Outrage

Terrorism polarizes people, whether you’re talking about the acts themselves or just fighting over the word. President Obama was on television last night trying to set out a coherent and defensible strategy for the U.S. to follow in its endless confrontation with jihadism, hard on the heels of the gruesome slaying of an off-duty British soldier on a London street by two men who shouted Allahu akbar as they hacked and slashed him to death and then stood with bloodied weapons in hand, haranguing witnesses in justification of the act. Muslim organizations rushed to condemn the crime while the polemics heated up in the media.

In a commentary in the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald questioned the use of the word terrorism, asking, "How can one create a definition of "terrorism" that includes Wednesday's London attack on this British soldier without including many acts of violence undertaken by the US, the UK and its allies and partners?" and asserting that "… the term [terrorism] at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states."

You have to deal with these issues, even if it angers you that people like Greenwald are rude enough to raise them at a time when all you feel is horror and outrage. Most of us are aware that the ethical issues involved in warfare are tangled and uncomfortable, but faced with savagery like this, we need to have our outrage validated before we can have a civil discussion. We are entitled to our outrage, aren't we?

I'd say that we are, but I'd also say that outrage isn't a policy, and we need to confront the issues Greenwald raises if we're going to come up with a policy in response to the deep-rooted hostility to the West that seems to prevail among Muslims. So let's try to make some distinctions that will answer Greenwald's question and point to an approach that might help President Obama steer us out of the impasse we seem to be in.

I don't propose to waste a lot of time arguing about the meaning of the word "terrorism." Like other emotionally loaded words, such as “racism”, it denotes something real but is often used as an incantation in an attempt to short-circuit debate. It’s a trump card that is supposed to ace any argument you may have. It's not much of a guide in making policy. The question to ask in a moral or political debate is not whether a certain action conforms to a contested definition but whether that action is justified.

So let's ask: is there any way of justifying the killing of Lee Rigby? He was, it is true, a British soldier. He was not, however, in uniform or engaged in a military operation; he was unarmed. His attackers wore no distinctive uniform or emblem, as required by the 1949 Geneva Convention, which also, incidentally, prohibits the infliction of “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds” on “persons taking no active part in the hostilities.” If you’re going to call what happened to Lee Rigby an act of war, then I’m going to call it a war crime.

But it’s not clear whether the laws of war apply in the struggle against terrorists, however defined; the so-called War on Terror is taking place in a legal gray area which is tying the lawyers in knots. Barack Obama found out how hard these issues are when he became President and actually had to take charge of the thing; his prosecution of the war by drone strikes and his failure to close the prison at Guantánamo are evidence of the difficulties he has encountered in balancing our security with the rule of law.

A better guide for most of us than legal theories is simple moral intuition. At the level of common usage we know what people mean by terrorism: intentionally targeting defenseless people in order to advance a political agenda. The defenseless part is important; we know that when a heavily armed American unit on patrol is shot at by Iraqi or Afghani insurgents, that’s war, not terrorism. If a man is willing to expose himself to enemy fire, he’s not a terrorist. The element of cowardice in terrorism is definitive: terrorists know their targets are not going to shoot back. There’s a reason Lee Rigby’s attackers didn’t pull their knives on armed sentries at the gate of a British military base.

And we know there’s no justification for the killing of defenseless people, even if we sympathize with the cause for which the act is committed. A person of sound moral intuition cringes when a cause he favors is “supported” by an act of terrorism. Sound moral intuition has a way of being smothered by emotion, and emotions run high in violent conflicts. But moral integrity requires that we condemn the killing of defenseless people whenever and however it occurs.

Which brings us to the next point: none of the above is to justify the “many acts of violence undertaken by the US, the UK and its allies and partners” that Glenn Greewald decries. The people under the rubble of shocked and awed Baghdad were just as dead as the people under the wreckage of the World Trade Center. But there are distinctions to be made if we are to find our way through the fog of ideological war to reasonable policies that will protect us without victimizing others. The grounds on which we condemn an action matter in shaping policies to prevent its repetition.

