Two 14-year-old Girls

     Not long after I wrote my last post on insulting the prophet, I heard a debate on the radio that raised my free-speech hackles a bit. One participant took the position that people should be criminally liable for speech or symbolic acts that they know are likely to result in violence, such as burning a copy of the Koran. She articulated the principle in terms of causality, which is what I found troubling, because it seems to me that to assign moral blame to the speaker for how an audience reacts is to deny (or at the very least dilute) the responsibility of audiences to react appropriately. Even if an inappropriate response is predictable, I am reluctant to blame the speaker, except in cases of fraud or deception.

     As if to make that point clear, last week the Taliban attempted to assassinate a fourteen year old girl, Malala Yousufzai, for her audacious and heretical suggestion that girls should be educated. The Taliban have made it very clear that they intend to respond with violence to such advocacy; it was therefore reasonable to anticipate that if Malala were to continue speaking out in favour of girls' education, she would be targeted. And yet we view her (rightly in my mind) as blameless in this, and in fact we praise her for her courage. The blame, all of the blame, falls squarely on the shoulders of the ignorant zealots who tried to kill her. They did wrong, not she. 

     The same week, a successful attempt on the life of a different fourteen year old girl was made, unfortunately by someone less inept than the Taliban: Amanda Todd committed suicide after ruthless bullying. 

     The juxtaposition of these two girls and their circumstances leaves me greatly conflicted. On the one hand, I feel very strongly that Malala did nothing wrong, and that nothing she said justified any act of violence whatsoever. At the same time, though, I have great sadness and sympathy for Amanda, and anger at her abusers. And there's the conflict, because ultimately she was the one who decided to kill herself, in response to abuse which at its core was speech. (I know she had been punched and blackmailed, but I will go out on a limb and speculate that it was the insistent display of hatred and moral condemnation more than anything else that drove her to such misery.) Did I not just conclude, before being confronted with this case, that speakers are not to be held morally responsible for the inappropriate reactions of their audiences, even if they are predictable? If Malala was blameless for the attempt on her life, even though it was predictable that Taliban zealots would react with inappropriate violence, how do I still feel anger at Amanda's bullies, for her inappropriate reaction of self-directed violence?

     I've struggled with this, and for a while I thought I could explain it this way: The bullies are not to blame for her death, but for something very nearly as evil. They are to blame for treating her with such devastating cruelty as to make her miserable enough to want to die, and that's plenty blameworthy enough.

     But I'm not sure that rationalization really does the trick, either. After all, Malala's speech clearly caused great distress to the poor sensitive Taliban, hurting their delicate feelings or their religious sensibilities or whatever badly enough to provoke them to violence, and yet I have almost no sympathy whatsoever for them and their reaction, whereas I do have sympathy for Amanda.

     The real answer, I think, is uglier. I said above that only in the case of fraud or deception can we blame speakers for the actions of their audience, and I think we have all deceived Amanda and each other. Malala spoke truthfully and frankly; she said she believed girls deserve to be educated, and the Taliban assassins could have tried to reason with her and her audience, to explain why she was wrong and to convince us all that no, after all, girls ought not to be educated. But they didn't do that. They surrendered the moral high ground and shot her instead.

     In contrast, Amanda's bullies told her, through their words and actions, that she was worthless and bad and deserved to die. Some creep manipulated her into showing her bare chest to him online, but we told her, collectively, that was something for her to be ashamed of. We empowered him to blackmail and humiliate her, by making a federal case out of "wardrobe malfunctions", by making it a big deal, a grave moral concern. In short, we told her a lie that she believed, and on that basis killed herself. We've got to stop telling that lie, and I suppose the first step there is to stop believing it ourselves. 

Explaining is not Excusing

     I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago who expressed a certain dissatisfaction with my earlier post on the Man-Cold. It's not that she thought it was necessarily false, she said. She just didn't like my giving men an excuse to be such wimps. Well, I don't think I did that. I gave an account for why it might actually have been a survival trait for men in our evolutionary past to be laid low by a simple cold, but I never said anything about whether or not it was morally appropriate. Indeed, while it might once have been sensible, most of us don't hunt mastodons anymore, so being unable to wash the dishes or take out the garbage just because you have a cold is just silly. We no longer live in an environment where being a wimp about a simple cold has any practical justification. We can understand why men might be wired this way without committing ourselves to saying it's perfectly all right for them to lie incapacitated on the couch if they get the sniffles.

