The Folly of Pacifism (III)

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Loquitur Veritatem

This is a reworking of two earlier posts (here and here). Follow the second link to see a long list of related posts.

Winston Churchill said, “An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last.” I say that a person who promotes pacifism as state policy is one who offers himself and his fellow citizens as crocodile food.

Bryan Caplan, an irritating twit who professes economics at George Mason University, is an outspoken pacifist. He is also an outspoken advocate of open borders.

Caplan, like Linus of Peanuts, loves mankind; it’s people he can’t stand. In fact, his love of mankind isn’t love at all, but rather a kind of utilitarianism in which the “good of all” somehow outweighs the specific (though by no means limited) harms caused by lying down at an enemy’s feet or enabling illegal immigrants to feed at the public trough.

As Gregory Cochran puts it in the first installment of his review of Caplan’s The Case Against Education,

I don’t like Caplan. I think he doesn’t understand – can’t understand – human nature, and although that sometimes confers a different and interesting perspective, it’s not a royal road to truth. Nor would I want to share a foxhole with him: I don’t trust him.

That’s it, in a nutshell. Caplan’s pacifism reflects his untrustworthiness. He is a selective anti-tribalist:

I identify with my nuclear family, with my friends, and with a bunch of ideas. I neither need nor want any broader identity. I was born in America to a Democratic Catholic mother and a Republican Jewish father, but none of these facts define me. When Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Catholics, and Jews commit misdeeds – as they regularly do – I feel no shame and offer no excuses. Why? Because I’m not with them.

Hollow words from man who, in large part, owes his freedom and comfortable life to the armed forces and police of the country that he disdains. And — more fundamentally — to the mostly peaceful and productive citizens in whose midst he lives, and whose taxes support the armed forces and police.

Caplan is a man out of place. His attitude toward his country would be justified if he lived in the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, or any number of other nation-states past and present. His family, friends, and “bunch of ideas” will be of little help to him when, say, Kim Jong-un (or his successor) lobs an ICBM in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., which is uncomfortably close to Caplan’s residence and workplace.

In his many writings on pacifism, Caplan has pooh-poohed the idea that “if you want peace, prepare for war”:

This claim is obviously overstated. Is North Korea really pursuing the smart path to peace by keeping almost 5% of its population on active military duty? How about Hitler’s rearmament? Was the Soviet Union preparing for peace by spending 15-20% of its GDP on the Red Army?

Note the weasel-word, “overstated”, which gives Caplan room to backtrack in the face of evidence that preparedness for war can foster peace by deterring an enemy. (The defense buildup in the 1980s is arguably such a case, in which the Soviet Union was not only deterred but also brought to its knees.) Weasel-wording is typical of Caplan’s method of argumentation. He is harder to pin down than Jell-O.

In any event, Caplan’s pronouncement only attests to the fact that there are aggressive people and regimes out there, and that non-aggressors are naive to believe that those people and regimes will not attack you if you are not armed against them.

The wisdom of preparedness is nowhere better illustrated than in the world of the internet, where every innocent user is a target for the twisted and vicious purveyors of malware. Think of the millions of bystanders (myself included) whose sensitive personal information has been scooped by breaches of massive databases. Internet predators differ from armed ones only in their choice of targets and weapons, not in their essential disregard for the lives and property of others.

Interestingly, although Caplan foolishly decries preparedness, he isn’t against retaliation (which seems a strange position for a pacifist):

[D]oesn’t pacifism contradict the libertarian principle that people have a right to use retaliatory force? No. I’m all for revenge against individual criminals. My claim is that in practice, it is nearly impossible to wage war justly, i.e., without trampling on the rights of the innocent.

Why is it “nearly impossible to wage war justly”? Caplan puts it this way:

1. The immediate costs of war are clearly awful. Most wars lead to massive loss of life and wealth on at least one side. If you use a standard value of life of $5M, every 200,000 deaths is equivalent to a trillion dollars of damage.

2. The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain. Some wars – most obviously the Napoleonic Wars and World War II – at least arguably deserve credit for decades of subsequent peace. But many other wars – like the French Revolution and World War I – just sowed the seeds for new and greater horrors. You could say, “Fine, let’s only fight wars with big long-run benefits.” In practice, however, it’s very difficult to predict a war’s long-run consequences. One of the great lessons of Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment is that foreign policy experts are much more certain of their predictions than they have any right to be.

