The Mouse on "Meanings"

When we excuse an action we are admitting that the action was wrong. We justify an action when we believe it was the right thing to do. We have what may be called the Torquemada Solution by which we excuse (but do not justify) our killings. Temporarily suspending reason, we can imagine that Torquemada, the most effective of the Spanish Grand Inquisitors, acted out of the belief that his victims and their heresies were preventing the salvation of humankind. Once we understand “salvation” the way Torquemada understood it – as deliverance from eternal torment in a lake of fire – we easily see that he could have justified to himself far greater atrocities than those he actually committed. To Torquemada, not this life, but some other he imagined as more desirable, was the ultimate value. We can thus understand some of our disregard for human life as natural effects of the gravest sort of error.

We justify war on the basis of what we perceive as “injustice beyond the ordinary.” Sometimes we’re right. Given its result, we can justify the American Civil War, though the abolition of slavery was not that war’s original intent. And even though we were not fully aware of Nazi Germany’s atrocities when we decided to enter the Second Great War, if we had known of them we should have been compelled to take up arms. Others of our wars were not so justifiable as those, and if we had known the truth of the reasons behind them, we should not have involved ourselves in them.

Perhaps, though, we ask the impossible if we demand that all the people should be informed of all the facts before deciding significant issues. We are after all a republic in which elected representatives make decisions of the war-or-peace sort for us. Most of us have neither the time nor the intellect to devote to an assessment of the relevant issues. But even if time were afforded us, and even if all of us were reasonably educated concerning foreign affairs, our ability to determine the truth of the matter would still be impaired by the fact that we are often compelled by unconscious forces to believe the lie and doubt the truth. Difficulties far greater than those facing Pavlov’s dog face those whose “bells” are not mere bells but are plausible theories indelibly imprinted upon their minds. We love our freedom, and would be willing to die for it, but let the word “freedom” be attached to broad expanses of our neuronal territory, let it be emotionally interleaved with all our conceptions – not merely the most fundamental – and we will find ourselves dying for causes that have little or nothing to do with actual freedom, ours or anyone else’s.

When, for example, the word is repeated to us like a meditator’s mantra to justify the ambitions of a deluded politician, it is only by an almost superhuman effort that we ask whether an Iraqi would, to obtain his freedom, be willing to be killed by a foreigner who may be driven as much by a need for the approbation of his constituents (or contributors) as by a genuine care for the Iraqi, his wife, their sisters, brothers, and children – those the foreigner must slaughter in order to obtain the Iraqi’s freedom for him. And even if we were to ask ourselves that question, perhaps the word “freedom” will have been so positively charged by our own history, that we would answer for the Iraqi – who had no say in the matter – that he would surely welcome death if only his heirs could be assured a portion of that blessed freedom. It would perhaps never occur to us to wonder if the word “freedom” means to the Iraqi what it means to us.

To people unfamiliar with the Arab culture, that last sentence may seem only a rhetorical conjecture. It may seem that even if the Iraqi has a notion of freedom different from ours, his must certainly be false. Those so deluded will perhaps never have understood that all words – all but a logical few – have gotten their meanings out of human experience. T. E. Lawrence’s words provide a taste of the meaning of “freedom” as it might feel in the Arab mind, a feeling I can understand but do not share.

We had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room saying ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose.’

But at last Dahoun drew me: ’Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’ – and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert….

‘This,’ they told me, ‘is the best….’ “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”

I have seen a lot of desert country, mostly in Arizona, but have experienced nothing like the exhilaration Lawrence was describing. To me the desert is a hot place. In no way does it figure into my idea of freedom. But just as I might include aspects of “cowboy life” in the feeling that goes along with my conception of freedom, so must the desert involve itself in the experiential life of the Arab. The author from whose book I grabbed the Lawrence quote [Robert Lacey, The Kingdom] spoke with great understanding of the Bedouin’s nomadic life, particularly of the ghazzu, which he briefly defines as “the raid,” but which another Englishman defined as “a cross between Arthurian chivalry and County Cricket.” The idea was to steal another tribe’s camels, but in doing so, one had to obey the rules of the game: no molesting women and no raids between certain hours of the night. If your ghazzu failed and you were captured, the rules also required that you be fed well, and then turned loose, but your “team’s” camels and all but one firearm were confiscated. The “trudging back to camp after an unsuccessful raid was, apparently, a part of the game.”

Perhaps in the Bedouin mind freedom feels something like being out on a raid, knowing that even if you fail, the rules of the game will be followed, something like the feeling I get when I think of home.