, or people have moral worth only because they have specific traits. I don’t see much middle ground between those two. Either every person counts, or only some people count.

And if only some people count, then we must divide humanity into those who count and those who don’t, as in: the smart vs the stupid, the attractive vs the ugly, the strong vs the weak, our race vs the other races, our country vs the other countries, speakers of our language vs non-speakers, or the noble-born vs the commoners. From a wide perspective, it doesn’t matter how you draw the line. As soon as you accept the idea of distinguishing the morally worthwhile people from the morally worthless people, then your ultimate moral destination will be the same, regardless of the criteria that you adopt. And that moral destination will not be a pretty one.

The big problem with dividing humanity into the good people and the bad people is that it quickly leads to the endless and merciless punishment of the bad people. The connection is not a matter of logic, exactly, but more a matter of human instinct. We are genetically designed to form tribes. That what we do in the wild; it’s what we did for thousands of years before agriculture and recorded history. An essential part of our tribal instinct is to view the people in our tribe as morally important, and the people outside the tribe as morally worthless.An important thread of history is our slow conquest of that tribal instinct. Tribes grew into cities, cities grew into nations, empires, or groups of cities joined by languages. Then the modern religions spanned nations, and bound up large chunks of the globe into gigantic tribes.

The practical effect of these expanding tribe designations was a dramatic reduction in violence. Our tribal instinct allows us to kill anyone outside the tribe, and probably encourages us to do so. But we avoid killing the people in our tribe, and instead compete against them in various non-violent ways. The larger the tribe, the fewer people there are to enslave, torture, or kill, which suppresses natural human cruelty.

It was a huge step forward in the advance of civilization when the modern religions (Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam) declared some form of tribal universality, in the sense that anyone could join the religion. You didn’t need to belong to particular race, live in a particular region, or be a citizen of a particular nation. Each religion was open to everyone.

It didn’t work perfectly. There was plenty of fighting within each religion, and between the religions. The believers didn’t always adhere to their ideals, which is to be expected. The moral status of those outside the religion was always a difficult point. But these religions did a better job than anything that came before of keeping humanity’s darkest instincts under control.

Where the Monsters Come From

This is why the 20th century’s many radical experiments in building non-religious societies failed so miserably. Why was Stalin willing to starve 7 million Ukranians in 1932-1933? Why did Mao starve millions more in the Great Leap Forward? Why did Hitler kill millions of Jews? Why is Mugabe starving millions of Zimbabweans right now?

In each case, I think that it’s because the killers don’t recognize the humanity of their victims. They viewed the victims as slaughtered cattle, just some meat that was in the way of progress. And it’s perfectly human of them to do so. For thousands upon thousands of years people have killed, tortured, raped, enslaved, etc. people from other tribes. The question is not why the Communists and Nazis acted on their instincts and killed so many people; the question is why so many other leaders don’t act on the same instincts. The only possible answer is religion.

I know that that statement makes the atheists squirm, and I sympathize with their discomfort. I’m not advocating religion for its own sake, but for its consequences. You can believe or refuse to believe in God if you like, but I don’t see how any reasonable person can fail to see, as a matter of historical fact, the beneficial consequences of other people’s belief in the modern religions. Maybe there’s a non-religious way to achieve the same results on a large scale, but no one has yet found it.

Of course, mass murder is very different from teasing women who fall for a con man, or from mocking a cop who shoots himself in the leg, or from trying to reduce the law to good guys and bad guys. But that difference is one of degree, not kind. It’s the same instinct, and we all have it. One of the eternal burdens of civilization is perpetual vigilance against expressing the tribal instinct. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it in The Gulag Archipelago:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

President Bush is going to do something about high gas prices. Of course, there’s nothing that he really can do, but he’s going to do it anyway, or at least pretend to.

The Democrats are hoping that this signals Bush’s political weakness. Maybe it’s just pollster-driven political nervousness in an election year. I think that Bush is treating his base like the economic illiterates that they showed themselves to be in the Dubai Ports World fiasco. Maybe all of the above.

The non-political side of this is very simple: Oil is more expensive because more people want to buy it. The Indians and Chinese want to buy more oil than ever before, and they’re willing to pay extra to get it. If you think that the price of gas is too high, then don’t buy it. Somebody on the other side of the world will be happy to buy it instead.

You could even take pride in the fact that by paying high prices for gas you’re ensuring that the Chinese are paying high prices, too, which should slow their economic expansion. Or you could just accept that the law of supply and the law of demand are as unavoidable as the law of gravity.

In case you aren’t sure why the current demonization of the oil companies is pure flatulence, Cox and Forkum explain it perfectly. (Sorry if the image clips the sidebar. CSS and HTML remain largely mysterious to me.)

Update. Conservative pundits are uniformly on the right side of high gas prices:

Ann Coulter savages the Democrats for pretending to be upset about high gas prices, when they’ve always wanted to increase taxes on gasoline for the express purpose of pressuring Americans to use less of it. Her closing sentence:

The Democrats’ only objection to current gas prices is that the federal government’s cut is a mere 18.4 cents a gallon. States like New York get another 44 cents per gallon in taxes. The Democratic brain processes the fact that “big oil companies” get nearly 9 cents a gallon and thinks: WE SHOULD HAVE ALL THAT MONEY!