3. For a war to be morally justified, its long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs. I call this “the principle of mild deontology.” Almost everyone thinks it’s wrong to murder a random person and use his organs to save the lives of five other people. For a war to be morally justified, then, its (innocent lives saved/innocent lives lost) ratio would have to exceed 5:1. (I personally think that a much higher ratio is morally required, but I don’t need that assumption to make my case).

It would seem that Caplan is not entirely opposed to war — as long as the ratio of lives saved to lives lost is acceptably high. But Caplan gets to choose the number of persons who may die for the sake of those who may thus live. He wears his God-like omniscience with such modesty.

Caplan’s soul-accountancy implies a social-welfare function, wherein A’s death cancels B’s survival. I wonder if Caplan would feel the same way if A were Osama bin Laden (before 9/11) and B were Bryan Caplan or one of his family members or friends? He would feel the same way if he were a true pacifist. But he is evidently not one. His pacifism is selective, and his arguments for it are slippery.

What Caplan wants, I suspect, is the best of both worlds: freedom and prosperity for himself (and family members and friends) without the presence of police and armed forces, and the messy (but unavoidable) business of using them. Using them is an imperfect business; mistakes are sometimes made. It is the mistakes that Caplan (and his ilk) cringe against because they indulge in the nirvana fallacy. In this instance, it is a belief that there is a more-perfect world to be had if only “we” would forgo violence. Which gets us back to Caplan’s unwitting admission that there are people out there who will do bad things even if they aren’t provoked.

National defense, like anything less than wide-open borders, violates another of Caplan’s pernicious principles. He seems to believe that the tendency of geographically proximate groups to band together in self-defense is a kind of psychological defect. He refers to it as “group-serving bias”.

That’s just a pejorative term which happens to encompass mutual self-defense. And who better to help you defend yourself than the people with whom you share space, be it a neighborhood, a city-state, a principality, or even a vast nation? As a member of one or the other, you may be targeted for harm by outsiders who wish to seize your land and control your wealth, or who simply dislike your way of life, even if it does them no harm.

Would it be “group-serving bias” if Caplan were to provide for the defense of his family members (and even some friends) by arming them if they happened to live in a high-crime neighborhood? If he didn’t provide for their defense, he would quickly learn the folly of pacifism, as family members and friends are robbed, maimed, and killed.

Pacifism is a sophomoric fantasy on a par with anarchism. It is sad to see Caplan’s intelligence wasted on the promulgation and defense of such a fantasy.

Pacifism

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Loquitur Veritatem

Pacifism has several definitions, all of which are consistent with this one: an opposition to war or violence of any kind.

How does one oppose violence? Let me count the ways:

Refuse to partake of it, regardless of the consequences of refusal (e.g., one’s own death).
Oppose it by means of indoctrination and persuasion.
Respond to the threat of violence by promising a forceful defense against it, and carrying through on that promise if aggression ensues, so as to prevent or reduce the harm that an aggressor might cause.

Option 1 is useless against aggressors, of whom there have been, are, and always will be an abundance. Given the permanence of aggression, option 1 amounts to a futile gesture. It doesn’t break the so-called cycle of violence because there is no such cycle. Aggression is something that many people just do, regardless of any provocation or lack thereof. In fact, many aggressors view supineness as an invitation to attack. Bullies are drawn to those who are obviously weak or cowardly, and they see pacifists as either or both. So option 1 really does nothing to reduce violence, and may even provoke it. The only beneficiary of option 1 is the pacifist who practices it; his family, friends, and countrymen may suffer because of it.

In option 2, indoctrination can be applied only to members of one’s own group (club, gang, nation), which means that it makes that group vulnerable to aggression by outsiders; that is, internal indoctrination may foster violence against the indoctrinated group.

Option 2 also contemplates diplomacy toward other groups (e.g., other nations), which may take form of pleading for restraint or (in effect) offering a bribe.

Pleading for restraint (e.g., by appealing to the other party’s better nature). This is unlikely to sway a determined aggressor, regardless of soothing public pronouncements that he may issue.

Offering a bribe (e.g., an economic or military concession). This may (temporarily) assuage an aggressive party, but it does so by enabling that part to acquire at least some of its aims without incurring the heavier cost of violence. And a demonstrated willingness to make concessions just invites an aggressive party to demand more of them — or else. This is the “better red than dead” strategy of appeasement preferred by leftists during the Cold War. Leftists are so wedded to the strategy that they refuse to admit that it was Reagan’s “provocative’ defense buildup that broke the back of the Soviet Union and eliminated it as a military threat to the United States. (The subsequent military build-down has, of course, encouraged the military resurgence of the Soviet Union, in the guise of Russia.)