     But the tendency to equate explanation with excuse is powerful and widespread. In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker discusses at some length the surprising levels of anger faced by scientists who make any pronouncement about, say, the reproductive advantage that a tendency to rape might offer. Now, I should think it would be uncontroversial that, all other things being equal, a male of some species who was willing and able to force his attentions upon an unwilling female would have more reproductive opportunities than one who wasn't, and that it therefore shouldn't surprise us to find that some males carry such an urge. (Unless, of course, there really were some sort of magical shut-down system in the case of "legitimate rape", as a certain woefully ignorant politician recently claimed.) Yet, thanks to this instinct we have to confuse explanation with excuse, the very suggestion that some men might have an instinctive desire to rape is tantamount to declaring open season on women.

     It's not, of course. Recognizing that people have desires or instincts that may be inherited says nothing about the morality of acting upon those desires. No one would suggest that hunger is a culturally learned behaviour, that we only eat because we've been taught to. Hunger is a perfectly natural and hardwired instinct, but that doesn't mean we excuse all acts of eating as appropriate. (And we almost never justify cannibalism, an act of eating with a human victim. When we do, it's always in survival situations: "But I was really, REALLY hungry" is not the defense; "But I was going to die otherwise" is.) So what if we have a hardwired instinct to get horny? Unless it's possible to actually die of lust (I should be dead if it were, and I say this as someone who's been through cancer and chemotherapy), there can be no excuse for rape.

     In fact, I think those who object to explanations of bad behaviour as "excusing" it are promoting a very dangerous idea. The argument that a hardwired biological urge absolves us of moral responsibility is absolutely poisonous, because if it turns out that as a matter of scientific fact we do have hardwired biological urges, then we can no longer object morally to anything. Far better, and far more realistic, would be to acknowledge the plainly obvious fact that people do have instincts and desires, sometimes very powerful ones, that push them in the direction of doing evil things, and to say that we ought to cultivate the self-discipline to overcome these urges. Denying the reality of these feelings helps no one to resist them.

     There's another aspect to this that I feel is also morally dangerous. I had a conversation with another friend last week who said that she would rather not understand some things, because she never wants to understand how some people can do the evil they do. I can sympathize with that sentiment, but I think it's dangerous because it encourages us to think of evil as something other people do, and thus something we don't really have to worry about.
     That isn't how it works. People don't do evil because they are privy to some sort of secret knowledge that authorizes them to do things the rest of us find abhorrent. They generally do evil because they lack some belief or understanding or value that the rest of us consider important, or because they have managed to convince themselves that what they do is necessary and right. Or, I should say, that is why we do evil. We are unaware of mistakes we have made in our moral reasoning.
     That's the important point I want to make. Our moral responsibility is for what we do, and to ensure that we have made the best choice of action available to us. To do that, we need to be alert to the kinds of errors we might make, and to take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. The greatest evil is done by those who refuse to consider that they could be wrong, and the refusal to try to understand evil-doers is no protection against becoming an evil-doer oneself. It only makes it likelier.

Insulting the Prophet

What does it mean to insult someone?

We're all familiar with the basic schoolyard approach to insults.  They usually involve making some outrageous unflattering claim, often about the target's dietary or sexual practices, as a result of which presumably we are to hold the target in lower esteem. Personally, I was never much offended by the content of this sort of insult, nor much impressed by those who uttered them, perhaps because I have a tendency to interpret and analyze things literally. If someone alleges that I mate with iguanas, I'm more likely to be puzzled than offended: such a preposterous claim should reflect more on his credibility than my respectability.

Even in those instances where what was revealed about someone happened to be true, ("Billy's wearing green underwear!") it never made much sense to me that this should embarrass Billy. After all, we probably assumed he was wearing underwear, and it had to be some colour. I'd have thought it more embarrassing to be seen as having any interest in knowing the colour of Billy's underwear, and thus I always felt it was the insulter who should be embarrassed rather than the insulted. And I always felt just a little bit insulted as a member of the audience to such games, because the insulter who gleefully tells me the colour of Billy's underwear is implying through that speech act that I am expected to care.

That's the sort of thing that insults me. Not words, not statements of belief that I am unworthy, but clear demonstrations of that belief. You may say that you believe I am an idiot, and that's fine; you've presented a proposition which may be true or false, and put your own credibility on the line if I prove to be otherwise. But when you act in such a way that shows you fully expect me to behave like an idiot, when you tell me something obviously false and expect me to believe it or expect to convince me with a ridiculously flawed argument, that is something I can't help taking as an insult to my intelligence. When a grandmother's knitting needles are confiscated by airport security to protect me, it's an insult to my courage. When women are expected to dress modestly for fear their beauty will incite me to rape them, it's an insult to either my virility or my self-restraint or both. 

(Of course, if I am an idiot or a coward or an untrustworthy dangerous animal, it may be perfectly appropriate to treat me as such.)

