Condoleeza Rice: The rationalizing, supercilious face of evil

When C. Rice retired from her life of crime, she decided to become a professor at Stanford. Unlike, say, Bush's retirement to his ranch, this position entails occasionally being confronted by young and idealistic students about her past:

Evil has many faces and this is one of them. It is a face that blandly smiles upon horrific acts and later spins an endless stream of moral justifications from whatever flimsy fiber is conveniently available. A morally whole human being, upon learning that prisoners had been subjected to controlled drowning hundreds of times due, in part, to actions that she had participated in, would acknowledge the horror, accept some kind of responsibility, express some kind of regret.

Rice does no such thing. She has entirely expunged any feelings of guilt. Any residual sense that she might have been wrong has been entirely conquered by her narcissistic need for self-justification. Observe her demeanor, and her language ("dear", "do your homework"): Not only does she feel that the student's wrong, she feels that it's vaguely unfair that people even think she did something wrong, and especially unfair that young uncredentialed whippersnappers outside the circle of power get to question her conduct.

Forget about the tortured prisoners; what about Condoleeza's suffering? Huh? It puts one in mind of an old Fafblog post.

As to the substance of her argument, it is nonsense, of course. It rests upon the twin assertions that

• since the Bush administration orders were phrased so as to authorize only interrogation techniques cleared by the Justice Department, they were ipso facto legal; and
• Chewbacca was a wookie — that is, lots of irrelevant misdirection about stuff like the uniqueness of al Qaeda (about which, in particular, A. Serwer has the best answer).

The first defense opens an infinitely large loophole in the rule of law — appoint your pet lawyers to Justice, and then trample on the law all you want! Even if you could, by some reading of the relevant legal texts, construct a legal theory that reached this conclusion, you would not want this reading to be the one that prevails in governance. To establish such a precedent would be disastrously bad as a matter of public policy. It would be much better to construct a different reading, one in which the most powerful people are actually constrained by the law.

If Rice were a dispassionate observer — if the very same quality of mind were transplanted into someone who had no personal or professional ties to the Bush administration or the conservative movement — it is hard to believe that an idea so patently bad and stupid would get past her. But self-interest and tribalist instincts are powerful motivators. And I suppose you go to war with the flimsy legal arguments you have...

...and not the ones you wish for.

---

Incidentally, judging just from the first video, you might conclude that Rice "wins" the confrontation. And in theatrical, TV terms she does: at the end she fishes out a gotcha question about Guantanamo which the student cannot answer. This was a foregone conclusion. It's not really a fair fight: Rice has had a long time to practice her legalistic justifications for her actions. These students are newbies. Her ability to fend off some callow undergrads demonstrates that an expert in any given subject can extemporaneously ejaculate a convincing wad of noise to defend anything.

But let's examine the two ways she deflects the student's question.

First, she goes on at length about Guantanamo not being a site for interrogations. This is correct; the torture was conducted by the CIA in locations around the world that have not been disclosed, although they're outside the United States. According to ABC News, one likely candidate is abandoned Communist military bases in Eastern Europe. Which is so much better than doing it in Guantanamo! But Rice doesn't mention any of that. The student's confusion regarding interrogation vs. indefinite detention is actually convenient for her, as it allows her to completely change the subject away from torture without being obvious about it.

Second, regarding Rice's gotcha question about putting the Guantanamo prisoners on trial: the answer to Rice's question is that federal courts halted the trials because they concluded that the trials were being conducted illegally. Or, more euphemistically, the tribunals convened by the Bush administration had failed to satisfy the requirements necessary to be called proper ("competent") military tribunals. Or, less euphemistically, Rice's pals setup some kangaroo courts; and she wants this fact to excuse her for holding thousands of mostly innocent people in concrete cells for years on end without providing them timely legal recourse.

Theatrically, Rice won the confrontation. But the cold light of later reflection exposes her rejoinders as total trash. The medium of video is not well-suited to reasoned argument.

