Yesterday Eric Scheie posted this:
Glenn Reynolds linked a very thoughtful post by Sean Kinsell, and the thoughtless comments Sean is getting do not endear me to the people making them. Anyway, I'm too tired to get into the details, but in a minor aside to a post, Sean attempted to explain why local Japanese might be uncomfortable about a nearby U.S. army base. That drew angry comments taking Sean to task for supposedly denigrating the military, with one actually suggesting that Sean charged the military with being likely to commit "atrocities" when he said no such thing. But because of such comments, Sean's single sentence ended up requiring a long explanation which no one who is familiar with Sean would have considered necessary.
Here is the "offending" bit from Sean Kinsell:
It’s very difficult to assign blame in this scenario. It’s not possible to indulge the NIMBY-ism of every municipality, but it’s understandable that many towns don’t want the side-effects of a military installation. I’m very much a supporter of the military, but it’s a plain and simple fact that putting a lot of hopped-up kids in their early twenties far from home—in an environment of literal martial discipline in which their violent impulses are deliberately brought to the surface so they can be channeled to useful purposes—nearly guarantees an increase in crime and a tense relationship with the locals, whatever job-creating benefits may come along with the installation. Washington wants the existing agreement to be implemented; Tokyo seems to see the new administrations in both countries as an opportunity to restart negotiations practically from square one. Neither seems likely to have all its expectations met.
Eric Scheie then offered a poignant comment:
I'd like to hope that there is no such a thing as "political correctness" on the right, but some of the comments to Sean's post make me wonder.
I would respond to Eric that there is no reason to wonder; of course there is a version of Political Correctness on the Right. It should be clear to all of us that we have our unconscious prejudices and that unless we monitor ourselves carefully, and receive help from our friends, we will express those prejudices in ways which undermine our arguments. One of the reasons for my engagement with Jay Adler in The Open Mind series is just so that I can be challenged by someone who is smart, thoughtful, and disagrees with me in most areas. Without Jay's help (and the assistance of people like copithorne and Judge Crater) how could I ever hone my arguments and be sure I wasn't blinding myself to the obvious? Allow me to expand on this.
We (should) all know, at least in the abstract, that we contain biases. We all view the world through the filter of our own perceptions and preconceived notions of how the world works. If we were required to re-construct the world anew every day it would be impossible to function. Instead we all have a particular weltanschauung into which we incorporate new data. Thus, a Liberal will have an a priori implicit assumption that weapons are the cause of violence and will therefore support disarmament in its many forms, from nuclear disarmament to gun control laws. A Conservative will start from the assumption that it is people who are responsible for violence and oppose such disarmament efforts believing that such only empowers the "bad guys." Missed by both sides is that the presence of certain weapons decreases the risk of strategic violence while it increases the lethality of impulsive violence and may make such violence more likely. (I am a strong supporter of gun rights and think nuclear disarmament is one of the worst ideas that our President has had, and he has had many bad ideas, yet I also know that the presence of guns increases the danger of suicide and murder for impulse prone individuals. We do not have a test of impulsivity as a standard to determine the legality of gun ownership. The analogy to nuclear weapons should be apparent.)
Sean Kinsell's point should have been so obvious as to be trivial. Place a few thousand young American men in a situation where they have little appropriate channels for the expression of their exuberance and aggression, mix with an ethnically distinct and homogeneous (and often xenophobic) population, and the results will be guaranteed to increase the very low crime rate in the area. This is impossible to refute. It is also inexcusable for those who oppose the military to use such crime as a weapon with which to devalue and attack the military. Our military men and women have lower crime rates and lower rates of violence (including suicide) than their age related cohort, but that does not mean that our military men and women never transgress.
When we argue we tend to take polarized positions. It is how debates and arguments work. Our founders, in their wisdom, determined that the best way to adjudicate arguments was through the ballot box, a process I have referred to as "summing our irrationalities." In the public arena, the marketplace of ideas, those who are most passionately engaged in an argument will be those most involved. During the last decade or so with the advent of the internet and blogosphere, and going further back to the early days of talk radio, the Liberal side of the discussion had a relative monopoly on the subjects of discourse. A very few large news organizations served as gatekeepers of news and information. Their monopoly has eroded and they naturally are quite disturbed by the process. It is easier for them to demonize their political opponents than to engage their ideas, which is why they have tried, unsuccessfully so far, to label the Tea Party movement (and Conservatives in general) as racist and bigoted.
The Left has served the Right well for many years. As much as I find the guiding philosophy of the ACLU to be, in practice, repugnant and dangerous, I also recognize that they force the Right, when in power, to be attentive to actions that could threaten our freedoms. Unfortunately, we do not have anything truly analogous on the Right to assist the Left in a similar fashion. (There are many groups and organizations willing to challenge the Democrats in their over-reach, but none with the stature or history of the ACLU.) Perhaps because they have not had such opponents, the Left has fallen short in their ability to defend many of their positions when challenged. The Tea Party movement is a response to excesses on the Left. It could have a highly salutary impact on the Left if they take advantage of the opportunity to explore their own unconscious biases that have led them to alienate such a large part of the American people. I doubt they will take advantage of the opportunity so offered (simply compare George W. Bush and the Conservative reactions to Code Pink versus Barack Obama and the Liberal reactions to the Tea Parties) and they will fail because of their ignorance. Nonetheless, we should all remain cognizant of our flaws, and our tendency to see what we want to see rather than what exists in front of us.
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