No Straw MenEnlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, set up only to be confuted summarily.

No Straw Men

A version of this blog post appeared in the Hamilton College Spectator on November 14, 2003.

In my second semester of college, I began writing letters to the editor of the Spectator; it was and is a wonderful way to express one’s ideas without the usual complements of introduction, body, conclusion, etc. I soon turned to all-campus e-mails, an even less-demanding medium. Using my privileges as president of the Objectivist Club, I would preface our meeting announcements with short hooks to Hamilton. Yet I never really acted on my love for my writing—until now.

A few weeks ago, in my European Intellectual History class, I raised an objection to a point Professor Al Kelly had just made. He responded with characteristic wit: “Watch your straw men, Jon.” In elaborating, Professor Kelly explained that enlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, setup only to be summarily confuted. Still, we all resort to such recourse from time to time, since straw men are far easier to tackle than the ambiguities and contingencies and qualifications that make up reality.

Yet felling straw men says more about the feller than the felle. After all, you can judge a person by the enemies he not only makes but chooses, and if one addresses only the weakest arguments, one betrays the weakness of one’s own arguments. For instance, some hold that all feminists dismiss science as a male attempt to rape nature. But this notion simply upholds the most vocally irrational aspect of modern feminism, and reifies it as if it were the whole. Only dogmatists and demagogues waste time with such caricatures.

Scholars, on the other hand, refuse to engage in what the philosopher John Stuart Mill, in 1859, declared the gravest injustice of discourse: “to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion.” Scholars, as political theorist Chris Matthew Sciabarra remarks, “use an intellectual scalpel, rather than an ideological bludgeon,” to engage honestly and thoroughly with the most forcible criticism. As Aristotle counseled, “The fool tells me his reasons; the wise man persuades me with my own.”

Unpublished Notes

* We “would do better to raise serious, as opposed to spurious, questions . . . and to formulate our responses on the basis of meaningful knowledge and verifiable evidence rather than fantastic speculation and vacuous generalities.” [1]

* “He covers virtually every aspect of the issue, and does so in a way that conveys both a firm commitment to his own conception of justice as well as a resolve to do justice to opposing views.”[2]

* “[Cicero] has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than ever his own. . . . He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. . . . If he is unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”[3]

* “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side . . . he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts . . . the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. . . . . All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind . . . is [only] . . . ever really known . . . [by] those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest light. So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up.”[4]

* “Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test.”[5]

[1] Mouin Rabbani, “Head in the Sand,” in Brian Klug et al. “Debating a World Without Israel,” Foreign Policy, March-April 2005, p. 59.

[2] Irfan Khawaja, [Review of An Eye for an Eye? The Immorality of Punishing by Death, 2nd ed., by Stephen Nathanson], Teaching Philosophy, June 2003, p. 200.

[3] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University, 1991).

[4] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 4th ed. (1869), in David Wooton (ed.), Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), p. 626.

[5] C.S. Lewis.

Teach a Man to Fish

A version of this blog post appeared in the Hamilton College Spectator (November 14, 2003), the Syracuse Post-Standard (January 22, 2004), and What We Think: Young Voters Speak Out (College Tree, 2004). The post also was noted on the Hamilton College Web site on September 28, 2004, and January 22, 2004.

On Monday in Beinecke, the Hamilton chapter of Amnesty International asked me for money to buy a water buffalo for a farmer in Nepal. The scene reminded me of a comparable event I wrote about last year. “So, we donated spare change in water buckets at the dining halls, we fasted, we volunteered for Utica’s soup kitchen. But something was missing—an ingredient so implicit in our bounty that we overlooked its necessity. That manna is capitalism. For capitalism, in contrast to the quick fixes of Hunger and Homelessness Week, is a long-term panacea.”