And so what does it mean to insult Islam or its prophet or indeed any religion? Who or what should feel insulted, when someone makes a satirical film or a cartoon depicting the Prophet in an unflattering way? If what is said is false, well, does this not reflect poorly on the speaker more than it does upon the Prophet, and call for no more punishment than being revealed for a fool or a liar? And if what is said should be true, then it is either irrelevant and nobody's business (as in the case of Billy's underwear) or it is a relevant and legitimate criticism, in which case it is perfectly appropriate to act in accordance with it.

Actions speak louder than words. When, claiming to act on behalf of Islam, you storm an embassy and murder people because someone else thousands of miles away made a fool of himself, you demonstrate that you believe Mohammed to be an arrogant, vindictive and thin-skinned bully who resorts to violence rather than reason. If that belief is false, then it is you who insults the Prophet with your actions. And if it is true, then it is a perfectly legitimate basis upon which to criticize the religion.

That's not my house!

One day, when I was in kindergarten, we were all asked to draw pictures of our houses. And so we picked up our crayons and got to work. After a while, as my crude representation was beginning to take shape (I took great pains to get the chimney placement just right, struggling with how a vertical chimney could still be perpendicular to a sloped roof), the kid sitting next to me looked over and said indignantly, "That's not my house!"

Okay, so it was a French immersion kindergarten, and maybe the kid was still trying to sort out how pronouns worked, and thought the assignment for everyone was to draw his house. Kind of a cute mistake in a kindergarten kid, but it's somewhat more frustrating when this kind of subjectivity takes over in adults. Lately I've encountered it in two examples I'd like to discuss.

The first was in the context of a Facebook status thread argument about abortion, in which I reprised a little bit of my argument from this posting. Mainly I wanted to make the point that it may not always be a good thing to view the fetus as a person from the moment of conception, because while that may be a great way to behave as an expectant parent, forming a healthy social bond with the person-to-be, it also can create a great deal of unnecessary suffering in the case of a miscarriage. Miscarriages being rather common, after all, is it really better to think of oneself as the grieving parent of a dead child, or a (temporarily) disappointed would-be parent?

This comment drew considerable ire from one commenter who inferred immediately that I must not know what I'm talking about, or I could never say anything so heartless. Obviously I'd never been through a miscarriage myself. Obviously I wasn't a parent. Well.... as it happens, I have a fifteen year old son whom I love dearly, and my wife and I have been through somewhere between 4 and 6 miscarriages after he was born. (It's hard to know the exact number, because in at least one instance it was never fully established that she was actually pregnant. She sure had all the symptoms, but it's uncertain if anything remotely viable was actually starting to develop in there.)

Now, we were deeply disappointed each time, because we really did want a sibling for our son and another son or daughter for ourselves. We also had started to develop hopes for and bonds with the potentiality that was starting to grow, and it was sad to lose them. But did we feel like parents who had lost an actual child? No, no indeed. Our first pregnancy produced a healthy son, and now that he was born, the disappointment of losing a pregnancy was utterly inconsequential compared to the absolute horror with which we thought of losing him. We are the proud parents of a wonderful son; we are not at all the grieving parents of 4-6 dead children and one survivor.

My point here is not the commenter on that thread was wrong to think of a fetus as a person. I don't think she is wrong to think that way, or at least, not very  wrong; on a personal level I think it's quite desirable for individuals to bond with their unborn children that way because it is a part of good parenting. But I think she was wrong to think everyone must think that way, and to assume that her experience of pregnancy and miscarriage was privileged over any other experience that doesn't mesh with it. We are not wrong to be merely disappointed by miscarriage, either. The error she made, and the error I'm musing about in this post, is in thinking that her experience was the experience. Just as my kindergarten classmate mistook his house for the house we were all supposed to draw.

The other example that's been weighing on my mind lately is that of a frequent anonymous commenter to this very blog. He or she regularly exhorts me to accept a particular religious view, assuring me that if I just ask God to reveal Himself to me, I'll come to know Him and cease with all these silly doubts and philosophizing. Now, I don't doubt that I'll feel that way if I just swallow the blue pill (or is it the red one), that I'll be thoroughly and comfortably convinced of my place in the universe and my relation to the divine. But I can't get past the concern that feeling that way won't make it true.

Now, looking at it from the perspective of the commenter, I can certainly see his or her subjective position. I know that believing one has a personal knowledge of the divine feels exactly like knowing, and more, it feels like a private kind of knowing that no one else can truly understand if they don't feel it too. I understand how privileged that sense of knowledge can feel. I feel it too, but I recognize that it really only applies to things that I, by definition, must know, such as how I feel, how I perceive something, how sincerely I am open to God's revealing Himself to me. I know these things better than anyone else can, but I recognize that my subjective privilege doesn't go beyond the borders of my skull. It's not for me to know, better than you do, how you relate to God, whether or not you love your children, what your house looks like.