The actions I presume Greenwald is referring to are not terrorism but, rather, either war crimes or what is delicately called “collateral damage.” The distinction matters because it clarifies how these offenses are to be remedied. You can argue till you drop about the definition of terrorism, but there is a legal definition of war crimes and a procedure for prosecuting them. Let’s call things by their names: the dead children in My Lai were victims of a war crime. And even if not enough war crimes are duly punished, they are recognized as crimes. The U.S. Army is not proud of My Lai. And the U.S. Army is currently prosecuting a sergeant who carried out a massacre of unarmed combatants in Kandahar province in Afghanistan. Terrorists do not prosecute themselves; only legitimate powers do that.

Collateral damage is harder to assess morally, but we have to make the effort. Most everyone recognizes that warfare is a messy business and that non-combatants will occasionally be caught in the fray. Allied bombing killed seventy thousand French civilians in the wake of the Normandy invasion, and nobody considers the Allied campaign against Hitler to have been delegitimized as a result. But even a single civilian death is too many, and a consistent pattern of civilian deaths has to call into question the strategy that produces it. Here is where our moral intuition has to kick in. To object to civilian deaths as a result of military action is not to concede any moral equivalence between legitimate powers and jihadist cutthroats. It is merely to recognize that an Afghan farmer whose child has been killed by an American missile has suffered as much as Lee Rigby’s loved ones. Some collateral damage may be inevitable in warfare, but carelessness toward collateral damage is indistinguishable from malice.

President Obama appears to be aware of this, and we should support him in his efforts to make the struggle against jihadism more just and less wasteful of innocent life. We are entitled to be horrified and angered by the killing of Lee Rigby, but we should also be outraged any time American munitions kill non-combatants, intentionally or not.

Sam Reaves www.samreaves.com

Losing Syria

Wars in far-away places usually take place at a safe remove, our awareness of them filtered through terse casualty reports in the paper at breakfast or snatches of jerky video, smoke rising from a jumbled cityscape, distant wails just audible beneath the reporter’s commentary. Most of us can’t find these places on a map, and unless there are American troops out there we really don’t care about them. We can’t afford to; there’s too much bloodshed in the world to exercise a lot of empathy and expend a lot of grief about every conflict.

And then there are the ones that hit home because we’ve been there. I made a short visit to Syria many years ago, and I brought home impressions that make that country’s excruciating suicide hard to shrug off. I’m as jaded as as anybody by the constant turmoil in that part of the world, but unlike most Americans I have sweated under that sun and brushed that dust off my shoes. It’s real to me. The people are real, too: I’ve bargained with shopkeepers, bantered with street urchins and been taken home for dinner by strangers. I’ve looked them in the eye; I know they bleed and suffer.

In 1985 I had a few days in Damascus and Aleppo at the tail end of a summer spent mostly in Jordan, studying Arabic. I had a contact in a household of Jordanian students at Damascus University, who were kind enough to put me up and show me around, including a quick jaunt up to Aleppo on the train for an overnight visit. Syria was mysterious and forbidding, a Soviet ally and a major sponsor of terrorism, oppressed by the sinister personality cult of Hafez al-Assad, whose portrait, sometimes in multiple copies, loomed prominently in virtually every public space. Armed men were everywhere, a good many of them in civilian clothes, which was ominous. You like to think that a man with an AK-47 is subject to military discipline and a clear chain of command. In Syria they weren’t always: Assad’s regime famously featured at least five separate bodies of secret police. Syria was the archetype of the brutal Middle Eastern dictatorship.

It was also, I found, a society of great complexity and considerable graciousness. In both Damascus and Aleppo, many layers of history had left a dense and visually enthralling urban core, Islamic exoticism overlaid by French colonial rationality (and the occasional eruption of brutal Soviet functionalism). There were streets where you could stretch out your arms and touch the walls on either side; there were tree-lined boulevards and vast shady public gardens. The Hamidiyeh souk in Damascus and Al-Medinah in Aleppo were labyrinthine and endlessly fascinating.

