Just desserts
<p>There comes to us from Iraq the news that a terrorist group<br />
calling itself Sword of Truth has kidnapped four people from a group<br />
called Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and has threatened to kill<br />
them unless some demands for the release of certain terrorists from<br />
Iraqi jails are met.  What makes this interesting is that CPT exists<br />
to oppose the U.S. occupation; that is, they are in effect (if not by<br />
intention) allies of the terrorists threatening them.</p>
<p>When I first learned this, my first gut reaction was to think &#8220;Ha!<br />
Off with their heads!&#8221; My second reaction was to feel ashamed of my first<br />
reaction.  How have things come to such a pass that I find myself<br />
rooting for terrorists to kill Westerners?</p>
<p><span id="more-237"></span></p>
<p>I had to think about that for a while.  I&#8217;m with the hawk side on<br />
the Iraq war, but reluctantly; I am all too aware of the long-term<br />
risks of violence as a method, even when we adopt it under stress of<br />
necessity and for defensive reasons.  One of the risks is that we may<br />
come to love violence and embrace it too readily.  Was this happening<br />
to me?</p>
<p>Time for some what-if scenarios and ethical analysis.</p>
<p>There are two features of this mess that make it different<br />
from a &#8220;normal&#8221; hostage situation.  One of these is that I consider<br />
the members of CPT my enemies, because I consider them enemies of my<br />
civilization and my country.</p>
<p>Note that I did <em>not</em> say &#8216;enemies of my government&#8217;.   That they<br />
undoubtedly are, but I&#8217;m not real fond of my government.  I do not in<br />
general feel any desire for its enemies to die, unless they pose a threat<br />
to my civilization and my country.  My country is not its government;  my<br />
country is my neighbors, and their neighbors, and everybody who identifies<br />
with the American vision of freedom.</p>
<p>&#8220;But&#8230;&#8221; some of you will say, &#8220;peace groups like the CPT aren&#8217;t<br />
your enemy. Or at least, they don&#8217;t intend to be.&#8221;</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not at all clear to me that groups like the CPT don&#8217;t intend<br />
to be enemies of my country. So much of the soi-disant &#8220;peace&#8221;<br />
movement is <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8'>run by<br />
unreconstructed Stalinists and Maoists</a> that these days I tend to<br />
presume any so-called &#8220;peace activist&#8221; group is just another one of their<br />
fronts. I don&#8217;t think that assumption has yet turned out to be<br />
wrong.</p>
<p>But even if that&#8217;s a wrong assumption in this case, CPT&#8217;s<br />
intentions matter much less to me than their effects.  David Duke, Noam<br />
Chomsky, Pat Robertson, and Michael Moore would certainly deny being<br />
enemies of my country, but the effect of their speech and actions is<br />
to suck up to totalitarianisms of all kinds and give aid and comfort<br />
to people like Osama bin Laden who <em>are</em> unequivocally enemies of my<br />
country.  That makes them the enemy, too.</p>
<p>(Oh, boy, there&#8217;s a fantasy.  David Duke, Noam Chomsky, Pat<br />
Robertson, and Michael Moore chopping each other to pieces with<br />
Sword-of-Truth scimitars in a Rabid-Right-vs.-Loony-Left deathmatch.<br />
I wish I could sell tickets.)</p>
<p>This is sufficient to explain why the thought of those four CPT people<br />
being executed doesn&#8217;t bother me.  In general, I don&#8217;t mind when my<br />
enemies kill each other.  It saves my friends the trouble &mdash; and,<br />
more importantly, relieves us of the moral burden of killing.  I suppose<br />
I would consider it a better outcome if the CPT crew killed the terrorists,<br />
who are on the whole more dangerous; and the best outcome of all would<br />
be if CPT and the &#8220;Sword of Truth&#8221; gang managed to kill each other.<br />
But if only the CPT people get whacked, they&#8217;re no loss.</p>
<p>But my gut reaction was stronger than that.  The thought that these CPT<br />
people might die didn&#8217;t just leave me indifferent, it filled me with<br />
satisfaction. I had to meditate for a while to understand why.  I did<br />
finally get it.</p>
<p>I like it when villains or dangerous idiots are killed by their own folly.<br />
That seems just to me.  More importantly, it&#8217;s how other people learn not<br />
to be that way.  It&#8217;s evolution in action; it improves the meme pool,<br />
or the gene pool, or both.</p>
<p>This is actually one of my gut reasons for favoring drug legalization,<br />
though I&#8217;d never thought it through quite so far before.  I don&#8217;t think we<br />
have enough selective pressures against idiocy any more; I&#8217;d like<br />
idiots to have more chances to kill themselves, ideally before they get<br />
old enough to vote or reproduce.  Not because I relish their deaths,<br />
but because I want to live in a future with fewer idiots in it.</p>
</p>
<p>(By the way, I&#8217;m using &#8220;idiot&#8221; in its original sense here.  To the<br />
ancient Greeks, an &#8220;idiot&#8221; was a person too closed in on himself to be<br />
a net plus to his neighbors and his society.  Distinctions beetween<br />
mental impairments, communicative defects like deaf-muteness, or<br />
insanity were not clear and not considered important; the important<br />
question was whether the &#8216;idiotes&#8217; (private person) was capable of<br />
discharging the responsibilities of a citizen in the agora.)</p>
<p>If the CPT people aren&#8217;t villains, they&#8217;re idiots.  Idiocy is the<br />
least it takes to ally yourself with terrorists against Western<br />
civilization. &mdash; not because the West is the fount of all virtue,<br />
but because, whatever the West&#8217;s flaws, Islamofascism is incomparably<br />
worse.  The death of those four CPT people would at least diminish by<br />
four the number of dangerous idiots in the world; therefore, it&#8217;s a<br />
good thing.</p>
<p>I checked this line of thinking by asking myself how my evaluation<br />
would change if drug intervention (say) could make idiots into<br />
non-idiots.  In that case it would still be a good outcome for<br />
villains to off themselves, but there wouldn&#8217;t actually be any point<br />
in selecting against idiocy.  Idiocy would become like<br />
nearsightedness, a defect too easily correctable to bother being<br />
eugenic about.</p>
<p>I felt much better once I thought all this through.  I don&#8217;t want<br />
to become the kind of person who takes joy in the death of other<br />
people; but if rooting for a future with fewer idiots in it is wrong,<br />
I don&#8217;t want to be right.</p>
