We Shouldn’t Feel Each Other’s Pain?

Paul Bloom makes the case against empathy, which he distinguishes from compassion:

It is worth expanding on the difference between empathy and compassion, because some of empathy’s biggest fans are confused on this point and think that the only force that can motivate kindness is empathetic arousal. But this is mistaken. Imagine that the child of a close friend has drowned. A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain. In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.

Or consider long-distance charity. It is conceivable, I suppose, that someone who hears about the plight of starving children might actually go through the empathetic exercise of imagining what it is like to starve to death. But this empathetic distress surely isn’t necessary for charitable giving. A compassionate person might value others’ lives in the abstract, and, recognizing the misery caused by starvation, be motivated to act accordingly.

Bloom goes on to warn that “empathetic distress is destructive of the individual in the long run” and claims that “experiencing others’ pain is exhausting and leads to burnout.” Sam Harris agrees, using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of why Bloom is right:

Bloom’s thesis is that emotional empathy, the ability to identify with others and “feel their pain,” is generally a poor guide for ethical behavior. As he acknowledges, many will find this idea grotesque—how could sharing another’s pain be anything less than a virtue? Indeed, many readers will feel that their very humanity depends on the strength of their emotion when witnessing suffering of the sort on display in Gaza. To question the merits of empathy is to question love, compassion, and basic human decency.

However, Bloom likens empathy to anger, and the comparison is remarkably astute. We want to be able to feel anger when circumstances warrant it, but then we want to stop feeling it the moment it is no longer useful. A person who is unable to feel anger would be, as Bloom says, “the perfect victim,” but feeling too much of it reliably leads to misery and chaos. Generally speaking, to have one’s moral judgment colored by anger is to have it clouded. Bloom argues that empathy is like anger in this respect, and I am convinced that he is right.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig hesitates at Bloom’s arguments, suggesting that we should consider the “function” of empathy in different contexts, especially it’s role in religious traditions:

If a person faces ongoing demands upon her emotional resources and requires a steady stream of positive, upbeat responses in return, then it is easy to see how empathy might eventually render her dysfunctional. On the other hand, if she lives in a world where piety and intense relational faith are valued, the otherwise unhealthily empathetic stigmata could be seen as supremely functional. And, indeed, many of us venerate a number of Christian figures whose empathy overwhelmed them even unto death.

This is not to suggest that all should aspire to mystic ecstasy, but rather to observe that the success or failure of particular emotional states appears deeply dependent upon context. It may be wise to question the demands and structure of contemporary society before determining an individual’s appropriate level of emotional availability. True, the more distant and emotionally restrained person might be more functional given the requirements of our post-industrial market society, but one might also ask whether the shrinking niche for the emotionally unguarded reflects a loss for us all.

The Shortages Of Socialism

VENEZUELA-SHORTAGE

Matt O’Brien explains how price controls lead to empty supermarkets in Caracas:

Venezuela imports most of its basic goods, so it’s only profitable to sell them at the official prices if you can buy them overseas with dollars you got at the official exchange rate. Businesses that have to pay 60 bolivares for one dollar aren’t going to spend it on things the government will only let them sell for, say, 20 bolivares. They’ll leave their shelves empty instead.

But it’s even more perverse than that. The companies that are lucky (or corrupt) enough to get cheap dollars don’t always use them on what they’re supposed to. That’s because they can make more money selling their subsidized dollars in the black currency market than they can make selling their subsidized goods at the official prices. So they’ll fake invoices that show them importing what they said they would, and then flip some dollars for a quick profit—or maybe hoard them for a bigger profit later. That’s why, as Francisco Toro puts it, Venezuela’s “‘butter importers’ are no such thing” but are rather “currency arbitrageurs, with a loss-making side-business in butter imports.”

Similarly, Sarah Rainsford shares her shopping frustrations in Cuba:

 I once approached my big local supermarket full of optimism. I now know I’m likely to find a mixture of half-bare shelves and ones stacked with a single product: cheap ketchup, say, or adult incontinence pads. Basic items disappear whenever Cuba struggles to meet its import bills. For weeks there was no toilet paper or cartons of milk. Now even the delicious local coffee is “lost,” as Cubans say – “esta perdido”.

