The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: just a few of the several States of our Union
I've been out of commission for a while--there was an interesting scare at the surprisingly empty, surprisingly responsive, and surprisingly concerned St. Luke's/Roosevelt Medical Center Emergency Room--but that shan't keep me from commenting on the now week-old State of the Union address. A quick highlights reel:1. Bush's best rhetorical move: linking economic strength and economic leadership in the world at large to democracy, anti-terrorist activities, and the war in Iraq.
By railing against isolationism generally, the President crafted a non-obvious yet very clever and fairly compelling link between the two seemingly-disparate goals of a strong economy at home and a strong (read: forceful) foreign policy abroad. We need to keep our markets open, he said; we need to welcome foreign workers; we need to adapt to the new global marketplace in order to maintain our position as an economic leader in the world. In short, we need to take an active part in the global economy and cannot descend into economic isolationism or high-tarriff protectionism if we want to maintain our competitive edge. And while workers in threatened industries might want to see their jobs saved, nearly all of us know that what Bush said on these counts is true. It is in our best interest to take an active interest in world markets.
The clever move that followed was the suggestion that an active interest in foreign governance is also in our best interest, for the exact same reasons. Moreover, it is allowed--nay, responsible--for the same reasons that active participation in the global economy is allowed and, indeed, responsible. We can't accept isolationism economically: our economy will flail and fail. We can't accept isolationism politically, either: our government and our institutions will also flail and fail. Just as we have seen the dollar threatened when we try to protect jobs and divorce certain industries from worldwide economic trends, we have seen that unstable governments abroad and foreign terrorism can come back to bite us at home. We can't just live in a bubble of democratic goodness here in America; we must reach out, by force if necessary, and engage in an active foreign policy--for the good of polities in the world at large, to be sure, but also for the domestic good.
2. Bush's worst rhetorical move (and I quote):
Ultimately, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their dark vision of hatred and fear by offering the hopeful alternative of political freedom and peaceful change. So the United States of America supports democratic reform across the broader Middle East. [One short paragraph about Egypt here.] The Palestinian people have voted in elections, and now the leaders of Hamas...Okay, come on now. Like the two measly sentences of the intervening paragraph are going to keep us from noticing that the Palestinian election brought a terrorist government into power. Whichever of Bush's speechwriters brilliantly placed the two news items "democracy brings peaceful change" and "the Palestinians just democratically voted for terrorists" next to one another should be shot. (Well, no, okay, that's rather a harsh overstatement. But the move is rhetorically terrible. It highlights the problems with Bush's doctrine of democratic superiority, not the success thereof.)
The speech may have been the worse for this move, but it's worth pointing out that the juxtaposition presented here did get me thinking (specifically, about the problems of democracy and the Bush democratic doctrine, unsurprisingly). I tend to privilege democracy highly. After all, it ideally gives a people self-determination, which is a very great good indeed; I may even be prepared to state that this is an inherently moral good.
But there are some difficulties in Bush's firm belief that democracy is the political ideal that brings peace and justice to wayward states. First and most obviously, we should point out that the masses in any given state are not necessarily nice, just, or fair. The majority of people in a state may favor the destruction of Israel; or warfare in Iraq; or harsh measures against some political, ethnic, or religious minority; or even just theft from the rich; but majority support doesn't make any of those things right. In such circumstances, it's hard to tell whether justice, fairness, and decency on the one hand, or democracy on the other, is the greater good. (Indeed, it's not clear to me that there's even a general rule; perhaps we need to take things on a more pragmatic, case-by-case basis: democracy may be the greater good when the question is one of property rights and popular repossession without compensation to the owner, but it may be the lesser good when the question instead concerns killing or radical destruction of human life. But such pragmatism has, I think, dire consequences for coherent and determinative moral systems (the kind which are useful by virtue of offering us instructions by which to live our lives).)
Of course governments must always balance basic morality and indivual rights against popular desires--we Americans try to do that with our Bill of Rights; the Brits do it with their unwritten Constitution and an explicit, legally-binding dependence upon decency and common sense in daily actions--but the problem of fair and moral governance nonetheless seems particularly acute in a democratic system. It is a system that breeds ideologues and encourages strong speakers who can arouse passions in a crowd, not, I note, a system that easily allows independent thinkers to rise to the top while practicing careful deliberation on any given issue. There are many things to be said for democracy; but there is, perhaps, something also to be said for a Platonic aristocracy of the best-educated, most thoughtful, most moderate voices, led at the top by a philosopher-king who has been raised to consider problems of good governance. (There is much to be said against such a system, too, to be fair: democracy comes with the possibility of mob rule and shameless demogogues, but monarchy is closely allied to tyranny.)
The second big problem with the democratic doctrine as practiced by Bush is the percieved right--perhaps even obligation?--to impose democracy abroad. Even if Bush is right about the stability and moderating effects of democracy, I can't help but think that our "encouragement" has done anything in Iraq (for example) but destabalize the government and foment anti-American, anti-European radicalism. In almost all circumstances, I tend to think that stability is a far greater good than any particular governmental system; life is better if it is predictable, even if not ideal (or even harshly oppressive). This is contraversial, I know, but I just don't think we've shown that democracy trumps other governmental forms when it comes to producing happy people. If we're worried about unhappy people coming to blow us up, I'm just not sure forced democracy is the way to go regardless of whether the system brings greater domestic stability. If it's not making us appreciably safer, though, I have a hard time with the idea that we are justified in overthrowing someone else's government. We would do well to remember that that's a way to scuttle self-determination, too.
