Torture and Americans

Andrew Sullivan has linked to several new polls demonstrating American support for torture as a policy for national security. Nearly six in ten white southern Christan evangelicals believe that torture is an okay policy. Among countries that support a general ban on all torture, the United States is towards the bottom of the nineteen surveyed, in the same group as Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan and Egypt. The number of Americans who support the torture of terror suspects is fourty-four percent. That deserves to be repeated: nearly half of Americans believe that torture is legitimate against individuals who have been accused--not proven guilty--of terrorism. I think that's crazy, but I also think that it's (partly) explainable.

Here's Andrew's diagnosis:

"The idea that torture is immoral in itself seems alien to a majority of the millions who lined up to see Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ."

And again:

"This is what America now is: a country with the moral values of countries that routinely torture and abuse prisoners, like Egypt and Iran."

Now take at a look at the groups listed with the United States: Egypt, Iran, Russia and Azerbaijan: all four are corrupt autocracies that are highly more likely to be torturing their own citizens than foreign nationals who happen to get swept up in a drag-net half-way around the world. In each of these countries an elite coalition not representative of the nation as a whole rules through an exclusionary and often precarious power-sharing agreement in which each member would happily game it to their total advantage if possible. This leads to a suspicious citizenry, wary of the state but perhaps more importantly, of other groups of citizens and non-state actors. In each case the state positively encourages this paranoia, knowing that the best way to deflect attention from itself is to play up fears of non-state groups.

Andrew's theory is that Americans have given up on a moral principle against torture. Many Americans no longer believe that torture is an absolute moral wrong. Torture is a conditional evil--'When a comparable moral evil is not at stake, torture is wrong'--whereby a negation of the antecedent entails a negation of the consequent. Andrew believes that this is a morally culpable error in moral judgment, confusing a categorical for a hypothetical injunction.

The trouble with Andrew's analysis (he has been one of the most forceful and effective critics of America's current torture policy) is that he has never given a solid argument for why torture is an absolute moral evil, and as Nagel and Bernard Williams have often pointed out, we have just as strong intuitions against moral absolutism as we do in favor of it, and there are certain moral dilemmas in which, no matter what we do, we will understand that we have violated one or the other of a fundamental moral principle. Let me propose, perhaps with much charity, that those American's in favor of torture understand it to be a true moral dilemma, as defined by Nagel, in which however one acts,

"it is possible to feel that one has acted for reasons insufficient to justify violation of the opposing principle...Given the limitations on human action, it is naive to suppose that there is a solution to every moral problem with which the world can face us. We have always known that the world is a bad place. It appears that it may be an evil place as well."*

Those Americans in favor of torture maybe recognize that it is--to use another Nagelian phrase--a 'moral blind alley.'

Now, also take a look at those countries most opposed to torture as a means of state policy. They are Spain, France, Britain and Mexico. All have had bad and recent histories on the subject of torture, as both victims (Spain, Mexico) and perpetrators (France, Britain). They are acutely aware of the moral, political and cultural corruption that a torturing regime can effect. They are strongly against the policy because they are very sensitive to the dangers. The net effect of this history is a wary and distrustful view of the governmental security apparatus and policy.

It seems to me that this is what the many American's lack, not a moral principle. Americans in favor of torture as an official policy have not necessarily abandoned a moral absolute (if Nagel's right, it may not be an absolute in any case), but believe that this absolute has, after all, some conditions in extremis, and that the government can be trusted to respect those conditions. In other words, Americans are too ready to believe that the accused are actually guilty, and that that the accused actually have actionable information that they are withholding out of dogmatic hatred and an evil ideology, and that this information may save millions of lives. They have been persuaded of the falsehoods that ticking-time-bomb scenarios actually occur, and that other means of interrogation are less effective than torture. They believe that their government would only use torture in cases of imminent, deadly threats against real bad guys, rather than for any political or strategic reasons. All of these, as I say, are false and/or confused, but IF you believe all these things, then you have not necessarily abandoned a fundamental moral principle in supporting torture.