(Photo: An empty shelf inside a private market in Caracas on June 17, 2014. By Leo Ramirez/AFP/Getty Images)

The Case For War: Blog Reax

President Obama Addresses The Nation To Outline Strategy On ISIS

James Joyner didn’t hear anything terribly new in Obama’s address tonight:

The first thing I’d note is how much it sounded like any number of foreign policy speeches given by his predecessor. He declared again and again that, “As Commander-in-Chief, my highest priority is the security of the American people” and proudly enumerated all the was that “we have consistently taken the fight to terrorists who threaten our country.” He noted that, “We took out Osama bin Laden and much of al Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’ve targeted al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, and recently eliminated the top commander of its affiliate in Somalia.” …

The second observation is that it’s still not clear exactly what Obama’s strategy is. His stated political objective is to “degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy” but he offered no plan that could plausibly do more than the former.

Andrew Sprung wasn’t impressed either:

Other than the execution of Foley and Sotloff,  ISIS’s direct threat to the U.S. is thus far hypothetical. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be countered. But does that threat justify unlimited executive action without express authorization by Congress? Obama glided right over that basic constitutional question. In short, the speech raised a lot more questions than it addressed — or than Obama has addressed elsewhere. It provided a thin sketch of a strategy and justification. Given broad popular support for action against ISIS, perhaps Obama calculated that less is more. But as a means of educating and preparing the nation, it was a cursory effort — an “I got this” from a president currently enjoying little public confidence.

Zack Beauchamp picks up on a cruel irony:

Bush argued that the United States needed to launch wars against regimes that might sponsor terrorist groups before they were imminent threats to the US. Obama is applying a version of that preventative war logic to ISIS.

Now, the comparison isn’t exact. There’s a compelling case that ISIS, an utterly brutal jihadi group that has already beheaded two Americans, will one day turn its eye towards the American homeland. It’s certainly more compelling than Bush’s case that Saddam might sponsor nuclear terrorism against the United States. What’s more, the military campaign Obama is proposing is extraordinarily more modest than Bush’s full-scale invasion of Iraq. But the irony here is unmistakable. Barack Obama, who won the presidency on the strength of his opposition to Bush’s war in Iraq, is now launching a new campaign in Iraq — on fairly similar reasons.

David Corn wonders what Obama will do when the war doesn’t go as planned:

Obama’s intentions are clear: he doesn’t want to return to full-scale US military involvement in Iraq. But now that he has committed the United States to renewed military action there, where’s the line? When US military intervention in Libya was debated in the White House, Obama, after careful deliberation, chose a calibrated course of action that included limited US military involvement as part of a multilateral campaign. That plan achieved its end: Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was ousted. (The dust there, however, is far from settling.) Obama’s approach to ISIS is similar, but this problem is more vexing and the risks greater. His speech gave little indication of how he might confront the possible problems and hard choices that will likely come.

There’s an old cliché: no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The same might be true for a case for war. Once a war is started, the narrative of that war, like the events themselves, can be hard to control.

Hayes Brown emphasizes that Obama’s “success stories” really don’t make much of a case for this type of counterterrorism strategy:

“This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years,” the excerpt reads. Except this is probably among the least encouraging thing that Obama could possibly say. Yemen and Somalia have been the target of hundreds of U.S. strikes, from not just armed drones, but also Special Forces raids and missiles launched from nearby ships. After nearly 13 years of using the authority granted to President George W. Bush to destroy al Qaeda in 2001, the United States is still trying to prevent the spread of terror in those countries, making the odds that the fight against ISIS will be a short one extremely low.

Jack Goldstone also focuses on those very bad examples:

I sure hope we get a DIFFERENT campaign than we had in Yemen and Somalia.  Those countries are still total wrecks, half-overrun by terrorists and rebels after years of air attacks.  The attack against ISIS needs to be more successful than our campaigns against the Houthis or al-Shabab; otherwise we will be fighting an endless war with little progress.  In those countries the problem is precisely that we have not had reliable allies on the ground (except when Ethiopia fought  with us in Somalia, and that did bring a major success).  So we need to find or create them in Iraq and Syria, and fast.

Paul Scharre argues that the air force is not well prepared to execute the strategy Obama outlined, primarily due to a shortage of drones:

Countering terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS requires more than simply dropping bombs. The key enabler is intelligence, much of which comes from unmanned aircraft, or “drones.” Contrary to the popular attention paid to “drone strikes,” the most valuable service that drones provide isn’t the ability to drop bombs—many manned aircraft can do that—but rather the ability to loiter overhead for 16-20 hours at a time, watching terrorists and gathering information. Several drones working together can provide 24/7 coverage, an unblinking eye watching a terrorist’s every move, and most importantly, every person he meets with, allowing intelligence analysts to unravel a network and find key leaders.

