When To Do It

A couple of years ago on my birthday I was lucky enough to catch a Victor Davis Hanson lecture on TV. He's a well known conservative pundit but my appreciation for him stems from his work as a classicist. His book "Carnage and Culture" seemed the perfect answer to Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel." Geographical determinism seems very much a pons asinorum to me. Anyway, during this lecture about the Pelopenessian War, he make some profoundly negative comments about Alexander the Great. My girlfriend at the time, unfortunately hindered by a Stanford education, commented that it was inconsistent of me to agree with Hanson's characterizations of the Pelopenessian War and yet disagree with his assessment of Alexander.

I was shocked when she said this. So much so that at first I thought she was joking. I wondered for a moment if this fallacy was common. It seemed silly at any level. As a man, am I too be 100% right or 100% wrong about anything? Not likely. It is much more probable that I am partly right and partly wrong about any topic and the proportion would determine my level of mastery. That makes much more sense. Life is not a neat geometric theorem. Just because you disprove one aspect of something doesn't necessarily make it all wrong. Cleverness is not superordinate to Truth.

This is comes to mind when I speak to others about the existence of God. Do I believe he exists? Of course I do by virtue of the Moral Law or Tao which we and no other animal is responsible. But I don't believe the world is 6000 years old. And to say that God doesn't exist simply because the Bible is wrong about a geological fact is a schoolboy's argument.

Science is about certainty and thus doesn't answer any of the questions I find really interesting. Science considers something true when it is completely free from human judgment but what about my interactions with other humans can be judged by this standard? Science is a method to view the natural world. If the conept and reality of God is to have any power at all, it has to be quite separate from the natural world. It is a logical fallacy to believe that you can use science to prove or disprove the existence of God.

However, this is quite different from Religion. I must discover the Moral Law or Tao myself through honest and relentless inquiry into the nature of things and myself. There is no written rule book. Not the Bible. Not the Koran. They are both signposts to discovery, not clearly laid out codes of conduct.

Again, I refer to the martial arts. People often ask me for one technique that will work all the time. Instructors often try to distill years of training and experience into basic physical movements. Both come from the wrong place. A good instructor doesn't teach you a technique that works. He puts you in a position to have experiences that allow you to discover the validity of a technique on your own. The brilliance of a training method is rated by how much it makes the student think he invented something on his own. That's the spiritual discovery I'm talking about. I don't get caught up in all thing things that are factually incorrect. I look at it as a whole-- as what experiences am I meant to have through thinking in this manner. Sure, you can take it as a Code of Conduct, but I think that's missing the point. I believe we are meant to ask why.

Ridley's book Genome tries to subordinate our recognition of the Moral Law as genetic in origin. From that point of view, the Moral Law is something Darwinian-- our adherence to it benefitted us as a species. Perhaps this is true, but it doesn't change the fact that it exists. Female animals may defend their children to the death but they will not die for the good of the group because of some moral imperative. Aristotle speaks of this distinction in Nicomachean Ethics when he rates the types of courage. A regular man who values his life goes into battle with a great deal of fear but overcomes it with the knowledge that he is defending something greater than himself. This is what raises Hector above Achilles despite the latter's great skill in arms. The community will give that ordinary man who overcame his fear a respect reserved for him and his brothers alone. From this point of view, superiority is somewhat antithetical to courage.

Scientific answers are not enough. They are no guide to live your life. They provide no examples of how to interact with your fellow man in a just and honorable fashion. The questions that I encounter in my daily life are not scientific ones. The Bible, with all its errors, provide a better guide for how I should treat my brothers than any physics text. That's an obvious truth and I don't know what took me so long to get to it. I know this. How many times have I had the adage, "The right tool for the right job" drilled into my head? That's wisdom as far as I'm concerned. It's not just knowing what to do (which is easy) but more importantly, when to do it.

A Nice Surprise

I had an interesting night. It was a friend's birthday party and I ended up engaging a Cal philosophy major in a refreshing conversation. Foucault was her favorite and I shared with her my love and appreciation for Spinoza. Generally, speaking of Spinoza has had a similar effect as prodigious body odor. So imagine my glee to encounter someone who may not be as familiar with Spinoza as I am but could appreciate my great affection for the man and his work.

She spoke of abstractions and the use of language to free them of the limits of epistemology. I've been thinking about that all night and I don't know if that's possible. Humans think in language. Without language, there are no abstractions or concepts. In using language to describe the new term, you are again bound by epistemological concerns. How can you describe any concept without the use of language? I'm not familiar with Foucault. Maybe he has an answer for this. Please share if anyone can shed some light on this.

But this idea of using new language reminds me of what McInerny calls the tendency of modern philosophers to want to be "strong poets." In the desire to be original, they move away from the daily usefulness of philosophy. I did not come to philosophy from academia. I came from martial arts and fighting. The questions I had were not of my "self" or of "forms." I wanted to know when to fight. I wanted to know what were the limits of my behavior, of my effort and work. Aristotle spoke of men like Achilles and Alcibiades who were so naturally superior, they were a "law unto themselves." While not comparing myself to either of those great men, I found myself limited by convention and what was considered acceptable behavior. I sought personal excellence and when it conflicted with what my parents and teachers expected of me, I was punished.

Being a "strong poet" holds no interest for me. As much as I understand the need for artistry, I find myself mostly uninterested in form and the manipulation it implies. Certainly I find the Republic easier to digest in its form than the Nicomachean Ethics but I feel a great affinity for the starkness of Aristotle's work. "Here is the truth," he seems to say. "Digest it as you are able."