Indeed, world hunger is not a problem of redistribution. As psychotherapist Michael J. Hurd observes, people don’t go hungry “because you throw out half a stick of butter or an unfinished Coke.” In the same way, malnutrition does not develop into abundance when you donate one of those shiny new $20 bills to some charity. As they say, Give a man a fish, and feed him for the week. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime.

To wit, though the specifics vary from country to country, the root cause of hunger is always the same: not lack of handouts, but lack of a market economy. Consider sub–Saharan Africa. Echoing Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource 2, philosopher Andrew Bernstein argues, “Africa has the identical natural resource fundamentally responsible for the West’s rise: the human mind.” Yet the continent lacks the social system that allows the mind to flourish, which liberates it to invent and innovate. What Africans, like other starving people, desperately need, therefore, is to marry the mind to the market.

For to the extent that it has existed, the free market has enabled abundance unmatched in human history. When was the last time a famine occurred in any capitalist nation? It is no coincidence that the hungriest countries—Somalia, Afghanistan and Haiti—are the most averse to economic and political freedom.

Now, I don’t doubt the sincerity of my fellow students. But if your heart bleeds for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free to whom Emma Lazarus dedicated our Statue of Liberty, then give them the gift of capitalism and watch their cups runneth over. We can debate the details later, but let’s call a spade a spade. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, the haves have capitalism; the have-nots have not capitalism. To rephrase President Clinton, It’s capitalism, stupid. To rephrase Karl Marx, Workers of the world unite for capitalism; you have nothing to lose but your hunger.

Unpublished Notes

1. Robert Wright, “Poverty and the Middle-class Terrorist,” Slate, September 10, 2002, in Robert Wright, “A Real War on Terrorism,” Slate, September 3-September 13, 2002.
But one thing aid has generally not done, as the economist William Easterly showed in The Elusive Quest for Growth, is make a clear contribution to lasting economic development—to the market-driven modernization that tends to be lacking in terrorism-exporting countries.

Nor has aid dramatically contributed to the freedom and democracy that are also lacking in terrorism-exporting countries. In fact, when aid passes through the hands of dictators, a large chunk has a way of winding up in the hands of their cronies, consolidating autocratic rule. According to calculations reported by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton Root in the National Interest, “every dollar of per capita foreign aid improves an incumbent autocrat’s chance of surviving in office another year by about 4%.”

2. Pedro Sanchez, “The Next Green Revolution,” New York Times, October 6, 2004.

3. The traditional kind of foreign aid simply does not work. It does not encourage the recipient nations to reform their legal systems, or their markets; it does not help them to become industrialized.

4. Gary Dempsey and Aaron Lukas, “Promoting Afghanistan,” Center for Trade Policy Studies, January 23, 2002.
The real source of poverty and isolation in much of the world lies in the unwillingness of many states—especially Muslim states—to make themselves competitive in the global economy. Poor countries, in other words, have adopted poor policies. The key to fighting poverty doesn’t lie in foreign aid, which often merely helps recalcitrant governments avoid necessary reforms. Developing countries must reduce trade barriers, establish the rule of law, protect private property, curb inflation, cut wasteful spending and corruption, and stop meddling in domestic markets. A trade deal wouldn’t prompt those changes overnight, but it would introduce external discipline to get the basics right.

Right now the United States imposes its highest trade barriers on exports that are most important to poor countries, such as sugar, footwear, clothing, and textiles. In the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, for instance, the United States pledged in 1995 to phase out all textile and apparel quotas over a 10-year period. Only a tiny percentage has been scrapped so far. On average, developing countries face tariffs on their manufactured exports that are nearly four times the tariffs facing exports of developed countries. Because of that inequitable pattern of protectionism, Thomas W. Hertel and Will Martin of the World Bank have concluded that developing countries would capture around 75% of the world economic benefits from further trade liberalization in the manufacturing sector.

In other words, Washington could deliver far more important and long-lasting “aid” to poor farmers and workers around the world by allowing them to sell what they produce duty-free in the U.S. market.