The Air Force refers to these 24/7 coverage areas as “orbits,” and in its most recent budget, it slashed them. In its Fiscal Year 2015 budget submission, the Department of Defense reduced the number of 24/7 Air Force Predator and Reaper orbits by 15 percent, from 65 to 55. This would make sense if there was too much capacity in the force or if the reduction of troops from Afghanistan meant that fewer surveillance orbits were needed. The reality is that demand for unmanned aircraft for high-priority missions like counterterrorism far exceeds supply.

Earlier today, Chris Woods reminded us of the limits of air power:

[T]here’s scant proof that airpower-only campaigns actually work. Much of Libya is now overrun by militant Islamists, while Yemen is actually less stable today after five years of secret U.S. drone strikes. Ground troops will eventually be needed to hold territory once IS is forced out of the areas of Syria and Iraq it now controls. Washington and its Western allies not only have little appetite for another ground war, they don’t have enough credibility to conduct one following the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. Presumably that’s why Obama has promoted the idea of a regional solution to the problem. Yet with the Syrian and Iraqi armies barely capable of stepping up, it’s not clear who would fill that void.

And Frum practically begged Obama to not go back into Iraq:

Those of us associated with the Bush administration bear the burden of having launched a war on false premises that then yielded disappointing results. It’s a heavy responsibility, and one most of us have struggled with in our various ways. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of it. But it’s one thing to fail to achieve your aims. It’s another to start a war with no discernible aims at all. It’s not crass, not narrow, not unethical for the president of the United States to test any proposed foreign policy—and most especially the use of armed force—against the criterion: “How will this benefit my nation?” That test is not a narrow one. The protection of allies is an important U.S. interest. The honoring of international commitments is an important U.S. interest. And it could even be argued that humanitarian action can be justified when it will save many lives, at low cost in American blood and treasure, without creating even worse consequences inadvertently. This new campaign against ISIS does not even pretend to meet that test. It’s a reaction: an emotional reaction, without purpose, without strategy, and without any plausible—or even articulated—definition of success.

But Freddie deBoer doubted that things would ever change:

I can envision no plausible scenario in which this country stops its endless projection of military force. Not in my lifetime. I suppose I hope only that people in the media will someday be honest and say: we are bent on war, and our media is bent on war, and there is no such thing as an anti-war voice in our politics or media, and we will go to war again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. We might “win,” this time. We will certainly destroy ISIS if we set our minds to it. And we will leave behind another failed state, whether after a year or ten, and then that failed state will do what failed states do, and we will go back again. But every time a little weaker, a little more vulnerable, until someday at last, the next war is the one that leads to our own destruction.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama delivers a prime time address from the Cross Hall of the White House on September 10, 2014 in Washington, DC. By Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Images)

The Case For War: Tweet Reax II

The first round of tweets here. Note the date on this tweet:

Live-Blogging The Case For War

9.51 pm. Here’s the best rationale I can think of for what the president has just announced. If we simply left ISIS alone, there’s a real danger that it could begin to organize in such a way as to threaten the US. That in itself reveals the craven dependency that the regional powers still have with respect to this kind of Salafist fanaticism – but it remains a fact. We can do a few things from the air to make ISIS’s life a lot harder, and hope to God that yet more American bombs in Iraq won’t go astray or provoke an even more intense reaction. Maybe the non-Salafist Syrian opposition can get its act together, but maybe it can’t. At best, the strategy is simply to try to contain ISIS with airpower. And that’s basically it. Another Sunni Awakening? That’s the hope. But at this point it’s surely just a hope.

So this is really a police action which does not end crime, cannot apprehend the criminals but can keep the criminals from getting a firmer footing for a while. As long as we are cognizant of that, we can judge its relative success or failure. But it contains no inkling of what the unintended consequences will be, leaves Obama open to even more pressure to send ground troops in if things go South, and allows the Congress to shirk any responsibility to declare war. Apart from all that, it’s brilliant.

9.42 pm. Notice a few salient things: the utter vagueness of the end-game; the refusal to go to Congress for a new war; not even a gesture toward telling us how we actually pay for this amorphous thing (with the Republicans suddenly losing any interest in the debt); no real sense of whether the Iraqi and Syrian forces can really fight ISIS, with or without US air support; and the grand coalition of Sunni Arab states … well, it looks like the Saudis may be rattled enough to help – but you don’t hear a peep from the Gulf states or Jordan.

This is an almost text-book case for not starting a war. I have come to the conclusion that the administration saw a kind of tipping point on the ground with ISIS, has no real solution, and improvised this strategy on the fly. And as far as the model in Yemen and Somalia, well …

And:

And the beat goes on …

9.37 pm. Hard to disagree:

Now, Obama has never denied he is prepared to wage a long war of attrition against Islamist terrorism. So it is not exactly a U-turn to target ISIS the way we targeted al Qaeda in Af-Pak. But if you do not buy the idea that mere force works against Islamist terror – because in a terror war, force can actually embitter and create as much terrorism as it prevents – then this is a grueling conclusion. It means a state of permanent warfare. It sets a precedent that the US can be baited into this kind of action by any two-bit Jihadist with a social media account and a few scary videos.

