Showing posts with label Machiavelli. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Machiavelli. Show all posts
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Can Pacifists Be Citizens? A Jewish Solution
As previously noted, I view government as a devil's bargain. I accept the existence of an institution with the power to engage in violence and whose main purpose is violence. This applies to fighting wars and even the punishing of criminals. Government authority means nothing if, at the end of the day, they are unable to physically harm those who defy them. The main reason why I endorse government violence is that I see it as the alternative to private vendettas. I am not about to accept a world in which "every man does what is right in his own eyes." I can fathom turning the other cheek precisely because there is a police officer out there who can strike the person for me. Thus my purpose is not to engage in violence, but to do whatever I can to limit it. Openly acknowledging the necessity of violence puts me in much the same situation as Machiavelli, begging to be misunderstood as endorsing tyranny. I would argue that, on the contrary, my willingness to acknowledge the Machiavellian reality of government allows me to be a true defender of liberty and limit government violence. I recognize what kind of deal I am making and have clear boundaries. This is different from the person who pretends to deal with government and not make compromises with liberty. Such a person has no protection when faced with the real moral dilemmas of a tyrannical government.
It is the common practice in times of war to grant draft exemptions to pacifists and "consciousness objectors." I fail to see the reason for this and fully agree with Richard Dawkins on the absurdity of giving people special protection simply because of "religion." By agreeing to be a citizen you accept the legitimacy of the government to fight wars and agree to help it do so. Since pacifists cannot agree to this, they cannot be citizens in any meaningful way. This is not a violation of anyone's religious liberties. Religious liberty only exists when you pay the door fee of becoming part of the system by accepting its validity. If you cannot pay that price then you are not part of the conversation.
The citizenship question really goes far beyond military service. If pacifists were consistent in their beliefs they would become "conscientious objectors" from jury duty and voting. By serving on a jury the government is asking you to accept their legal authority to punish people even with physical force. The government is also asking you to honestly declare whether you think a person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Maximum security prisons are directly connected to the threat of physical violence; prisoners who do not comply face being beaten and if they try to escape they may be killed. How can a pacifist ever convict someone of a violent crime? I would add that since we can assume that any violent criminal was brought in by police licensed to engage in physical violence, such violence was either used or implicitly threatened. Thus a pacifist would have to automatically throw out any case rather than be an active participant in this system of government violence. If you let a person go who you believe beyond a reasonable doubt is guilty because you object to prison conditions and police tactics you are not keeping your end of the bargain you struck with the government.
When you vote for your congressional representative, you are voting for someone licensed by the Constitution to vote to declare war. The President is the Constitutional Commander in Chief with the power to lead the United States military in battle. Participating in an election means declaring the moral validity of the Congress to declare war and the President to wage it as put down in the Constitution. Since the Constitution is a war validating document, no pacifist can ever accept the legitimacy of the Constitution without making a hypocrite of himself.
Rather than forcefully expelling or killing pacifists, I would suggest a solution from Jewish history. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, Jews even when tolerated and allowed to live in peace, were not accepted as citizens. In each city Jews lived under the authority of their own kehilla system, operating as its own semi-autonomous government. It was the kehilla that negotiated with the Christian authorities for Jews to be allowed to live in the city and practice their own religion. These negations usually involved monetary payment, call it taxes or bribery. "In the pre-modern world, there was no such thing as rights. There were privileges that you paid for." Jews were also subject to blasphemy laws which barred them from making statement offensive to Christianity. This was not due to "intolerance," simply a matter of Jews, by definition, not being able to accept the legitimacy of a Christian State, whose claim to authority rested on Christian theological claims.
Pacifists should be allowed to live in peace within this country; not because of any right to religious liberty (they lost that right the moment they rejected the government, which gives allows for religious liberty to exist), but because they are non-threatening producers, whose presence benefits society at large. Pacifists should not actually be citizens. They should not have the right to vote, they should not serve on juries but should pay an extra head tax to cover their lack of military service. They would also have no free speech protection and be barred from making any statements deemed "subversive." Since they are outside the political system they have no reason to involve themselves in it or even speak about it. Every American would have the right to put themselves down as a pacifist and pay the consequences. (Children of pacifists should have the option of going to court and rejecting the beliefs of their parents and immediately take the test and oath of citizenship without having to wait five years.) Those who do not and instead decide to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, lose all claim to ever being "conscientious objectors."
