A Right Good Beating

Earlier today I rode my bicycle up to a four-way stop, let a car cross, and then started to pedal again. But then the truck behind that car roared through the intersection and cut me off. It stopped in front of me, and the guy inside leered at me, like, "What are you going to do about it, bike man?"

Now, I'm not a very aggressive guy. Far below average, I'd say. But I'm a guy for all that, and prone to guy-like thinking. So I did a Walter Mitty as he drove away, mentally dragging him out of that truck and whuppin' his butt (I'm from Arkansas, so that's how I talk when I get mad. Even in my head).

Actually, maybe such fantasies are just human nature, and aren't limited to guys. Humans seem to have an innate sense of justice that says there are few things sweeter than seeing a bullying fool get their comeuppance. No less a philosopher than Immanuel Kant approved of this instinct. In his Critique of Practical Reason--not exactly a chest-thumping sort of book--he says:

When someone who delights in annoying and vexing peace-loving folk receives
at last a right good beating, it is certainly an ill, but everyone approves of it and
considers it as good in itself, even if nothing further results from it. 

Kant brought this up to emphasize his belief that justice requires punishing wrongdoers. He was arguing against the purely utilitarian idea that punishing those who hurt people just adds one evil on top of another, and is therefore a bad thing. Utilitarians might think punishment is still a necessary evil, but only for discouraging criminal acts, or removing criminals from society. They don't see retribution as a good reason for punishment. Kant was no utilitarian. He was all for retribution, and was a firm believer in the death penalty. But his reasoning was a little counter-intuitive. One of his fundamental maxims was that people should be treated as ends in themselves, not as means, because they are rational beings who can make ethical choices. When somebody wrongs another person, then, we should treat him as a rational person and conclude that he's made his choice about how people in general should be treated. Then we should treat him accordingly--just the way he treated the people he wronged. In other words, by punishing people for doing wrong, we are actually respecting them as rational, autonomous beings, and treating them according to the ethical maxims they've followed themselves.

Which is all very interesting (well, to some people), but the ethics of punishment isn't exactly what I want to think about here. What I'm more interested is the ethics of self-help justice--of whether someone who is in the right is justified in using force against someone who isn't. If some bully has been making everyone's life miserable, and some normally-nice person finally thrashes him, has justice been served? Is this what should have happened? Seeing it happen fills most people's hearts with gladness, so it's clear our instincts say it's right. But are our instincts correct in this case, or is this more like our instinct to eat bacon and donuts every morning--powerful, but not a good general rule?

Whatever Kant may have thought about the justice of bully-beating, one thing is clear: he wasn't going to be administering those beatings himself. Immanual Kant was barely five feet tall. He was almost the Platonic form of a 98-pound weakling. Unless he was a trained ninja, if he had tried to beat up that bully, he would have gotten pounded within an inch of his brainy little life.

And that's one reason I'm leery of the instinct that says giving bullies a "right good beating" is the right thing to do. There's no guarantee that the person in the right is the one who will win the fight (poetic, no?). In fact, most bullies spend a lot of time thinking about fighting, if not actually practicing it. Less aggressive people usually don't. Knowledge and practice lead to skill, whether that skill is good or bad. I learned that lesson once at a party, when I got into a playful fencing match with foam swords. My opponent was a woman who had done some fencing in college, and, well...she trounced me. If by some strange twist of fate I ever get in a real sword fight with her, I hope she uses her left hand.

The point is that if the bully's been in more fights, or if he's just bigger, stronger, faster, or tougher, he's probably going to win the fight. That doesn't match our sense of cosmic justice, but when has that sense ever been realistic? I like to imagine I could have beat up the guy in the truck, but there's no guarantee. I'm pretty strong for my size, but I don't know the first thing about fighting. He may be a boxing champ for all I know. In fact, if I had tried to start something with him, he might have just pulled out a gun and shot me. I live in trigger-happy state in a trigger-happy country, so that's not a bit far-fetched.

Of course, all this establishes is that it's a bad idea for people to attack bullies unless they absolutely have to. That doesn't tell us whether it would be a good thing in principle. If you knew that you would win, would you be justified in beating up someone who had hurt many other innocent people? My gut tells me yes, but I think my head tells me no. Might just doesn't make right. There's no necessary correlation between who's right and who's more powerful. I like to think about it this way: Imagine a huge man walking up to you and saying, "Two plus two is five, and if you say different, I'm gonna stomp you". You primly tell him that two plus two is actually four, and then spend the next few days in the hospital. It may not be much consolation, but here's the thing: he didn't prove his point by beating you up. Two plus two isn't five, no matter whose butt you kick to prove otherwise.

