POLITICAL JUDGMENT

by William H. Benson

March 19, 2009

     On March 19, 2003 at 9:30 p.m. est, two hours past the deadline for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to resign, U.S. and British forces began a concerted air strike against Hussein’s government. A ground campaign followed, and by April 9, allied forces had control of Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein had gone into hiding.

     On May 1, President George W. Bush announced the end of major military operations in Iraq, stating “Mission Accomplished!” However, a peacekeeping force remained in place to subdue the insurgents. On December 13, 2003, U.S. forces found Hussein hiding in a hole in the ground. He was brought to trial, convicted, and eventually executed for his mass slaughter of the Kurds, a decade before.

     In selling the idea of a war against a destitute third world Middle Eastern country that most Americans knew little about, both the President and Vice President used words and language based more on wishful thinking than reality.

     In September of 2002, Dick Cheney tried to persuade Dick Armey, the Republican House majority leader, saying, “We have great information. They’re going to welcome us. It’ll be like the American army going through the streets of Paris. They’re sitting there ready to form a new government. The people will be so happy with their freedoms that we’ll probably back ourselves out there within a month or two.”

     In late 2002, George W. Bush described Saddam Hussein as “a man who would likely team up with Al Qaeda. . . .This is a man who told the world he wouldn’t have weapons of mass destruction, promised he wouldn’t have them. He’s got them!”

     In a recent book entitled Dead Certain, the author Robert Draper, wrote, “Bush wasn’t relying on intelligence to buttress his claims of Saddam’s dark fantasies of plotting attacks on America with Al Qaeda, or direct contact with Al Qaeda. For no such intelligence existed.” And the thin intelligence that claimed Hussein owned weapons of mass destruction was proven incorrect.

     Judgment, especially judgment in the political arena, is a rare quality. A columnist Michael Ignatieff recently wrote: “I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with learning when to admit your mistakes.” That means loosening your attachment to an idea that may be novel, curious, or even interesting but is patently false and will prove catastrophic.

     There are any number of ideas about a given issue, but only a few of them are true and applicable to human life, embedded in reality. It is those few ideas that can be trusted, and upon them decisions can be made. “Fail again; but fail better.”

     Ignatieff also wrote, “Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself.” That means listening closely to those internal warning bells ringing inside when being led toward a decision. The difficulty though is that in certain people who have lived charmed lives, warning bells do not ever sound.  

     Ignatieff suggested that a wise political leader must avoid staying in his or her cocoon of imaginings, but instead must confront the world every day, deciding who to trust, who to believe, and who to avoid. “Prudent leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates and opponents of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing.” He or she must challenge all fixed ideas.

     There were some thinkers and writers in the early days of 2003 who showed good judgment on Iraq and predicted quite accurately the dire consequences that actually unfolded there. These people did not have more knowledge than those working in the White House, or even access to better intelligence.

     What they had was outright skepticism and a recognition of the limits of American power and authority. “They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror.” “They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country.”

     Paul O’Neill, Bush’s first secretary of the Treasury, was extremely skeptical of the war, when he said that the U.S. was “grabbing a python by the tail, by dropping a hundred thousand troops into the middle of twenty-four million Iraqis and an Arab world of one billion Muslims. Trust me, they haven’t thought this through.”  

MICHEL de MONTAIGNE

by William H. Benson

March 5, 2009

     On February 28, 1571, a French nobleman and a lawyer in Paris’s royal court named Michel de Montaigne retired. Coincidentally, it was his thirty-eighth birthday. He had shown no signs of literary ambitions, but he was determined to devote his remaining days to living in his country estate where he would think and write about nothing but himself.

     “Because I found I had nothing else to write about,” he said, “I presented myself as a subject. When I wrote of anything else, I wandered and lost the way.”

      For the next twenty-one years, until his passing at the age of fifty-nine from kidney stones, he wrote a series of, what he called, “essais,” a French word meaning “attempts” or “trials.” This was a first, for no one in all of literature had written only about themselves, using first person singular.

     Montaigne wrote “about his boyhood, his family, his education, his house, his travels, his books, his illnesses, his friends, his dreams, his interests, his habits, his experiences, his opinions, his religion”—a compendium of all thoughts that occurred to him, written down as they slipped in and through his mind, done without any plan or organization.

