Wednesday, July 26, 2006

The unwronged wrong-doer

Chris Matthews makes a complaint that one hears often, that the Bush administration is blinded to facts by ideology. My contention is that both sides are necessarily forced to see the world through their ideology. If anything, it is the pejorative use of the word ideology that is blinding us.

Most arguments, including the one about the war on terror, are about how to explain someone's wrong doing. Within our own political culture I argue that there is widespread agreement on what constitutes wrong-doing (indeed, an agreement about what effects are bad is what having a culture means), and that most disagreements are about who or what should be blamed for wrong-doing.

The problem is that different theories can explain the same facts more or less equally well, or can explain them well enough so that a reasonable person could find those explanations convincing. In the terror war we have acts of terror against us and, recently, against our ally Israel. Is this evidence that the confrontational approach of the Bush administration is not working? There are a couple of theories. If you think that terror is caused by poverty and the frustration of legitimate ambitions then the continued acts of terror in the presence of an administration that sees addressing such concerns as appeasement, then the continued acts of terror are confirmation of your theory. If you see the problem of terror as caused by a power hungry alien ideology then the continued acts of terror against the most powerful nation in the world and its allies are confirmation of your theory.

The critics of the confrontational approach see the other side as being too simplistic, as failing to ask "why they hate us?" The idea that someone would do wrong for no reason, just because they are "evil," is simplistic at best.

But I argue that any belief system must have such an un-explained "wrong-doer." Like Aristotle's un-moved mover, every chain of causality has to begin somewhere. The people that attribute the actions of terrorists to the injustices committed by the US or the Israelis are just as simplistic in their explanations of why the US and the Israelis are causing these problems. In the accomodationist' belief system the actions of the theory's bad guys are explained just as the confrontationists' theory explains the actions of terrorist: lust for power, a willingness to do anything to get it, in a word, evil.

There are two caveats to this. One is that the motive attributed to the US tends to be material gain, the motive attributed to terrorists in the confrontationists' theory tends to be lust for power. The other caveat is that often the accomodationist explanation for the bad actions of the US or Israel tends to be more benign. The Israeli decision to set up the state of Israel is seen as the tragic reaction to the Holocaust, or the US reaction is seen as the result of the US being hijacked by nefarious interests in the oil industry, leaving the US people as a whole as semi-innocent victims and the real villains being Moneyed interests, etc. The evil actions of the powerful can be attributed to tragic misunderstandings or circumstances, but the result in terms of policy recommendations is the same--appease the terrorists. Even if the US or Israel are doing wrong from innocent motives it is they who have the power to break the chain of action and reaction. So even if they are not viewed as benign directly morally culpable the onus is still on them to not retaliate or make concessions. The terrorists actions against us always being the result of some crime or misdeed committed against them, it is always the side that retaliates against them that is the un-wronged wrong-doer, the one that puts the chain of misfortune in motion, or, as Bush might say, "the evil one."

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