Meanwhile, Bob Tyrell takes the Republicans to task for acting like Democrats and pretending not to understand that neither the US government nor the oil companies can control the worldwide price of oil. His best paragraph:

The politicians may think the answer is to drag businessmen into investigations, but that is not going to produce oil. It may produce votes for the politicians from the electorate’s economically illiterate but not much else. What is needed is more oil or at least a steady contribution to Boone Pickens’ 85 million barrels. That means opening up areas where we know oil exists, for instance, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It means encouraging the creation of more refineries. We have not built a new refinery in the United States in 30 years. It means encouraging alternative energy sources, the best being nuclear.

The point about not building new refineries may not be as strong as it sounds. It omits the fact that existing refineries have been steadily expanding their refining capacity during that same time period. So maybe the lack of new refineries is simply an economic decision that expansion is cheaper than new construction, or maybe it’s an economic decision partially driven by environmental regulations.

More important than the number of refineries is whether and to what extent our refining capacity has risen during those years—and even that’s something of a muddle: Refining capacity has increased, but not as quickly as our demand for gasoline.

And you could even step back and ask why it’s important that we refine our gasoline domestically. The argument would be: We import lots of other products that are manufactured abroad; why not gasoline? I don’t have any answers today; just questions.

But the good news is that the conservative thinkers and media are all on the correct side of the issue du jour, even if the Republicans aren’t.

Update: Power Line slams the Republicans for unveiling a “Gas Price Relief and Rebate Act of 2006″, which includes authorization for the Federal Trade Commission to “bring enforcement actions against any supplier unlawfully inflating the price of gas.” Nobody knows what it means to unlawfully inflate the price of gas, so this is silly at best, if the FTC just shuffles some paper and does essentially nothing, and destructive at worst, if the FTC takes its witch-hunt directive seriously. John Hinderaker concludes:

There was a time when Republicans knew better than to engage in this kind of stupid degagoguery. If Republicans don’t know any more about economics than Democrats, why, exactly, should we keep voting for them?

Well, there is national defense. But, still.

Clayton Cramer and Eugene Volokh both point to a decision from a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals holding that a student has no first-amendment right to wear a t-shirt critical of homosexuality, even though he wore it in direct response to a school-sponsored event that endorsed, or at least appeared to endorse, homosexuality. See Cramer and Volokh to learn about the case law in this area. My impression is that it’s like most controversial areas of constitutional law, which is that there is no real law, just politics masquerading as law. And that’s extra-obvious in this case, as Judge Reinhardt, who wrote the majority opinion, is well-known for ignoring precedent and simply declaring his personal views to be law, as is the Ninth Circuit generally.

What grabbed my attention came from this part of the majority opinion:

We conclude that Harper’s wearing of his T-shirt “colli[des] with the rights of other students” in the most fundamental way. Tinker, 393 U.S. at 508. Public school students who may be injured by verbal assaults on the basis of a core identifying characteristic such as race, religion, or sexual orientation, have a right to be free from such attacks while on school campuses. (emphasis added)

Sexual orientation is a core identifying characteristic? Judge Reinhardt apparently thinks so, and considers it obvious enough to state without citation or explanation. In doing so, he tells us far more about himself than the law. It reminds me of George Kelly’s personal construct or person-as-scientist theory of personality, in which each person chooses a handful of variables with which to understand the world in general, and other people in particular. Reinhardt’s phrase shows that within his personal reality, sexual orientation looms large. It seems like an awfully small and unstable world.

Start with the phrase ’sexual orientation’. What does it mean? Technically, it could refer to any type of sexual interest, but in practice it means homosexuality and other practices and desires currently deemed politically acceptable. Surely Judge Reinhardt would be perfectly comfortable discriminating against pedophiles, necrophiles, or bestialists. (At least I hope he would. The alternative is frightening to contemplate.) Only the most devout and politically clumsy leftists follow their dogma to its logical conclusion, which is that all sexual practices are fundamentally equivalent, from procreative sex to coprophilia and sexual asphyxiation.

And why discriminate among pleasures? Sexual pleasure is the most pleasure for many people, but not for all. Others prefer non-sexual pleasures, some of which are socially acceptable, and some of which are not. Some people drink, some smoke, some pick their noses in public. Some are committed nudists. Some eat too much and become fat. Some get obnoxious tattoos and piercings. If some people enjoy those things more than sex, then how can we deny them the same rights and protections that the sex-obsessed enjoy?

But internal inconsistency is the minor problem. The much larger problem involves the consequences of actually believing that sexual orientation is one of each person’s core identifying characteristics. If you believe that, then what else must you believe? If our pleasures define us, then what distinguishes humans from animals? Is a human being’s orgasm any more intense than a cow’s? And if not, then why should cows suffer for human pleasure, rather than humans suffering for bovine pleasure?

If you deny that humans are inherently more important than animals, then you must explain why we’re the ones who kill the cows, and not the other way around. The practical answer is raw power: We are capable of killing the cows, and they are not capable of killing us. But making power the sole basis of morality opens up possibilities too dark for the western imagination to fully comprehend.

