The Not-So Candid Friend

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that I am currently reading Michael Walzer's 'Just and Unjust Wars'. It was in part originally prompted by Walzer's desire to give a systematic account of the moral considerations which grounded his, and others', objections to the war in Vietnam. Walzer also supported the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, and, with some caveats, the bombing of Lebanese infrastructure, last summer. Although I haven't read the TNR article he wrote at the time - it's paywalled - I understand that, in part, his defence rested on a distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello (see here and here for a criticism and response in last winter's Dissent). His position seems to have been that whilst some Israeli acts were war crimes, the war itself was just. Whilst he does in general affirm the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello in 'Just and Unjust Wars', I think it is worth recalling exactly what Walzer said about that distinction in the context of the war in Vietnam, and counter-insurgency campaigns in general. Although the parallel is not exact - Hizbullah was by no means solely conducting a guerrilla campaign against an Israeli invasion, and a significant part of Walzer's point is that the guerrillas are now the legitimate political authority, which means that making war on them is an act of aggression, a claim and entailment we would rightly hesitate to make about Hizbullah - I think it is nonetheless instructive.

In the theory of war, as we have seen, considerations of jus ad bellum and jus in bello are logically independent... But [once the guerrilla movement has won very substanial popular support] they come together. The war cannot be won, and it should not be won. It cannot be won, because the only available strategy involves a war against cvilians; and it should not be won, because the degree of civilian support that rules out alternative strategies also makes the guerrillas the legitimate rulers of the country... The position of the anti-guerrilla forces has become doubly untenable.

Even if the Israeli position was only singly untenable - because attacking Hizbullah was not, as such, an act of aggression, since Hizbullah were not the legitimate political authority - it was still untenable on this account, since Walzer's position is clearly that fighting a force which shelters amongst, and cannot be isolated from, because of their support for it, civilians will mean doing things that any justified rules of war will rule out. If ought implies can, and can has normative weight in the sense Walzer uses it in the above passage, then a war that cannot be fought should not be fought. Maybe Walzer would, because the campaign in Southern Lebanon had ostensibly more limited aims than the one in Vietnam - initially to return the kidnapped Israeli soldiers, and then to remove Hizbullah's capacity to launch rocket attacks into Israel - draw a distinction between the measures necessary to fight the kind of war being fought in Vietnam and that being fought in Lebanaon. This look spurious to me, though, because only the second of those ostensible aims justifies the extent of the Israeli incursion, and it is one which is functionally identical to the American aim in Vietnam; to destroy a guerrilla movement, since Israeli security against rocket attacks from a hostile Hizbullah could only ever be guaranteed by destroying it as an organisation. I made this point at the time, but it looks like Walzer as a matter of consistency ought to endorse it: sometimes the omelette could just never be worth the eggs.

Pissup, Brewery...

I suppose this is entirely predictable, really, and so Brown'll get his coronation full-blown, rather than ill-disguised. How hard though, could it have been to find 45 Labour MPs prepared to nominate at least one or the other of Meacher and McDonnell, and thus at least give the membership a chance to voice its dissatisfaction with the current direction of the Party? You'd have thought that 10 years of government would have created enough people with no real hope of advance off of the backbenches. Either way, I've been saying for a while now that I was going to vote for McDonnell - Meacher seemed to have gone off the reservation a bit after getting sacked - and then leave the Party, so I suppose I ought to just leave now.

Get An Electrician

There's a Massive Attack song on Protection, Better Things, sung by Tracey Thorn. It's a kind of lament for a lover who is trying to ease their way out, simultaneously bitter and resigned, scathing about the explanations meant to soften the blow and knowing that it can be scathing because the chances are that there's nothing to be salvaged. Reading odds and ends of the Observer's attempt at a summary of the Blair years from the weekend before last, I was reminded of it. Jamie had it about right the day beforehand, when the Grauniad ran teasers:

Ten years in office, 54 criminal justice bills, 3000 new offenses and one CCTV camera for every four people in the country and you’re left with a sensation of permanent crisis... Endless institutional tinkering doesn’t convince people that things are improving. It convinces them that institutions are irrevocably broken.