Theodicy and its opposite

Devout people often attempt to address the Problem of Evil, or specific instances thereof (e.g., the manifold cases of cruel and inhuman violence advocated in the Bible) by claiming that their god's actions are above human judgment. Since a god's actions are above human judgment, our judgment that these actions are evil holds no weight: the actions are just and good, even though our judgment declares them not to be.

Obviously, this belief is socially toxic. Once convinced that your own moral judgment can be overridden by a higher authority --- not through moral persuasion, but by simple invocation of the fact that the speaker possesses greater authority than you do --- it becomes all too easy for you to defer similarly to worldly figures in positions of authority.

But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing to point out, for the record, a flaw in this argument that has always seemed utterly obvious to me, but which I rarely (never?) hear said explicitly, and which doesn't seem to occur to most religious believers.

Let us grant, for the sake of argument only, that all the humanly observable events in the Bible occurred in reality, rather than in fiction. How would you know that your god had better moral judgment than you do?

More concretely: How do you know that your god is not, in fact, a demonic superpowerful alien who gets off on tormenting and deceiving people, but who merely claims to be good?

Once you contemplate this question for about ten seconds, it becomes obvious that the only way to distinguish between a righteous deity and a malevolent, deceitful one is to exercise one's own intellect and moral judgment. If tomorrow, a mysterious, brilliantly shining light appeared over Manhattan, performed a number of miracles, and then ordered everyone, in a profoundly booming voice, to abduct and rape children, then I dearly hope that you would not follow its orders, because you would know that you were right and the shining light was wrong.

In short, no being can demand that you defer to its moral judgment. In fact, once you become an adult, you are morally obligated to refuse to defer to someone else's moral judgment. If you permitted yourself to defer to someone else's moral judgment, it would also be possible for you to be deceived into deferring to an evil or amoral being, which is unacceptable.

Here are some bogus counterarguments, and their refutations:

"God created the universe, and therefore has authority to make moral judgments within it."

First of all, the denizens of the Bible have only God's word that he is responsible for creating the universe. This could be a lie. Second, the power to create something does not imply higher moral judgment with respect to that creation, as the many children of abusive parents know. God could be an abusive parent. The only way to distinguish between an abusive creator and a benevolent one is to exercise one's own moral judgment.

"God is all-powerful, and has the authority to make moral judgments."

This is just a generalization of the previous point. First, it could be a lie that God is all-powerful. Second, being all-powerful (or "X-powerful" for any X) indicates only that God possesses an ability that you do not. It says nothing about whether that power is being exercised for good or evil, which one can only determine by exercising one's own moral judgment.

"God is all-powerful. Formally, for all X, God can do X. Instantiating, let X = 'determine the rules of morality'. Therefore, God can determine the rules of morality."

A clever twist on the above, but flawed in nearly the same way. Let Alice be an omnipotent God, for whom the above holds true. Now consider Bob, the "almost-omnipotent God" for whom the following statement holds: for all X, where X is not 'determine the rules of morality', Bob can do X. Now, how do you distinguish Alice from Bob? It's impossible in general, because "determining the rules of morality" is not an operation that has any observable effects. If you have evidence that some deity is Alice, then you have equal evidence that it is Bob. Therefore, you have no basis for believing that you should defer to this being. Only your own moral judgment remains.

"God is all-knowing, and must have higher moral judgment than you."

First, again, you only have God's word for this; it could be a lie. Second, even if this fact is true, knowing what is good is vastly different from doing what is good. It is possible for an omniscient being to know what's good, but prefer to do evil. And, once again, one can only distinguish between a good omniscient being and an evil omniscient being by exercising one's moral judgment.

"God can send you to Hell, and therefore is the final arbiter of good and evil."

Stalin could send people to the gulag, but that didn't make him moral. If a being possesses the power to damn people to eternal suffering, and that being is evil, then the morally right action is to defy that being, and the highest act of heroism is going to Hell.

(I would also claim that willingness to damn people to eternal suffering for acts committed in a finite lifetime amply demonstrates that the being is evil, but that's independent of this argument.)

"God did [insert good thing here], therefore God cannot be evil."