Option 3 — deterrence — is a kind of persuasion, but it’s persuasion backed by force. When deterrence works, it works because the other person or the other side’s leaders believe (with or without justification) that violence will be met with violence of an unacceptable degree. Credibility is the key to deterrence. It requires the appearance and fact of resolve and an overt display of prowess. In international affairs, a display of prowess requires a nation to build and maintain substantial and obviously capable armed forces. (American leftists have been undermining the resolve of the nation’s leaders and the attainment of military might since the end of World War II.) Deterrence encompasses the resolve and ability to strike first when it becomes obvious that the other side is preparing to strike. The first blow can, in some cases, be the last one. When deterrence doesn’t work, it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway — because the other side is recklessly aggressive, and would have attacked in any event.

The pacifist believes that the world ought to operate in a certain way, that there ought not to be violence. And so he commits himself to nonviolence. But the pacifist’s ought disregards the is of human nature. Pacifism works only if everyone is a pacifist to begin with — a demonstrably false proposition.

A true pacifist is a person who will die for the sake of his pacifism, by refusing to defend himself. That’s quite all right with me if my group’s gene pool thereby becomes less pacifistic. But it’s not all right with me to be dragged into subjection and defeat by pacifists. Or by leftists whose policies are no better than pacifism.

* * *

Related posts:

Defense as the Ultimate Social Service

A Grand Strategy for the United States

The Folly of Pacifism

The Folly of Pacifism, Again

The Ideal as a False and Dangerous Standard

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

This is from my post, “The Folly of Pacifism, Again“:

[T]he case for pacifism … is fundamentally flawed….

[I]t rejects the actuality of human nature for an idealized version that is impossible of realization. It is, in other words, an example of the Nirvana fallacy in operation. In this instance it is based on two assumptions — hopes, really — that run contrary to the actuality of human existence. There is the hope for a world without states, and therefore without the kind of state-sponsored violence known as war. But states are inevitable because statelessness invites warlordism, and if a supposedly stateless people join in self-defense against a warlord they will have created what amounts to a state for the purpose of committing violence — in self-defense. Then there is the hope that people — state or no state — will not band together against the “outside world,” but they will.

Bill Vallicella, Maverick Philosopher, in a typically thoughtful post (“Can What Is Possible to Achieve Be an Ideal For Us?“) says this about ideals:

Ideals must be realizable if they are to be ideals. The ideal ‘points’ to a possible realization. If that be denied then it is being denied that the ideal stands in relation to the real when the ideal has its very sense in contradistinction to the real. At this point I could bring in analogies, though analogies seldom convince. The possible is possibly actual. If you say X is possible but not possibly actual, then I say you don’t understand the notion of possibility. Or consider dispositions. If a glass is disposed to shatter if suitably struck, then it must be possible for it to shatter. Analogously, if such-and-such is an ideal for a person, then it must be possible — and not just logically or nomologically — for the person to realize that ideal.

I believe this is an important topic because having the wrong ideals is worse than having no ideals at all. Many think that to be idealistic is good. But surely it is not good without qualification. Think of Nazi ideals, Communist ideals, leftist ideals and of their youthful and and earnest and sincere proponents. Those are wrongheaded ideals, and some of them are wrongheaded because not realizable. The classless society; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the racially pure society; the society in which everyone is made materially equal by the power of the state. Ideals like these cannot be achieved, and if the attempt is made terrible evils will be the upshot. The Commies broke a lot of eggs in the 20th century (100 million by some estimates) but still didn’t achieve their fabulous and impossible omelet.

Pacifists and anarchists, as far as I can tell, hold unrealizable ideals. And yet they insist on judging what is real and achievable against those ideals. The pursuit of peace, in the way that pacifists would pursue it, can lead only to subjection by those who do not want peace, except on their terms. The pursuit of absolute liberty, as anarchists would pursue it, can lead only to subjection by those who despise liberty, except as their personal liberty enables them to trample others.

Pacifism and anarchism, in other words, are delusions no less dangerous than “the classless society; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the racially pure society; the society in which everyone is made materially equal by the power of the state.” All are routes to oppression.

The Folly of Pacificism, Again

Posted on August 28, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

I had meant to be done with pacifism after writing “The Folly of Pacifism.” But I cannot ignore the subject because it rears its ugly head again, in Fernando Teson’s “Libertarian Wars” at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

It is not that Teson is a pacifist, but he neatly summarizes an argument against war that Bryan Caplan — an avowed pacifist (and the main target of my earlier post) — is fond of using; for example:

[D]oesn’t pacifism contradict the libertarian principle that people have a right to use retaliatory force? No. I’m all for revenge against individual criminals. My claim is that in practice, it is nearly impossible to wage war justly, i.e., without trampling on the rights of the innocent.