In other words, contra Andrew's interpretation, our values may after all be the same as those of Spain, France, Germany and Mexico, while quite different from those of Iran, Egypt, Russia and Azerbaijan; the relative variable here might not be moral value, but political judgment and trust of governmental authority. If so, then it's not that Americans have lost sight of a fundamental moral principle, they have lost sight of a political one.

*Thomas Nagel. "War and Massacre" in Mortal Questions. p73.

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Is Zizek Really a Communist?

Zizek—I think—claims to be a communist. Not a party communist, of course, nor even a political communist, but a revolutionary communist. He would like us to place communism within the enlightenment tradition—not the namby-pamby enlightenment tradition of Mandeville, Mill or Rorty, but the bare-knuckled, paroxysmal enlightenment of the French Revolution. Enlightenment as revoution, sure, but revolution in the name of Objective Reason.

Zizek has made a highly entertaining career ridiculing lefty wimps, which could be defined as those who refuse—or better, verdrängen—the violent Kern constitutive both of human society writ large and the human psyche writ small.

In the end, Zizek’s standing as a revolutionary communist rests upon what is perhaps the one commitment that he is clear and consistent about: that history is driven by class struggle, and that class struggle is the only true opposition that is not a displacement or symptom of something else. He embraces the Althusserian paradox: everything is symbolic, but in the end, economics in terms of the class struggle is everything.

I could find many more passages like the following to support this claim:

“Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.”(full article here)

Zizek’s communism therefore ultimately rests upon his conviction that class struggle is the only ‘essential antagonism.’ But class struggle figures in Zizek’s thought like trauma in Freud, and the ‘real’ in Lacan.

In keeping with this, his only really clear and consistent commitment, Zizek’s one constant and never-ironic target of attack is the myth and concept of organicism: the idea that somewhere, somehow, at some time and in some way, human individuals and human socieities can be whole. This is, in the langauge of psychoanalysis, the fundamental fantasy, the myth of egoic wholeness as opposed to subjective fracture—and at base, the source of human aggression (hence the struggle). Zizek’s Ideologiekritik could be interpreted, finally, as the attempt to work the acceptance of castration into the political domain, for however disparate and scatter-shot his many polemics seem to be, they all aim to undermine any stable ideological position through sarcastic and irreverent dialectics of parody, mockery and satire.

Perhaps, in my opinion, Zizek’s most interesting thesis—never really stated in any systematic manner, but iterated often throughout his works—is that what binds people together into communities, and equally what binds together an individual person's (fantasy of) identity, is enjoyment. People and peoples differ from one another, form cliques, likes and dislikes, committ violence and atrocity, not from any shared beliefs, or shared values, or shared culture/ethnicity/background—peoples are formed according to what they enjoy. Beliefs and values are in the end--if they are anything relevant to social grouping--just symbols of personal and social economies of enjoyment. You are different than me—why? Not because you believe that The Mummy was an entertaining film, but because you actually enjoyed it. I am not one of you—why? Not because you value suburbia over city, but because you actually enjoy your large house and your long drive-way and your Wendy’s. I'm not a republican--why? Not because of any particular beliefs I have about health-care policy or geo-political strategy, but because I can't begin to imagine what it would feel like to take sincere pleasure in patriotism and a large, waving flag. Jouissance as the ultimate social concept, the primitive that makes sense of all the rest. I am not being insincere when I say that this is possibly be a real scientific insight for the social sciences—even though it needs to be theoretically systematized in a way Zizek has never even begun to try.

But if Zizek’s hails the class struggle, it is within the Lacanian framework of castration and the real. And if he promotes himself as a Marxist, it is against the one notion that animates Marx from his early humanism to the days of Das Kapital: that the class struggle, and therefore social struggle, can be overcome. Nonsense, according to Zizek. The closure, the suture, can never be accomplished, the fantasy must be destroyed, alienation and violence are the consitutive core of human kind, the letter has killed the body—the cause is lost, essentially. And yet, says Zizek, we must fight, struggle, resist, pursue this desire tenaciously to the death—what does this make of Zizek? Obviously—he is no communist, he’s an anarchist.