Even if he was right and you were wrong, and he beat you up to show he was right, that still wouldn't prove anything. What it comes down to is that there's absolutely no connection between who can win a fight and what is actually right or true. These are completely independent things. It's strange that this isn't obvious to us, but we evolved in a world where conflicts were often settled by force, so in this case, our instincts don't match logic.

If might and right are unconnected, then do we want to say that those in the right can legitimately prove it by a show of force? I don't think so. While I want to think I would have been justified in smacking that guy in the truck around a little, I don't think it's true. For one thing, of course, it would be a disproportionate response--he was being a phenomenal jerk, but he didn't hit me. But the deeper reason is that might doesn't make right, even when you're in the right. Force may be justified if you're defending yourself or someone else--it's certainly justified to stop a bully from hurting someone, by force if that's what it takes. But the force itself has nothing to do with what's right. Force is at best a necessary evil, one that's just as available to bad people as good people--more available, in fact, because they don't feel the need to restrain themselves. Force may be necessary to prevent wrongs, but it can never show who's right. It can only show who's stronger, and that's not the same thing at all.

What's Really Shocking

It's 6:00 in the morning. I don't go to work until 9 most days, so I'm not usually up this early. But I couldn't sleep well. The thing is, I saw people expressing opinions yesterday that are weighing on my mind. First, I saw a picture of a sign in front of a pizza joint in my home state of Arkansas. It said "Leviticus 20:13. Why don't we listen?" Now, here's what that verse actually says.

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."

Well, that seems clear enough. This pizza place, called Heavenly Pizza Pies, seems to be calling for the killing of gay people, or at least gay men.* When there was an outcry, they took the sign down and claimed they were saying no such thing. Maybe they didn't mean it that way. I don't know. Here's the response that they posted on Facebook:

We as a company don't support same sex marriage, but we still care for everyone and would do anything to help. We posted a Bold Verse out of God's word, something that as a nation we have forgotten. As a nation we have taken God out of schools, we have taken prayer out of school and the work place, and now we take another one of God's law and throw it away. We will stand bold in honoring God's word in and out of the work place. If you were upset with this verse, remember its God's word, we will all stand before him in judgement.

What are we to make of people posting a sign like that? Honestly, I doubt they really want to see gay people killed, but you never know with some people. One thing we can conclude with confidence is that they're being extremely selective about which parts of Leviticus to take seriously. I mean, this is a pizza place--I'm pretty sure they put sausage, pepperoni, and ham on their pizzas, and all those things are made from pork. Leviticus 11:7-8 clearly says pigs are unclean and not to be eaten. Their carcasses aren't even to be touched, which, it has been often pointed out, would seem to rule out playing football with an actual pigskin.

When questioned, people say such dietary restrictions are part of the Old Covenant, and that the New Covenant makes them unnecessary. But those same people point to the verses about homosexuality in Leviticus and say they still hold. Why? What are their criteria for deciding which parts of the Bible are still valid and which are no longer applicable? I ask this question all the time, because I would really like to know, but I never get a clear answer. Usually I get no answer at all, even though I think I usually succeed in asking nicely. Apparently the question is gauche.

Seeing the picture of this sign in my home state disturbed me enough, though I can't say it surprised me. But what continued to disturb me were other things I saw people saying on the same topic, or in response to it. One woman, in a thread unrelated to the pizza joint sign, also mentioned the parts of the Old Testament that talk about killing gays. She wasn't exactly stating her approval, but she was mentioning it in support of her contention that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong. In a thread about the sign, a guy told me that homosexuality is clearly wrong according to the Bible, and cited Genesis 2:18, where God decides to create women:

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.

This guy was apparently thinking of a different translation, and used the word "worker" instead of helper. Yes, worker. So, here's someone defending the idea that homosexuality is bad, by citing a verse saying women were created almost as an afterthought, to be "workers" for men. I'll admit, I found this kind of upsetting. What made it worse is that he seemed to be a decent guy, who honestly seemed to be trying to do what is right, based on his religion (he thought the pizza place sign was a bad thing, for example).

So I pointed out that he's deciding to how to judge one fraction of the human race (homosexuals), based on his interpretation of a text that says half the human race were created as helpers for the other half. Deciding how to treat that large a percentage of humankind is a pretty serious step to take, morally speaking. And he's doing it based on Genesis, the same book that tells us a snake talked, that people lived hundreds of years, and that Noah got two of every species on earth onto a boat (did he go to the Andes to get llamas? What about plants?).

Anyway, I asked to consider the possibility that the Bible is a book written by members of an ancient tribe living in a violent, sexist, superstitious time. Yes, it does say homosexuality is wrong, that homosexuals should be killed (along with suspected witches and children who curse their parents), and it also says that women were created to be "helpers". And when it does, it's wrong. And when people base their behavior toward women, gays, and others based on a literal interpretation of those verses, they are wrong, and perpetuate the unbelievable injustice that's characterized most of human history--millions of lives lost and wasted, for thousands of years, based on parts of the Bible that are mostly myth or myth-based ritual.