Why is it “nearly impossible to wage war justly”? In a later post, Caplan puts it this way:

1. The immediate costs of war are clearly awful. Most wars lead to massive loss of life and wealth on at least one side. If you use a standard value of life of $5M, every 200,000 deaths is equivalent to a trillion dollars of damage.

2. The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain. Some wars – most obviously the Napoleonic Wars and World War II – at least arguably deserve credit for decades of subsequent peace. But many other wars – like the French Revolution and World War I – just sowed the seeds for new and greater horrors. You could say, “Fine, let’s only fight wars with big long-run benefits.” In practice, however, it’s very difficult to predict a war’s long-run consequences. One of the great lessons of Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment is that foreign policy experts are much more certain of their predictions than they have any right to be.

3. For a war to be morally justified, its long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs. I call this “the principle of mild deontology.” Almost everyone thinks it’s wrong to murder a random person and use his organs to save the lives of five other people. For a war to be morally justified, then, its (innocent lives saved/innocent lives lost) ratio would have to exceed 5:1. (I personally think that a much higher ratio is morally required, but I don’t need that assumption to make my case).

It would seem that Caplan is not entirely opposed to war — as long as the ratio of lives saved to lives lost is acceptably high. And Caplan gets to choose the number of persons who may die for the sake of those who may thus live. He wears his God-like omniscience with such modesty.

Teson offers a more rigorous interpretation of the pacifist point of view:

[I]n any war innocents die. They did not initiate violence against us, yet in response to the foreign attack we will be bringing about their deaths. Maybe the morally right thing to do is to surrender to the aggressor, if doing so would prevent us from causing the deaths of innocents. The libertarian who thinks that we cannot permissibly fight even defensive wars is a contingent pacifist. To him, if we could repeal the attack avoiding simultaneously the deaths of bystanders, then we could permissibly do it. But because we cannot avoid those deaths, we may not react against the attack: we must wave the white flag. This reasoning applies to the defense of others as well, because that action, too, will bring about the deaths of innocents. On this view, NATO’s intervention in Libya is wrong, not because it protects persons attacked by Khadaffy, but because it impermissibly kills innocents.

Teson’s formulation strikes me as the one that most pacifists would prefer. But it is as mistaken as Caplan’s more blatantly presumptuous brand of soul-accountancy. Perhaps Caplan is angling to be the Death-Panel Czar.

Seriously — and war is a serious matter — the case for pacifism, as it is made by Caplan and Teson, is fundamentally flawed.

First, it assumes a social-welfare function, wherein A’s unhappiness can cancels B’s happiness. In this instance, the lives of some “innocents” are weighed against the lives of other “innocents” and found unworthy of defense by war. This is a weighing that no human being is qualified to conduct on behalf of others.

Second, this weighing of lives can be done only if one studiously refuses to be counted among those whose lives are saved (or potentially saved) by waging war. In other words, the true pacifist is saying that his life is not worth that of any other person, even an armed enemy. So much for self-defense, which may be rejected readily enough on paper and behind the shield afforded by the defense and police forces of the United States.

Third, it rejects the actuality of human nature for an idealized version that is impossible of realization. It is, in other words, an example of the Nirvana fallacy in operation. In this instance it is based on two assumptions — hopes, really — that run contrary to the actuality of human existence. There is the hope for a world without states, and therefore without the kind of state-sponsored violence known as war. But states are inevitable because statelessness invites warlordism, and if a supposedly stateless people join in self-defense against a warlord they will have created what amounts to a state for the purpose of committing violence — in self-defense. Then there is the hope that people — state or no state — will not band together against the “outside world,” but they will.

I address this second hope in “Inside-Outside,” which is aimed at another of Caplan’s many pacifistic screeds. The whole of my post bears repeating:

Bryan Caplan seems to think that the tendency of geographically proximate groups to band together in self-defense is a kind of psychological defect. He refers to it as “group-serving bias.”

It is nothing of the kind, however. It is a simple case of self-defense. And who better to help you defend yourself than the people with whom you share space, be it a neighborhood, a city-state, a principality, or even a vast nation? As a member of one or the other, you may be targeted for harm by outsiders who wish to seize your land and control your wealth, or who simply dislike your way of life, even if it does them no harm.