Mao Zedong said that power comes from the barrel of a gun—and he’s the sort of man who would know. If power defines morality, then who’s right and who’s wrong depends on who holds the gun, and where it points. The man deserves to eat the cow because he’s holding the gun, and the cow deserves to die and be eaten because it’s on the wrong end of the gun. And that works just fine for cows. But one moral idea always leads to another. Eventually we must ask: What happens when one man points the gun at another man?

Here’s a pet theory of mine: A key component of Christianity is the idea that each person is a child of God, with unlimited moral worth. It was a novel idea at the time, wildly at odds with the ancient world. That cornerstone idea silently undergirds most of our moral thinking: What’s wrong with infanticide, or cannibalism, or even slavery? Few people today can articulate a coherent non-circular answer, but the proper answer is that each person is a child of God.

Take that away and we go back to the ancient world. Homo Sapiens don’t naturally think of all people as having equal moral worth. Instead, we think in tribal terms: family, nation, region, class, race, and language. The natural state of humanity is tribalism, where small groups struggle continuously to kill or enslave each other, where a man can be equivalent to a cow—if he’s wearing the shackles rather than holding the whip. Christianity didn’t change human nature; it merely suspended it.

Ideas have consequences. Announce often enough that humans are nothing more than animals, and someone may take you seriously. If a man is no more or less important than a cow or horse, then why not hook him to your plow and make him till your field? Why not butcher him and sell his parts for profit, as the Chinese do with their political opponents? Ask not why the communists are capable of such atrocities; their practices have a long historical pedigree and plenty of intellectual supporters. Ask instead why some of us still consider it to be morally unacceptable. And ask why so many people today cringe at slaughtering political prisoners for profit, but see nothing wrong with abortions for convenience, euthanasia for the infirm and elderly, or a right to suicide.

God is dead, or at least he has no shortage of would-be assassins. Only our inarticulate residual squeamishness holds us back from the Abyss.

I assume that Judge Reinhardt had no grand purpose for announcing that sexual orientation is one of a person’s core identifying characteristics. But he didn’t need to have a grand purpose. You don’t change the morality of whole populations through deduction, with moral premises that lead to moral conclusions. Instead, you change their words and actions, on whatever pretext, and they will then infer from their behavior a belief in corresponding moral principles: “I act this way and say these words, so I must hold these beliefs. And since I hold these beliefs, then I cannot deny the rightness of the actions and words that follow from them.”

The people who think about these subjects often underestimate the ordinary man’s capacity for moral reasoning. It’s true by definition that most people have average intelligence, and it’s true that the details of their daily lives occupy most of their attention. This is why most people don’t keep up with politics, or study history, or learn theology. But morality is different, because it asks the perpetually interesting question that is the essence of moral inquiry: “What should I do?” Every man, woman, and child must ask that question hour by hour, minute by minute. Over time, they figure it out. They infer their words and actions down to principles, then they deduce those principles back out to actions and words—for efficiency’s sake, if nothing else.

The judge says that sexual orientation is a core identifying characteristic. It’s a shocking statement with horrifying implications. But we don’t oppose it by objecting to it. In morality as in politics, you can’t beat something with nothing. If we would sustain Christianity’s centuries-long holiday from human nature, then we need words of our own. The judge was wrong, but do most of us agree on what he should have said that would have been right? How should we think about homosexuality? What are a person’s core identifying characteristics? How should we think about and categorize people, in opposition to the zeitgeist that demands strict non-thinking about a growing list of characteristics?

I don’t know the answers. I don’t know how to preserve the ancient moral base the Christianity has bequeathed to us. But I sure hope that somebody figures it out, because I know exactly where Judge Reinhardt and his ilk will take us.

CNN reports that the Bush administration is getting tough on enforcing immigration laws:

Federal immigration authorities arrested nine people linked to IFCO Systems and rounded up more than 1,000 illegal immigrants in multistate raids, federal law enforcement officials said.

Among those arrested and charged in connection with the employment of immigrants are seven current and former managers and two lower-level employees of the company, said U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby.

Has Bush finally seen the light on illegal immigration? I doubt it. More likely, he hopes to placate the conservative base into staying quiet for a big pro-business immigration bill, which means amnesty that isn’t called amnesty, and no meaningful enforcement after the bill becomes law.

Michelle Malkin has the hard numbers on Bush’s refusal to enforce immigration laws. Arrests and threats of fines dropped to nearly nothing after Bush took office, with a low of 159 workplace arrests and 3 notices of intent to fine nationwide in 2004. On her figures, Bill Clinton did a much better job of enforcing these laws, though still not enough to make much of a difference.

As I argued here, immigration can’t be easily solved while conservatism and big business stay together in their political marriage. Today’s charade of enforcement should insult the intelligence of the conservative base. But given the base’s know-nothing attitude toward the Dubai Ports World deal (of which Malkin was something of a leader), I can understand some cynicism from the business side.