All of it, of course, was teeming with people: the Syrians were a diverse and cosmopolitan bunch. There were divisions; Christians and Muslims lived in separate neighborhoods and the regime was dominated by the minority Alawites. But they all rubbed elbows in the streets and I didn’t hear any complaining about privilege or the perfidy of other religions. They’d all been urbanized for millennia and were supremely social. Strangers were polite and helpful, friendships quick to form. My less-than-perfect Arabic was complimented. After the heat of the day the cool evenings were spent on the balcony with tea and backgammon, or on a stroll down to the ice cream shop or the café, my companions trading covert smiles with the extraordinarily beautiful Syrian girls passing in flocks.

It was all slightly disorienting. Evidence of the regime’s malevolent omnipotence was plentiful. This was a famously anti-Western state, the backbone of Arab rejectionist belligerence towards Israel and the U.S. And yet the people I met didn’t seem to hold anything against me or to hate much of anybody. They seemed to be getting on with their lives, to have the same needs and aspirations as anybody else. They were saddled with a toxic regime but they were pretty much like you and me. There are a lot of people in this world in the same boat.

When the Arab Spring reached Syria and the first outbreaks of violence challenged the regime of Hafez’s more presentable but equally ruthless son Bashar, I had a moment of foolish optimism. I thought maybe Syria would go quickly, the way Tunisia did, with minimal bloodshed and the emergence of a revitalized civil society from that age-old comspopolitan stew, some first steps on the bumpy road to an open society. I should have known better.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Britain, France and the U.S. declined to aid the beleaguered Spanish Republic, opting for a supposedly principled neutrality that let Hitler and Mussolini pour in troops to aid Franco’s insurgents, dooming the Republic. In 1991 the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on all parties in the quickly fragmenting Yugoslavia, thus assuring that the Serbs, who dominated the Yugoslav military, would get all the heavy weapons. The people in Sarajevo and Srbenica paid the price for the diplomats’ high-mindedness.

We never learn. President Obama’s reluctance to intervene directly in Syria may be understandable, given our experiences of the past decade. But if the price of involvement is high now, it’s because he has let it rise inexorably, to the point where he is now unwilling even to back up his ultimatum about the use of chemical weapons. Effective aid to the Syrian rebels early in the conflict, falling far short of direct intervention, could have made a crucial difference. Turkey would have provided cover for some discreet shipments of arms; imposition of a no-fly zone would have been more drastic but fully defensible on the same terms as our intervention in Libya. And early aid might have consolidated the power of the most liberal elements in the Syrian opposition, before the jihadists of Al-Nusra came to the fore. Now, of course, Obama can point to the danger of weapons falling into the wrong hands to justify inaction.

Meanwhile, a quarter of the Syrian population is languishing in vast squalid camps, the death toll climbs by triple figures every day, and what’s left of society is splitting along sectarian lines. There will be a bitter fight to the end. When they finally clear the rubble out of the streets, it’s going to take a while before the old neighborly grace of those Damascus evenings returns.

Death in Chicago

Just when you think Chicago’s murder epidemic has peaked, a new outrage reminds you that things can always get worse. The death of a six-month-old baby last week, hit by the usual stray bullet when her father was the apparent target, has produced the all-too-familiar heartbreak and helpless anger.

The murder rate in Chicago’s black neighborhoods has spiked in the last couple of years, and people are calling for action. The problem is that there’s no consensus on what kind of action is needed. Some people blame the easy availability of guns; others fault the Chicago Police Department, which is scrambling to adjust strategies to keep the lid on a situation that seems to be out of control. Some of the current chaos is an unintended consequence of two policies touted as successful: the dispersal of housing projects (bringing gang members into new neighborhoods) and the decapitation of drug gangs (leading to succession struggles). And of course there are always the root causes that need attention, whether you think it’s the economic distress of the black community or its social disintegration that’s at the heart of the problem.

So what do you do? I don’t think I’ll get much of an argument if I say that all of the above are factors in the crisis. The argument starts when you try to come up with public policies that will make things better. There’s no doubt that guns are to violence what gasoline is to fire, an accelerant that can turn a spark into a conflagration. The problem is that you can’t just wish guns away; they’re here to stay. If forty years of the Drug War haven’t rid our streets of drugs, I don’t think doubling down on firearms bans is going to make all the guns vanish. It might be smarter to concentrate on regulating behavior rather than objects.