     He then gave each—some only two pages and others as much as fifty—a title: Of Smells, Of Friendship, Of Sadness, Of Idleness, Of Liars, Of Constancy, Of Solitude, Of Sleep, Of Fear, Of Age, Of Prayers, Of Conscience, How We Cry and Laugh for the Same Thing, Of Moderation, Of Thumbs, Of Cannibals, Of Names, Of Virtue, Of Anger, Of Vanity, Of Cruelty, Of Cripples, Of Glory, Of Presumption, Of Books, How Our Mind Hinders Itself, and Of Experience.

     In another essay that he entitled “Of Repentance,” he answered his critics when he wrote, “If the world finds fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves.”   

      A reader can see in Montaigne’s essays his humanity, his warm self-deprecating humor, and his endless curiosity. “I set forth a humble and inglorious life,” he said, and in his “Preface” he wrote, “Reader, thou hast here an honest book.” His motto was his ever constant question: “Que sais-je?”, meaning “What do I know?,” in which he professed his absolute ignorance about many things.

     Again, in “Of Repentance,” he wrote, “So, all in all, I may indeed contradict myself now and then; but truth, . . . I do not contradict. If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.” An admirer of Montaigne’s once wrote, “He renounced all intellectual and spiritual authority and that renunciation became his authority.”

     Was Montaigne’s life a waste of his talents? His contemporaries, no doubt, believed so. Did he make a huge mistake retiring from his job as a lawyer at age thirty-eight to write drivel about himself? His colleagues probably believed so. But Montaigne came to believe “that human beings must discover their own nature in order to live with others in peace and dignity,” and this self-imposed isolation was Montaigne’s way.

     How shall I live? What should I do with my life? What do I know? These are questions some people ask of themselves, but few seem to act upon the answers they receive back. Life comes at us in a rush—childhood, education, marriage, children, jobs, purchasing a home, television, the news, sports, theatre, all happening while we are trying to find our way—and the crucial questions of life we can lay aside, easily. Life happens whether I or you think deeply about it or not.

     Montaigne thought deeply about his. Toward the end of his final and grandiloquent essay, “Of Experience,” he wrote: “For my part then, I love life and cultivate it, such as it has pleased God to bestow it upon us. I do not desire it should be without the necessity of eating and drinking; and I should think it a not less excusable failing to wish it had been twice as long. ‘A wise man is the keenest seeker for natural riches.’”

LANGUAGES

by William H. Benson

February 19, 2009

     As Lewis and Clark traveled from tribe to tribe west across the North American continent, they remarked repeatedly on the differences among the languages of the Native American peoples. Some that they heard sounded “liquid and melodious,” and others were “harsh and guttural.” Scholars have since identified at least eight distinct language groups, fifty-three separate stocks, and between two and three hundred individual languages. And those are just the languages north of the Rio Grande.

     Grammars varied widely among these languages, and it is the grammar that makes a language so formidable. It is never simply a matter of learning a series of the other language’s words for their English equivalents. For example, a sentence in English—Suddenly, she heard someone give a yell from across the street.—would translate into the Mohawk language this way: Suddenly, by what you could hear, there, it beyond the street, the ear went to who just then made shouted back towards her.

     The best way to learn to think in a grammar as complex as that Mohawk sentence, is to grow up in it, learning it as an infant, toddler, and then as a child.

      Grammar, the underlying construction of a language, need not be so difficult. Consider Mandarin Chinese, a nearly “grammarless” language. Rudolf Flesch, a prominent English writing authority, wrote about Mandarin Chinese: “It has no inflections, no cases, no persons, no genders, no numbers, no degrees, no tenses, no voices, no moods, no infinitives, no participles, no gerunds, no irregular verbs, and no articles.” All words contain only a single syllable, and sentence construction is the usual order: subject, verb, object.

     Scholars now understand that the Chinese language once had the usual “arsenal of unpleasant grammar,” but that over several millennium, the Chinese people eliminated all that into a streamlined language, consisting of “standardized, prefabricated, functionally designed parts.”