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Secular Theodicy: A Review of Day of Empire (Part II)
(Part I)
I hope my readers will forgive my long discourse, but I felt it served a useful purpose; I wished to make it very clear how this theodical history game is played, who benefits from it, and to make sure that I am not accused of being a defender of religious fundamentalism (Haredi or any other brand) or of intolerance. On the flip side, I do not want anyone to think that I was simply going after Haredi Jews as my target here is not Haredim but Amy Chua, a Chinese-American Law Professor who teaches at Yale. Chua may not be Haredi but, in terms of playing the theodical history game for all of its intellectual dishonesty, she is every bit their equal. Not that she is interested in defending divine providence; rather, walking in the Whig tradition, she has adapted the game for the cause of tolerance.
Her book, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance and Why They Fall, analyses what Chua likes to refer to as “hyperpowers” and argues that their rise was due to their tolerance, or at least their relative tolerance, and their subsequent downfall was due to the fact that, when faced a crisis, they chose to turn away from tolerance. This is comforting in that the people who do the decent, pious and moral thing come out ahead in this sort of narrative. It must overcome the hurdle of all such narratives namely that, as political thinkers such as Glaucon and Machiavelli recognized, misbehavior often does pay off in the political realm. Kicking the Jews out of your country and seizing their property or claiming Church land for yourself is a good way to raise money; money that can be used pay for an army, fight wars, oppress people living in other countries and gain even more power and renown. In effect Chua has set for herself the task of correcting the “misimpression” that one may have gotten from the casual study of history that great powers are created by being “intolerant” and being better at it than anyone else.
To play her game she has, at her disposal, two moveable pieces, tolerance and hyperpowerhood. Which societies count as being tolerant and which ones count as being hyperpowers? These concepts are so wide open that Chua can have them mean whatever she wants them to mean. She goes through the pretense of defining these things. In her introduction, she defines three conditions to be a hyperpower:
Its power clearly surpasses that of all its known contemporaneous rivals; it is not clearly inferior in economic or military strength to any other power on the planet, known to it or not; and it projects its power over so immense an area of the globe and over so immense a population that it breaks the bounds of mere local or even regional preeminence. (xxii)
She defines tolerance as: “letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society – even if only for instrumental or strategic reasons.” (xxiii) Not that Chua is actually serious about trying to stick to these parameters. When you can say that the seventeenth-century Dutch counts as a hyperpower, but sixteenth-century Spain does not then the concept of a hyperpower has no meaning. (more on this later) If we were serious about using her definition of tolerance we would have to admit that Nazi Germany was a tolerant society. They did let many different people live, work and prosper in their society. The Nazi army contained people from dozens of different countries. The Nazis worked with Frenchmen, Poles, Hungarians, and Russians, and many non-Germans prospered under Nazi rule. The Nazis were even willing, on occasion, to work with Jews. What becomes clear very quickly about Chua is that what matters for any given society is not if you were really “tolerant” or a “hyperpower” but if Chua wants to make you out as one of the good guys, if she can use you as part of her morality tale that tolerance is a good thing.
If Chua was a real historian and not writing Whig propaganda for modern liberals she could have easily written a book about the paradox of tolerance and intolerance faced by great powers. Almost all great powers have found themselves ruling over multiple societies and cultures, often even hostile ones. This presents a problem. On the one hand, people are not likely to meekly submit to a power that tries to suppress their culture, ban their religion and physically wipe them out. On the other hand, in order to maintain oneself as a great power, one is going to need to create a common society with a common cause. This requires that the various societies and cultures under one's dominion must, in some sense, yield and agree to merge into the general culture. The solution is to try to balance these two requirements. One makes the overt gesture of tolerance while at the same time, usually less overtly, one tries to bring pressure in order to force dissenting groups to knuckle under. One can easily show how different powers such as the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, Spain, and the United States have faced this problem of dealing with multiple cultures and have followed this line of reasoning, while practicing different models of tolerance/intolerance. In essence, such a book would be an expanded version of Michael Walzer’s On Toleration. This line of argument avoids a number of problems. It makes no absolute claims so it does not have to deny exceptions. This allows for one to be somewhat open-ended about what counts as a great power or as a tolerant society. This argument merely tries to describe a given phenomenon; it does not judge whether tolerance is good or bad, it does not try to create some sort of historical law, it makes no predictions as to the future nor does it proscribe any given course of action or ideology. As with all good history, it offers a method of analysis but affirms no dogmas.