As for the police, they’re short-handed and contending with mistrust from the community, some of which they have admittedly brought on themselves. But even if you don’t like cops, they’re all you’ve got; you can insist on better police performance but you can’t promote a “no snitching” culture in your community and expect the situation to improve.

The economic distress and the social disintegration are the toughest; those are long-term projects and are partly a matter of public policy and partly a matter of cultural changes that will only happen when enough people want them to happen. They will be with us for a long time.

If you’re feeling hopeless, it might be useful to take a look at history. It’s easy to forget that Chicago has always had crime, and sometimes it’s been worse than it is now. An instructive book is a volume by Herbert Asbury originally published in 1940 as Gem of the Prairie and re-issued as The Gangs of Chicago (echoing Asbury’s more famous The Gangs of New York) by Basic Books. Asbury detailed the long and sordid history of crime in Chicago, which was a wide-open town with weak and corrupt law enforcement from the beginning. Consider this account of a schoolboy gang war in the Maxwell Street area in the late 19th century: “For years the boys carried knives and revolvers to school, and occasionally slashed and took pot shots at each other in the class-rooms, and fought desperate and often bloody battles in the streets and playgrounds. The last of the gun-fights occurred in December 1905…” Chicago has seen this before.

And yet, things have not always been that bad. Crime waxes and wanes. Prohibition made the twenties a nightmare in Chicago, but by the fifties the streets were largely safe. Then things got bad again with the vast social changes of the sixties and seventies before improving substantially in the nineties. When crime is waning, it’s often because the police response improves, as when Captain Simon O’Donnell reduced crime in the Maxwell Street district “by literally clubbing the underworld into submission,” as Asbury says.

Tough policing can help, as New York City’s experience shows. We have to recognize that at the most basic level, brute force is needed to deter crime. We have to make sure our police force is adequately staffed and funded and supported, while insisting that police conduct be rule-governed and fair. In addition, I’d love to see us reconsider the modern equivalent of Prohibition, the futile and destructive War on Drugs. It’s the geyser of illicit drug cash that triggers the disputes and buys the guns in Chicago’s gang wars.

It’s a multi-front war. The other things have to happen as well, the social and economic improvements and the community consensus that helps restrain anti-social behavior. Part of it is public policy and part of it is minding your own back yard and making sure your kids know right from wrong. There’s no magic bullet, and what you (or I) think is the main problem is probably only one of them. But history shows that societies can improve; I’ve seen it in my lifetime. Start by holding yourself accountable and then let your elected officials know that they are accountable, too.

Sam Reaves www.samreaves.com

Don't Blame Me

Democracy is a dispiriting spectacle. Elections ought to showcase a democratic society at its best, with an interested and informed citizenry flocking to the polls to reward the candidate who has run the most honest and informative campaign with the opportunity to govern in accordance with firm principle and sage counsel. Instead, with record levels of cash fueling record levels of partisan hysteria, this election is making the Bud Lite ad campaign look like the Oxford Debating Society. Election Eve 2012 finds a weary electorate, as numb as a stalker victim after two years of relentless courtship, thinking, “Whatever happens, at least tomorrow night it will be over.”

Let’s hope. The very real possibility that a narrow margin in the popular vote could lead to another 2000-style smoke-filled-room slugfest is too depressing to contemplate. Only the lawyers win in that scenario. But then they always win. Keep your fingers crossed.

I don’t know that I have anything more intelligent to say than any of the other thousands of commentators who are delivering authoritative views on this election. We’re all commentated out at this point. I’m not going to try to tell you who to vote for. Instead I’m going to give you my two cents’ worth on your duties as a citizen.

I’m a bit of a contrarian on this point, so steel yourself. Here’s my Rule Number One for voters in a democracy: If you’re not sure who to vote for, don’t vote. That’s right. If you can’t make up your mind, stay home. Let those of us who have put some effort into figuring out who’s less likely to screw things up determine the outcome. The more uninformed voters who skip the election, the more the informed votes count. Thank you for sitting this one out.

