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14 October, 2006 The nuclear weapons program in North Korea has something in common with genocide in Sudan, the mistreatment of political prisoners in secret camps, the power of the Taliban in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, and violence by armed groups in various parts of the world: somebody has declared it unacceptable. Those making the declarations include Amnesty International, a Swiss MP, a United Nations official, and, of course, George W. Bush. It was in July that Mr. Bush said the launching of missiles by North Korea was unacceptable, but the missiles were never returned to North Korea for unlaunching. Nor did North Korea find itself baffled when it chose to behave unacceptably again by testing a nuclear device. Mr. Bush called the Sudanese genocide unacceptable six months ago, but this month Sudan's government redoubled its genocidal efforts and responded to pressure from the UN with an unprintable letter of defiance. As for Amnesty International, its calling murderous anarchism "inexcusable and unacceptable" makes but a faint counterpoint to its sustained scolding of democratic states. Those armed groups, unexcused and unaccepted though their actions be, remain not only unhindered and presumably unworried, but even uncharacterized as thugs or bigots or would-be tyrants. The word unacceptable is currently the term of first and last resort for anyone wanting to condemn anything on any grounds, but not very long ago it was associated mainly with such things as faulty goods and badly-written reports. In those contexts, unacceptable is potent enough. There's a standard to be met, and there are consequences for not meeting it. An unacceptable report doesn't stand as a report. Yet the same word, unacceptable, becomes both impotent and curiously empty when used for things that can stand without the speaker's acceptance and that deserve, in any case, to be condemned in terms of moral substance. The absence of moral substance undoubtedly accounts for the popularity of unacceptable in polite society, from which it has spread to the society of people like Mr. Bush. That popularity does coincide approximately with the ripple of relativist attitudes through intellectual circles. Like correct as a substitute for right, and valid for true, unacceptable shows a wish to disallow value judgements or any reference to fixed principles while retaining the ability to censure some things as a practical matter. To call an act repugnant is to admit the existence of a certain standard, accessible to the sensibilities of decent people, which has been violated. To call it savage or ruthless, bigoted or tyrannical, is to fix the moral position of the perpetrators. To call it unacceptable is only to frown pompously in keeping with the occasion. Morally substantive words alone don't constrain wrongdoers any more than unacceptable does, but they have a twofold virtue to recommend them: they let the world know that the speaker has an opinion of the matter in question and not merely a reaction to it, and yet they make no rash promises. • 8 October, 2006 It was a bad joke, or would have been for anyone but an adolescent. I disliked it myself on second thought. Worse still was my young teacher's reaction: she took it seriously. Then came the worst of all. "I was only joking," I said. "Oh, no, you weren't," she said. That was that. I looked into her unblinking gray eyes and remembered too late that I was talking humor with someone who had never known such a thing except as an exotic excuse for improper remarks. In her mind there was no pigeonhole for bad jokes, nor was there one of those mirrors that let us see ourselves risking an injustice to the mind of another. I found that I at least had enough sense to stop arguing. The discovery of that sense, combined with the feeling of despair at having to fall back on it, made for a wonderfully complex memory. Differences of outlook are vital to the health of a society, always assuming that the members of society are capable of grasping them and applying a common vocabulary to them for purposes of discussion. To be common, a vocabulary must have a life of its own which we allow to intrude on our personal mental lives. Thomas Mann tells us, "Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates." Without a way of agreeing whether a word is contradictory or not, speech itself becomes a busy silence. Now the United States of America approaches another election day. After that, it will hardly pause before plunging into a Hellespont of words for the two-year swim to the next presidential election and attendant contests for lesser offices. How many voters will stretch their dripping limbs on the far shore without knowing whom they really disagree with, or even guessing that they don't know? There's reason to hope that many will simply refuse to listen to the Bush Republicans again, but it would be more heartening to see them listen and resent the insult to their intelligence. Until America has made up all its lost ground and then some in the pursuit of universal, humanities-based education, anyone who advocates a more "sensitive" foreign policy must expect to be widely mistaken for a political fawn even without being quoted out of context. That's a sad fact of life on both sides of the Mississippi. Still, there should not be so large a portion of the English language that's open to misunderstanding and calculated distortion. It should at least be possible for Lawrence Eagleburger and others to state, "Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy," without the risk that opponents will find it profitable to misrepresent not an enemy as meaning not a threat. It should