What I want to assert to my commenter here is that it's not for you to know, better than I do, how I relate to God, how much I love my son, or whether or not I'm drawing an accurate picture of my own house. It's not supposed to be your house.

Nobody Cares What You Think

     "Nobody cares what you think" is something they drill into you in law school, but sometimes I find myself wishing that it was taught to everyone, aspiring lawyer or not. Of course, much of the time it's used to correct the speech habits of students preparing for their first year moot, when prefacing any statement with "I think..." is just a bad idea anyway. But the true significance of this idea is subtle, and may take several years to sink in.

     It doesn't mean that no one wants to hear what you have to say. It means that whether or not you believe what you are saying, and how strongly you believe it, is of no relevance. What your audience cares about is whether or not there are good reasons for them to believe it. In the practice of law, especially, your actual opinion doesn't matter, because you might well believe your client is probably guilty, but your job is not to decide that, but to advise the court as to the best arguments available for why there's a reasonable doubt.

     I've had the opportunity to judge some junior high school debates, and find students very often falling into a similar trap. A speaker would stand up and deliver an impassioned speech starting out with "We strongly believe that the proposition must stand!" This is silly, because we know very well that in the next round, the very same speaker will be emphatically stating how strongly they believe the very same proposition must fall. And so the point here is the same as the one in law school: nobody cares what the speaker believes; we want to hear the arguments for why we should believe, preferable arguments we haven't considered before.

     I was recently reminded of this lesson on a message forum I frequent. We had been discussing some topic or other, the death penalty, I believe, and had gone on for some five or six pages of posts arguing about whether or not capital punishment is cheaper than life imprisonment (it's not, when you take into account the appeals process necessary to make sure we don't execute someone innocent). And then, of course, after all this lengthy and thorough discussion, someone joins in posting his opinion that we shouldn't waste money on keeping these monsters alive in prison, and should just shoot them.
     Obviously the poster hadn't read any of the thread, and was unaware or just didn't care that his arguments had already been presented and dissected in fine detail. No, he just wanted to tell us what he thought, sparking a new round of debunking the same old arguments. But why would anyone care to know that he, this anonymous person on the internet out there, happens to hold a particular and demonstrably common opinion? We aren't voting on it. We don't know him, we don't have any reason to be affected in any way by the fact that he holds or does not old that view. What we want to know is if there are good reasons why we should share that view. And if he'd taken the time to peruse the thread rather than boldly announcing his not-at-all unusual perspective, he'd know that the arguments he brought to bear were old news to the participants.

     Now, it's not necessarily true that no one cares what you think. Some people probably do, and of course when we're voting on something, what each person thinks is aggregated together to give a result. And when you're planning a dinner party, it's good to know what each guest's culinary preferences are. But most of the time, it's a good guiding principle to bear in mind that the mere fact of your preferring A over B is of no value to anyone but you.

Guns Don't, People Do.

     There are all sorts of arguments for and against legal restrictions on gun ownership, but one of the more disturbing arguments I hear from time to time is the one that certain Americans raise: that an armed populace is the best defence against a tyrannical government.

     Now, I don't mean to reject that entirely, because certainly there have been many tyrannical governments overthrown by force of arms throughout history. And there are instances where armed citizenry have made it difficult or even impossible for foreign powers to invade and occupy a country. A realist must recognize that there is a role for weapons and violence in this world, if only because others give them a role. I certainly understand the sentiment (misattributed to Thomas Jefferson) that it is better for government to fear the people than for people to fear the government, though I disagree very much: it is fearful governments that are the most dangerous to their people. (More on that in a later post, I expect; I've been meditating again on the nature of fear quite a bit since this Officer Wawra story broke.)

     But this whole approach to combatting government tyranny is doomed, because it buys into Mao's famous dictum that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and that view of power is at the core of tyranny. One can imagine (or at least fantasize about) a benevolent tyranny where those with a monopoly on lethal force wield it with benign restraint and only for our own good, but tyranny is tyranny is tyranny.