The conservative base has the nation’s long-term best interests at heart, but it doesn’t easily grasp complex business realities. Big business understands those complex realities quite well, but it’s only interested in the short term. Maybe the two can meet somewhere in the middle. To do that, though, conservatives must push themselves mentally to understand the business perspective.

For example, conservatives want the borders closed and the flow of illegal immigrants stopped. But I bet that many businesses cannot operate profitably without those immigrants. So if we close the border, then those businesses will need to close down with it, or move across the border toward the cheap labor. Are we willing to pay that cost?

I’m not saying that we are or aren’t, just that the costs and consequences of closing the border are probably far more complicated than what most conservatives imagine. If we want to come to some accomodation with big business on immigration, then we must see the world as they do. If we can’t, won’t, or otherwise don’t understand their perspective, then today’s clumsy political theater is all we can legitimately expect.

If you listen to the MSM, then you’re probably worried that the Democrats are poised to triumph in November. I just catch little glimpses of these stories, but they seem awfully familiar. A parade of experts explains that various technical factors and trends all favor a big Democrat win. Americans are mad about the war. American hate Bush. Americans now understand the wicked bigotry of Middle America and the horrors of the Bushitler political machine. Or whatever.

Jim Geraghty on NRO has a piece that laughs this off. He points out that the MSM and Democrats have been making these bold predictions over and over for several years now. The failure of each wave of predictions seems to embolden rather than embarrass.

The simple fact is that polls this far in advance of an election mean nothing, because most voters pay very little attention to politics until right before the election. Most people have jobs and families that fill their days, and they take only a few hours a week or two before the election to read about the candidates, watch some political TV, or talk to a trusted friend before deciding how to vote.

If you start with those people in mind, then you can see how the Democrats and MSM delude themselves year after year. The Democrat positions are designed for surface appeal—and they succeed at that. With MSM help, the Democrats are very effective at vague soundbites: Bush lied; people died. Iraq is a quagmire. Culture of corruption. Etc. And those soundbites are very effective on the people who don’t pay much attention—but only for as long as they don’t pay much attention. The Democrats and MSM keep hoping that those people will never really pay attention, and they’ll vote on the basis of bumper-sticker slogans.

But American voters aren’t nearly as stupid as the Democrats and MSM wish they were. It only takes a few minutes’ thought for most Americans to see that the Republicans may not be perfect, but they’re far better than the alternative.

And I think that the bumper-sticker slogans backfire: In presenting childish arguments for their side, the Democrats not only show that they don’t have any serious ideas of their own. They also display their contempt for the voters. I think that many of the voters notice that before election day, and vote accordingly.

There’s a special set of stories in which not only is the story itself well known, but the first sentence or two is particularly memorable. Three come to mind:

“Call me Ishmael,” from Melville’s Moby Dick. This is surely the best-known opening sentence in an English novel, which is strange, considering that it doesn’t convey any distinctive idea. Its popularity is a testament to the power of short sentences.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I think that it’s a profound thought.

“It is a sin to write this,” from Ayn Rand’s short story Anthem. It’s not as well-known of a story as the other two, but that first sentence is short, hits hard, and immediately conveys the story’s sense of paranoia.

Can you think of any others?

Update: I just remembered another, arguably the most famous: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.  That’s not technically the entire first sentence; there’s no period for another hundred words.  It’s surprisingly readable, though, for such a long sentence.

These four words are all unpleasant, but each in its own way:

‘Rack‘ is the correct spelling for “I racked my brain.” It’s a torture metaphor. It implies that you’ve put your brain on a rack and stretched it to force it to reveal its secrets. Not a pretty picture.

‘Wrack‘ is a much rarer word. It’s closely associated with ‘wreck’, and originally involved ships. Today about the only place you’ll see it is in the set phrase ‘wrack and ruin’.

‘Wreak‘ technically only means “to inflict or bring about,” but its subject always involves destruction or something similar. ‘Wreak havoc’ is the most common usage in America, with ‘wreak vengeance’ a likely second. Past tense is ‘wreaked’, not ‘wrought’.

‘Reek‘ doesn’t involve destruction at all. It’s exclusively about foul odors.

Update: I forgot a much more common meaning for ‘wrack’, which appears in ‘wracked with pain’ or ‘a wracking cough’. In this sense, I’ve always spelled it with a ‘w’, but many people leave it off. Somebody here says that it’s wrong with the ‘w’, because that pulls it away from the torture metaphor. Google hits on parallel phrases run about even.

My completely unsupported intuition is that ‘wracked with pain’ doesn’t come from the torture metaphor. If ‘wracked’ in that phrase should be ‘rack’ and refer to torture, then the rest of the phrase is redundant.  Torture already implies pain. The preposition is wrong, too: If you’re talking about torture, then ‘racked with’ is silly because there’s only one thing you can really rack with, and that’s a rack. It’s like using ‘hammer’ as a verb: You can only really hammer with a hammer.

To me, a wracking pain or a wracking cough suggest a full-body spasm that leaves the victim in a fetal position. Maybe that indicates that the sufferer would soon die, so he’s wrecked. Maybe it was a metaphor for a wooden ship being carried sidesways by a current into a rock and wrapping around it, which would be consistent with the nautical origin of ‘wrack’. I don’t know; I’m just guessing. But the image of someone being slowly stretched flat on a rack doesn’t fit with my feel for ‘wracked’ as a sudden, sharp pain that leaves the victim curled up in a helpless ball.