This suggestion was apparently out of bounds. Though I tried hard to be civil, I was the bad guy for saying such things. The man I was debating got mad, and a woman chimed in to say she felt sorry for me and would pray for me. Neither of them seemed at all shocked by Bible verses talking about killing gays, or describing women as "helpers" by design, even though one of them was a woman. Yet they were shocked by me saying those passages should be rejected as the writings of an ancient people who believed the earth was flat.

What kind of world are we living in when a large percentage of people still look at Iron Age documents about killing people, or treating women as second class citizens (because of a story involving their creation from a man's rib) and they aren't shocked by them? Not only are they not shocked, but they believe them and live their lives by them. What they do find shocking is someone questioning those verses. That strikes me as very, very twisted, especially since many of them really are trying to do the right thing. It's just that they're basing their judgement of what's right on very questionable, hard to interpret sources.

Please don't get me wrong. This may be a screed, but it's not an anti-Christian screed--many of the people I admire most are Christians. It's a screed against discrimination based on Biblical literalism. Taking these writings as straightforward guides to behavior is very, very hurtful. The guy I was debating claimed that the Bible verse about killing gays should be interpreted to mean they would be suffer "eternal death" (Hell) not earthly death. That's also hurtful, but I also think he's wrong about the interpretation. I think that verse means exactly what it says, and that it's surely caused untold numbers of violent deaths. Who knows how many people were stoned to death because of that verse, or others like it? It says what it says, and it's wrong.

Obviously, I have a big problem with this kind of fundamentalism. But I have a far bigger problem when its practitioners try to write their Old Testament views of morality into law. If people want to believe these things, that's their right. I think they're wrong and hurtful beliefs, but I'm not going to try to force them to change. That's not the kind of country we live in. But I am going to keep telling them they don't get to force that view of morality on me or anyone else. They were allowed to do so for millennia, and that needs to end. Soon.

Does that mean laws should never enforce moral codes of any kind? Certainly not. Justice Antonin Scalia once asked, if he shouldn't say homosexuality should be illegal, whether he could still say murder should be illegal. Of course he should! Murder clearly hurts people, and you don't need to appeal to any religious text or supernatural entity to see that. Murder, rape, theft, perjury, and dozens of other things are clearly hurtful for obvious, real-world reasons, and should of course be illegal. But ideas about what is wrong based on religion or the supernatural are very debatable, and therefore shouldn't be written into law, especially if not everyone in the country subscribes to that religion. If you want to follow additional moral rules, based on religion and beyond the proper scope of law, that's your prerogative. But I don't see why you should be able to force anyone else to. If you want to tell gays they don't get to have the same right--to love and marry another adult--that you have, you need to realize that you are denying them something most people consider an essential part of a happy life. You'd better have ironclad proof that homosexuality is wrong and damaging, and for reasons that don't appeal to the supernatural. I've never seen any such proof.

And if you want to go on thinking that homosexuality is bad, or that women are "helpers", then that's your right. If you want to quote Bible verses saying homosexuals should be killed, I guess that's your right too, as much as it makes my lip curl to hear it. But please, please ask yourself this: Which is more shocking? People questioning Bible verses that promote such ideas, or the verses themselves?

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* I hate that I feel like I need to mention this, but since I'm 41 and single, people will wonder, and that will distract from the point I'm trying to make. I'm straight. I'm not the bravest guy, but I like to think that if I were gay I would have had the guts to come out years ago. This issue is important to me because I have a lot of gay friends I love, and I hate seeing injustice, especially when it's justified with such dubious reasoning.

Online Debates: What's the Point?

A democratic society requires certain things of its citizens, and one is the ability to coexist with people with opinions different from our own. Democracy is based on the notion that if everybody is free to voice and defend their ideas, the best ideas will win out over the others. That's the theory anyway. It obviously doesn't always work in practice, but free and constructive debate is still one of the essential pillars of democracy. If it breaks, the whole thing will come crashing down.

You would think social media would be an incredible tool for democratic debate. For one thing, it's partially a written medium, and writing can be better than speech for communicating subtle ideas. It lets people set their thoughts down, look them over to see if they make sense, and then rework them if they don't. It also leaves a record, so people can go back and see exactly what points have been made, rather than relying on memory. Social media is also as fast and global as the Internet itself. If you and I are both on Facebook, I can write a comment, and you can read it and respond immediately, whether you're on the other side of the room or the other side of the world. And of course, mass distribution is no problem. Hundreds of millions of people could be reading this right now if they cared to. Which they don't, but the possibility is there (I won't hold my breath.)