After all, it's problematic to assume that, because democracy works for us and we're a powerful country, monarchy or oligarchy don't work for others. It's just not clear to me that a rich, relatively permissive, and practically undemocratic U.A.E., for example, yields people who are yearning for political change. (Actually, judging from my friends from Dubai, it is rather more clear that they would be horrified by the prospect.) Yet we as a nation persist in the belief that democracy is the only government worth having.
Of course, none of this means that Bush is necessarily wrong about the desirability of the recent Palestinian vote. It may well be that democracy is moderating and that the vote represents real promise in the Middle East. After all, Hamas is suddenly going to have to deal with domestic issues: with clean government (given that Fatah was largely overthrown because of its pervasive corruption), with education, with hospitals. They're going to have to negotiate with the rest of the world on everything from disarmament (where they may hold their own) to environmental issues (where they'll want to appear respectable in the world). Even if their ideals don't change, the end of Israel is hardly going to top Hamas's to-do list. And, anyhow, their ideals might change, merely for pragmatic reasons of maintaining their power and avoiding domestic violence on their watch. Perhaps Bush is right that, in the long term, democracy breeds peace.
The thing is, that's not clear yet. And he was stupid to put it in his speech. And he was stupider still to use the Palestinian election as an example of a newly spreading, peaceable democracy.
posted by Skay @ 8:48 PM
4 Comments:
3. Bush's Strangest Rhetorical Move:
"Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research – human cloning in all its forms … creating or implanting embryos for experiments … creating human-animal hybrids … and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos."
Wait, human-animal hybrids? What the hell are those? Are those like the things in Alien Resurrection?
I gave Bush's speech a D+. The D is self-evident. The plus is for a promise still unfulfilled.
Right on, Donovan.
Human-animal hybrids... I hope, hope that doesn't mean outlawing the implantation of animal tissues into a person (a la today's standard pig-valve heart surgery). I'm sure it doesn't--but there's not a big jump from that to using other animal parts in us, to implanting whole hearts, to organ harvesting, to gene splicing. I think Bush must be going for the gene-splicing angle: we don't want a person whose cells--all cells, not just those transplanted organs--contain animal DNA.
I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that this is weird and sketchy, but if I'm right about what Bush means, I also fear that it could seriously limit medical science without any tangible moral gain. I mean, we don't think it's wrong to give a heart-attack sufferer a new (animal) heart valve; if giving someone a DNA implant to cure a genetic disease can equally save or better someone's life, then why not? Indeed, do we have a positive moral obligation to offer it to them?
It's arguable--indeed, plausible--if not clear cut.
And of course, it's not a far reach to say that, if we save lives with animal DNA implanted into, say, human embryonic cells, we can also simply enhance those embryos with animal DNA (bringing a new generation of super-humans with great strength, eyesight, or size) into the world. And Bush is right: that is scary. Because then, suddenly we're experimenting with people.
Why is that ethically different than curing people through the same means? It's a tough question.
It is a tough question; one to which I need to devote more thought.
I went to see James Watson speak three or four years ago in Cambridge when he was promoting his latest book (Genes, Girls, and Gamow). Throughout his talk and into the Q&A session he was kind of senile and had some obvious axes to grind, but I'll never forget his response when he was asked about the kind of genetic engineering ("experimenting with humans") that we're talking about here.
He responded that he believed that nature's randomness in combining genes and traits to create new and unexpected life brought with it a certain beauty. He didn't offer an ethical or logical position on the issue, but an aesthetic one. It struck me as a particularly interesting response.
Of course, is there beauty in finding out that your baby has trisomy-21? Err, get back to me when I've had time to think about it...
I like the angle of the aesthetic response a lot, and I respect it immensely.
It doesn't help much when trying to tease out the moral implications that are so important when crafting public policy, though, does it? At least, not unless you defend a morality based primarily on aesthetic considerations (obviously not unheard of, as Sartre might serve to show, but still quite unusual and probably undemocratic).
When I was in college, I spent an afternoon at a roundtable with a corn biologist and geneticist. She was one of the prime movers in making genetically engineered corn (in her case, for humanitarian rather than corporate reasons, but they're linked). Several of my fellow students were unhappy with the idea of GM foods, ranging in rhetoric from the "don't mess with God's creation" sort of unhappiness through to the more tempered "I'm just not sure about frog genes in my tomatoes" unhappiness. The researcher made a compelling response to the latter: 98% of frog genes (I make up the number here, but it was indeed extraordinarily high) are the same as corn genes. Living things share enough genetic material that it's of very little consequence that this particular gene was first identified in a frog instead of in a cornstalk.
Of course, something is keeping us genetically distinct from the frogs and the plants of this world, and there's no guarantee that your gene falls into the 98%. But it occurs to me that genes are all of a type anyway, which may be important. Consider that it doesn't seem particularly immoral to break a cup down into its constituent atoms and then reconstruct those atoms into carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, helium, and assorted other elements, and from them form water and other molecules, and from those form frogs; at any rate, at least, we hardly say that that's immoral because we have made a frog from a coffee cup. That's because we don't presume those atoms to be essentially cup-like in any way: atoms are atoms, and can as easily, necessarily, and appropriately form cups as they can frogs. Similarly, perhaps, all animal and plant life require DNA, and we're discovering that one string of DNA can easily supplement another in order to create new or different things. Perhaps DNA is an appropriately interchangeable building block, too, then. Perhaps it doesn't much make sense to talk of this or that string of codons as being "corn DNA," "frog DNA," or "human DNA."
I maintain my skepticism. But it's worth a thought.
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