Shots Across The Bow

Playtime is over, back to work

Playtime is over, back to work I was looking over the local alternative weekly newspaper, the Metro Pulse when I came across an opinion column by a Mr. Massimo Pigliucci. Mr Pigliucci is an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, and a regular contributor to the Rationalists of East Tennessee web site. The column concerns the war on terror and is entitled Those who Understand Bin Laden Seeing that title, I of course had to read on to see what the man had to say. Sorry for the lack of a link; a new edition of Metro Pulse has been issued, and the archives on their site is very limited. Remember, as I go through this, Mr. Pigliucci claims to be a rationalist.

Warning: this article is not an exultation of terrorism or a defense of Bin Laden. But the very fact that I have to start with this disclaimer is a sad commentary on the state of freedom of opinion and speech in contemporary U.S.

Now hold on a minute. We have a man who is voicing his opinion in a column which he was paid to write, an opinion which, based on the title of the column, will be an opinion which runs counter to the current political climate, and he is complaining about the lack of freedom of opinion and speech. Was he forced to write that disclaimer by the editor of the Metro Pulse, or the publisher of the paper? Of course not. He wrote it to establish a moral high ground, i.e., if the reader disagrees with his opinion, then the reader must support censorship and thought control.

Continuing:

The U.S. government, on the one hand, insists in calling this a "war" against terrorism (even though, technically, only Congress can declare war---and it hasn't); but, on the other hand, it refuses to treat its prisoners as POWs

What's the difficulty? It's not a declared war; they aren't prisoners of war. Congress has authorized all actions taken to date, so where is the problem? We are engaged militarily, against an adversary who struck first, on our soil. What would you like to call it, a 'negotiation through force' against terrorism? Doesn't really sing, does it?

Worse, since the Taliban were obviously a ridiculously puny enemy for the mighty U.S., we are now looking for additional ones, and Bush nonchalantly threatens Iran, Iraq, and North korea, lumping them together under the laughable label of the "axis of evil." Never mind that it is difficult to see communist North Korea plotting together with Islamic fundamentalists (or, for that matter, mortal religious enemies Iraq and Iran working with each other).

Wow. You'd think a professor, even a biology professor would be a little more versed in history. How closely did Japan and Germany work together during WWII? Were their economies compatible? How about their basic philosophies, forms of government, or religious beliefs? Yet those two nations nearly ran the table in the 1940s. As for Iran and Iraq never working together, if the good professor would check back just a decade ago, Saddam Hussein sent most of his air force to Iran prior to Desert Storm, to keep it safe from the US attacks.
More importantly, Iran, Iraq and North Korea do not have to become allies in order to become a combined threat. North Korea is still working to develop nuclear weapons. If they are successful, does Mr Pigliucci really think that they won't use them against the US unless they've formed a formal alliance with Iran and Iraq? President Bush recognized that with a minimum amount of interactions between the three countries he named, the threat they represent would increase geometrically, not just arithmetically.
By the way, does anybody remember how we were being warned that we couldn't beat the Taliban without heavy losses and years of effort? Now it is obvious that the Taliban was 'ridiculously puny.' First we aren't strong enough, then we are too strong, and we get criticized either way.

I am most certainly not missing the Taliban. Heck, I think somebody should have kicked there asses long ago. I have no sympathy for people who use religion to subjugate women, annul civil rights, and destroy priceless historical monuments. What I am questioning is the assumption that, just by bombing people, we will solve our problems.

If that was all we were doing, then Mr. Pigliucci might have a point. However, we aren't just dropping bombs. We are feeding refugees; we are trying to help Afghanistan form a stable government; we are going after the lifeblood of the terrorist organizations, their funding; we are investigating world wide with the help of our allies, and closing down the places where the terrorists can go and get support; we are sharing information with other countries, and they with us, resulting in thousands of arrests, and who knows how many lives saved from attacks thwarted through a stoppage of funds, or the arrest of a conspirator. In short, we are doing one hell of a lot more than dropping bombs. Mr. Pigliucci wants to ignore all that we are doing and oversimplify our effort in order to discredit it.

The war on terrorism will never be won, just like the equally misnamed and misconceived "war on drugs." That's because to solve these problems we first have to understand their roots. Until we acknowledge that human beings will always go after the easy pleasure of drugs and that people outside the U.S. (especially in the Middle East) have a justifiable rancor against America, we will not make progress on either front.

Ahhh, decadence, thy name is Pigliucci. People are going to use drugs because it's fun. Why fight it? By the way, not all humans go after the "easy" pleasure of drugs. I guess they are the real problem. But that certainly is an interesting argument. Let's try it on a few other illegal activities.

• Students are going to cheat on their exams to get the easy grade. Why fight it?
  
• People are going to cheat on their taxes. Why fight it?
  
• Men are going to rape women. Why fight it?
  