If you don’t think your vote makes any difference anyway, so why bother, I encourage you not to bother. If voting is too much trouble, please forget it. I’m not going to get in your face about it. I’m not even going to feel superior for voting, believe me. You’re probably right in saying that my little vote doesn’t make any difference. But my one little vote is all I’ve got, and the fewer people who vote, the more my one little vote counts. It’s the aggregate of votes that makes the difference, and I’d like to think it’s an aggregate of as many quality voters as possible, meaning voters who are paying attention.

It’s a mistake to say that voting is a patriotic duty. Informed and intelligent voting may be a patriotic duty, but not many people are up to that. I really wish the others would stay home.

I’ll get roasted for saying this, of course. I’ll be accused of having a partisan agenda because high turnout tends to favor one party over the other. There’s a fight raging now about attempts to depress voter turnout; that’s another matter and I’m against it. If you want to vote, you should get the chance. I’m not talking to you. But if you just weren't paying any attention until that nice college kid collared you on the way into the bar and signed you up to vote, I encourage you not to work too hard to find the polling place tomorrow. Go to the bar instead. I mean it. Unless you have strong feelings, or at least a reasonably educated guess, about who is more likely to govern wisely, don’t vote tomorrow. I’m the last guy who’s going to give you any grief about it.

And whatever happens, you will be able to say, “Don’t blame me, I didn’t vote for the guy.” Those of us who did will have to take the rap.

Sam Reaves www.samreaves.com

Europe on Fire

It’s satisfying to be proved right, but there’s little joy in it when the call you got right was a prediction of disaster.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in economics. I’m a self-educated amateur who tries to keep up with the basic concepts and how they play out in the real world. Sometimes I think I understand why things happen the way they do; sometimes I have no idea what’s going on. Occasionally something like a conviction about proper policy solidifies.

Ten years ago when the euro usurped the national currencies of twelve European countries, I told the few people I happened to discuss it with, “It’s a bad idea.” Nobody seemed to be especially alarmed by my skepticism, and I didn’t really have an axe to grind. But I knew it was a bad idea, because a very lucid and instructive book had told me so.

In her 1984 book Cities and the Wealth of Nations, subtitled Principles of Economic Life, the urban theorist Jane Jacobs discussed the vital role a currency plays as a feedback mechanism for an economy. The book was an investigation of what makes some regions thrive and some stagnate, and one of its key ideas was that the fundamental unit for the care and nurturing of an economy was not the nation but rather the city. It is networks of cities and their surrounding regions, each specializing in what it does best and trading with others, that make up an advanced economy.

Jacobs discussed the feedback function of a currency at length, saying, “Today we take it for granted that the elimination of multitudinous currencies in favor of fewer national or imperial currencies represents economic progress and promotes the stability of economic life.” The European Commission couldn’t have put it better. But Jacobs dissented, pointing out the key function of a freely traded currency in regulating an economy. When a country exports too little and imports too much, the resulting decline in the value of its currency (because it is no longer in demand) ought to help correct the situation by making its exports cheaper and imports more expensive. It’s a feedback mechanism which Jacobs compared to the physiological mechanism of a rise in CO2 in the lungs triggering a contraction in the diaphragm.

The problem is that different regions of a country may have different economic needs. Jacobs cited the example of the rise in the British pound due to the demand for North Sea oil and how it killed the English pottery industry by making its exports too expensive. Having a national currency, Jacobs said, was like having a group of people engaged in diverse activities whose breathing was regulated by a central brain operating on consolidated CO2 data for the whole group. If you’re lying on the couch, the enforced breathing rate is probably OK; if you’re trying to swim or play tennis, you’re in trouble.

Of course, we’re not going back to having regional currencies in the United States. A big and culturally homogeneous country like the U.S. can get away with having a national currency because population mobility can compensate to some extent for the burdens imposed by a one-size-fits-all monetary policy. And it’s true that having a single currency over a large area lowers transaction costs and thus facilitates trade. But there are always trade-offs, and in Europe today the costs of the single currency imposed on the disparate collection of economies that makes up the EU have obliterated the benefits.