Aid’s long-term prospects are much bleaker. When Harry Truman took enormous political risks in 1947 to push the Marshall Plan through Congress, he was dealing with nations very different from Afghanistan. If massive government spending could work anywhere, it was in post-war Europe: Skilled labor was widely available, the rule of law and property rights had a long history, and the customs of a commercial society were recoverable. All Europe needed was physical capital. Afghanistan currently lacks all of those things, so massive foreign aid won’t achieve much. It would likely create an addiction to freebies among Afghanistan’s political elite that they would eventually use to blackmail the West: Give us more money or “the bad guys might come back.”

5. John Blundell, “Africa’s Plight Will Not End with Aid,” Scotsman, June 14, 2004.
Without the rule of law, private property rights, an independent judiciary, limited government and an infrastructure for basic transportation, water, electricity and communication, Americans would also be a diseased, broken and starving people.

6. Marian L. Tupy, “Poverty That Defies Aid,” Washington Times, June 19, 2005.
“poverty that defies aid”

7. Victor Davis Hanson, “Misunderstanding America,” National Review Online, February 25, 2002.
“Everyone from Swedish relief officials to Bono whines that in proportional rather than absolute amounts of foreign aid, we American are tightfisted and do not give generously to the Third World countries. Forget the billions that we do hand out—and whether such blanket donations without the prerequisite conditions of Westernization make countries like Egypt, Palestine, North Korea, and Pakistan worse rather than better. Instead consider that Americans, unlike Europeans, spend billions in defense that in real terms are not directly tied to the security of the United States but rather ensure global trade, tranquility and security.

“Just how much ‘foreign aid’ is a multibillion-dollar carrier battle group, when it patrols the Mediterranean or the Sea of Japan and so has the effect not of stealing foreign resources but rather of ensuring that Turks and Greeks are not at war, that Koreans do not blow each other up, or that China keeps away from Taiwan and Japan? Unlike simple food or money, this type of ‘foreign assistance’ is quite risky to its benefactors—and more likely be resented, caricatured, or misrepresented. Sending in an air wing to Kosovo can save thousands; sending in the Red Cross or the U.N., tragically, cannot. G.P.S. bombs, not Amnesty International, are more likely to keep killers away from Big Ben and the Vatican. Should we not deploy carriers, frigates, and planes the world over, both the Europeans and the Third World would not enjoy a stable global community, but one that would either sink into the chaos of a Mogadishu, Monrovia, or Kabul, or find its stability only in the law and order of a Baghdad, Peking, or Havana.

8. The historical record suggests that foreign aid promotes perpetual dependence.

9. Ugandan President Yoweri Musevani, during a 2003 meeting with President Bush.
“I don’t want aid; I want trade.”

Ideas Matter: Why Civilizations Clash

A version of this blog post appeared in the Hamilton College Spectator (November 21, 2003), in the New Zealand Free Radical (April-May 2004), and on the Web site of the Liberal Institute (March 2003).

“Armies are in motion,” observes Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism (2003), “but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding—one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.”[1] That worry is deeply ideological, and as we engage in what Daniel Pipes calls a “cosmic battle over the future course of the human experience,”[2] we ignore it at our peril. Specifically, our so-called war on terror is one of ideas. We still need armies of course, but since culture undergirds politics, in the long run certain ideas, if unchallenged, will only breed more 9/11 kamikazes.

Some say these ideas evince an epochal antipathy between militant Islam and the West, a “clash of civilizations” in Samuel Huntington’s formulation, which shapes the essence of their mutual alienation. Yet what is this essence? What is it that we, as Americans, stand for? Who hates what we stand for? And what do they stand for? If the answers have been ambiguous—for one, “terrorism” is a tactic, not an enemy—Berman brings them into focus.

