We thick-headed humans have learned little of power and mercy, even with many of us professing to love Jesus (who just asked us all to be nice and wise to each other). Ancient Greece seems to have a better handle on the Frankenstein-like true nature of force, making their Gods’ power unchecked, even by sense. Having killed, and eaten his parents, Zeus divvied the natural world, not by attribute, or temperament, but by lots. Poseidon just better learn to like to swim! Zeus loves a fetching human girl, and makes her into a cow on the approach of his wife, his caprice insensible to human logic. Why? Because he can! And it’s the because government can part that makes it shamble on without a mandate to see or adapt, these five millenia later.
A woman in New York City is high. The public health apparatus gets her, and it’s off to a place of expensive care. The police get her, and she’s deemed criminal. Despite the same high, the rewards and punishments are totally capricious. Spin the spinner.
I had a patient who was laying insensibly drunk in a Subway sandwich shop. When I woke her she made a good go at trying to assault me. I handled her gently, sweet talked her, and she was my dear best buddy five minutes later. The remarkable thing is that she had no recollection of it at all. Blackout insensibility is amazingly common in chemical adventurers. But, there is a set of cops who, if she tried this on them, would arrest her, citing respect for the law and its agents. She would come to her senses in the jail with no memory of why she was there, much less a sense of the justice of it. To her, it would be like a werewolf story with the damage done with the rising moon; a phenomenon of nature. I am not saying that trying to kick the nads of agents of the city is good, or should not be a crime. I am saying that there is nothing but more tragedy for her in punishing her for it. More punishment on her would add to the heap of bad things that put her on the floor of Subway insensibly drunk. Wisdom and mercy are still the high virtues. As it was, she woke up in the hospital without the werewolf feel, but she (really, society) is several thousand dollars poorer with our care.
This will be the first in a series of explorations into what should be a basic philosophical question regarding crime and punishment:
To what degree is lack of functionality criminal?
Obviously, if we both reward and punish the very same behavior, we lack a philosophical context for making a just determination on what being high is. Is it sickness, criminality, mental illness, or dysfunctionality? Most people imagine the answer to this question lies on a criminal linear spectrum, but, to my mind, a better model of thinking about it would be a color wheel with the colors swirling and blending according to the unique circumstances of the patient. I’m on board with the sickness part of the answer. These folks require immense patience, and the clue comes from the precision of language; patient is the more fitting concept.
America’s pattern of warfare for the last three quarters of a generation has been against failed or failing Statesm – or those States unable (we would say unwilling) to contain their citizen terrorists. But are they functional enough for this assumption to be just? Or practical? Afghanistan was attacked for not fighting off Al Qaeda, rather, for not allowing us to tear up their country doing it for them. Iraq was also destroyed for weakness: we now know, in retrospect, that Saddam had to maintain the specter of WMD to deter Iran. He knew his military was the hollow shell we smashed in 2003. The thing all nations undergoing our drone assassination program have in common is they are too weak to have an Air Force, so as to have a say about our policy.
Are we asking failed states to have more capability in predicting and affecting the movements of their citizens than we have over ours? How would we, the most sophisticated nation on the planet, predict our peoples’ inner thoughts? Tens of thousands of our citizen travel back and forth to the Middle East and Pakistan every year, how would we know which ones were going to Jihad? Europe has the same issue, with thousands of European terrorists attacking Syria, Iraq and Turkey. But you don’t see drones stalking Jihadists over the banlieues Paris. I think the Trumpkins would say we should start.
Jihadism is now a feature of the political consciousness of all Islamic nations. In every case it is an alternative political consciousness to criminal governance, weak governance, dysfunctional governance. Is asking, say, Egypt, to crack down on their Jihadis the same impossibility as Egypt demanding Democrats crack down on Republicans for their anti-Muslim rhetoric? Would this situation be helped if Egypt asserted their right to send armed drones hunting over our Congress? How would the international community have gone about getting Weimar Germany to crack down on the Nazi party?
All of our blood and treasure sunk into Iraq was an effort to make their society functional as a Nation State. It was a complete failure. Not one Iraqi institution has stood up on its own two feet. We trained up Millions of troops for WW2 in less than a third of the time spent on Iraq and Afghanistan’s professional armies, only to see them collapse overnight in the face of minimal pressure from whatever the Jihadi de jour. This is because, to raise proper troops, we had to raise the functionality of their nation: the sophistication and functionality of a military is a reflection of the sophistication and functionality of its society. And, as far as the things we’ve tried in the Islamic world, in our intimate dance of hatred/alliance, we are no closer to knowing what makes for national functionality now, than we were when the War on Terror began. George Washington bears quotation in full here: “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.” The only tool the state has to deal with a problem is force. Yet, it seems clear to this author, the problems of dysfunctionality will not respond to attacks that make the weak weaker.
America has been at war, or in conflict, with every single country at the bottom of the Transparency International registry of most corrupt countries. We are not Transparency International’s Air Force, they are not drawing up our target lists. The list shows that this warfare trend transcends ideology. The simplest explanation is that the USA is now a status quo power, opposed to changes in the world order, and corruption is a reflection of a failed state, and failed states radiate trouble into our desired stability. A cynic might say we once thought we were Zeus-like, and bombed everywhere because we could. We must of seemed Zeus-like to the average farmer in Afghanistan: dropping food pallets with one hand, zapping lightning bolts with the other. But bombing failed states for their own good looks like geopolitical macro to our jailing the insensibles for their own good micro.
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