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Educational Policy and the Extended Mind

Here’s an apparent inconsistency: it seems that, given a century of psychometric study, that there are innate factors to intellectual performance that are rigid vis-à-vis enviornmental inputs and settings. No matter what you do or where you put them, some students will predictably excell at school, and others will fail. Better teachers, smaller classrooms, expenditure per pupil, a healthy diet from pre-natal development onwards, a nurturing home enviornment—these all have important effects, but even considered collectively, those effects are bound by what seems to be innate, even genetic capacities.

On the other hand, it is undeniable that we are all a lot smarter than our counter-parts a hundred years ago. This is not only true in terms of literacy rates, basic mathematical competence, graduation rates and college attendance. Even our IQ’s have been improving (by what is known as the Flynn effect).

The first observation suggests that we really ought to be quite a bit less ambitious when it comes to public education policy, lest we waste a lot of resources and energy for negligible marginal benefits, incurring high opportunity costs. Prudent public education policy would replace the goal of making everyone smart (a pie-in-the-sky or ‘romantic’ view), and orient itself towards finding ways to make the incorrigibly dim nonetheless productive workers. On the other hand, the second observation suggests that there are in fact important and measurable returns to investment in public education—witness the fact that most Americans can now read, and know enough arithmetic at least to fill out their tax forms.

Let me call these respective positions ‘What’s the Point?’ (WTP) and ‘Yes We Can’ (SSP). WTP often responds to SSP in the following way: yes, certain metrics like literacy, basic mathematical competence, graduation rates, even a base-line IQ, have improved over the centuries, most notably the past one. But this achievement has been merely to allow the full exploitation of a natural capacity, and we are fast approaching the time when marginal returns on education investment fast diminish. In other words, whereas some prudent social policies have enabled increasing numbers of citizens to achieve their natural potential, we have not affected that natural potential itself, and once we reach it, there is not much more that policy will effect. Furthermore, for many students, we have already past whatever natural potential they have, and are now expecting results that simply are not achievable.

WTPers are fond of an analogy between innate mental capacities and innate physical capacities. Take running. Just about every human being can run, and some can run faster and farther than others. Surely some of that is due to training, diet, confidence, dedication--but in the end, a defnite limit is reached, and an innate distribution of ability becomes evident. Thus, (so the WTP argument runs) it is just as much folly to expect every child to learn calculus and to quote Shakespeare as it is to expect every child to run a 7 second 100m or a 4 minute mile.

But let’s consider this analogy a little further. Observe that ‘innate’ capacities, like running, operate within what are in effect artificial constraints. To measure one’s ‘innate’ running ability, we require (for example) that aids like drug enhancers, bionic legs, superhero lung transplants, roller skates, and so on, are verboten. But we do allow for scientific nutrition regiments, super-tech training aids, the use of all sorts of biometric technology. Without any of these artificial constraints, the relevance of ‘innate’ ability becomes not only specious, but moot. With superhero lungs and bionic legs, who knows, maybe I could run a one-minute mile. The point being, if we refuse to abide by artificial constraints, ‘innate ability’ becomes not only irrelevant, but almost incoherent. (Consider this question: what is the ‘innate’ life-span? If the physicalists are correct, and brain transplants become one day possible, and new bodies can be grown ‘brave new world’ style, then….you see the point).

I wonder why we shouldn’t consider ‘innate’ intelligence along the same lines. The equivalent of Olympic-criteria for measuring intellectual performance in the United States is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Like the olympic sports, the NAEP sets up artificial constraints on the measurement of intelligence. The NAEP assesses skills in reading, math, science, writing, history, civics and geography. Verboten for students taking the NAEP are instruments like calculators, spell check, wikipedia, maps, and so on. But why do we insist on these constraints? It is hard to imagine very many scenarios where anyone in a ‘real life’ situation would not be able to avail themselves of any one of these technologies, so what is it exactly that we are measuring, and why?