even have been barely possible in the aftermath of the atrocities of September, 2001, for most people to understand Susan Sontag when she contradicted President Bush's use of the word cowardly as an epithet for suicide missions. It's more than possible that Mr. Bush would in any case have preferred the inappropriate word to an appropriate one such as barbaric. As it was, he was able to talk nonsense and have it received better than sense. Too many members of the American public seem caught in a vortex of half-formed thoughts propelled by half-considered words. When the complacent ignorance of Mr. Bush and his "base" brings a show of contempt from the opposition, people write to newspapers to invoke what they call the democratic principle of "respecting other people's opinions." There is no such principle. There is a similar-sounding principle, the very foundation of a democratic society, which we often express in the words, "You're entitled to your opinion." We do respect each other's right to form an opinion independently and to state it openly. However, we also value the right to judge the content of each other's stated opinion. If an opinion is ill-founded or malicious or fatuous, no lover of either democracy or freedom has an obligation to feign respect for it. Respect for language is essential to respect for principles. When people's words obscure their thoughts, or when their too-personal understanding of words obscures the thoughts of others, principled argument becomes all but impossible and the swim to election day becomes a very chancy crossing. • 6 May, 2006 "Everything is political," came the reply. It was a reply to someone on a mailing list who had objected to the use of the list for a political debate. The political debate raged on until the moderator stepped in and sent the debaters to activist heaven, martyred for a dubious principle. That line, "Everything is political," serves well to confound people without convincing them, much like the flip "Everything is relative" which has seen so many juveniles through so many ethical difficulties. People who declare everything to be political surely have their reasons, but people who remain unconvinced have a couple of better ones. The assertion that everything is political is, itself, a political maneuver of the kind that exploits verbal nuance. First, we're led to accept the philosophical argument that all interpersonal experience is political in that it is inseparable from questions of power and interest. But no sooner have we admitted this diffident-looking Trojan horse into our midst than out pops a much more aggressive and partisan sense of the word political. It may also be true that among physical objects everything is massive in that everything has mass. Yet even the most philosophical among us will distinguish between pebbles and boulders, and again between boulders nestled in hillsides and boulders hurled by catapults. The objection made on the mailing list was to a highly salient, dominating kind of politicality. One may scratch one's head and concede that everything is somehow political while observing a distinction between the political element in everything and the partisan essence of some things. Everything is not partisan. But there's no need to make even that concession. Everything political? How cogently can one argue that catching a cold from another person is political in any sense at all? Or falling in love? The second problem is at least easier to solve than the first. A middling arguer can manage it superficially by asserting the influence of socioeconomic factors on people's encounters and responses (a straw at which many parents have grasped in vain) or the subsequent micro-politics of negotiating differences between the lovers. The first problem might be managed by a shifting of attention to the unequal availability of cold remedies, or it might simply be dismissed as something our political "everything" was never meant to cover. The point is that backing up the statement "Everything is political" soon begins to require a degree of ingenuity. Whether that makes it a mere chore or a stimulating exercise, like forming improbable shapes with matchsticks, depends on one's bent. Not only is it an uphill push to maintain that everything is political, but there's a very different proposition that coasts easily over all obstacles thrown in its way: Everything is personal. Given only the premise that we're talking about human experience, this is a reliable fact of vital and universal significance. Asserting this proposition entails no semantic juggling, nor any risk of having to retrench the scope of everything under pressure. Indeed, the pressure will be on those who try to find exceptions to the rule. War? That's a classic political issue, but it takes its meaning from the actual personal experiences of individual people, each combination of person and experience being ultimately unique. Without particular cases of suffering, death, displacement, danger, or fear, any reference to war as distinct from peace would be unintelligible. The same holds true for bigotry, economic exploitation, and all other acknowledged political concerns, let alone the rest of human experience. A pattern may be a valuable construct, but the particulars which it roughly represents are nothing less than absolute realities. There is an uncivilized form of politics that tends to obsession with patterns and with master plans for readjusting them. Pump the power of the state into such an obsession, and one day the world will hear, as it heard from Stalin, "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." Civilized politics envisages the fate of a single life.
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