I wasn’t the only one who said this was a bad idea, of course; in 1998 the British Tory leader William Hague said the the euro would become “a burning building with no exits.” He was shouted down, and the imposition of the single currency proceeded. If ever a man was entitled to say, “I told you so,” it’s Hague.

How could the Europeans do this to themselves? Because politics always trumps economics. The people that wanted a federal Europe because they thought it would rival the United States as a world power knew that the single currency would force countries to surrender more and more sovereignty. A single currency can’t work without a single regulatory authority, lender of last resort, etc. And sure enough, in the face of the economic disaster that would be precipitated by a euro breakup, the measures being discussed are precisely those things: a banking union, jointly issued euro bonds and other measures that mean a further shift of power from Rome, Madrid, Paris, Athens and even Berlin to Brussels.

A lot of Europeans don’t like it, but it’s too late. They’re trapped in the burning building. The Greeks may have invented democracy, but their democracy is totally impotent in 2012. Both their choices in their recent election were bad: either excruciating austerity or a rebellious stance that would probably have led to their expulsion from the euro zone and precipitated a continent-wide collapse. Brussels has the whip hand because the Greeks like everybody else gave up their freedom of choice in exchange for the illusory prestige of a world class currency.

Jane Jacobs could have told them it was a bad idea.

Sam Reaves www.samreaves.com

Misdirection

A ruckus in the Michigan state legislature has seen a pair of female legislators censured for, depending on whom you believe, either a lack of decorum or their impertinence in challenging male attempts to own the abortion issue. Representatives Barb Byrum and Lisa Brown were barred from speaking on the floor of the house after they proposed an amendment to an abortion bill making proposed restrictions on abortion apply to vasectomies. The dispute, which does not feature especially high levels of statesmanship or rhetoric on either side, seems to center on Brown’s use of the word ‘vagina’ in her remarks.

The Republican boss who refused to allow the women to speak is an easy target here; whether he was genuinely shocked by hearing the anatomical term or simply intent on shutting down debate, he has hardly advanced the cause of democracy by clamping the censor’s hand over his fellow legislators’ mouths.

But outrage over his high-handedness should not obscure the sleight of hand constituted by the women’s proposed amendment. Byrum was quoted as saying, “If we truly want to make sure children are born, we would regulate vasectomies.” This is an egregious and perhaps willful misconstrual of the objection to abortion. Byrum’s implication is that opposition to abortion is based on the idea that any prevention of pregnancy is wrong. But abortion opponents are not outraged by the idea of preventing pregnancy (leaving aside the most devout Catholics); they are outraged by the idea of ending pregnancy by terminating the life of the fetus. A vasectomy prevents pregnancy, but there is no fetus involved. Byrum’s attempt to conflate vasectomies with abortions is therefore totally irrelevant to the central question. She is attempting to sell us the notion that opposition to abortion has nothing to do with the fetus.

Abortion arouses profound passions on both sides, which is all the more reason to discuss it dispassionately. Some claim that only women are qualified to debate the issue, since they are the only ones directly affected by it; this line of reasoning collapses if we ask whether men are the only ones qualified to debate, say, the military draft or chemical castration. Matters of public policy affect everyone, and logical premises and conclusions have no gender. The most that can be said is that men should approach the topic of abortion with a measure of humility.

Let me start by saying that I think a case can be made for abortion in the early stages of pregnancy; let me continue by saying that I think Barb Byrum’s equation of vasectomies and abortions is dishonest. She must certainly understand that the central question in abortion is whether or not the fetus has rights. Bringing vasectomies into the discussion can only be an attempt to distract. If the central question about abortion is simply whether or not women have a right to prevent pregnancy, then it’s an easy issue. But it’s not, because there is another living being involved besides the mother. The question has to be when and how that being acquires the rights we attribute to a human being.

If you are going to make a case for abortion, you have to tackle the question of the rights of the fetus head-on. Attempts at misdirection only make people suspect that your case is weak. So what about it? When does a fetus become human?