First, one can easily do a mixture of good and evil, and still be evil or amoral. I bet many evil dictators in history have been kind to their pets. Second, even raising this argument essentially proves my point that one must exercise one's own moral judgment. If you really believed that God's moral judgment overruled your own, then it wouldn't really matter what you think is good. The fact that you feel obligated to bring up an example that you judge to be good shows that you believe in your own moral reasoning more than any authority.

Now, again, in all of the above, I am granting arguendo the reality of some subset of the fictions in the Bible. I don't actually believe in these fictions, so I don't really have to consider the problem. But religious people who endorse the evil in the Bible (or any fraction thereof), even as a matter of allegory, do have this problem. All religious people suffer from unjustified belief, which is an intellectual failing. However, over and above that, I will always regard their refusal to judge their gods as a moral failing.

A brief reply to Leon Wieseltier

OK, one more thing on today's Times, and then I'm going to put the paper and the blog down and get back to work. In the Sunday Book Review, Leon Wieseltier writes, whilst discussing Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint:

Liberals must think carefully about their keenness to mirror some of the most poisonous qualities of their adversaries. It was never exactly a disgrace to American liberalism that it lacked its Limbaugh. But demagoguery now enjoys a new prestige.

There is an old Jewish joke that goes like this (quoted from the rendition in this Canadian Jewish News article):

Two Jews, sentenced to death by the czar, are before the firing squad. They are offered blindfolds. One says, "You can stuff your blindfold." The second Jew responds, "Shh! Don't make trouble!"

That is all.

---

UPDATE: No, wait. I'm too mad. Just one more thing. Wieseltier writes:

The demagogue's gravest sin is not incivility, it is stupidity. Does the Bush administration love capitalism too much? But it is also possible to love capitalism too little. The greatness of capitalism, after all, is that it may be politically corrected. Was American power used improperly, or for ill, in Iraq? But it is also possible for American power to be used properly, and for good. Is the friendly opinion of the world a condition of American security? Often, but not always. The incompetence of the Bush administration in world affairs, too much of which was ideologically ordained, does not alter the fact that the United States must sometimes deploy overwhelming force against extreme wickedness. It will be disastrous, for liberalism and for America, if the indignation against George W. Bush becomes an excuse for a great simplification, for a delirious release from the complexities of historical and political understanding that it took the American left decades to learn.

And, of course, it's us irrational "Bush-haters" (note how this term insinuates that our hatred of the man derives from something other than hatred of his policies) who are leading America off the cliff. We're a simplistic rabble, too immature to run the country, unlike wise old men who, like Wieseltier, understand the ins and the outs and the what-have-yous, the intricately braided complexities of homiletic aphorisms like "it is also possible for American power to be used properly, and for good".

The supercilious hectoring of liberal hawks, like Wieseltier, and the editorial staff of The New Republic, and Thomas Friedman, should be viewed in light of a singular fact: they supported the Iraq war. They believed that even with an obviously dishonest and incompetent American administration at the helm, it was worth killing Iraqis and killing American soldiers on the enormous gamble that was the Iraq war. (Needless to say, none of these well-fed pundits' lives were placed in the line of fire. Funny how it's so much easier to let other people die for your grand abstractions.) All the while, they caricatured people who were against the war (such as, say, 90% of the population of Spain) as a bunch of shaggy, dunderheaded narcissists. And now, the Iraq war has predictably turned into a disaster; and, far from being ashamed of their own gullibility, they are turning around and lecturing us on how to run a country, accusing us of "demagoguery" and "stupidity".

This is like a guy who walks into a chess tournament drunk, loudly calls everybody a patzer and a cheater, brags about his own strategic brilliance and moral probity, passes out handbills containing glowing encomia to his amazing unbroken string of victories, and then sits down at a table and gets roundly checkmated in six moves.

And then he gets up and tells everybody else how he's still got all the answers and you should never open with king's pawn to four.

I never thought I'd quote approvingly from Forrest Gump, but stupid is as stupid does. The American liberal hawk faction, of which The New Republic was perhaps the leading light, has done stupid, big time. It would do well to sit down and display a little humility.