{"id":237,"date":"2005-12-06T05:34:56","date_gmt":"2005-12-06T10:34:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=237"},"modified":"2005-12-06T07:55:17","modified_gmt":"2005-12-06T12:55:17","slug":"just-desserts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=237","title":{"rendered":"Just desserts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There comes to us from Iraq the news that a terrorist group<br \/>\ncalling itself Sword of Truth has kidnapped four people from a group<br \/>\ncalled Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and has threatened to kill<br \/>\nthem unless some demands for the release of certain terrorists from<br \/>\nIraqi jails are met.  What makes this interesting is that CPT exists<br \/>\nto oppose the U.S. occupation; that is, they are in effect (if not by<br \/>\nintention) allies of the terrorists threatening them.<\/p>\n<p>When I first learned this, my first gut reaction was to think &#8220;Ha!<br \/>\nOff with their heads!&#8221; My second reaction was to feel ashamed of my first<br \/>\nreaction.  How have things come to such a pass that I find myself<br \/>\nrooting for terrorists to kill Westerners?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I had to think about that for a while.  I&#8217;m with the hawk side on<br \/>\nthe Iraq war, but reluctantly; I am all too aware of the long-term<br \/>\nrisks of violence as a method, even when we adopt it under stress of<br \/>\nnecessity and for defensive reasons.  One of the risks is that we may<br \/>\ncome to love violence and embrace it too readily.  Was this happening<br \/>\nto me?<\/p>\n<p>Time for some what-if scenarios and ethical analysis.<\/p>\n<p>There are two features of this mess that make it different<br \/>\nfrom a &#8220;normal&#8221; hostage situation.  One of these is that I consider<br \/>\nthe members of CPT my enemies, because I consider them enemies of my<br \/>\ncivilization and my country.<\/p>\n<p>Note that I did <em>not<\/em> say &#8216;enemies of my government&#8217;.   That they<br \/>\nundoubtedly are, but I&#8217;m not real fond of my government.  I do not in<br \/>\ngeneral feel any desire for its enemies to die, unless they pose a threat<br \/>\nto my civilization and my country.  My country is not its government;  my<br \/>\ncountry is my neighbors, and their neighbors, and everybody who identifies<br \/>\nwith the American vision of freedom.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But&#8230;&#8221; some of you will say, &#8220;peace groups like the CPT aren&#8217;t<br \/>\nyour enemy. Or at least, they don&#8217;t intend to be.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not at all clear to me that groups like the CPT don&#8217;t intend<br \/>\nto be enemies of my country. So much of the soi-disant &#8220;peace&#8221;<br \/>\nmovement is <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8'>run by<br \/>\nunreconstructed Stalinists and Maoists<\/a> that these days I tend to<br \/>\npresume any so-called &#8220;peace activist&#8221; group is just another one of their<br \/>\nfronts. I don&#8217;t think that assumption has yet turned out to be<br \/>\nwrong.<\/p>\n<p>But even if that&#8217;s a wrong assumption in this case, CPT&#8217;s<br \/>\nintentions matter much less to me than their effects.  David Duke, Noam<br \/>\nChomsky, Pat Robertson, and Michael Moore would certainly deny being<br \/>\nenemies of my country, but the effect of their speech and actions is<br \/>\nto suck up to totalitarianisms of all kinds and give aid and comfort<br \/>\nto people like Osama bin Laden who <em>are<\/em> unequivocally enemies of my<br \/>\ncountry.  That makes them the enemy, too.<\/p>\n<p>(Oh, boy, there&#8217;s a fantasy.  David Duke, Noam Chomsky, Pat<br \/>\nRobertson, and Michael Moore chopping each other to pieces with<br \/>\nSword-of-Truth scimitars in a Rabid-Right-vs.-Loony-Left deathmatch.<br \/>\nI wish I could sell tickets.)<\/p>\n<p>This is sufficient to explain why the thought of those four CPT people<br \/>\nbeing executed doesn&#8217;t bother me.  In general, I don&#8217;t mind when my<br \/>\nenemies kill each other.  It saves my friends the trouble &mdash; and,<br \/>\nmore importantly, relieves us of the moral burden of killing.  I suppose<br \/>\nI would consider it a better outcome if the CPT crew killed the terrorists,<br \/>\nwho are on the whole more dangerous; and the best outcome of all would<br \/>\nbe if CPT and the &#8220;Sword of Truth&#8221; gang managed to kill each other.<br \/>\nBut if only the CPT people get whacked, they&#8217;re no loss.<\/p>\n<p>But my gut reaction was stronger than that.  The thought that these CPT<br \/>\npeople might die didn&#8217;t just leave me indifferent, it filled me with<br \/>\nsatisfaction. I had to meditate for a while to understand why.  I did<br \/>\nfinally get it.<\/p>\n<p>I like it when villains or dangerous idiots are killed by their own folly.<br \/>\nThat seems just to me.  More importantly, it&#8217;s how other people learn not<br \/>\nto be that way.  It&#8217;s evolution in action; it improves the meme pool,<br \/>\nor the gene pool, or both.<\/p>\n<p>This is actually one of my gut reasons for favoring drug legalization,<br \/>\nthough I&#8217;d never thought it through quite so far before.  I don&#8217;t think we<br \/>\nhave enough selective pressures against idiocy any more; I&#8217;d like<br \/>\nidiots to have more chances to kill themselves, ideally before they get<br \/>\nold enough to vote or reproduce.  Not because I relish their deaths,<br \/>\nbut because I want to live in a future with fewer idiots in it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>(By the way, I&#8217;m using &#8220;idiot&#8221; in its original sense here.  To the<br \/>\nancient Greeks, an &#8220;idiot&#8221; was a person too closed in on himself to be<br \/>\na net plus to his neighbors and his society.  Distinctions beetween<br \/>\nmental impairments, communicative defects like deaf-muteness, or<br \/>\ninsanity were not clear and not considered important; the important<br \/>\nquestion was whether the &#8216;idiotes&#8217; (private person) was capable of<br \/>\ndischarging the responsibilities of a citizen in the agora.)<\/p>\n<p>If the CPT people aren&#8217;t villains, they&#8217;re idiots.  Idiocy is the<br \/>\nleast it takes to ally yourself with terrorists against Western<br \/>\ncivilization. &mdash; not because the West is the fount of all virtue,<br \/>\nbut because, whatever the West&#8217;s flaws, Islamofascism is incomparably<br \/>\nworse.  The death of those four CPT people would at least diminish by<br \/>\nfour the number of dangerous idiots in the world; therefore, it&#8217;s a<br \/>\ngood thing.<\/p>\n<p>I checked this line of thinking by asking myself how my evaluation<br \/>\nwould change if drug intervention (say) could make idiots into<br \/>\nnon-idiots.  In that case it would still be a good outcome for<br \/>\nvillains to off themselves, but there wouldn&#8217;t actually be any point<br \/>\nin selecting against idiocy.  Idiocy would become like<br \/>\nnearsightedness, a defect too easily correctable to bother being<br \/>\neugenic about.<\/p>\n<p>I felt much better once I thought all this through.  I don&#8217;t want<br \/>\nto become the kind of person who takes joy in the death of other<br \/>\npeople; but if rooting for a future with fewer idiots in it is wrong,<br \/>\nI don&#8217;t want to be right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There comes to us from Iraq the news that a terrorist group calling itself Sword of Truth has kidnapped four people from a group called Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and has threatened to kill them unless some demands for the release of certain terrorists from Iraqi jails are met. What makes this interesting is that&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=237\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Just desserts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-terror","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}