His most useful contribution is his commentary on the philosophy of the Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutb (1906-66). A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the prototypical terrorist organization that politicized a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Qutb violently opposed Gamal Nasser’s secular régime; in return, Nasser imprisoned or executed many members of the brotherhood. But the organization remained active underground, and 35 years later Qutb’s poisonous legacy shot up in four Boeing 767s, by way of a new brotherhood, known as Al Qaeda. (In fact, Qutb’s younger brother Muhammad taught Islamic studies in Saudi Arabia, where one of his students was Osama bin Laden.)

Qutb denunciated all things modern and lamented the dualistic “schizophrenia” of the secular and the sacred. He took greatest umbrage at the separation of church from state. Yet rather than seeking transcendence in a way that would allow both to exist within a larger context, he sought to erase secular life by engulfing life itself in religion. Indeed, his acutest quarrel was not with America’s failure to uphold its principles; his quarrel was with the principles.[3] Scorning our materialism, capitalism, individualism, humanism, rationalism, decadence and moral laxity, Qutb cherished austerity, self-sacrifice, collectivism, faith or feeling above reason or science, and self-denial. In Qutb’s view, the former traits not only induce mental confusion and spiritual corruption; they also graft those sins onto the pure Islamic soul.

But why the sword and not just the pen in response? Why do Qutb’s disciples furiously beat back discotheques and Big Macs in Bali and Iran? Why do they try to stone women to death for adultery in Nigeria? And why did they knock down those “tower[s] of Babel,” in Norman Mailer’s description, in downtown Manhattan?[4] To the Qutbian mentality, anything this-worldly lacks moral value; only a supernatural paradise awash with virgins has meaning. Hence, employing force, in this life, to achieve one’s ends cannot be immoral. Moreover, as Dinesh D’Souza argues in What’s So Great about America, freedom entails the freedom to choose one’s virtue—to wear a burka on Monday and a miniskirt on Friday. To a Qutbian, such freedom is in fact slavery. And in a world of unending temptations, coercion must accompany, in effect co-opting, the exercise in philosophical cleansing.

And yet, our enemy is not coextensive with any particular religion, like Islam, or any particular region, like the Arab or Muslim world. Rather, the enemy is wider—the enemy is an idea, a political ideology that revolts against the liberal world order. For instance, consider the following passage: “Man is made of mud and ashes. . . . Why are you proud, O mud? Wherefore art thou exalted. . . . O the vile ignobility of human existence! O the ignoble condition of human vileness.”[5] The author is not Sayyid Qutb oor Osama bin Laden, but Pope Innocent III, who wrote these words in the 12th century. But would Qutb or bin Laden disagree? No, for whether they are American Evangelical Christians living in the Bible Belt, ultraorthodox Jews in the West Bank, or Islamists in Pakistani madrasas, our enemies all merely spin variations on the same basic rejectionism. (The latter are more consistent than their brethren, who have and continue to adapt their beliefs to modernity and its midwife, liberalism.)

To concretize this revolt, recall the image of two passenger jets smashing into the Twin Towers. Explains philosopher Harry Binswanger: “First, observe the target: the World Trade Center. What does the World Trade Center symbolize?. . . . It is the core of Wall Street, which is the base of New York City. New York is the [cultural and economic] dynamo powering America—the so-called Great Satan.” Next, recall “the images of Osama bin Laden and his primitive, bearded barbarians squatting in the dirt around their campfires in Afghanistan.” Now juxtapose that primitivism with the image of a skyscraper, wherein free men and women were hard at work on their computers and cellular phones. The difference: whereas our attackers seek to destroy, Americans seek to develop. For America stands for “individual freedom, the freedom to use one’s independent mind to produce material prosperity, a rising standard of living, and individual happiness on this earth. Freedom, wealth, happiness”—our values are absolute anathema to our enemies.[6]

Is this hyperbole? Do some people really, as President Bush declared, “hate our freedoms”?[7] Heed the words of Ayatollah Khomeini: “We are not afraid of economic sanctions or military intervention. What we are afraid of is Western universities.”[8]