So what have we done with this amazing tool? We've told jokes and shared pictures of puppies, which is fun. We've gotten back in touch with each other, which is great. And we've made each other real, real mad. We've divided up into mutually distrustful camps based on politics and religion. So, this amazing technology that could have been the greatest gift to civil, democratic debate since...ever....has helped drive us apart. Why? Because we don't know how to have a civil discussion with people we don't agree with.

We screw it up, and we screw it up badly. One problem is that we can't decide what we want to accomplish by debating. Is the point of a debate to win? If so, how is winning measured? By how thoroughly you get your opponent's goat? By how much you humiliate them in front of observers? Neither of these are especially worthy goals. After all, what good does it do to anger or humiliate someone, besides giving you a little thrill of not-very-noble accomplishment?

But maybe the idea of winning a debate is not quite so crass as that. Maybe it's not about insulting or humiliating your opponents, but simply, and without malice, pointing out their mistakes. That is necessary sometimes. If they're saying something you know to be completely inaccurate or illogical, then the record needs to be set straight, especially if others are likely to believe and spread what they're saying. But don't assume you've taught them any lessons. Psychologists have shown that even if you give people absolute proof that they are wrong, most of them will go right on believing anyway. Proof, it seems, is no match for conviction.

But maybe the idea of winning isn't the right way to think about debate. Maybe the goal of a debate should be to convince others to see things from your point of view, at least for a little while? In that case, thinking in terms of winning and losing isn't helpful. If people see debates in win/lose terms, and see changing their mind as "losing", then it's going to be very hard to convince them. Nobody likes to lose. So, if your goal is to convince people of your point of view, then you need to proceed very differently than you would if you were just trying to insult or humiliate them. You have to let them save face as much as possible, so they can come around to your view without feeling embarrassed or defeated.

There's also a third way of thinking about the point of debate: maybe instead of victory or persuasion, the goal is to compare notes; to get a little closer to the truth cooperatively than we could have separately. Think about the old story of the blind men and the elephant: the blind men each touch a different part of the elephant, then draw different conclusions about what sort of beast an elephant is.  Then they commence fighting among themselves over who's right, when none of them actually is...at least not completely. If they had realized how limited their individual points of view really were, and had the good sense to compare notes, they could have learned a lot more about elephants. This kind of cooperative dialogue really does work. One of the best reasons to get in a debate is that other people bring up points you never would have thought about on your own.

But this isn't widely appreciated, to say the least. As far as I can tell in online discussions, winning is the most common goal, with persuasion a distant second, and comparing notes hardly considered at all. And that's a shame, since so many people think of winning in terms of baiting or embarrassing their opponents. That really doesn't get us any closer to truth. And the truth is what we're really after. Isn't it?

Part of the reason we're more likely to get mad than learn anything in a debate is that we have so much trouble seeing things from the other person's point of view. And I'm not just talking about their opinions. I'm talking about how they see the debate itself. We make comments that strike us as witty and decisive, and expect our opponents to see them the same way we do. But they don't. They see them as aggressive, sarcastic, and overconfident. And you would too, if you were them. But we don't look at our own comments from the other person's perspective. We look at them from our's, which is why we're astounded that, not only do they not find them witty and convincing, they may find them downright insulting. We think, "How can they possibly argue with such such ironclad arguments? Why don't they concede the point?", without considering that if we were in their shoes, no force on earth could make us concede--not to somebody being that smug, and certainly not with all those people watching!

The other problem, besides our inability to see the debate through our opponent's eyes, is a lack of restraint. We get heated up, and everything we say takes on extra bite. We taste blood, and it gets harder and harder to hold back. We're too busy thinking about our next point to think about anybody else's perspective, so we forget there's even a reason to be restrained. Which just goes to show we're not as smart as we think we are.

If we're ever going to learn to have constructive debates online, then, we're going to have to learn two things: taking the other side's point of view, and restraining ourselves enough to stay polite. Both are hard, especially in the heat of a good argument. That's when we forget the whole point of the debate, and just start trying to make our opponents look stupid--which is not the least bit constructive. What we should have done is try to convince them of our point of view, try to learn something from theirs, or both. If they really do need to be proven wrong, then we should have tried, as the saying goes, to "make a point without making an enemy". But all this is, once again, incredibly hard. We're prone to seeing our comments in the best possible light, and theirs in the worst. That means if we feel like we're bending over backwards to stay civil, we're probably hitting just about the right note. Then we might actually convince someone to see our side.

Of course, we also need to be more charitable not just when we talk, but when we listen. If we keep in mind that people's comments probably seem more aggressive to us than they do to them, it's easier to shrug off their little digs and keep our cool. Easier, but not easy. None of this is easy. And lots of people think it's not even worth the effort. They figure that if someone is saying something stupid, they deserve to be ridiculed. "That'll show'em", they think. But that's the thing. It won't.