• People are going to kill each other. Why fight it?
  

Of course, now, over halfway through the column, we find that Mr. Pigliucci lied to us when he said he wasn't going to defend Bin Laden. By according Bin Laden and his associates a 'justifiable rancor', Mr. Pigliucci is suggesting that the actions of terrorists can be at least partially justified by the actions of their target. In other words, if a girl wears a sexy dress on campus, she has contributed to her own rape.

I know Mr. Pigliucciu is going to accuse me of failing to make the 'subtle distinction' between motivation and justification, but here's the thing: The people who died on September 11 did nothing to deserve the death that Bin Laden saw fit to give them. Bin Laden himself was not wronged by any of those people, nor was he personally wronged by the United States. If his motivation was some inchoate rage against the presence of the US, and he felt that this rage was justification for the slaughter of 3000 inoocents, then he needs to be put down like any other rabid animal.
But let's take Mr. Pigliucci's side, for the sake of argument. What has America done to provoke such a violent rage?

Where does the anit-U.S. acrimony come from? If you don''t know, you haven't paid attention. Even the European allies of the U.S. have repeatedly taken action against what they see as the cultural and economic imperialism of Americans, and if you add the extreme poverty, ignorance, and religious fanaticism of many people in Middle eastern countries, you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

That's it? Cultural and economic imperialism? That explains the slaughter of over three thousand? Surely you can do better than that, Mr. Pigliucci. Cultural and economic imperialism....hmmm. If the folks around the world like to watch our movies and eat our fast food and buy our products more than those they make at home, maybe that says more about what is available in their countries than about American imperialism. McDonalds and Coca-Cola don't force their way into other markets, and once there, don't hold guns to people's heads to force them to buy. It's called the marketplace. People buy what they like. People adopt behaviors that appeal to them. Perhaps Mr Pigliucci would be happier if we restricted what people could see, and hear, and buy, so that they wouldn't be unduly influenced by the vibrancy of American culture.

As an evolutionary biologist, Mr. Pigliucci should be familiar with the concept of competition, where the stronger replaces the weaker. This concept applies to cultures just as it does to organisms, albeit with different mechanisms, and a greatly contracted timescale. Cultural evolution does not equal imperialism. We don't force our way of life on anybody.

I also note the elitism in Mr. Pigliucci's assessment of the Middle East. Only one problem. Most of the terrorist's leadership cadre come from upper middle class to wealthy families and are usually well educated. They use the poor as foot soldiers, playing on their ignorance, inflaming their hatred and fanaticism with religious rhetoric, but what causes they're hatred? We're back to Osama now. Why did he hate America so much that he wanted to detroy thousands of lives? What motivated his to feel such rage that he felt justified in unleashing such carnage? Let's assume Mr. Pigliucci is right and it was American foreign policy which set Bin Laden off, particularly our support of Israel. Do we renege on our commitments, abandon our national interests to appease the wishes of a madman? Of course not; that course of action would be folly.

But it takes a much more serious commitment, and the art of making subtle distinctions, to address the problem seriously. It requires a radical revision of American foreign policy, and perhaps even a bit of a self critical attitude toward the sacred cow of free-market capitalism.

And here, Mr. Pigliucci exposes himself. Capitalism is the evil here. That's why America is a target. As long as we turn a profit, as long as we create wealth, as long as we continue to produce in abundence, we will be targets. We aren't targets because of 'cultural and economic imperialism.' We're targets because of our wealth.

Finally, I did a little research on Mr. Pigliucci. Mr. Pigliucci is an Italian citizen with a permanent residence in the U.S. He's lived here for about twelve years, but has not become a citizen, choosing instead to remain a resident alien.

Mr. Pigliucci, I'm speaking to you directly now. People leave their homelands only because there's something missing there, something they need that they can't find. They travel until they find whatever it was they were looking for, then they settle down. Whatever you were looking for, you found in America. Maybe it was a job, or an educational opportunity, or a better lifestyle. America has fulfilled her promise to you sir, but you are repaying that hospitality with scorn.

You have every right to be here, and every right to voice your opinion, and if you can pocket a little change doing so, well then, that's the free market capitalism that makes America great. But as long as you hold a green card, you are a guest here, and it is very rude for a gueast to criticize his host, even if that criticism is well founded and well intentioned. If you want to be taken seriously, then do one of two things. Either go back to Italy, and then tell us why we are wrong, and why you couldn't stay, or stay here, become a citizen, and work from within to improve your new home. I'll still believe you are wrong in almost every particular, but I will respect your opinion as coming from a fellow American, rather than the whining of an ungrateful houseguest. Right now, you remind me of the Yankees who come to Tennessee to live because it's so much nicer here, then spend hours complaining about how they handled things much better up north. It's time for you to put up or shut up.

Posted by Rich at March 31, 2002 2:49 AM