Am I trying to find the language to describe the purity of touch as my friend suggested at one point? Yes. Of course. I came to this from seeing the disconnect from what people said with their mouths to how they lived in their bodies. I am convinced your body cannot lie. It is the sum total of your experiences. If you are confident and open, I will feel that when I touch you. If you are fearful and withdrawn, I will feel that too no matter what you say. She pointed out that this is a futile quest as language, ipso facto, can never hold the purity of touch. While I'm inclined to agree, I still believe that I can develop a methodology for people to understand the truth of touch.

We interact with the world through our bodies and whatever we hypothesize in our minds, we must test with our flesh. The further we get away from this truth, the closer we get to neuroticism. Without the wisdom of experience, all things are equal and in being equal, they have no value.

So philosophy for me is a physical endeavor. It is not so much about what I think but rather how I move through the world. There are many men far more clever than me but I don't believe many are much more capable. And that matters more to me. I want to live my life in the mud, in the marrow-chilling cold, and the heat stopping heat. A life lived in one's mind cannot move through the world very well because it has never learned the world's rules.

Is that what Philosophy is to me? The Tao? Is it that vein of wisdom that every single spiritual teacher has sought to share since the beginning of time? How do I move in harmony with the Tao? What does the Tao expect of me? I don't know. I can only check and test over and over until I distill some sort of wisdom.

One of my teachers once said that being a warrior has nothing to do with winning or even succeeding. It has to do with risking and failing and risking again for as long as you live. Finding that universal truth, that consilience which I clumsily describe by the word "Tao" requires a stout heart-- one that can be broken again and again. Sir Francis Bacon once said, "I know not why, but martial men are given to love." I do know why. We are given to love because in learning our craft, we have had our hearts broken over and over by the shattering of every comforting illusion we might have every possessed. We are given to love not because our hearts are hard but because they are durable. We can make the risk because we can live with the pain. Finding the Tao is the same thing. As Spinoza described, understanding and belief is a single act. It is only after you believe can you test the validity of a premise or construct. You must believe with all your heart and you must bleed if your belief is proven false. Despite the risk of considerable pain, you must test your beliefs because in them lies your blindness.

"The important things is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."
-Charles Dubois

My Thoughts on Iraq

I've received a lot of requests for my opinion on the Iraq War lately. I've always hesitated to talk about this because most folks have already made up their mind and it's generally rather pointless for me to say anything. First of all, let me say this. Everybody has an opinon about the War. More importantly, everyone thinks their opinion should be taken seriously. So I wish, before anyone says anything anymore about the War, they ask themselves these following questions.

1. What do I actually know about War?
2. What is an insurgency and how do you fight it? (historical preceden please)
3. What do I know about International Relations? Have I ever worked in the field?
4. What do I really know about the political process in DC?
5. Do I have any first hand information about anything pertaining to the War?
6. How do I determine the veracity of a given account? Because it corresponds with what I already believe?

Okay I got that off my chest. I'm just quite sick of stupid, uninformed opinions.

On to the meat of the issue. Do I think we should have got into the War. That's not an easy question to answer. You have to refer to globalization and whether or not you think it is positive. I do because globalization has done more to raise the living standards of more people around the world than anything else. This is inarguable fact. Just look at China. Globalization requires stability and the freer movement of trade. It is largely dependant on the movement of oil. America only gets 7-11 percent of our oil from the ME. The oil we're protecting there is mostly Europe's and Japan's. And rightly so given Breton Woods 1 which formalized the arrangement of the US taking care of Europe's security concerns in return for Europe not arming which presented nothing but trouble up to 1946. Now Saddam, and especially Saddam with WMD, was a huge destabilizer. Whether or not he had WMD isn't the issue. By very virtue of his desire to acquire WMD should be reason enough to put him on the block. What about India and Pakistan? How is that fair? Fair is for fucking children. It has no place in IR. You play with the cards you're dealt and unfortunately, the ME is more important to us than Southeast Asia. Take into account that you cannot contain ambition indefinitely and the UN is not an answer. Remember that our jets were regularly fired upon throughout the 90's when Saddam routinely defied the terms of the ceasefire of the first Gulf War. So there's lots of reasons to depose Saddam and all of them pretty good in the grand ledger.

But I think the war was a bad idea. Why? Because I can't tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shia by looking at them. How can I can be discriminating about who I shoot if I can't do that? And if I can't be discriminating, I going to create tons of ill will without meaning to and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. So it just doesn't work where the rubber meets the road. But more importantly, Americans as a whole, don't have the intestinal fortitude to run a proper counterinsurgency. It's dirty work and we're much to dainty to do it properly.

A counterinsurgency succeeds when it does one thing. It has to convince the people of the given country that violence on their part is a really bad and untenable position. Why didn't we have very much trouble with this in Japan and Germany? Because of Tokyo and Dresden. We had beat the piss out of the general populace so badly, they could field much if any insurgency. They were so demoralized and humiliated, they both figured they had to try something else. And throughout history back to the time of the Ancient Greeks and the Achaemenid Dynasty the only thing that has every worked. And we don't have the stomach politically for this type of work.

That's why sending more troops is a bad idea. Unless their ROE changes drastically and they are cleared to do what they must, free from media scrutiny, nothing will happen towards quelling the insurgency. In fact, their will just be more opportunities for troops to get killed and commit mistakes that can be spun as atrocities.

So the War is winnable but not as most Americans would like to win it. And that's dangerous for the world and the advancement of the human condition. In our collective desire to makes ourselves feel good, we shirk our responsibility.