Tracey Thorn is obviously much more dignified than New Labour, but there's the same sense of desperation. What makes her more dignified is that she doesn't try and hide it. When she sings

You say the spark's gone
Well, get an electrician

everyone, including her, knows it's pointless: this is, after all, not the sort of spark that can be provided by an electrician. That gives it pathos. The general hyperactivity of New Labour's attempts at media management is a desperation that cannot admit it is desperate, a conviction that the public's impression of the government must constantly be massaged which must always deny that any massaging is going on. It therefore lacks the pathos, and so the dignity, not that pathos is top of the list of qualities that are generally looked for in governments anyway. Blair himself may, I concede, have some pathos - the sincerity is so pleading, so brittle-seeming, that it could hardly not be aware of itself - but it is hardly the basis of dignity. This is because, even if it did have pathos, the new Labour approach to its electorate would still be infantilising, since it refuses to believe that, left to witness the results for themselves, the British public can be trusted to credit the achievements of the government. Amongst other things, that's profoundly anti-democratic, since what kind of right to rule themselves could realistically be attributed to people who cannot be trusted to trouble themselves acquire even basic information about the governance of their country when presented with the truth by their government.

The feature that will surely in the end, if it doesn't already, more worry the current government's successors, whoever they are, though, is how counter-productive it is. Of course there are doubtless other causes at work, but one of the causes of the total disbelief with which most government claims seem to be met is surely the awareness that the government does not think that its citizens can always be trusted with the truth. Even more than that, because the government's distrust seems to be quite general, not tied to any particular interest, there doesn't need to be any specific evidence of witholding of the truth for it to be reasonable to think that dissembling is going on, and even more than that, by irritating people, the infantilising makes them much less likely to be reasonable in the first place.

The other way in which it is counter-productive, for a left-wing government at least, is the way in which it totally fails to shift the terms of the discourse. I suppose in New Labour's case that may attribute to it a desire to shift the terms of the discourse which it never really had, but at least for many of those who supported New Labour it must be a disappointment. By focusing on managing the media, on massaging public opinion, New Labour left itself at the mercy of a news agenda dominated by basically Tory newspapers. Because of that, it was never really able to make an attempt to really roll back the ideological damage of eighteen years of Tory rule. Alright, Cameron has pledged to fund public services at the same levels as the current government, but those services are not funded significantly more fairly than they were ten years ago. The social democratic case has not been made, and that's partly because New Labour's belief in the infantilism of the electorate meant it did not think it would stand for it, which, in 1997 at least, was probably unjustified.

The broader point here, obviously, is that how you communicate with other people, the respect with which you treat them, the assumptions you make about how they process information, about their prior beliefs. If you want an open, constructive debate, a discourse where things are genuinely learnt, minds genuinely changed, treat people with respect, read their contributions charitably, be open to the thought that you are wrong. That isn't always easy - misunderstandings occur, tempers flare, and things are said or written which might not be if tongues were bitten, all of which I have been guilty of - but just because a goal isn't always met, it doesn't mean it should not be one, though. Where we have done something wrong, been too quick or too uncharitable, we should make amends, or at least stop flailing about, hoping to hit something in the end. If you're not prepared to do that, then you're probably not looking for the things that doing it would help secure. When that happens, at least one person in the conversation is likely to be asking for an electrician when there's really not much point. At least Tracey Thorn did it with dignity.

If Only It Really Were Like Shooting Fish In A Barrel

I really hate John Reid. I can't think of anything he has done which hasn't been populist in the worst possible way. He seems to have made a career of pandering to ridiculous, often outright fascist, and almost always racist, tabloid-generated moral panics, if he hasn't been generating them himself. Anyway, you can ask him questions online here. Treat him with the respect he treats you; none at all.

Of All Plagues, Good Heaven, Thy Wrath Can Send, Save, Save, Oh Save Me From The Candid Friend!

Nick Cohen in the New Statesman on Julian Baggini's 'Welcome to Everytown: A Journey Into The English Mind' (via):

Baggini's background and philosophical training gave him the intellectual honesty to be as critical of the biases he and his friends shared as he was of the biases of others. Even before he went to Rotherham, he was wary of the thoughtless anti- patriotism that lay behind David Hare's cry that "most of us look with longing to the republican countries across the Channel. We associate Englishness with everything that is most backward in this country."