Saying that life begins at conception establishes a nice bright line of demarcation, and there’s a lot to be said for bright lines in debating complicated matters. But if life begins at conception, then does a miscarriage have the same status as the death of an infant? Millennia of human practice seem to indicate that it doesn’t. The parents may mourn, but there is generally no inquest, no funeral. We have chosen to act as if very early on, a fetus is not yet a fully existing human being. This view allows the use of intrauterine devices for contraception, which do not prevent conception but rather prevent implantation in the uterus. They are in fact abortifacients. Again, there is an implicit recognition that conception does not produce a fully realized human life, only the potential for one.

But if we concede this, we have to take very seriously the fact that the fetus does indeed develop into a human being. What other outcome is there? Advances in pre-natal medicine that allow the survival of premature infants at earlier and earlier stages make it very clear that the fetus inexorably builds a claim to full humanity, and no amount of insistence on the mother’s rights over her own body can trump that. How can a human being’s right to life depend on the will of another? A woman may understandably waver in her attitude toward an unwanted pregnancy; if one day the mother decides she doesn’t want the child, then changes her mind, does the fetus’s array of human rights switch on and off depending on the mother’s state of mind? At some point, we must concede that the fetus is vested with human rights, independently of the mother’s desires. Calling the fetus a parasite hardly disposes of the issue; children are totally dependent on others for their survival for years after birth. Declaring them parasites does not strip them of their rights.

I don’t claim to know when a fetus becomes vested with human rights, but I do claim that there has to be such a point. I’d suggest that fetal viability outside the womb in line with current medical capabilities might establish a reasonable criterion. But I’d argue for strict adherence to that criterion once established. It’s tough to see any justification for late-term abortion except danger to the mother’s life.

So I think you can make a case for abortion in the early stages, but once the fetus is viable I don’t think it is any longer exclusively a question of a woman’s rights to her body. There are two sets of rights involved now, and no amount of misdirection can change that. The questions get tough at that point, even if you are passionately committed to choice. The increasing incidence of sex-specific abortion in some immigrant communities in the U.S., favoring male children over female, has to pose uncomfortable questions for the pro-choice movement. If you don’t squirm, you’re not thinking.

Abortion is a harder issue to think through than Barb Byrum wants us to believe. And men are not the only ones who need to approach the topic with humility.

Sam Reaves www.samreaves.com

Listen up

The state of political discourse in the United States continues to deteriorate, with right and left trading insults instead of arguments and moderation going the way of bell-bottom jeans. Congress is paralyzed and the country seems to be split into two hostile camps, with the Tea Party on one side and Occupy Everything on the other, and no middle ground where reasonable people who want to solve the country’s problems can meet.

It’s a depressing picture, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. I think it’s a waste of time to try to figure out who started it or which side is more unreasonable. Unfortunately, that’s what most of the discussion seems to be about. It’s a lot more emotionally satisfying to score points and get high-fives from like-minded people than it is to engage in real discussion of the issues and try to discern the correct policies to follow.

I could try to raise the level of debate by droning on about quality of evidence and standards of argument, but instead I’m going to try to irk everybody on both sides by pointing out that nobody has a monopoly on truth. In doing this, I’m not arguing for a mushy, content-free centrism. I’m not going to try to sell you “everybody is a little bit wrong and a little bit right” and leave it at that. I have distinct political views, and if you’ve read many of my posts you know what they are. I think there’s a right answer and a wrong answer to most questions about social and economic policy, and I think they are empirical questions capable of resolution.

But I also think that policy decisions often involve trade-offs and compromises between legitimate interests and that opposing views, even if mistaken, can alert us to things we need to consider. Shutting them out hampers the pursuit of truth. Most of all I think that in discussing complex chaotic systems like a human society, a little intellectual humility is called for.

So put down your megaphone or your brick and listen up. Below are some things liberals and conservatives need to understand. The list is not exhaustive and you can carp about my phrasing and quibble with labels. (I’m using liberal and conservative in their commonly accepted meanings in American parlance, nothing complicated.) And yes, these are superficial propositions, designed to get people thinking and talking. Now listen up.