There is just one last problem. “To arrive at a situation in which Nazis have conquered Europe,” Berman writes, “you not only need to have the Nazis themselves, you need to have all the other right-wing movements that look on Nazis in a friendly light, and you need to have left-wing opponents like the anti-war French Socialists, who cannot see that Nazis are Nazis.”[9] Applying this pearl to our new world war, we must recognize that to defend America—to defend Western civilization—we infidels need the proud, moral confidence and certainty of our enemies. We must recognize that our ideas uphold life, that ours is the morality of liberalism and hence liberty. Likewise, we must recognize that our enemies’ ideas uphold death, that theirs is the morality of terror and hence tyranny. As two writers for the Ayn Rand Institute put it, “We cannot combat . . . fanatical faith with timid self-doubt, no matter how many bombs we possess.”[10]

Footnotes

[1] Paul Berman, “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,” New York Times Magazine, March 23, 2003.

[2] Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: Norton, 2003 [2002]), p. 260.

[3] Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Understanding the Global Crisis Reclaiming Rand’s Radical Legacy,” Free Radical (New Zealand), May-June 2003.

[4] As quoted in [Unsigned], [Untitled], New Republic, November 26, 2001.

[5] Pope Innocent III, “On the Misery of Man,” in Bernard Murchland (trans.), Two Views of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), pp. 5, 9.

[6] Harry Binswanger, “America vs. Death-Worship: The Moral Meaning of the Coming War,” Lecture, Columbia University, October 2, 2001.

[7] As quoted in Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Pledges Attack on Afghanistan Unless It Surrenders bin Laden,” New York Times, September 21, 2001.

[8] As quoted in Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 122.

[9] Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 206.

[10] Stephen Siek and Tore Boeckmann, “America’s Battle with Moral Uncertainty,” Ayn Rand Institute, September 24, 2001.

Unpublished Notes

As military historian Victor Davis Hanson notes, “Take your pick of the Western agenda. Women’s rights? They want to go back to the Dark Ages. Homosexual rights? They want to kill them. Democracy? They don’t believe in it. . . . Technology? They don’t like it.”[11]

Indeed, if one considers Western “universities as a symbol of the unfettered mind, of reason given full play, of the right to question anything,” as writer Edwin Locke writes, then our enemies are right to fear—nay, welcome—the West.[12]

Qutb’s vision of “liberation” thus entailed unrelenting adherence to Islamic law, sharia, or, as Berman writes, “freedom from false doctrines that fail[] to recognize God.”[13] That bin Laden sees Saddam Hussein as an apostate is an extension of this worldview, which repudiates Zionists and Christian Westerners from without and secularists from within.[14]

Qutb believed that the faithful were living through a new “age of ignorance” (jahiliyah)

As Daniel Pipes notes, Qutb (1906-66) is part of a tradition of anti-liberal Islamists, beginning with Ibn Taymiya (1268-1328), through Hasan al–Banna (1906-49), Abu al–A‘la Mawdudi (1903-79), Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1903-89), and culminating in Osama bin Laden.

The revolutionaries who overthrew the shah of Iran in 1979 and the assassins who gunned down President Anwar Sadat of Egypt two years later were overt Qutbians.[15]

As we enter the TK year after September 11, it behooves us to understand the causes of that evil, to make sure that we have learned its lessons and are able to prevent similar future massacres.

[11] As quoted in Rone Tempest, “Right Way to Farm the Classics,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2004.

[12] Edwin A. Locke, “The Psycho-Epistemology of the Arab World,” Lecture.

[13] Paul Berman, “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,” New York Times Magazine, March 23, 2003.

[14] Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Understanding the Global Crisis Reclaiming Rand’s Radical Legacy,” Free Radical (New Zealand), May-June 2003.

[15] Daniel Pipes, “Jihad and the Professors,” Commentary, November 2002.