Bob Tyrrell notes in JWR:

Over the weekend it was reported that the Bush administration has been laying plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. On Monday the Washington Post reported that “The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.” The Post knows this because its reporters laid hands on “internal military documents.” So now those documents and the controversy within the military surrounding them are known to the public, the world public.

This is minor compared to the big fuss that the press made about our wiretapping operations, in which they stopped just short of publishing a How-To guide for al-Qaeda on how to evade government eavesdropping.

This got me wondering: What exactly is the difference between 1) a domestic press that eagerly publishes whatever US military secrets it can find, and 2) a foreign country’s spy program?

Entering college in 1988, I vividly remember the unbearable smugness with which we were lectured about the new cardinal virtues of academia: tolerance and diversity.

‘Tolerance’ in their lexicon turned out to mean tolerance of liberalism, no matter how extreme. It did not mean tolerance by liberals of anything they didn’t like. Diversity worked the same way: If you didn’t like their opinions, then you weren’t respecting diversity, and could be punished for that sin. If they didn’t like your opinions, then your opinions were always so extreme and unconscionable that they weren’t protected by the halo of diversity, and you could be punished or ostracized for having such horrible opinions.

It bears noting that very few of the students and professors actually agreed with this not-so-subtle thought-control program. Probably only five to ten percent were really gung-ho about it. But five to ten percent is all you need, if the rest are sheep. And they were. Most professors are content to study and teach in their chosen fields. They don’t want any trouble with politics; they have too much at risk. So they keep their heads down, their mouths closed, and their thoughts to themselves. I don’t blame them. I would do the same if my job, reputation, and career depended on not being smeared by left-wing lunatics.

Vandalism as Free Speech

Dr. Sally Jacobsen, interim director of Women’s Studies at Northern Kentucky University, was upset. Some pro-life students had erected an anti-abortion display on campus consisting of about 400 white crosses to represent aborted fetuses. (That’s about two-and-a-half hours’ worth of abortions nationally.) Dr. Jacobsen didn’t like those crosses. She felt that they were a “slap in the face” to women who might be making “the agonizing and very private decision to have an abortion.”

So she invited some of her students (all female) to help her vandalize the display. The campus newspaper reports that “The group knocked the crosses down and piled them in trashcans around the plaza, and removed the “Cemetery of Innocents” sign.” They did this in broad daylight, apparently convinced that they were exercising their right to free speech.

The pro-life group is pressing charges. The Dean of Students is making appropriate noises about how maybe vandalism isn’t free speech. But don’t hold your breath waiting to find out whether Dr. Jacobsen will suffer any professional repercussions.

The Renegade Librarian

This story really upset me. I’m not sure why. I guess it’s that the harm that people suffer from academic bias is real and specific, not just general poor education. Real people—nice people—go into academia with intellectual curiosity, thinking that they’ll get a fair shake. But they won’t. They may think that they’re safe, because politics doesn’t interest them. So they spend years of their lives training for academic careers, and then it’s all wasted in a matter of days if they express a politically incorrect opinion.

Scott Savage is Head of Reference and Instructional Services at Ohio State University, Mansfield campus. Just two months ago he agreed to server on the university’s First Year Reading Experience Committee. The committee’s task was to select books to be assigned in a required freshman reading course. Other committee members suggested predictably liberal books. Mr. Savage criticized many of their choices as too polarizing, and proposed something more neutral.

His fellow committee members didn’t appreciate the criticism. Some said that the books weren’t polarizing. Others said that they were polarizing—and that was the point. Mr. Savage responded to the latter criticism this way:

In my view it would be good for students who tend not to read to be given the choice of a book that actually interests them. But if we are decided that we want to engage our students in the kind of exchange of ideas on which the “secular” university is founded, then let’s choose something that confronts the accepted wisdom of Ohio State University! Like students and young profs did in the ’60s, man!

He then went on to recommend four very conservative books, one of which is sharply criticial of the movement to normalize homosexuality. He closed with: “I haven’t read all of these, but I would like to, and I am sure they would spark significant discussion on campus.”

We can’t quite tell what happened next, as we only have this cease-and-desist letter from the Alliance Defense Fund. It gives a narrative of events, the original email, and responses further into the discussion. The committee members didn’t get his point about orthodoxy, and they were horrified by the anti-gay book. Mr. Savage dug in his heels and fought back.

The email responses to Mr. Savage bring back memories of my college days. On the one hand, there is no liberal campus orthodoxy, and you’re delusional for thinking so. Associate Professor Hannibal Hamlin wrote to Mr. Savage:

Selecting one book does not imply that all others are neglected or suppressed, so it seems perverse to suggest that there is some active attempt to promote some notional “OSU” orthodoxy, against which you are valiantly struggling. . . . It is no stifling of free speech to point out that an author is a quack, if the author is clearly basing an argument on bigotry rather than actual fact. And while such a book might make for an interesting focus of discussion, this freshman program seems not the place for it, unless we are prepared to spend the time (and give the freshmen the supplementary reading required) to debunk the falsehood.