The what is a very prickly issue, and innatists will get upset if you seem at all puzzled about it. But I think I can partially answer the ‘why’. We are still wed to a fundamentally Cartesian, fundamentally classical understanding of intelligence. According to this model, to ‘know’ something is to be a certain state, rather than to possess a certain ability. Thus, to ‘know’ that 98 + 113.5 = 211.5, or that the slope of a curve equals ∆x/∆y, is to have an intuitive insight into the nature of number, or in the nature of m. But consider for a moment: why is it that today, almost any decently educated 5th grader will be able to determine that 98 + 113.5 = 211.5, and any decently educated 8th grader will be able to solve for a slope-intercept? Before the development of a base-10 arabic numeral system, it would have been difficult for almost anyone to solve for the first, and before Descartes, to solve for the second. I am suggesting of course that there is a strict analogy between the use of a calculator and the use of a base-10 numeral system. Both are artifical, yet testers for the NAEP consider one’s ability to use the first still somehow ‘innate,’ while the latter is ‘artificial’—indeed, cheating. Why not then, instead of trying to measure some suspect ‘innate’ faculty, we instead measure ability—not under no constraints, but under constraints that are plausible and ‘realistic.’

Overall, then, I am suggesting that ‘innate’ intelligence no longer makes a whole lot of sense—although it still makes some sense, just like running—once we accept an externalist, “extended” theory of mind. In other words, we should take to heart the theory developed by Clark and Chalmers in their famous paper and apply it to the debate over innatism and educational policy. Returning now to the issue between WTP and SSP, we can at least partially explain the discrepancy noted at the beginning by recognizing that, because of technologies like a base-10 numeral system, even someone of ‘average’ intelligence can now solve for problems that, half a milennia ago, only the most educated and ‘innately’ intelligent could solve. That is to say, tests like the NAEP are in fact somewhat anachronistic, and I am sure that, if we did for instance allow for the use of graphing calculators, and the internet, that we would see marked improvements in test scores and therefore ‘average intelligence.’

Some caveats: this makes most sense when applied to mathematics, and to a lesser degree, skills like geography and history. That’s because the gains from technology (including symbol-systems) demostrably extend by orders of magnitude cognitive capacity. It’s not clear what role any such technology plays in writing and reading. I have some thoughts on this issue, but I’ll save them for the comment section if any one cares to explore the issue further.

Secondly, and less directly, I’m still not convinced that even on the innatists own ground and under their conditions that there is anything obvoiusly being measured. This is because I suspect that ‘innate’ ability, to whatever extent the concept makes sense, is influenced as much if not more by factors such as focus, attention, and motivation as by any raw capacity. The problem might be fitfully compared to the issue of indeterminacy. Whatever it is one is measuring by standardized tests, it will remain inscrutable whether performance results from raw capacity or from motivation, and so far, we have no reliable way (as far as I know) of controlling for one or the other. To see just how this issue informs the debate, check out this discussion.

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Dignity and Death in the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court issued its opinion on Baze v. Rees yesterday, marking an uneasy victory for supporters of one of those remaining cultural deficiencies that keeps the U.S. from proudly marching among the ranks of civilized nations, i.e., the death penalty. It is uneasy because the Justices could agree on fairly little, and their disagreement is likely—according to analysts—to lead to increased and welcome wrangling with the issue; but nevertheless a victory because, following the moratorium, our State slaughterhouses are once again free to open for business. The decision, which ruled that lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment,” has been beautifully though too briefly analyzed by Jody Madeira at the Neuroethics and Law Blog. Madeira’s analysis brings to the foreground the Justices’ struggle with the central, though somewhat unlikely, role played in the deliberations by the concept of dignity. (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about law.)

