Mouseworld -- Two

Yesterday I half-heartedly promised that I would write a followup to that day's blog, the subject of which was, "why do bad things happen to nice people." The focus yesterday was, however, not specifically on the nice people that the bad things happen to, but rather upon the general structure of causes and effects. I fully intended to write today about the intrapersonal structure of causes, how it is that human beings, while nevertheless trapped in a macroscopic universe of causes and effects, still seem to possess the ability to change the world. But I was having some difficulty finding a good lead sentence and so procrastinated on beginning at all.

But then I mouse-clicked over to Miss Fairhope's blog and read some of the comments her readers had posted, one comment in particular. Miss Fairhope had written forcefully (and well) of her feelings about war, not just the war in Iraq, but all wars, and 'lowed as how she couldn't figure why it was that human beings could be so stupid. A commenter had this to say:

[Y]our blog of today was written through a sense of confessed naiveté, and as such was failing to understand the reality of things. One thing is what we'd like things to be and the other is how things are -the reality-, and that is especially true when it comes to the reality of man and the wars, little or large, he conducts.

Now, a logician might immediately cast aside the commenter's argument on the ground that it is circular. He (or she), trying to make a case (I suppose) for the inevitability of war, says that "the reality" is that we engage in war. Well, yes, we do, and that's the problem Miss Fairhope saw with our behavior. To merely admit the reality of war is not to justify or explain war. It is simply to restate the problem.

Well, as I say. That's how a logician might respond if his aim was merely to put down a vacuous argument. But in taking that path the logician would have made no headway in answering Miss Fairhope or in seeking the real causes of war. So, I decided to defer until another day the analysis of how personal freedom emerges from an ineluctable structure of causes and effects and take a look at one large class of effects, war, or to be more specific, why those who see war as an inevitable product of human nature are mistaken. That is, I want to see how the structure of causes and effects might work to produce results in which war would be the exception and not the rule.

First, the reality of the way the human mind works involves us in making decisions out of two great bodies of cause, reason and emotion. Between these two, we may find many differences but I want to concentrate on one of them. Reason is reflective. Emotion is impulsive. It is altogether fortunate that we can reason upon some things, and equally fortunate that we can be impulsive about others. Facing immediate and sudden danger, we would be foolish to reflect on the matter before acting. But if the situations we face do not necessarily involve immediate danger, if in fact we have available to us the time and means to weigh and marshal evidence before taking action, we would be more than foolish to "act without thinking."

Generally, the dangers for which war is the solution are of the second sort. In fact, a nation that goes to war without thinking would be almost certain to be unprepared. Typically, but not always, the decision to go to war takes place after a studied deliberation. So we can with reasonable assurance say that the activity we call war is of the reflective sort. We have the time and the means to consider the alternatives before actually loosing "the dogs of war."

Consider the example of the war in Iraq. [I will here assume that the reason given for that war was the real reason, the possibility that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, the means to produce more, and the will to use them.] First, a few facts.

(1) We were already fighting a limited police action in Afghanistan, seeking to bring to justice the criminal who had conspired to perpetrate a capital crime.

(2) In November 2002, at our insistence, the UN had deployed and empowered two teams of inspectors into Iraq, to determine the truth or falsehood of the WMD claims being made by the intelligence services in the US and Great Britain.

(3) The US, taking stock of its armed forces and noting their limitations, could also have legitimately concluded that it would be better to finish the work in Afghanistan before opening hostilities with Iraq.

With those three facts in mind, the administration might have decided -- key word, decided -- to ask the UN to increase the number of inspectors in Iraq and to extend the length of their mission. Behind that decision would have been the logical belief that with the inspectors in Iraq, looking over Saddam's shoulder, he would be relatively incapable of producing more weapons or of using the ones he allegedly possessed. If that policy were implemented in the UN then the US and its allies fighting in Afghanistan would have much more time and many more resources to bring the criminals to justice. Simple common sense....

Now this example shows clearly that there was nothing inevitable about going to war in Iraq. So why did we? Answer: because we failed to exercise an available option. We made a decision on the basis of something other than reason. We acted on the basis of what was either a reason other than the WMD threat, or we acted for reasons that could not be justified by reason.

Yesterday I used the example of a man who died for "evil" reasons, either incompetence, ignorance, or administrative failure. In each of the three chains of cause and effect I analyzed we saw that the problem was that the people involved had not used an available cure of which they were ignorant. The "evil" that killed the man was thus not inevitable in terms of what might have been. The cure might very well have been known if the doctors had been better educated. In the example of Iraq, we see a similar pattern. A "cure" was available. It was simply not used. The evil that followed -- war -- was thus a product of the failure of a few men to exercise simple human judgment.

The commenter might reply to this by pointing out that this is exactly what he meant by "what we'd like things to be." The "reality" is that the intelligent choice was not made. But if he meant by his comment that war is inevitable, then he must be saying that it is inevitable that men will always fail to use their minds reasonably, that they will inevitably be controlled by their emotions, that they will act on impulse, and not on reflective judgment. That this is not the case -- nor need it be -- is evidenced by the countless times throughout history in which men of wisdom and (yes!) virtue have acted on the basis of reason. We are as free to be reasonable as emotional.

But one thing explains -- but does not justify -- our failure to always be reasonable in cases where reason is possible (i.e., where the danger in not immediate and sudden). To act spontaneously on the basis of emotion is easier than to act reflectively out of reason. We must make a conscious effort to pause and reflect, and every effort requires energy. And if it is so that for every idea there exists a concatenated physical counterpart, then it is inevitable that the laws of inertia will assert themselves into our physico-mental efforts. We are thus prone to not-think rather than to-think.

But this does not mean or imply that reflective judgment is impossible or that the failure to judge is inevitable. Nor does it imply that evils such as war are natural. It means simply that war, like every other evil, is caused by a failure to exercise those qualities of our being that make us truly human. Wars may certainly happen, even when we judge correctly, but wars such as the one we are fighting in Iraq would never take place if we were ruled by reason.

Consider, for instance, that the inspection effort would finally have concluded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no factories to produce them, and consequently no will to use them. Perhaps we would by now have brought Osama bin Laden to justice, managed with the help of our allies to talk sense into the leader of Iraq, and brought about something like stability in the middle-east. And perhaps if the policy outlined above had been implemented, George W. Bush might have gone down in history as one of our greater presidents rather than as an abject failure.