Pacifism must be a choice.

Today, we will have another anti-war rally here in San Francisco. Tens of thousands of smug people-- way to pleased with themselves-- will high-handedly lecture us from the vaunted position of their unassailable moral authority. Forget for a moment that these events are nothing more than emotional masturbation, a group gestalt and self-congratulatory nonesense. Forget the fact that none of these protests would be possible without the system that so many of the protestors hate. Forget the reality that many of these protests do, in fact, turn violence and are generally permeated with a strong sense of beliigerence. Forget all of these things and you still have the one fundamental point that makes most pacifism rationalization masquerading as morality.

What do I mean by that? Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a lady roughly my age about the war in Iraq. She asked my opinion and to her credit, was genuinely open to hearing what I had to say. But before I could say anything, she said, "You should know, I'm a pacifist." An inocuous enough statement but what caught me was her sense of the moral superiority of her statement. I didn't choose to make an issue of it then but it reemphasized to me what I teach to all my students.

For pacifism to be a moral choice, you have to be able to do the opposite. In other words, if you have no capacity for violence, your pacifism is more statement of fact than it is a matter of morality. Such a statement typifies slave-morality. This swiftly degenerates into cowardice which becomes the foundation of appeasement. For a person who cannot fight, appeasement is the only option regardless of its morality.

What about someone like Gandhi then? Surely his pacifism is a moral one? I don't think so. He chose his tactic very carefully-- against an enemy who had lost his stomach to do the dirty work of counterinsurgency. Had he tried this in Darfur, he would not have been so successful I think. Nor was he able to mount an armed insurrection. He chose the only tactic he had and he was right solely because he had measured his opponent accurately. He was a great strategist but his actions have nothing to do with morality.

Violence is simply not less moral than non-violence. If you can stand aside and promote peace while others around you are being oppressed than your non-violence is of the immoral sort and I have no use for it. For those who truly are pacifists-- people who are capable of violence but walk away from it on ethical grounds-- I have nothing but respect for. But I have met very few such men. None in fact. This type of thinking allows us to confuse happy circumstance with morality. Many of us who fancy ourselves pacifist are lonly allowed to do so because of security provided by other men. Such morality is not moral. It's is the rantings of a spoiled teenager.

Flawed Thinking.

I don't want the readers of my blog to get the idea that I think I'm smarter than everybody else. I don't think that and I'm always looking to learn more. I'm not certain of much and I'm doubly suspicious of what I am certain of. As usual, I think I developed this habit of thought from my training in martial arts. You can never rest on your laurels or take someone's word for the efficacy of a technique. You have to test it and continually test and refine as long as you live. I think that's tiring for most people and this habit of mine has certainly driven every one of my girlfriends a little crazy in the past.

Still, I'm not willing to give this up. It seems that the Cosmic Joke is that we Humans are only comfortable with certainty and the only thing you can be absolutely certain of is change. As I've said before, it seems to me that most people just want to feel good about themselves-- as though high self-esteem is our raison d'etre as a species. I'm reasonably sure that's wrong. It smackes of solipsistic nonsense; the idea that my primary mission in life is to feel good about myself whether I deserve it or not. I can't believe the ease in which some people let themselves off the hook in our society. But I digress.

I want to discuss the environmental nutbags that I'm surrounded by in the SF Bay Area. I've said for a long time that scientists are the priests of our time. I don't know how many time I've heard someone say, "Well, science says..." without understanding in the least what the science actually says. Parroting science you don't understand is no different from parroting the supposed machinations of God. Scientist, unlike priests, are not bound by a moral code. They are not altrusitic. They want fame and fortune just like everybody else. We question other professions' motives when they involve fame and money. Why not scientists? What's the difference? I'd like to make one major point that pretty much everybody I've talked to has missed.

Global warming is happening. We know that because we have empirical measurements that support that statement. Why it's happening is not so clear. It could be carbon dioxide or it could be the natural geological cycle of the Earth. We're not sure. According to some measurements, there is a corresponding rise in CO2 level and general temperature of the Earth but a corrollation is not a causation. No one can explain fully the mechanism behind the rising temperature of the Earth. Now here's my point. It doesn't matter if 99.9 percent of the scientist believe this to be true. It doesn't make it true. Hard science is unaffected by democracy. 99.9 percent of scientists can agree on something and have it still be wrong. There is a reason why the Earth is heating up and getting a lot of people to agree with your reasoning may feel nice but doesn't make it so.

Many educated people confuse this with the softer fields of study. Take history for example. Historical consensus means something here-- again, not because it is necessarily true but because without a time machine, we have no accurate way of knowing what actually happened. Because of this, we bolster our hypotheses with the works of others and arrive at what we hope to be the truth in some rather obtuse ways. (I'm speaking of Ancient history-- not anything we have an empirical record of) For example, we think we know where the city of Troy originally stood in Asia Minor but we can never really be sure.

Hard science isn't like that. Consensus doesn't mean anything. You either know exactly why or you're making a guess. It could be a good guess but it's still a guess and it's always bad idea to make a policy based on a guess.

And ultimately, that's what I'm writing about. Policy. We should have policy that is environmentally sensitive because we only have one Earth and we cannot start over if, in fact, global warming is caused by humans. But we should not endanger our current prosperity or risk the prosperity of our children for something that is still a guess, no matter how many people believe it to be true. Any environmental policy choice has a cost and yes, that cost may be as great as a 2 foot rise in the oceans. It's a matter of perspective. If I'm a father trying to feed my son, the long term affects of my labor on the planet are the very least of my worries.

Policy doesn't exist in a vacuum. The levels with the educated intelligentsia and the so-called Masters of the Universe so love to pull are attached to very real human lives that exist in the here and now. We can never forget the the status quo which benefits us so greatly does not affect everyone equally. Everyone deserves a chance at prosperity and the real human flaw is believing that some others don't.