I must admit that I have trouble seeing how dignity has anything whatsoever to do with the decision; it is hard to abuse a word as badly as any sanction of the death penalty must. Its appearance, I think, has something to do with Justice Brennan’s 1972 opinion "that a punishment must not by its severity be degrading to human dignity." And so anyone who wishes to uphold the status quo—that the death penalty or any particular means of carrying it out is constitutional—must struggle to fit the grand idea of dignity into the hangman’s noose. But does, or can, the word “dignity” possibly mean what the Justices want it to?

Dignity has different meanings, to be sure. Someone might have dignity merely by virtue of their awareness of the moral law within. Or someone might have a sort of inner dignity, a strength of character. Alternatively, we most commonly describe someone as having dignity based on their outward behavior. And in this regard one might think that the concept of dignity applies most naturally and correctly to external appearance: you lose dignity, for example, when you get ice cream all over your face (incidentally, this is why I prefer cups to cones), or when you trip down the stairs. Or one might go on to extend this use of word, pointing out that one also loses dignity when screaming in pain or expressing one’s fear of death. It is this latter sense that the Court seems most interested in. The problem, though, is that this notion of dignity seems derivative: we take one’s outward appearance to be a sign of their dignity, not to be mistaken for the real thing. The man who calmly faces a firing squad has dignity; the man who stands before the firing squad calmly because he has been injected with a paralytic agent, on the other hand, only appears to have dignity. Taking the appearance of dignity for the real thing shows the utmost disregard for dignity.

What Madeira’s treatment brings out, then, is that the Court’s views on dignity in allowing lethal injection (and the death penalty) do not merely use the word in an overly broad sense, losing the literal sense (i.e., the sense that makes dignity valuable in the first place) behind. Rather, the Court isn’t concerned with dignity as such at all, but uses the word as a smokescreen for something else: the comfort of the people who show up to see the execution. (Of course this is not a concurring view—concurring views were rare in this trial—and Justice Stevens rightly takes the others to task for this abuse.) That is, what the Court is concerned with is not the dignity of the condemned at all, and for good reason: it isn’t clear why they would be. After all, if you’ve already determined that someone ought to be killed, and even exposed to the excruciating pain one requires of retribution (Scalia), it would be rather odd to worry that the condemned might embarrass himself by flailing around in his death throes. Personally, I’d prefer humiliation to death as a mode of punishment, since only the latter clearly violates human dignity in the sense that has value. (C.f. House: “You can live with dignity. You can’t die with it.”)

So no, the Justices concerned about preserving dignity in lethal injection aren’t all that worried about the dignity of the condemned. They are worried, instead, that the audience, seeing what the suffering of violent death looks like, might be made uneasy by their complicity in and support of this ancient barbarism. It is the feelings of those who support State-sanctioned killing—not the subjects of their sentiments—that are paramount. The worry, then, is that those who support execution, by witnessing it in its bare, unaestheticized state, might feel uneasy. The horror! And, feeling uneasy, they might—even worse—reconsider their position. Historically, of course, this shouldn’t be much of a concern: people have spent a great deal of time in the past watching violent executions without a worry. But we are more sensitive today, and our sensitivities must be protected at all costs, even from the consequences of our own choices. And moreover, there may be a deeper fear: that we have reached a state of civilization that really is incompatible with the continuation of these ancient rituals; to hold on to those rituals, then, we must do all in our power to keep that disjunct from getting a visceral grasp on witnesses. Perhaps I am overly cynical, but I cannot keep from seeing the Court as saying, essentially, that we must preserve the death penalty, even at the cost of hiding its true nature from its supporters. (See Dahlia Lithwick’s “Barely Lethal” for an analysis along these lines.)

