Come, Take.

The following is my planned opening statement for a debate that will take place on Wednesday, Nov 11, Langford Lab, Room 101, Texas Tech University. The debate is over the concealed handgun policy on campus.

1. The fear of weapons

‘My child, accept from me the glorious arms of Hephaestus, so splendid, and such as no man has ever worn on his shoulders.’ The goddess spoke so, and set down the armour on the ground before Achilles, and all its elaboration clashed loudly. Trembling took hold of all the Myrmidones. None had the courage to look straight at it. They were afraid of it. Only Achilles looked, and as he looked the anger came harder upon him and his eyes glittered terribly under his lids, like sunflare. [The Iliad, 19: 10-15]

Weapons are terrible things. I don't mean necessarily that they are bad things; I mean this in the original  sense: weapons are frightening. The instruments of combat elicit at least a grave trepidation in any normal person who takes hold of one, or even looks at it with full attention to its purpose. People who are not frightened by weapons are themselves frightening people -- the ilk of Achilles.

Frightening as they are, America embraces weapons; and America is a violent place, relative to the rest of the first world. A lot of Americans are going to do stupid, dangerous things tonight. Some are going to be drunk. Some are going to get in fights. Some are going fly off the handle and to hurt each other, or threaten to, very badly, and often for very trifling reasons. Earlier this month, a Houston man stabbed another man to death in a fight over who got the last piece of chicken [source]. No matter how far we are from Houston, we all feel the sense of pointless loss in this story. And when violence like this touches our lives, or even seems like it might, it is especially frightening. In that moment we wonder, desperately, does he have a gun? or a knife? I pray he doesn't have a gun.  Sometimes he does, and sometimes it ends badly. 

This violence in our midst is frightening, even when it does not touch our own lives.In that light, it makes sense to ask whether we want concealed handguns on campus. College campuses are a unique environment. We have a lot of young people, people under stress, and also eccentric old people like me, sometimes under stress too, and so forth.  A few weeks ago I attended an open forum, where members of the campus community spoke about their thoughts and feelings regarding guns on campus. Most students who spoke were pro-gun, but the majority of faculty members spoke against guns on campus, or, to be more precise, wanted the police to have the only legal guns on campus.

I must say that the faculty members were not as well prepared as the students. In this sense I was very proud of our students -- who seem to have learned that that systematic observation trumps intuitive speculation in the post-Enlightenment mind. They seem to have also learned that a statistic has a numerator, a denominator, and clearly described sample population. On the other hand I was a bit disappointed in the faculty, who mostly talked about their fears and feelings, their supposed qualifications to have a firm opinion, and related anecdotes.

2. The facts

So here are the facts, which the students brought to light, and of which the faculty were unaware.

We are not the first school, or the first state, to allow legally concealed handguns on campus, and so we can learn about the dangers from others' experience. About 150 college campuses have allowed licensed concealed carry for an average of 5 years each. I must admit it comes as a pleasant surprise, even to me, that the number of CHL-related assaults on all these campuses combined to date has been zero. The number of CHL-related deaths has also been zero [source]. There have been three self inflicted gunshot injuries by CHL holders on campuses, resulting in a total of one hospitalization.

How do we wrap our heads round those statistics? If we string the experiences of all those campuses back to back on one average sized campus, we would have observed a total of 750 years -- the span since the time of Kublai Khan -- without a CHL-related assault, and with only three accidents, only one of which required a trip to the hospital.

On the other hand, we had four people hospitalized by a chemistry experiment this very year [source]. I don't think we are considering a ban on those. God knows how many people have been hospitalized playing football on the field of Jones AT&T Stadium; there's no push to ban that. In 2012, sadly, Megan Rough was killed in an automobile accident on campus [source], that was not her fault. We aren't debating a ban on automobiles on campus. These are actual injuries and deaths, not just fearful what-if's -- and we can expect the same activities to produce more injuries and deaths at a rate many times that of licensed concealed carry on campus.  

We can get more data by adding off campus statistics -- which I think we should, because universities are not the only stressful, contentions places in the world, and I don't even accept the contention that they are particularly stressful and contentious. We will see later that the data doesn't support that contention, either.