(To be continued …)
I hope my readers will forgive my long discourse, but I felt it served a useful purpose; I wished to make it very clear how this theodical history game is played, who benefits from it, and to make sure that I am not accused of being a defender of religious fundamentalism (Haredi or any other brand) or of intolerance. On the flip side, I do not want anyone to think that I was simply going after Haredi Jews as my target here is not Haredim but Amy Chua, a Chinese-American Law Professor who teaches at Yale. Chua may not be Haredi but, in terms of playing the theodical history game for all of its intellectual dishonesty, she is every bit their equal. Not that she is interested in defending divine providence; rather, walking in the Whig tradition, she has adapted the game for the cause of tolerance.
Her book, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance and Why They Fall, analyses what Chua likes to refer to as “hyperpowers” and argues that their rise was due to their tolerance, or at least their relative tolerance, and their subsequent downfall was due to the fact that, when faced a crisis, they chose to turn away from tolerance. This is comforting in that the people who do the decent, pious and moral thing come out ahead in this sort of narrative. It must overcome the hurdle of all such narratives namely that, as political thinkers such as Glaucon and Machiavelli recognized, misbehavior often does pay off in the political realm. Kicking the Jews out of your country and seizing their property or claiming Church land for yourself is a good way to raise money; money that can be used pay for an army, fight wars, oppress people living in other countries and gain even more power and renown. In effect Chua has set for herself the task of correcting the “misimpression” that one may have gotten from the casual study of history that great powers are created by being “intolerant” and being better at it than anyone else.
To play her game she has, at her disposal, two moveable pieces, tolerance and hyperpowerhood. Which societies count as being tolerant and which ones count as being hyperpowers? These concepts are so wide open that Chua can have them mean whatever she wants them to mean. She goes through the pretense of defining these things. In her introduction, she defines three conditions to be a hyperpower:
Its power clearly surpasses that of all its known contemporaneous rivals; it is not clearly inferior in economic or military strength to any other power on the planet, known to it or not; and it projects its power over so immense an area of the globe and over so immense a population that it breaks the bounds of mere local or even regional preeminence. (xxii)
She defines tolerance as: “letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society – even if only for instrumental or strategic reasons.” (xxiii) Not that Chua is actually serious about trying to stick to these parameters. When you can say that the seventeenth-century Dutch counts as a hyperpower, but sixteenth-century Spain does not then the concept of a hyperpower has no meaning. (more on this later) If we were serious about using her definition of tolerance we would have to admit that Nazi Germany was a tolerant society. They did let many different people live, work and prosper in their society. The Nazi army contained people from dozens of different countries. The Nazis worked with Frenchmen, Poles, Hungarians, and Russians, and many non-Germans prospered under Nazi rule. The Nazis were even willing, on occasion, to work with Jews. What becomes clear very quickly about Chua is that what matters for any given society is not if you were really “tolerant” or a “hyperpower” but if Chua wants to make you out as one of the good guys, if she can use you as part of her morality tale that tolerance is a good thing.
If Chua was a real historian and not writing Whig propaganda for modern liberals she could have easily written a book about the paradox of tolerance and intolerance faced by great powers. Almost all great powers have found themselves ruling over multiple societies and cultures, often even hostile ones. This presents a problem. On the one hand, people are not likely to meekly submit to a power that tries to suppress their culture, ban their religion and physically wipe them out. On the other hand, in order to maintain oneself as a great power, one is going to need to create a common society with a common cause. This requires that the various societies and cultures under one's dominion must, in some sense, yield and agree to merge into the general culture. The solution is to try to balance these two requirements. One makes the overt gesture of tolerance while at the same time, usually less overtly, one tries to bring pressure in order to force dissenting groups to knuckle under. One can easily show how different powers such as the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, Spain, and the United States have faced this problem of dealing with multiple cultures and have followed this line of reasoning, while practicing different models of tolerance/intolerance. In essence, such a book would be an expanded version of Michael Walzer’s On Toleration. This line of argument avoids a number of problems. It makes no absolute claims so it does not have to deny exceptions. This allows for one to be somewhat open-ended about what counts as a great power or as a tolerant society. This argument merely tries to describe a given phenomenon; it does not judge whether tolerance is good or bad, it does not try to create some sort of historical law, it makes no predictions as to the future nor does it proscribe any given course of action or ideology. As with all good history, it offers a method of analysis but affirms no dogmas.
(To be continued …)
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