Baggini told me he had noticed that when his friends went overseas "they always found something to delight in. They would tell me how wonderful it was to share a glass of wine with the old boys in a rural French bar, and not realise that if those old boys were speaking English they would probably be saying, 'That Jean-Marie Le Pen, he's got the right idea.'"

Cohen seems to take this to justify precisely that attitude. He approvingly quotes Baggini saying that:

[t]he new Labour slogan "you can't have rights without responsibilities" was the view of the English mainstream... "It's an illiberal thought," he told me. "Liberals believe that you have rights on the basis of your membership of the human race. But most of the English aren't liberal. They believe that you only have rights if you are a fully paid-up member of this society. That's why they will be very illiberal about 'Muslim preachers of hate' and say, 'We don't care about their rights. What about ours?'"

Well, the New Labour interpretation of 'you can't have rights without responsibilities' is illiberal, but more properly, the claim makes not an illiberal, but a conceptual, point, since obviously, if has a right, then someone else must have a duty, which could easily be parsed as a responsibility, to uphold that right. A right no-one had a duty to uphold would not be a right. What the New Labour interpretation of the rights-responsibilities claim demands is that rights be constrained by some inchoate, rather conservative and authoritarian idea of the social good: you may have the right to wander the streets freely, but only so long as you don't loiter in such a way as to cause morally upstanding members of the community distress. Norms of public interaction are to be structured by those with access to traditional forms of authority, and so in such a way that is generally to the detriment of those who lack that access. There are two mistakes: first, assuming that a change in norms of social interaction is automatically a breakdown in such norms, and second, that no-one has a right to do wrong - think here of whether there is a right to adultery.

The apparent inability of a professional philosopher to make the relatively simple distinction what it would be preferable for people to do, and what they are required to do, aside, the point here is that it would be reasonable to paraphrase the attachment to the particularities of place as 'That Jean-Marie Le Pen, he's got the right idea.' It is the demand that others are not Other, that they conform, assimilate, and that is profoundly illiberal. Now, maybe there's something to be said for that position, but however satisfying it may be for Cohen and perhaps Baggini, an accusation of hypocrisy directed at those who dislike it some but not all of the time is at best an ad hominem attack on some of those who reject it some of the time and not a point in its favour. The inconsistency it apparently brings to our attention does not even force anyone to affirm the kinds of attitudes Cohen seems to be praising, since when it is shown that attitudes x and y are inconsistent, there are always two possible steps: to give up x, or to give up y. Personally, I think that the Boules-playing stereotypes invoked by Cohen describe people, in this respect, just as bad as the inhabitants of Rotherham, if in an otherwise far more pleasant setting, and any other members of the 'liberal intelligentsia' who find Englishness unpalatable can do the same.

Exactly what Cohen thinks he is up to here I'm not really sure. Presumably it is part of his 'look how everyone who doesn't think that Islamic fundamentalism now is analogous to Nazism in 1939 has betrayed the ideals of the left' shtick, but a) it fails to hit its target, for the reasons I've given, and b) invokes normative principles which are themselves in stark contrast to the internationalism of the left. If the others need to stop being Other in order to qualify for full moral status, why the hell would we treat them decently elsewhere? Why in particular, would we bother sacrificing our blood and treasure to bring them democracy? I suppose it is typical of the candid friend to be sneering and patronising, even when their candour is quite misplaced, and so we might forgive that, but when they saw at the branch on which they sit...?

A Saucer Of Milk, Please

Here, the claim that

Science is of far greater use than philosophy, unless of course you’re looking to party through 4 years of college - only then does philosophy have a legitimate purpose.

Of course, if one were to engage in ad hominem reasoning, one might wonder what arcane knowledge it is that philosophers acquire that leads them, in the writer's opinion, to gain a reputation for partying, whereas computer scientists, more or less universally, have a reputation for generally being amongst the dullest people in the world. Relatedly, although more to the point, we might ask to what end science and philosophy, respectively, might be useful, and how we might judge the character of that end, as well as their efficacy at achieving it.