The web site concealedcarrykillers.org/ lists 763 cases of criminal homicide by concealed handgun license (CHL) holders since May 2007. That is about 95 per year nationwide.  So that is a lot of people if you look at it one way. But, on the other hand, over 300 people a year drown in bathtubs, and over 500 a year in swimming pools [Stossel: Give Me a Break, p.76-77]. So bathtubs are 3 times more dangerous, and swimming pools 5 times more dangerous than CHL holders. And even if you don't swim or bathe, you are more likely to die from a vehicular collision with a wild animal than by to be shot by a CHL holder. I don't mean there's, say, a moose driving a car; I mean, for example, you hit a moose with your car, and die. That kind of thing kills more people than legally carried handguns. So, we have bath tubs swimming pools, moose, elk, large deer, etc. You will face serious dangers in life at every turn in life.  But not from me.

If we scale these nation-wide statistics (95 deaths per 320 million people per year) down to an average sized institution of higher learning with about 4200 students [source], and (let's assume) 300 faculty, it suggests one death per 750 years in an average sized college -- which is lower than the figure actually observed so far for actual institutions of learning (zero per 750 years). So the "special circumstances" of college life have been observed, so far, to be safer than average for concealed carry.

Not only do CHL holders tend not to commit crimes; their presence on campus probably prevents crime. This is not mainly through the heroic crime-stopping interventions by gun owners -- though that definitely does happen -- but instead through a deterrent effect. Criminals, especially rampage shooters, understandably choose to go to places that are free of legal guns to commit their crimes. Wouldn't you?

For example, there were seven theaters showing "Batman, Dark Knight" in or near Aurora, CO on the day of the well known  mass shooting. The shooter did not go to the largest one, or to the one closest to his house; he went to the only one of the seven that prohibited legally carried handguns [source]. Wouldn't you? The fact is that even though guns are legal in most public spaces, over 90  of  mass shootings occur in that small fraction of public space where they are not [source].

So the most important thing as far as crime prevention is not how CHL holders behave during active shooter situations, but how potential rampage shooters behave when they know someone might have a gun somewhere, which, in point of historical fact, is to not go there. Conversely, by not allowing legally concealed handguns on campus, we make it a magnet for just these types of predators.

3. The "gap"  (between the fear and the facts)

It seems that the events that so many faculty members (and a few students) are so afraid of simply don't happen. At the same time, I don't take lightly that the faculty members and other anti-gun speakers at the forum were honestly afraid of legal concealed carry on campus. They were afraid of being shot during a spirited class discussion, or a dispute over a grade -- or of one student in their class shooting another. Their fears were genuinely felt and expressed, and they did not seem to be unreasonable people. Yet, those fears are grossly mis-calibrated with respect to easily obtainable facts. This means there is something subtlety to the issue, that goes beyond the bare facts of safety.

Here is the thing, and I think it is of importance far more general than this particular issue . When someone experiences pain, or fear, and they pin that pain and fear on something and say this is what's hurting me, then they begin to hate that thing in a way that is almost immune to reason. I do it; you do it; I have never met a person who I found was immune. I talked earlier about how guns are involved in a large number of frightening and painful incidents in the US every year, including over 10,000 homicides, and people have a very justified anxiety about those situations and the way guns are involved in them, and that gives them very bad feelings about guns.

To  calibrate those fears with the actual dangers, you have to know something -- something important, that not everyone knows and that unfortunately isn't talked about much. I think what you have to know is that, when it comes to picking up a weapon, there are two very different sorts of people. There is one sort who picks up a weapon in service of their own ego -- and in their hands it is as a dark, dangerous toy, whose purpose is  to hurt or intimidate other people, and to garner feelings of power from doing that. This kind of person is generally agitated, brash, and aggressive -- and when he picks up a weapon, he becomes even more agitated, brash, and aggressive. These are the kind of people we should be frightened of. And we often are.

Then there is another sort of person, who picks up a weapon in service to something outside of himself, or herself. For these people, picking up a weapon has the exact opposite effect. They become calm and severe. They become specially careful, and, in fact, carefully peaceful in all circumstances except those rare occasions where fighting is the right thing to do. For this kind of person, weapons are not a toy but an instrument of duty. Their presence adds solemnity to any occasion, and picking one up is very much like stepping into a church.