It only seems like academia is in the iron grip of political conformity. But that’s just a big misunderstanding. Yes, they only assign books by liberals, but that’s just because the liberal books are true, while the conservative books are full of lies and bigotry. There’s no political bias here at all! If the conservatives want their books to be read on campuses, then they should quit spouting such outrageous ideas and come up with more interesting and acceptable ideas, instead of complaining about some imaginary political orthodoxy.

On the other hand, in the next paragraph, and without missing a beat, Hamlin warns Savage that there is an orthodoxy, and an anti-discrimination policy, about which he should be careful:

On the matter of homophobia, I think you should be rather careful, Scott. OSU’s policy on discrimination is not simply a matter of academic orthodoxy, but a matter of human rights.

The real opportunist is Associate Professor of English JF Buckley. I think that he has a very promising career in modern academia, and I mean that in the worst possible way. First, he’s openly gay, which is obviously a big plus. Second, he has good political instincts. He smells an opportunity for advancement, and jumps on it. He wasn’t even on this committee, yet within hours of receiving Savage’s (unpublished) second email, he goes on the attack. In an email, he criticizes the book for about a page, and then goes for the jugular:

As a gay man I have long ago realized that the world is full of homophobic, hate-mongers who, of course, say that they are not. So, I am not shocked, only deeply saddened—and THREATENED–that such mindless folks are on this great campus. I am ending now, with the hope that I have seriously challenged you Scott, and anyone who “thinks” as you purport to do. You have made me fearful and uneasy being a gay man on this campus. I am, in fact, notifying the OSU-M campus, and Ohio State University in general, that I no longer feel safe doing my job. I am being harassed.

You might imagine that an English professor capable of writing phrases such as “I have long ago realized” might want to publish his prose only in the most obscure of academic journals. But Mr. Buckley isn’t a scholar; he’s a politician, which is why he has such a promising future in academia. So he sent that email to all@mansfield.ohio-state.edu. That might have been only all the faculty on the Mansfield campus, but more likely it was everyone with a Mansfield campus email account. In politics, as in war, you must be bold.

Mr. Buckley then joined with another openly gay professor in filing a sexual harassment complaint against Mr. Savage. Scroll on down to the last two pages of the linked document. It appears that neither Mrs. Savage, nor anyone else involved in this affair, has actually read the anti-gay book. This was all based on the Amazon.com summary, and some online columns by the author.

Regardless of how the complaint is officially resolved, I predict that Mr. Savage will soon lose his job, and he will then be unemployable at all but a handful of universities. That’s how liberal tolerance works.

HT: Clayton Cramer

On starting this blog, I had hoped to do a series of posts like this, with each a short essay on how to write well. But someone has already done it, and probably done it better than I would have. It’s aimed at journalists, so it has a lot of points on storytelling in addition to word choice, syntax, punctuation, etc. For anyone who wants to write better, it’s a must-read.

HT: Wince and Nod

Cox and Forkum put up a Mugabe cartoon from a year ago. If you don’t know about Mugabe, he’s a Marxist dictator who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980. He made news a few years ago when he ordered all the country’s white farmers to give their land to his cronies. Most fled; a few stayed behind and were killed. Mugabe was warned that this would lead to mass starvation—not only in Zimbabwe, but in neighboring countries, too.

He seized the land anyway, in the name of anti-colonialism and virulent anti-white racism. Unsurprisingly, his political buddies didn’t know much about farming, and the country’s economy has collapsed. He responded in 2005 in typical Marxist fashion, by throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes as part of Operation Clean Up the Filth. Some people were herded into re-education camps, some were left homeless on the street to starve, and others were dumped in the countryside to starve. About 3 million Zimbabweans have left the country, and about half of those who remain are on the brink of starvation. It got bad enough in 2005 that one of Mugabe’s ministers floated the idea of trying to lure back some of the white farmers whom the government had driven away. Unsurprisingly, few were interested.

That was a year ago. Now things are worse. The starvation continues, and the currency has become nearly worthless. The official inflation rate is 782%, though private sources put it at over 1000%.

The word of the day is ‘controversial’. Properly used, it describes something as being the subject of a dispute, as in: “The committed approved agenda items one and two on unanimous voice votes, but item three was controversial.”

But ‘controversial’ has also become a code word that the MSM uses to describe anything that it hates: Democrats introduce bold proposals, while Republicans introduce controversial proposals. It’s accurate in a grammar-school sense, but completely redundant. If a newscaster is telling you about a proposal, then you can safely assume that it’s controversial in the sense that somebody somewhere in the country disagrees with it. It’s like talking about a violent war or a short midget. Wasting words by stating the obvious is poor usage.