Three things conservatives are right about that liberals need to recognize:

1. Personal responsibility (or lack of it) is a key element of any social pathology.
Most liberals know this, even if they won’t admit it. They know that you can give some people an adequate income and they will still prefer to steal, that mere possession of weapons is not what makes people violent, and that if you don’t hold people accountable for their actions there will be no restraint on their actions. Liberals demonstrate that they know this by loudly calling for accountability whenever the miscreant is above a certain income level. But they are squeamish about accountability for the socially disadvantaged, which is patronizing and short-sighted.

2. Taxation reaches a point of diminishing returns fairly quickly.
This one ought to be obvious, both as a thought experiment and on the historical evidence. Up to a point, you can raise taxes and get more revenue, but pretty soon the rich start to wonder why they should go to the trouble of starting another company and creating another five hundred jobs when ninety percent of the money is going to go to the government. Or they understandably start looking for ways to hide their money. High tax rates deter enterprise and drive the rich away—remember when all the famous British people were living outside the U.K.? You can argue about exactly where the point of diminishing returns is, but what you can’t do is go on trying to solve problems by creating entitlements and answer every query about paying for them simply by saying, “We’ll tax the rich until their eyes water.”

3. Deterrence works.
Deterrence works on the streets; ask New Yorkers. When they started locking people up for jumping the turnstiles and spray-painting the walls, the streets got safer. And deterrence works on the international level, too. When Qadhafi saw what happened to Saddam, he coughed up his weapons program pronto. The problem for liberals is that deterrence is ugly. Deterrence requires a credible threat, i.e. occasional exemplary violence, and that’s not nice. Liberals think, in the face of all the evidence, that people are basically nice and that if you are nice to everybody they’ll be nice to you. Conservatives know better.

OK, now that I’ve got the liberals steamed up, it’s your turn, conservatives. Here are:

Three things liberals are right about that conservatives need to recognize:

1. Tolerance is a virtue.
We all used to live in tribes, and tribal loyalty used to be a survival mechanism. But in this globalized, urbanized society we have to share space and resources with a bewildering variety of aliens. For the whole thing to work, everybody needs to be equal before the law, and everybody deserves respect as an individual. Conservatives know this, but it’s all too easy, in a reaction against the grotesqueries of political correctness, to revert to a lazy tribalism and indulge your hostility or contempt for people you don’t like. This is a moral failing and a political one as well.

2. Patriotism is not a substitute for thought.
Patriotism is, you might say, the modern version of tribalism. But it’s an improved version; particularly in the United States, patriotism means loyalty to a concept of nationhood that transcends ethnicity, admitting anyone who embraces the ideas of the Constitution to citizenship. And that's a good thing. But patriotism is not license. It’s one thing to say that we have to rally round the flag when we go to war; it’s another to cut off debate about whether we ought to be going to war. And the virtues of our concept of nationhood do not entitle us to do as we please wherever we please. We are still bound by moral strictures that outrank an executive decision or an act of Congress.

3. The richer you are, the better you can afford to pay taxes.
This one has to be considered together with the above remark about diminishing returns, of course. But a moment’s reflection shows that if you start with a billion dollars, you have a lot more left after paying a third of your income to the government than if you start with fifty thousand dollars. And if you can’t make do on two-thirds of a billion dollars, you need a lifestyle adjustment and I mean right now. Yes, this is an argument for progressive taxation, which conservative purists abhor. And I hesitate to make it because of the slippery slope which leads to punitive taxation, a concept liberals find impossible to resist. The only admissible object of taxation is to cover the government’s expenditures. And insisting on a flat tax as a principle makes for clarity. But when income inequality is spiking and a world-scuppering debt crisis looms, I’m OK with a reasonably progressive tax system with rates capped at a point somewhere shy of the deterrent level.

There you have it; if you see something you don’t like, tough. It’s time to stop congratulating yourself on the loftiness of your values and get down to business figuring out how the world works and how you and your fellow citizens can cooperate to solve its problems.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com