These are the kinds of people who make up the law abiding gun culture in America; this feeling of gravity and reverence, and of service in the use of arms, is passed down as a generational tradition. People who are not part of this culture never see this, and those who are sometimes never see anything else; but even if you aren't familiar first hand with this culture of reverence, now you know, and these are the kind of people CHL holders are.

America is indeed a violent place in general; but mostly, indeed almost exclusively, these acts of violence are perpetrated by a very small handful of what you might call bad apples -- what you would technically call sociopaths. These are the first kinds of people with respect to handling weapons. A 1972 study of criminality among males in the US by Marvin Wolfgang observed that 2/3 of the violent crime was committed by small group of repeat offenders comprising 7% of the observed population [Source: Wolfgang: Delinquency in a birth Cohort, not available for free, but here is an indirect source citing the statistic]. That means that, on average, if there were 15 boys in your senior English class,  there is one guy who committed more violent crime than all the rest put together. You probably know who that guy is, too.

Sweden, on the other hand, is a relatively peaceful place. It isn't because of gun control:  Guns and Ammo ranked Sweden among the top 10 countries in the world in gun rights [source].  Yet Sweden has only about 1/7 of the homicide rate that the US has [source].  Interestingly, what little violent crime there is in Sweden is comes from a similar -- though smaller -- bunch of bad apples. How small is that cohort of bad Swedish apples? Most of the criminal convictions for violent crime in Sweden came from just 1% of the population [source] -- as opposed to 7% in the US. So they have about 1/7 the number of sociopaths as we do here, and about 1/7 the murder rate. What a coincidence!

So what we have, at one end of the spectrum, is a very small number of people who are highly predatory and, apparently, lack the normal moral mechanisms that inhibit the impulses to do violent harm to others. These people who elicit very reasonable fear in many of us, both by direct encounters and by their very presence in society. We should hope they don't have guns -- but many of them do, almost all illegally. Then there is a larger supergroup, probably comprising not more than 20% of the population [inferred from this source], who commit the rest of the violent crimes; and between these two groups, we walk around with a lot of justifiable fear. Since we can't always tell by looking who is who, we are apt to pick up a sort of general fear of people and especially armed people. But most of these people have some un-apparent property that makes them practically never attack another person, especially when they are armed.

So our stereotype of people lashing out at random, or perhaps at random response to some trivial provocation -- which is what does meet the naked eye -- is entirely opposite of the underlying truth. It is closer to the truth to say that some people lash out again and again and again, and some practically never do, even under stressful circumstances. The historical fact is that the agencies that issue CHL's are very good at issuing them only to a subset of such peaceful people.  One study observed that a CHL holder was 20 times less likely to commit a gun crime than a police officer [source]. So who do you want carrying guns around, really?

4. On the propriety of guns on campus

But God said unto me, Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war, and hast shed blood. [1 Chronicles 28:3]

It is interesting that, while I don't have a weapon handy at all times, whenever I am cleaning a gun I always have another one close by, fully assembled and loaded. I mentioned this fact to a friend of mine and he told me he did the same thing. At the time, it just seemed to be an interesting coincidence; neither one of us really knew why. So I thought about it, and it wasn't hard to figure out the explanation: cleaning a gun is a visible re-minder of one reason you own it in the first place: there are people in this world who get their feelings of importance from violently preying on other people; and, while it is not likely, it is distinctly possible that one (or more) could burst in and target you at any given moment. Such as, right now.

This fact -- the that violence could come to you right now -- is an uncomfortable thing to be aware of. On the other hand, Col. Jeff Cooper has said that this uncomfortable awareness is the single most important factor in how you handle the situation if it does occur -- more important than skill at arms, or even whether you are armed at all. If you would wish to survive a violent encounter, then the chief thing, says Cooper, is that you are not astonished when it  happens.