Do we think American bombs raining down on Iraq again will win us friends? Apparently we do.

9.36 pm. Tweet of the night:

9.30 pm. So here we are. The strategy is not to defeat a direct threat to the United States, because there is no such threat at present. The strategy is to contain ISIS through US airpower, the Kurds, the Iraqi “Army”, and by trying to get the Saudis to work the tribes to turn a critical mass of Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis against the Salafists and toward Baghdad. I presume air-strikes in Syria will be designed to cut off ISIS’ supply lines across the now non-existent border. I don’t doubt there will be special forces on the ground.

There will also be old-school American service-members on the ground in Iraq to help train the Kurds and the central government forces. Somehow, along (one presumes) with massive bribes as during the first “Awakening”, this will turn the tide.

That we have already spent enormous sums training the Iraqi army – and that they fled at the first sign of a black ISIS flag – goes unmentioned. But we should have no illusions about their ability to do anything meaningful to push back the Islamic State. The Kurds have had limited success in regaining territory. But the covert war in support of the non-Salafist Syrian opposition will become much more overt – with the Europeans taking the lead in funneling them arms. Where those arms end up we have no real control over. So in effect we’re pumping a whole bunch of weaponry into Iraq and hoping, once again, that it doesn’t come back at us.

I found the president to be calm and assured. But, to be honest, the final pep-talk about America was unnecessary, even tone-deaf. Who can believe America is a force for good in that part of the world when we have just blown the whole place up – and left a failed state in our wake? And the president still seems to convey an impression that those rescued from ISIS will somehow be grateful to the US for standing up for civilization and its values. They won’t be. They’ll hate us, whatever we do – but especially when we intervene. One obvious factor missing: the Iranians – many of whom apparently believe that ISIS is America’s creation. But the Iranians could scramble the sectarian balance here – but seeming to be a Shiite force of exactly the kind that spawned support for ISIS in the first place.

I don’t buy this as in any way guaranteeing the demise of ISIS; to analogize this war to Yemen and Somalia – where the president’s glib declaration of success doesn’t exactly evoke confidence – is to miss the obvious point that the US created the nightmare in Iraq from 2003 onward. This is a continuation of the same war, with the exact same tactics used by Petraeus to bribe, organize and arm Sunnis repelled by ISIS. But this time, we have no troops on the ground. And the Sunnis are even more pissed off now than they were then. And our credibility is in the toilet. And our levers are weaker. And the multi-sectarian government just barely formed has not even come close to proving its inclusive potential.

I wanted to be reassured. Alas, I’m not.

 

The Case For War: Tweet Reax

Threat Inflation And The Case For War

Fred Cole tries to apply the Powell Doctrine to the ISIS war, asking whether defending Iraq from the jihadist group is a vital American national security interest:

If we were talking about the fall of Iraq, as ISIS capturing Iraq’s land and resources, then I could see how that could threaten the vital interests of the United States, in time. But, frankly, a few months ago ISIS was an army of technicals, guys in pickups with guns on the back. Now they’ve captured some better gear, they’ve captured some money, but they’re a long way off from being able to threaten the United States. ISIS is far more likely to threaten the vital interests of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey than the United States. … They’re willing to massacre civilians. They’re willing to massacre prisoners. They’re willing to behead journalists. But hyperventilated claims of ISIS as an existential threat to the United States are nonsense. ISIS is unlikely to touch us here. They can’t capture Baghdad. They’re certainly not an existential threat to the United States.

Doug Mataconis draws the same conclusion:

Notwithstanding the hyperbole of the media, it seems rather apparent that IS is not an immediate threat to the United States despite the threats that they have made to bring the battle to America’s shores.

In no small part, this is because it seems clear that, leaving aside their military success against an Iraqi Army that doesn’t seem to want to fight and “moderate” Syrian rebels that are clearly weaker than IS forces, they don’t have the capability to strike in the same way that al Qaeda did (and even in  that regard it’s worth noting that that 9/11 attacks took several years of planning.) Additionally, though, it seems clear that IS’s ambitions lie elsewhere at the moment. If anyone should be concerned about the immediate threat from IS, it should be nations like Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, which bears at least some responsibility for all of this given their role in providing arms to the Syrian rebels regardless of whether they were “moderates” or jihadists. Given that, it seems fairly clear that describing IS as an immediate and grave threat as much of the current rhetoric has done is extremely hyperbolic to say that least.