This misuse of ‘controversial’ probably comes from the MSM’s once-awesome ability to define a debate’s legitimate participants. Consider the ubiquitous MSM sentence: “But critics are concerned,” where you can be sure that the critics come from fringe liberal groups like NOW, NARAL, or Greenpeace. In the reporter’s mind, those fringe liberals are respectable people who should be heard, while fringe conservatives are not. And since fringe liberals hate all conservative proposals, every conservative proposal is controversial. Liberal proposals are rarely controversial because they’re mostly opposed by conservatives, who are dangerous ignoramuses who don’t deserve a place in any civilized discussion. I think that’s where it started 20 or 30 years ago, and over the years it lost all ties with its original meaning. Today it’s just a tepid and safe way for journalists to safely describe anything that they don’t like.

I hadn’t realized how deep this twisted usage had become in the minds of journalists until I read this story: Mugabe is angry that international aid agencies are monitoring Zimbabwe’s crops. (Good news: The new crop is almost twice as big as the previous one, which means that it’ll feed nearly half the country.) That’s not surprising news if you know anything about Zimbabwe. What surprised me was this sentence:

“Critics also point to Mugabe’s controversial seizures of white-owned farms for blacks, which analysts say has seen commercial agricultural output plunge more than 60 percent.” (emphasis added)

Could there be anything less controversial than a racist Marxist thug seizing property at gunpoint and plunging millions of people into starvation? Are there two sides to that? If this reporter could go back in time and report on WWII, would he write a story about Hitler’s controversial plan to exterminate the Jews? Is there no idea so evil that a modern journalist won’t implicitly legitimize it by calling it controversial?

Edit: Tweaked the wording on the last sentence.

Some University of Michigan sociologists studied 1733 men, starting at their high-school graduation in 1957 and following them for up to 35 years. They collected and compared all sorts of data, including comparing the prestige of the colleges that the men attended to their income and job prestige later in life.

The result: When they controlled for scholastic achievement and parents’ income, they found no effect from college prestige. The men at the prestigious schools were more successful, but not because they attended more prestigious schools. They were more successful because they were smarter and had wealthier parents.

HT: Joe’s Dartblog

Protestors march the streets again and wave their signs, this time to object to some unspecified legislation, but mostly to object to the rising sentiment towards taking our border security more seriously. Details are all over the blogosphere. Here are some examples.

These protests are far from spontaneous. ANSWER, a Communist front group, was reportedly involved in organizing them, as were various Spanish radio stations. In the first round of protests about a week ago, the marchers unwisely carried Mexican flags. This time around they were advised not to do so. Some did anyway.

Let’s avoid the contents of the immigration debate itself, and instead view it from the outside. Underneath the current shouting, the immigration issue doesn’t follow the usual fault lines and group loyalties of American politics. It moves in a different direction.
Here’s my theory American politics: It always works on a single axis. We’ve always had two major parties, with each party being an endpoint of the big axis or dimension along which American politics is fought. Each party is in fact a bundle of disparate groups, each with its own agenda. Each group determines how close it is to each party, and picks sides accordingly. So the major political axis is an average of all the little issues, and none of the little issues align exactly with the major axis. It’s like a bundle of sticks bound together.

Each group and its corresponding axis is always in motion, and the party struggles to hold them together by persuading each group that the advantage of party unity outweigh the price of compromise. Eventually the forces inside the bundle become too strong, and the bundle breaks open, sending the sticks flying in all directions to find some new axis around which to bundle themselves.

It’s tempting to think that the big issues of politics are timeless, but in fact the axis changes every few decades. Probably the most dramatic was the death of the Whig Party and the birth of the Republican Party in 1856 over the slavery issue. Gold versus silver was the burning issue in the late 1800s, in what was really a debate about how to handle monetary policy in an age of rapid economic growth.

The axis hasn’t moved much in the past few decades. Ever since WWII, the issues have been pretty stable: Communism, hedonistic liberation, and government control of the economy. Two of those three are weakening.

Communism is Dying

I include in Communism all of its little branches ideologies that encourage people to form group identities and hate their neighbors: feminism, racial separatism, class envy, environmentalism, unionism, etc. Communists always need people to hate each other; the particular type of hate doesn’t really matter.

The Cold War is over; there’s no USSR for the conservatives to fight, or for the liberals to surrender to. And Communism’s worldwide failure has pulled the intellectual foundation out from beneath its offshoot ideologies. There’s still plenty of rage burning in the fringes, but none of it has any future. If you went back forty years and asked a Black Panther what the point of all the violence was, he would probably have lots of rhetoric handy about some type of socialist utopia—for them, I think it was a race war—that was just around the corner, if only enough blood could be spilled.

The feminists’ utopia was less well-defined, but something wonderful was going to happen as soon as women were freed from the shackles of maternity, closed the mythical wage gap, claimed control of large swaths of language, won an unrestricted right to abortion, etc. And they largely got everything they wanted, but somehow utopia failed to appear. They should have studied Stalin more closely: Every generation the populace needs a new enemy for your followers to hate. The feminists were too effective: They reached the horizon and didn’t find the Promised Land, leaving their followers to wonder what the point of all their hatred was.

There are still plenty of Communists out there, of course, with many more who adhere to its branch ideologies. And they’re going to cling to their beliefs just as long as they can, which will be for many more years. But only the most obtuse among them can fail to notice that they’ve lost. Their belief is going to die. A hundred years from now there will be only a handful of Communists, if any. They’re like Southerners in the 1850s: They must have known that their way of life was going to end eventually, because the mechanization of the world was going on all around them. But they fought ferociously to the bitter end. So it will be with Communism.