     All Native American languages belong to a single language family, and Mandarin Chinese belongs to another, the Sino-Tibetan family. English, of the Indo-European family, originated in the Teutonic forests of Germany and was then transported across the English Channel to the British Isles where it ran headlong into Irish and Scottish Gaelic, as well as the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton languages.

     Approximately two billion people speak one of the Indo-European languages, including Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, English, Dutch, German, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Bengali, Punjabi, Pashto, Kurdish, Persian, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

     Of the 6000 spoken languages in the world today, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by some 873 million people. Spanish is the first language of choice for 322 million people, and English, in third place, has at least 309 million who claim it.

     Other languages, such as Garig-Ilgar, Mati Ke, and Gudanji, are three of the Aboriginal languages of northern and central Australia, and each have as few as ten living speakers.

     February 21 is the United Nations International Mother Language Day, a day to help raise awareness among all peoples of the distinct and enduring value of their language. Movements exist to save certain dying languages. There is one for Mohawk, another for Irish Gaelic, and a concerted effort in the United States is now under way to save Yiddish, a Germanic language of central Europe that used Hebrew characters and which was brutally swept aside after the Holocaust.

     “It has been said that once there is a revival movement for a language, the language is already dead.” There may be some truth to that, and yet there is tremendous value in each language that faces an uncertain death. Max Weinreich, a Yiddish scholar, fled his native Poland in 1939 when the Germans attacked his homeland, and once settled in the U.S., he opened his doors and began to teach Yiddish to American students, who were uninterested. When asked why he did this, he answered, “Because Yiddish has magic, it will outwit history.”    

LINCOLN VS. DARWIN

by William H. Benson

February 5, 2009

     “Neither man gave much evidence of his future greatness until well into middle age.” so wrote Malcolm Jones last July in an article he wrote for Newsweek, in which he compared and contrasted Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Both of these men knew of the other, and both knew that they were born on the same day, in 1809, on February 12, two hundred years ago next week.

     Because “[b]oth were private and guarded,” few who knew them understood the powerful and deep thoughts that coursed through their minds. Darwin’s gardener said of him, “Poor man, he just stands and stares at a yellow flower for minutes at a time. He would be better off with something to do.”

     Mary Todd Lincoln said of her husband, “He is of no account when he is at home. He never does anything except to warm himself and read; he never went to the market in his life. I have to look after all that. He just does nothing. He is the most useless, good-for-nothing man on earth.”

     Neither man, when younger, got along well with his father. Charles Darwin’s father, Dr. Robert Darwin, a very successful family physician in Shrewsbury, England, north and west of London, told his son in a pointed letter, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” And Lincoln said of his father, “My father taught me to work, but he never taught me to like to work.”

     The world took little note of either man until they each had surpassed their fiftieth birthdays. On November 24, 1859, 150 years ago this year, Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, when Charles was fifty years old, and exactly a year later, Lincoln, at the age of fifty-one, won the Presidential election of 1860. Suddenly, the world was wondering about these two men, and the world still is wondering.

     Their successes—Darwin in science and Lincoln in politics—stemmed immeasurably from their ability to write. Malcolm Jones wrote, “Both men were compulsive scribblers and note takers, and the clarity of their writing enhanced the power of their ideas.” And their ability to write masterful English was derived from their great passion for reading.

     Darwin read the sciences. His father wanted him to become a physician, but because he could not endure the sight of surgery, he decided upon a career as a country parson. Shy, quiet, retiring, bookish, he thought the ministry would fit his life style, but beetle-collecting called him away from theology. Darwin certainly had access to far more books living in England than did Lincoln who grew up on the frontier in Kentucky and Indiana.

     A naturalist and a scientist, Darwin lived all of his life in England, save for the five years, 1831-1836, he lived aboard the Beagle, sailing around the world. While en-route, he shipped back to London fossils of extinct large mammals, such as a giant sloth and a pre-historic horse. In addition, he collected living animals, preserved them, and shipped them home; all told, he shipped back to England 5436 skins, bones, and carcasses.

     In a sense, Darwin read the earth’s record—its fossils and its living life forms—comparing and contrasting them, noting their differences due to mutations as the life forms had changed and evolved, because of a process he called “natural selection.”

