The Military Mind

A Quaker friend of mine is always trying -- with success -- to point out to me that mainstream society really needs to abandon its hero-worshipping attitude toward the military mind. He is particularly annoyed by the current school of thought promoted by the Bob Woodwards of the world, which insists on seeing the handful of generals and commanders that have periodically been appointed and then ejected by the current presidential administration as the "adults in the room" -- that is, the intellectually and spiritually mature overseers of Trump's puerile tantrums.

My friend's point is that actually, the vast majority of things said and written by ostensible military thinkers in recent years has been "totally nuts," and just nobody pays enough attention to it to notice -- despite the fact that it exerts direct influence over the actions and decisions of the world's largest and most powerful military, as it projects its might into every corner of the globe.

"Kilt," not "whupped," etc.

As you may have noticed by now -- either from reading this blog or from witnessing my attempts to harangue a crowd in different fora -- I am always on the look-out for the use of the perfectly apposite literary quotation in public life. I long to pull one off myself. I want this beyond reason, beyond anything that can be explained by the normal pathways of human psychology. So when a high-profile politician extracts just such a gem from the pages of written lore, I always pay attention.

I therefore perked up tremendously back in 2016 during Tim Kaine's concession speech, when he dropped a line from Faulkner on the crowd  -- "They killed us, but they ain't whupped us yet." To my glee, not only was he not booed off the stage -- not only did it fail to elicit groans and eye-rolls from the audience at this display of needless and irrelevant erudition. Instead, he actually got a rapturous cheer.

And the crowd said, Crucify

“Their criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty. And when I asked President Xi, I said do you have a drug problem? No, no, no, I said you have 1.4 billion people, what do you mean you have no drug problem? No we don't have a drug problem. I said why? Death penalty. We give death penalty to people that sell drugs, end of problem. What do we do? We set up blue ribbon committees."

Donald Trump, February 15, 2019.

(Homage to Francis Bacon.)

Yes, it happened fast. You might have missed it. But the president of the United States just endorsed the mass execution of non-violent drug offenders. In a racist impression of broken English no less. Using as his exemplar a contemporary authoritarian regime currently holding more than a million people in concentration camps in its western provinces because of their race and religion.

Sometimes, one doesn’t have the words to express the disgust and contempt that a statement deserves. That’s when one turns to Francis Bacon.

Bad arguments about the End of the World

A friend has sometimes accused me of only having a few cards in my philosophical deck, and thus of overplaying them. (One of my favorites, as discussed before, is the "sawing off the branch you're sitting on" move. Someone makes an argument, and I look for the way in which -- in the very act of making the argument -- they already assumed its refutation. That sort of thing.)

I'm not a philosopher and am mostly willing to accept this criticism in good humor. The one thing I will say in my defense, however, is that there is a kind of unity to bad arguments, as much as there is to sound thinking. Bad arguments have a family resemblance. And therefore, it shouldn't surprise us to see similar argumentative moves coming up frequently against them. They can often be defeated with a similar set of tools.