I want to single out Justice John Paul Stevens: “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contribution to any discernible social or public purposes.” In recognizing this, Stevens expresses not what he holds to be the sentiment of the population, but the sentiment that the population ought to have, the one compatible with our supposedly “evolving standards of decency,” about which there too has been much debate. Most commonly, at least from what I’ve seen, the Court in such debates is concerned about whether it ought to legislate on the basis of what best fits the currently prevalent attitude, or the direction in which the attitudes seem to be shifting.

What we come to in the end is a particularly American view of the State. The notion of a Republic—a State that serves the interest of the people—can be taken in two markedly different ways. It can serve the interests the people actually happen to have, or it can serve the interests they ought to have, as a people worthy of a civilized State, and thereby make them more worthy. Americans tend toward the former view, and there are, undoubtedly, things to be said in its favor: when Governments attempt to impose morality on their citizens, they rarely do it well, and so the greatest difficulty plaguing comprehensive liberalism is the difficulty of deciding whose standards should serve as the moral aim toward which the State seeks to bring its citizens. We should not, then, want the State to legislate morals except in the clearest of cases. So, for example, the requirement that every citizen have at least a basic education is not much contested (except, at least, on the grounds that real education might somehow conflict with religion). But what case could be simpler, more clear cut, than this one? The wrongness of murder is even less contested than the value of education. What is contested, of course, is the idea that all human beings deserve to live. It is here that the question of human dignity becomes central; the view that some human beings ought to be put to death and yet must be allowed their dignity is, then, one of the major intellectual stumbling blocks on the path to civilized decency.

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Conservatism, Leftism, and that Hard-to-Reach Chewy Center

Conservatives sometimes present their political bent as the pragmatic approach: holding on to the values and practices we currently have seems like the practical, safe way to go. On a related, but somewhat different note Jim Ryan over at Philosoblog has written a defense of conservatism that strikes me as so horrendously ridiculous that it has forced me to break my general silence on matters of political philosophy. His main theme, essentially, is that leftism of all sorts (communist, progressive, liberal) ultimately comes together with fascism. As a somewhat odd leftist, one who supports Comprehensive Liberalism, I do not necessarily object to a certain affinity between leftism and fascism (one which surfaced in rather interesting ways when continental leftists took up Carl Schmitt against Rawls and Habermas). What I do object to, however, is conservatism. I want to quote the central paragraph in Ryan’s argument in full. It begins by arguing against the view of conservatism as being on the right—instead, Ryan wants to say, there is no right; only a center and its periphery:

Replace the left-vs-right model with a web of values, like a spider's web, with a center, a sweet spot where those decisions lie that best fulfill as many of the values as possible (a sort of satisficing or net satisfaction optimum, where there is the best resonance with as many of the valuable strands of the web as possible.) Fascism and leftism are represented by the space outside of the web and on the same plane as the web, where one has traveled along any of the radial strands away from the center and left the web. The various trajectories by which one can leave the web are the flavors of fascism. Hitler is at, say, 3:00 far outside the web, having traveled along the strand that represents the value of lifting the German people out of their misery. Lenin is at 10:00, having traveled along the strand of regard for the welfare of the lower and working classes. It's all statism and general-will-oriented anti-individualism, in which one no longer makes any effort to hit the sweet spot of values. It's all fascism. And it's all leftism. In no sense is the center of the web - conservatism - to the right of anything.

At first, this looks wonderfully convincing—I admit that I had to spend a few minutes thinking about it. Indeed, if conservatism is all about holding on to that sweet spot, where values are perfectly balanced, then the attempts to move away from this web are one and all misguided. But—since once I re-read the argument I found that there was essentially nothing to be said in its favor—I’m going to drop the “first let’s try to make this point look respectable” spiel and jump straight to what is obviously and glaringly wrong with it: it assumes that conservatism involves defending “a sweet spot where those decisions lie that best fulfill as many of the values as possible.” Of course this will not involve the fulfillment of every value, since values do, after all, conflict (security vs. privacy, liberty vs. respect for others, and the rest of the laundry list). So, much like Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds,” this sweet spot will involve some sort of balance between values, in which each value is maximally fulfilled in such a way that it allows also for the best maximal fulfillment of all other values. That is: it isn’t perfect, but it is as perfect as possible, i.e., the best of all possible political arrangements.