Hedonism

The national move to hedonism is younger than American Communism, and will take longer to die. But it has the same problems: Its roots are gone.

By ‘hedonism’, I mean organized political hedonism—ideological hedonism—not just the individual pursuit of pleasure. In the sixties and seventies, lots of people really thought that they could live lives of unrestricted consequence-free pleasure. This was the ideology of Hugh Hefner and Timothy Leary, the age of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. The younger crowd may not appreciate it, but many of those committed hedonists were quite sincere in their belief that their pleasures wouldn’t hurt anyone. Many thought that hallucinogenic drugs would lead to spiritual enlightenment, and that kids were better off with divorced unmarried parents than unhappy married ones.

Fortunately, ideological hedonism was never particularly well organized, except when it intersected with Communism. Its inherent strength is in its natural appeal to human nature. Most people would like to believe in the virtue of pursing their animalistic pleasures, but their likelihood of doing so was tied directly to their awareness of its consequences. It was easy to advocate divorce for the children back in an age when divorce was rare. Today, the real consequences of divorce are too obvious for anyone to make that argument with a straight face.

So ideological hedonism, like feminism, succeeded too well. The Age of Aquarius did not dawn. Pleasure still has consequences, and we all must live like humans rather than animals. Most people understand that today, though they don’t know what to believe instead of hedonism. The rich and powerful, relatively insulated from the consequences of their pursuit of pleasure, still adhere to their childhood religion.

This elite tenacity on hedonism is most obvious in the same-sex marriage debate, which the Left begins on the premise that each person’s defining characteristic is his preferred method of reaching orgasm. Legislation pending in the California Assembly right now would mandate the rewriting of public-school history along those lines. And there are still many stalwart advocates of drug legalization out there.

The problem with ideological hedonism is that—like Communism—it has no future. Is homosexuality such a great idea that everyone should do it? Should each person pursue his own pharmacological pleasure, regardless of the effects on society? Is promiscuous sex without shame a source of liberating pleasure, or does it leave its practitioners unhappy, and their children miserable? Everyone knows the answers.

The peculiar problem with hedonism is not so much defeating it, but finding something to replace it with. Many people find it difficult to frame any sort of moral argument in non-hedonistic terms. Some have even claimed that there are no moral arguments that don’t boil down to hedonism, that a hedonistic utilitarianism is the only rational morality. The counterpoint and eventual replacement will likely be a revival and modernization of some form of Christianity.

The Wobbling Axis

The Cold War is over. The Sexual Revolution failed. The only big political axis left is the size of government, and that debate will likely go on for the foreseeable future, though it could easily devolve into non-ideological pork-barrel politics.

So what will we fight about in the politics of the American twenty-first century? I think that we can get an idea from the current immigration argument, which has split both parties. The Democrats welcome the prospect of more likely voters, though the influx of cheap labor is bad for the unions.

The big business that largely fund Republicans like illegal immigration for the same reason: More labor supply means cheaper prices for labor. The libertarians are ambivalent; they like freedom, but they also generally respect law and public order.

The conservatives have the serious complaints about illegal immigration: It’s illegal. Leaving laws unenforced undermines our idea of law. Most of the illegals aren’t assimilating, which tears at our national and cultural unity. And now we have security concerns: If thousands of poor Mexicans can easily slip into the country, then surely a few dozen Muslim terrorists, well funded and well trained, can do so too.

So ignore the Communist idiots with their signs, except to note that the lack of assimilation is real, and occurs on a massive scale. Politically, the fight is within the Republican Party, between its donors and its voters.

I’m not saying that immigration will be the next great axis of American politics, or even a significant part of it. But I think that it’s a harbinger of what’s coming. Combine it with the War on Terror and the various Muslim excesses in Europe, and I see an overall theme of national confidence and strength versus pessimism, self-hatred, and isolationism. That’s where we’re headed: Will America protect its interests abroad and maintain a cohesive culture at home, or will we cower before foreign dictators and allow masses of unassimilated immigrants dissolve our culture?
This type of question isn’t new in American history. We’ve been through several of them, from the Louisiana Purchase to Manifest Destiny to the Spanish-American War to WWI to WWII to the Cold War. The history books mercifully forget them, but each assertion of national confidence faced domestic opposition that was at least as bitter and passionate as what we’re seeing today. Here is an account of a filibuster designed to delay our entry into WWI:

A dozen senators who agreed with La Follette’s [filibuster] spoke around the clock until 9:30 on the morning of March 4. When La Follette rose to deliver the concluding remarks, the presiding officer recognized only those who opposed the filibuster. The Wisconsin insurgent erupted with white-hot rage and screamed for recognition. While Democrats swarmed around the furious senator to prevent him from hurling a brass spittoon at the presiding officer, Oregon Senator Harry Lane spotted a pistol under the coat of Kentucky Senator Ollie James. Lane quickly decided that if James reached for the weapon, he would remove from his pocket a heavy steel file and plunge its sharp po