One morning, I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and my Netscape email client automatically downloaded that day’s news pane. On that particular day, the news was that two hijacked planes had been flown into the World Trade Center.
These were my first three thoughts, in order:
I guess I really am living in the Future.
Thank goodness it wasn’t nuclear.
and then
The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original event.
A mere factor of “ten times worse” turned out to be a vast understatement. Even I didn’t guess how badly things would go. That’s the challenge of pessimism; it’s really hard to aim low enough that you’re pleasantly surprised around as often and as much as you’re unpleasantly surprised.
Nonetheless, I did realize immediately that everyone everywhere would be saying how awful, how terrible this event was; and that no one would dare to be the voice of restraint, of proportionate response. Initially, on 9/11, it was thought that six thousand people had died. Any politician who had said, “6,000 deaths is 1/8 the annual US casualties from automobile accidents,” would have been asked to resign the same hour.
No, 9/11 wasn’t a good day. But if everyone gets brownie points for emphasizing how much it hurts, and no one dares urge restraint in how hard to hit back, then the reaction will be greater than the appropriate level, whatever the appropriate level may be.
This is the even darker mirror of the happy death spiral—the spiral of hate. Anyone who attacks the Enemy is a patriot; and whoever tries to dissect even a single negative claim about the Enemy is a traitor. But just as the vast majority of all complex statements are untrue, the vast majority of negative things you can say about anyone, even the worst person in the world, are untrue.
I think the best illustration was “the suicide hijackers were cowards.” Some common sense, please? It takes a little courage to voluntarily fly your plane into a building. Of all their sins, cowardice was not on the list. But I guess anything bad you say about a terrorist, no matter how silly, must be true. Would I get even more brownie points if I accused al-Qaeda of having assassinated John F. Kennedy? Maybe if I accused them of being Stalinists? Really, cowardice?
Yes, it matters that the 9/11 hijackers weren’t cowards. Not just for understanding the enemy’s realistic psychology. There is simply too much damage done by spirals of hate. It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world, whether it be the Jews or Adolf Hitler, about whom saying negative things trumps saying accurate things.
When the defense force contains thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of heavily armed soldiers, one ought to consider that the immune system itself is capable of wreaking more damage than nineteen guys and four nonmilitary airplanes. The US spent billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers’ lives shooting off its own foot more effectively than any terrorist group could dream.
If the USA had completely ignored the 9/11 attack—just shrugged and rebuilt the building—it would have been better than the real course of history. But that wasn’t a political option. Even if anyone privately guessed that the immune response would be more damaging than the disease, American politicians had no career-preserving choice but to walk straight into al-Qaeda’s trap. Whoever argues for a greater response is a patriot. Whoever dissects a patriotic claim is a traitor.
Initially, there were smarter responses to 9/11 than I had guessed. I saw a Congressperson—I forget who—say in front of the cameras, “We have forgotten that the first purpose of government is not the economy, it is not health care, it is defending the country from attack.” That widened my eyes, that a politician could say something that wasn’t an applause light. The emotional shock must have been very great for a Congressperson to say something that . . . real.
But within two days, the genuine shock faded, and concern-for-image regained total control of the political discourse. Then the spiral of escalation took over completely. Once restraint becomes unspeakable, no matter where the discourse starts out, the level of fury and folly can only rise with time.
R U Kidding, it seems to me that you are not serious and I mostly don't want to reply to you. However, you have said some things that look like they could lead to interesting conversation among actual commenters.
But the point of my post is that no one can calculate the ramifications of actions, or inactions. Did Hiroshima/Nagasaki cost lives, or save them? That's one of the clearest examples of "saving by killing" I can imagine, and I mean saving Japanese lives as well as American lives. Yet many auto-condemn the bombings. And they might be right. None of us can ever know.
The biggest reason this is confusing is that when we look at consequences of our actions, we want to choose some alternative to compare against.
So to argue that we "saved lives" by nuking japan, the argument is basicly "If we hadn't nuked japan we would have done something even more stupid and even more murderous. Compared to the only alternative, nuking japan was better."
I say this is a stupid argument. If you choose the "only alternative" carefully you can argue that anything which has survivors has saved lives. For example, imagine we nuked the USSR in 1987 or so, destroying most of the russian nukes along with 85% of the population of the USSR. But they hit us back with 20 remaining missiles, killing 15% of the US population. The argument could be made, "The USSR was inevitably going to attack us and kill most of our population, and our second-strike capability would hit them just as hard; maybe everybody in the world would die from the radiation. So by killing hundreds of millions of people and getting 45 million americans killed, we saved lives." We know now that the USSR didn't attack us and nobody seems to be particularly worried that russia will do so in the foreseeable future. But if we'd made that first strike we wouldn't know that. You could argue that the only alternative was a bigger nuclear war, and there would be no proof you were wrong.
Is there any value in such comparisons? Sometimes we're choosing what to do. Then we need to accept our limitations, and choose the best plan we can actually choose. If there's a better way available but we aren't good enough people to try it, then that plan is no good. Choose the best plan you can actually carry out.
But sometimes we're arguing about how good we did in the past. And in that context we should compare against the best plan available to us, whether we were psychologically ready to try it or not.
When we're arguing about how good we are, it's stupid to count up the number of people we killed against the number of people the bad guys would have killed. The bad guys kill innocent people -- they're bad guys, that's what they do. If we go into competition with them to kill innocent people and we don't kill as many, that means we're bad guys too, just not as bad as they are. If we think we're killing a lot of people to stop them from killing even more, and the result is that we kill more people than they do, now who's the bad guys? We are. We only assumed they'd kill more.
These are all "the ends justify the means" arguments. "If we didn't kill those innocent people the enemy would have killed even more." Even worse, "If we didn't do it, somebody else would." Imagine the crimes you can justify with that argument!
Here's my moral argument. When you do something bad, and you argue that you had to do it to keep somebody else from doing something worse, or you argue that nobody knows what the hell would have happened otherwise so there's no way to tell how bad it was etc -- when you find yourself looking for such sophistries to justify your actions -- you're doing something bad.