The cause of Caplan’s confusion is his adherence to a kind of libertarian idealism. In the anti-war argot of the 1960s, it was expressed as “Why can’t we all just get along?” But hope is not reality, Caplan notwithstanding.

Not getting along, to Caplan, is a moral defect. He therefore considers the differential treatment of insiders and outsiders to be an unmitigated wrong. But group cohesion is a prudential social instinct that no amount of rationalism can obliterate. Differential treatment of insiders and outsiders is an inevitable aspect of that prudential social instinct. It is not, at bottom, a moral issue.

If Caplan were logically consistent, he would focus his moral lens on the animal kingdom. There is plenty of inter-group conflict to condemn there: shark vs. tuna, cheetah vs. antelope, spider vs. fly, and so on. In the case of man vs. cattle (hog, fish, fowl, or other living thing), I wonder if Caplan opts for veganism? It would be the proper choice — for him.

Pacifism is a sophomoric fantasy on a par with anarchism. It is sad to see Caplan’s intelligence wasted on the promulgation and defense of an ideological fantasy.

The Folly of Pacifisim

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Loquitur Veritatem

Bryan Caplan — one of my favorite pseudo-libertarian targets — pooh-poohs the idea that “if you want peace, prepare for war”:

This claim is obviously overstated. Is North Korea really pursuing the smart path to peace by keeping almost 5% of its population on active military duty? How about Hitler’s rearmament? Was the Soviet Union preparing for peace by spending 15-20% of its GDP on the Red Army?

All Caplan has demonstrated is that there are aggressive people and regimes out there, and that non-aggressors are naive to believe that those people and regimes will not attack you if you are not armed against them.

Caplan’s particular brand of pacifism is worse than naive, however. It is also imbued with moral relativism, which I address in “Inside-Outside“:

[W]ho better to help you defend yourself than the people with whom you share space, be it a neighborhood, a city-state, a principality, or even a vast nation? As a member of one or the other, you may be targeted for harm by outsiders who wish to seize your land and control your wealth, or who simply dislike your way of life, even if it does them no harm….

…[Caplan] considers the differential treatment of insiders and outsiders to be an unmitigated wrong. But group cohesion is a prudential social instinct that no amount of rationalism can obliterate. Differential treatment of insiders and outsiders is an inevitable aspect of that prudential social instinct. It is not, at bottom, a moral issue.

To the Caplans of this world, the outsider who would attack you is your moral equal. He just happens to be “over there.”

It is true that one may be attacked from within, by one’s supposed allies. But that does not lessen the need to be prepared for attacks from without. In fact, it points to the virtue of preparedness, generally.

Ronald Reagan, in the context of arms-limitation talks with the USSR, often said “Trust, but verify.” I would change the saying to this: “Trust those who have earned your trust; be armed against the rest.”

The wisdom of preparedness is nowhere better illustrated than in the world of the internet, where every innocent user is a target for the twisted and vicious purveyors of malware. I am far from a computer expert, but my limited knowledge of computing has enabled me to root out malware thrice in the past few years — once for my wife, once for my father-in-law, and once (just yesterday) for myself. Think of the many completely inexpert users whose systems are fatally compromised or restored only at great trouble and expense because they are defenseless against the jackals who roam the internet.

The Caplans of this world simply don’t want to admit that there are “good” people and “bad” people, and that it is necessary for the “good” people to arm themselves against the “bad” people. In fact, the actions of individuals who promulgate malware and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda make a good case for preemptive warfare.

As for the true state of the world, I find apt a passage from Simon Mawer’s novel, The Gospel of Judas, which centers on a laicized Catholic priest named Leo Newman. Toward the end of the story, which is about the discovery of an alternative account of the life and death of Jesus by Judas Iscariot, a French priest encounters Newman and says,

Newman, you are one of those sentimentalists, who see Jesus Christ as a kind of social worker and the Christian faith as a series of conveniently liberal moral precepts. No wonder you abandoned the Church…. The Almighty is not a liberal, Monsieur Newman… The Almighty is the driving force for the entire universe and the universe is not a very liberal place. That is what the modern world seems not to understand….

Pacifists are sentimentalists who see the world as a benign place, which can be tamed by their moral precepts. They can afford their naivete because they are sheltered from the real world by the cops and soldiers whose efforts they scorn.

Politics and Prosperity

“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

Tag Archives: pacifism

The Folly of Pacifism (III)

Pacifism

The Ideal as a False and Dangerous Standard

The Folly of Pacificism, Again

The Folly of Pacifisim

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