     No, the answer to tyranny is not force. The truly revolutionary development that has lead to the spread of liberty was not the idea of arming the populace. There was nothing at all new about that; weapons have existed in private hands far longer than we've even had governments. The really important change has been the growth of the rule of law, the idea that people have rights and that disputes should be settled according to generally accepted universal principles rather than the personal preferences of any individual.
     This is much more than simply an idea that people hear about; there's probably no society without at least the idea of rules. What matters for the rule of law to take root is for enough people to genuinely embrace the concept, and to agree to abide by rules even when it is not in their immediate interest to do so. And of particular importance is that the people with the guns firmly adhere to this principle. That's why the militaries of developed countries are ultimately under lawful civilian control, and have such strict disciplinary systems in place.

     It's a subtle idea, and while it's well-established here, its grip is always a bit tenuous. Sometimes it's counterintuitive, as when we extend legal protections and due process to the nastiest of criminals. Sometimes it's just inconvenient, like when we stop for a red light at 3:00 a.m. and there's no one else on the road. But the fact that most of us usually obey the law for no other reason than that it is the law is the core of what protects us against tyranny. A tyrant can only become a tyrant if people obey him, and in a rule-of-law society, unlawful commands tend not to be obeyed.

     So the thing to do is to be ever vigilant against attempts to shape the law to the purposes of the tyrant. That means engaging in the political process, arguing and advocating and talking and listening, and steadfastly rejecting coercion. In other words, guns don't protect us against tyranny; people protect us against tyranny.

The Good News about Bad News

     Marshall McLuhan famously remarked that while we don't know who discovered water, it probably wasn't the fish. I want to say something about the good news that we don't notice in the background of horrible events such as the shooting in Aurora last week, because we are so deeply immersed in the good news that we don't even recognize it as significant.
     The good news is that these shootings are news at all. We are shocked and horrified and saddened by these events, and rightly so, for they are shocking and horrifying and sad, but we are also shocked because they are, for the most part, unusual. True, they happen much more often than we'd like; every few months some pathetic loser thinks he can bring meaning to his life through some spectacular orgy of violence. But that's not really so often, when you think about it on a global scale. It's rare enough that it makes the news if it happens anywhere in the developed world.

     Think what things were like a thousand years ago. Whole villages were massacred in Viking raids, but the news spread slowly, and even if there had been a global satellite network to share information instantly around the world, it wouldn't have been broadcast anyway, because no one cared. It wasn't news, anymore than a fatal car accident in Toronto attracts the attention of strangers in Buenos Aires; they have their own fatal car accidents to be worried about. "A village 20 miles away was slaughtered in a raid? Oh, yeah, that happened to my cousin six years ago." And compared to the level of violence that was commonplace in those days, for 12 people to die in one incident would have been quite unremarkable, except perhaps to those who actually knew any of the victims.

     Even a hundred years ago, violence was far more common than it is today. Less than that, even; I happened to catch a snippet of an old Flintstones episode where Fred was trying to bully Barney into going along with some scheme or other, menacing him with a fist. I was actually a little shocked; our cultural sensitivities towards casual violence have changed so much.
     We no longer accept violence as an appropriate way to resolve our differences. Well, that's not completely true; we still glorify it in TV and movies, and people talk about how they'd love to punch or shoot some person or other, but for the most part, we reject it as a dispute resolution mechanism. If you have a problem with someone today, you are expected to talk it out, resolve it peacefully, and if that fails, sue. In the past, however, violence was viewed as a perfectly natural and even appropriate way of getting what you wanted. Not getting enough from farming, fishing and hunting? Well, raid a neighbouring village or tribe.

     To be sure, there are still lots of people who resort to violence. But the spectacular shootings that make the news every so often have a different kind of motive. These are not people robbing banks or trains, trying to take economic resources by force. These are typically dissatisfied and unfulfilled losers looking for fame and notoriety. They want to be able to think of themselves as important and powerful, and I suppose they want our help and that of the press to reinforce that. But the point here is that shocking acts of violence get them that attention, and why? Because violence is no longer commonplace; it is rare enough today that it actually does shock us.
     That is the good news. This kind of violence happens in part because other kinds of violence don't happen so much anymore. In a way, it's a symptom of success. Human society may always have some level of violence, and if we're getting to the point where some of that violence is due to the very fact that we find violence unusual, I think that in the big picture, that's something to be thankful for.

     But it can be better. I think that if we were to recognize violence not as something evil, scary and mysterious, but perfectly mundane and distasteful, we could remove some of the reason for this kind of shooting. Decent people will handle feces if they must (changing diapers, cleaning up after a pet, maintenance of plumbing, etc.) but there's nothing mysterious or heroic about it, and we all try to avoid it as much as possible. Someone who runs into a movie theatre and flings poo at the audience is not viewed with awe as a supervillain, but with contempt. If we could somehow replace our fear of violence with contempt, then maybe these attention-cravers will find a more constructive way to get their fifteen minutes.