Further, even if we were to establish that philosophy is less useful than science, we might wonder how that would legitimate the judgment that it is of no use, unless you want to 'party through 4 years of college'. However, one might have to know that the conclusion 'x is of no use, unless you want to party through 4 years of college' does not follow from the premise 'y is of greater use than x' in order to wonder that, and that might require exposure to philosophy, which, ex hypothesi, is of no use at all, unless, of course, you want to party through 4 years of college. We might also want to note that the claim(s) that this claim is offered in support of is a distinctively philosophical claim, that

There is a clear line of demarcation between machine learning and artificial intelligence...
[t]he question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim...

Conceptual distinctions between learning and the property of having a mind? Claims about what it is interesting, presumably in a prescriptive sense, to study? The normative questions are, it would seem, inescapable, but if you haven't partied your way through four years, or in my case, a third of three years and then most of another two, of college, I guess that just wouldn't occur to you. Finally, note that those years of partying seem to have given me a sense of propriety - I wouldn't dream of saying that struggling and failing to teach computers to be able to sort text by crude semantic content was a worthless enterprise.

You Know, If Egoism Means I Do What I Prefer To Do, It's Vacuously True

Repeat slowly after me: game theory does not have to come with a set of claims about human nature attached, since it calculates strategies for interacting with other players once preferences and outcomes are held fixed, which means that you have to have some other claims about the preferences people have, the structure of institutions the players are interacting in and the pay-offs attached to the relevant outcomes within those institutions. Therefore, game theory cannot, by itself, show anything about the world: it depends on judgments about people's preferences, the institutions they are working within and the pay-offs that those institutions assign to outcomes - as well as, of course, the claim that people will or ought to rationally utility maximize - in order to have any predictive or normative power. Therefore, if Adam Curtis thinks that game theory by itself could legitimise the view that social systems are best organised by self-interest's invisible hand, he is mistaken, since what's doing the work there is the view that humans have self-interested preferences and that our interactions are such that they go better when we act self-interestedly, none of which bears any relationship to the claim that we can model strategies for interaction within institutions once we know people's preferences and the pay-off structure they face. I stopped watching after about twenty minutes of talking over the television.

Is It Because I Is Black, Or, An Orientialism Of The Past?

First, apologies for the appalling post title. Hopefully, the temptation to make jokes which are both bad and in bad taste will be explained and even vindicated by the actual content of the post. Probably, though, this will remain just a hope.

More substantively, I went to see an excellent presentation on early twentieth century British liberalism, and particularly Hobhouse - about whom I know basically nothing apart from what I learnt from the presentation - yesterday. Part of the point of the presentation was to suggest that the approach which Hobhouse and other so-called 'New Liberals' took to issues of disagreement are potentially fruitful resources for contemporary liberals to draw on in thinking about how to deal with disagreement now. One of the questions suggested that this was a mistake because the context in which the disagreement which Hobhouse et al. were concerned with was quite different, in particular that it didn't involve widespread, visible, ethnic difference.

I'm not sure the British Edwardian society was actually any more internally cohesive - party politics was conducted on significantly religious lines, with the temperance movement an integral part of one political party's appeal, and that's without even mentioning the Irish problem - or any less worried about immigrants - I understand that contemporary debates about asylum seekers are not very dissimilar to early twentieth century ones about Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe - than we seem to be, so I'm dubious about the historical claim. I'm also dubious about looking at contemporary liberal debates about toleration and state neutrality through the lens of the last five or so years: Political Liberalism is a text about dealing with the American Religious Right, I think, rather than Islamists, and even Brian Barry's somewhat hysterical Culture and Equality is at least as much about the Amish as anyone else, neither of which would have necessarily been problems alien in their basic structure to Hobhouse.

It's not just that I am dubious about this specific claim about the difference between contemporary and historical conditions, though. I think I am dubious about most claims that current problems - and I suppose perhaps particularly the problem of Islamist terrorism - are problems which have no documented historical counterparts. I suppose we could put the worry like this: is it Orientalist to think that Islamist terrorism poses a unique problem, without any historical analogies at all? I mean, the past may be a different country, but the basic problems of securing an intelligible and humane political order don't change across national borders - no-one thinks with DeMaistre anymore that there are only Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards and so on.