But of course, the war cheerleaders are describing it just so. Nick Gillespie calls them out:

As with al Qaeda back in the day, our fears of ISIS suffer from massive threat inflation at every possible level. At the start of the summer, the number of ISIS fighters in Iraq was somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,000 to 10,000; those numbers have doubtless grown but they still face off against more than a quarter of a million Iraqi troops and somewhere between 80,000 and 240,000 peshmerga soldiers. Even the much-maligned Free Syrian Army numbers 70,000 to 90,000. And, it’s worth pointing out, ISIS is facing intense opposition (and some cooperation) from other jihadist groups, including and especially al Qaeda. If the Iraqi armed forces are in fact incapable of fighting successfully against ISIS after years of training and resources given them by the United States, there is in fact little we will be able to do to change things in Iraq[.]

Even among those who don’t overstate ISIS’s capabilities, however, some still favor going to war in order to preempt a future threat:

[I]n a thorough presentation on Sept. 3 at the Brookings Institution, outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Matthew Olsen, presented a less scary picture. ISIS has no cells in the U.S., Olsen said, “full stop.” Further, Olsen said, “we have no credible information” that the group “is planning to attack the U.S.” ISIS, Olsen said “is not al Qaeda pre-9/11.” …

[But] the potential threat of ISIS targeting the U.S. in the future is real, administration officials say. More conservative observers like Olsen agree that it is better to go on the offensive against ISIS now than to risk them becoming a bigger threat to Americans later. “ISIL poses a multi-faceted threat to the United States,” Olsen said at Brookings, and it “views the U.S. as a strategic enemy.” He says ISIS, “has the potential to use its safe haven to plan and coordinate attacks in Europe and the U.S.” Foreign fighters joining ISIS, “are likely to gain experience and training and eventually to return to their home countries battle-hardened and further radicalized,” Olsen says.

Weigel takes it all in and parts with this wry observation:

Does anybody remember the last time we were told that Iraq had produced an “imminent threat” to American lives? Better to just stain the sheets and hit the panic button, I guess. The long Democratic dream, from Kerry to Obama, of reducing terrorism from an existential threat to a managable nuisance, is just not an election-winner.

Quote For The Day III

“Okay, I recognize Silver but no idea who the other two are. I’ll take a shot at the dude in the middle, though. He developed an app that helps you find the closest lumber yard?” – a commenter at New York magazine, about me, the dude in the middle of the photo-montage, in a new Vanity Fair list of white male “media disrupters“.

(Non-white-male media disrupters can be found here.)

When Fighting Back Means Tweeting Back

Heads up that this video from the State Department contains some really graphic stuff:

Zenon Evans has details:

Playing catchup to ISIL’s spread throughout social media, the U.S. government is also posting daily on the Facebook and Twitter. The campaign is called “Think Again, [Turn] Away” and it’s geared at English-speakers who are tempted to join the terrorist organization. Britain recently raised an alarm because its defense department believe around 600 citizens have taken up arms for ISIL, though some estimate as many as 1,500 have. There are also an estimated 100 American citizens and a sum total of 3,000 Westerners who have joined the fight to establish a Caliphate throughout much of the Middle East. America’s information front focuses a lot on kids: ISIL isn’t letting kids go to school, ISIL is eating meat while children eat bread, ISIL is killing children and using them as suicide bombers. It also features on individuals who became jihadists but are now disillusioned with the fight, as well as Muslims who denounce ISIL as hypocritical and unfaithful to the religion’s teachings.

Alex Altman measures what the US is up against in this battle:

Much of the terrorist group’s work has taken place on Twitter. “2013 was the year of Twitter for Al-Qaeda and ISIS,” [Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications coordinator Alberto] Fernandez says. Since May, more than 60,000 Twitter accounts have been set up to herald the group, including 27,000 since the murder of Foley last month, according to an analysis conducted by Recorded Future, a web analytics firm, for the British media outlet Sky News. ISIS has used the platform both to spread grotesque photos of decapitated heads and bloodied bodies—”jihad porn,” as government officials call it—and to recruit potential conscripts. As Twitter cracked down on some of the gory imagery, an ISIS adherent even called for themurder of the site’s employees.

In the meantime, many of the group’s members have fled the site, terrorism analysts say, for more obscure social-media platforms like Friendica, Diaspora and VK (a Russian social-networking site used by the Boston bombers). The U.S. still finds itself outmatched as it tries to suss out and rebut all this activity.