     Lincoln was more of a literary man, a deep reader of any book that he could latch his hands onto. He read Blackstone’s Law and Euclid’s propositions and proofs within the Elements of Geometry, but above all else, Lincoln read Shakespeare and the King James Bible, memorizing numerous and lengthy passages. Steeped in Renaissance English, he wrote with a style seldom matched in his day or ever since.

     A consummate politician, Lincoln was more the man of action than was Darwin, who was content to observe and then write a readable science. And, yet, each in their own sphere of knowledge has had far-reaching influence. We, the members of Western Civilization, are still trying to come to terms with the implications contained within “the theory of evolution,” and “The Gettysburg Address.” 

     Where Darwin read earth’s record in its fossils and living life forms, Lincoln read the human written record in its books. Where Darwin extended and revolutionized the natural sciences, Lincoln extended and revolutionized the concepts of human freedom inherent within the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

     Darwin and Lincoln, the two great thinkers of the nineteenth-century.

INAUGURATION

by William H. Benson

January 22, 2009

     A literary scholar once suggested that all story lines fit into one of 36 different plots, but another suggested that actually there are only two basic plots for all great stories: “someone goes on a journey” or “a stranger comes to town.”

     Huckleberry Finn, The Hobbit, and the parable of the Prodigal Son are three examples of “someone who goes on a journey.” Writers of westerns and comics often build their stories around “a stranger who comes to town.” Batman fought off a series of strangers who drifted into Gotham City, as did Superman in Metropolis, and Marshall Matt Dillon did in Dodge City, Kansas. It really depends upon your perspective, for every time that someone goes on a journey, he or she becomes the stranger who comes to town.

     Dr. Samuel Johnson, the British lexicographer, once asked a rhetorical question: “Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?” Yes, they are three great stories, and all three fit into the “someone goes on a journey” plot line.

     Don Quixote dressed himself in an old suit of iron, like an errant knight of old, and upon horseback charged at a windmill, thinking it a dragon, and ended up breaking his lance. Robinson Crusoe refused to listen to his father’s guidance and fled home to a life on the high seas, but in the midst of a storm, he finds himself washed ashore upon an island where he lived alone for nearly thirty years.

     In John Bunyan’s extended allegory, Christian sets off alone for the Celestial City and passes through the Slough of Despond, endures others’ taunts at Vanity Fair, and meets up with a host of characters, like Obstinate, Pliable, Faithful, Formalist, Hypocrisy, and Evangelist, some more trustworthy than others.

     Senator and President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday is now behind us, and “a stranger has come to town,” specifically to Washington D.C., to the White House, and to the Oval Office. With his hand on Lincoln’s Bible and repeating the oath of the office as directed by Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Roberts, Obama was sworn in to uphold the Constitution. A combination of ambition, intelligence, and daring has landed him in the highest office in the nation’s federal government.

     There is no shortage of advice for the 44^th President, some better than others.

     In last week’s Newsweek, Anna Quindlen suggested that the new President keep talking to the American citizens. “No one,” she wrote, “should underestimate what a succession of inspired secular sermons can mean in a time of civic darkness.” She may be right: FDR’s fireside chats and Reagan’s televised speeches from the Oval Office lifted American spirits as little else could ever do.

     Quindlen also suggested that Obama write his own speeches, a novel idea these days, and thus avoid the White House’s ghostwriters. “The committee,” she wrote, “is the enemy of the eloquent.”

     In order to succeed, Obama might consider the aforementioned literary examples. Avoid Don Quixote’s foolish idealism, tilting lances at windmills, thinking they are dragons. We have just ended eight years of that ideological and polarizing style, and it has led us into a quagmire. Also, Obama might consider championing resourcefulness, another novel idea these days, making a living with less or with what is available, as did Robinson Crusoe.

     Also, Obama will have to learn to trust some, such as Faithful, and not others, such as Formalist and Hypocrisy, and he will quickly learn which is which, as did Christian once he was on the other side of the Slough of Despond.

     Life inside the Oval office can be exceedingly difficult, but “there is one good way,” Quindlan wrote, “to appear willing to break out of The Bubble, and that’s to talk to the American people. . . . Sometimes it’s grandeur, the big ideas, the great thoughts, not as a substitute for action, but as a supplement.”

     Inauguration is the peaceful transfer of power, and a stranger, a new President, has come to town.