We might note that this arrangement can take two very different forms, depending on what values we are talking about optimally satisfying. In Rorty’s terminology, we can take up solidarity, where we attempt to optimally satisfy the values held within a given community; or we can take up objectivity, which will attempt to optimally satisfy objective values. Both attempts at hitting the “sweet spot” are, of course, seriously problematic. The solidarity attempt will be rather difficult if the community is not homogenous—witness, for example, today’s uproar over a suggestion to accommodate elements of sharia law within the British legal code. And insofar as even the most homogenous communities aren’t homogenous—which is, ultimately, why we don’t have societies that everyone is perfectly satisfied with (add to this the fact that individuals also hold internally conflicting values, which are themselves hard to balance)—the project seems a bit harder than one might at first imagine. The objectivity attempt will fare even worse, for more or less obvious reasons: we don’t quite know what the objectively right values are. That isn’t, of course, to say that they don’t exist; but on the objectivity model, the ongoing task of political philosophy is to figure out those values so that, eventually, they might be put into practice (of course one could add that we already have some approximations of these values, and we do have those in practice; but what we do not seem to have is the ideal balance of objective values).

The “sweet spot” at the center of the web that Ryan claims conservatism defends has, then, the following features: it is the best possible balance of values, and manages either to get an objectively ideal optimization of value satisfaction, or an optimization that is perfect for the community in question. This sounds, in other words, suspiciously like a utopia. Now let me be the first to say this: If we had a utopian society and conservatives were the ones defending it, I’d probably support them (if, maybe, grudgingly, for like the underground man I do enjoy shattering crystal palaces). But, uhm, we don’t have a utopian society. We don’t have it, in part, because we don’t know where the center of the web lies. And that’s why Ryan’s web analogy is pretty much absurd. First off, it doesn’t defend any existing conservatism; it defends an ideal conservatism of the sort that, really, most human beings would be likely to fall behind. But obviously since our society is not arranged according to the “sweet spot” model, it stands to reason that conservatives are not actually the people defending that “sweet spot”, so it may well make sense to say that they are on the “right” of the political spectrum rather than its center. Second, the web analogy misses the rather important point that those who want to change society are—duh!—usually not doing it perversely to ruin a good thing but because they want to make the society better. Ryan’s own examples should make this pretty obvious. Hitler wasn’t trying to ruin society by “lifting the German people out of their misery”—he was doing just that: trying to lift the German people out of their misery. Sure, in a perfect “sweet spot” society people wouldn’t be miserable; but when people are miserable, trying to overcome that misery seems, well, not so much as a move away from the ideal center, but a move toward it. Lenin wasn’t concerned with the welfare of the workers just because he wanted to screw with the existing order; the workers really were in an unacceptably miserable state.

Now Hitler and Lenin were obviously wrong in their methods, wrong in their theories, wrong in their morals, wrong about a lot of things. But, also obviously, this does not mean that all efforts to change society are wrong, and that all leftist causes are equivalent to Hitler’s fascism or to Lenin’s communism. In fact, what leftists generally want to do, as I’ve been suggesting, is move society toward the “sweet spot,” to nudge or drag or throw it closer toward a system that involves the optimal satisfaction of values. Conservatives, generally, are the people who resist such change. So let me conclude with two points. First, that some attempts to change society are obviously horribly mistaken and lead to disastrous consequences does not mean that all attempts to change society are equally bad (anyone who has taken Intro to Logic should get that one). Second, if the center of the web is the arrangement we want, then we should be supporting the leftists. We should do so discriminately and try to avoid supporting people like Hitler or Lenin (or at least Stalin). But if the sweet spot at the center is what we want, then conservatism is precisely the one position we can rule out at the start.

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