Fortunately, most of us will never be a victim of a violent crime. The Department of Justice estimates that 42% of Americans will be victims of a robbery or assault resulting in injury during their lifetime, and for around 75% of those who are victimized, it will only happen once [source]. This tells us that the police do a remarkable job of deterring, intercepting, and intervening against violence on our behalf -- such a good job that almost 60% of us will never face criminal violence even once, and around 90% of us no more than once.

In short, most of us, if we are not in the professions of arms ourselves (i.e., police or soldiers), will never face life-threatening hostility from another person over the course of our lives. So if we cross our fingers, close one eye, and hope for the best, then we can avoid an entire lifetime of the unpleasant awareness of that violence might visit, and probably be no worse off for it. In that case, we would be grossly unready if it does come; but, on the other hand, it probably won't, and the cost of being prepared for it is real, and it is both material and spiritual. What I mean is that being physically and mentally ready to fight consumes time, money, and sweat, and, on top of that, it hardens your heart in a certain way. This, I believe, is why David was told he was not allowed to build the temple.

So this thing we may sacrifice to prepare for, materially and spiritually, will probably never happen to most of us,. Moreover, it may happen despite our preparations or even because of them. So I do not blame anyone -- especially a woman, if I may be honest -- for going through life in what Cooper calls condition white: sheepishly unaware of, and grossly unprepared for, the violence  that may come to visit us.

Understand, it is not that David was not a good enough man to build the temple. There is nothing wrong with being a man of war. There are certain things that only hard men can do, and these things sometimes have to be done. As Richard Gernier said, paraphrasing Orwell, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

But then there are also things that must be done, or at least ought to be done, that require a softer heart. These include, apparently, building the temple. They include certain sorts of art, certain sorts of ministry, and I think, certain forms of scholarship. I don’t think that, say, Einstein could have formulated the theory of special relativity while he was cleaning a gun, or, more generally, alert to even remote possibility that he might be attacked at any moment. To do that kind of work, you I think you have be in a sort of trance, withdrawn from the details of the physical world around you. So we have the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. Legend has it that Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier while he was writing mathematical figures in a box of sand, and that his last words were, I beg of you, do not disturb my circles! Archimedes, apparently, was in condition white. Most people who do that sort of work are, at least when they are doing it.

So campus is a place where we do something special, something sacred, which we must attend to with our whole minds and a very great deal of sensitivity; and this kind and degree of sensitivity is at odds with a alert combat mindset. While the safety argument against guns on campus holds no weight for me (and, frankly, in the light of fact, is preposterous), this argument gives me pause. It is too abstract for many anti-gun thinkers to make explicitly, but they feel it in their bones; and the safety argument is, for many people I suspect, a practical sounding proxy for this more abstract one. People just feel there is something agitating about weapons, and that it is an agitation that, ideally, we can do without in this somewhat holy place. And they are right.

I am swayed by this, but I am not swayed so far that I would prohibit guns on campus, for two reasons. First, while the university would ideally be a sanctuary of of serenity, unmarred by the agitation of all things martial, the actual world differs from the ideal one in a way that sometimes necessitates a harder mindset. If the campus were guarded by angels, there would be no need for legal concealed guns and alert mental condition they require; but it is not. Bad people do exist; they do not respect our would-be sanctuary, and indeed they are more drawn to it as a hunting ground the softer we become. Second, even if I decide for reasons of scholarly decorum not to carry a gun to school, I do not have the authority to decide the same for you.

5. The value of freedom

You are entitled to your fears and feelings, and so am I, whether they are reasonable or not. We all have a few unreasonable ones. But when my fears become the basis of wanting to forcibly constrain your behavior, then the burden falls to me to prove they are reasonable, and that what your behavior really must be constrained. How strong is that burden? That depends. How much do you value freedom? The value of freedom -- or of what we might call individual sovereignty -- is exactly the distance between people should not do this and it ought to be banned.

We don't ban everything that is a bad idea, or even everything that is dangerous. Cooking with gas is dangerous. Riding a motorcycle is dangerous. Drinking beer is very dangerous -- linked to tens of thousands of deaths per year, including about 1/3 of all homicides and 1/3 of all traffic deaths. But we aren't even considering banning those things.  This is because, as a society, we value freedom. So before we ban something, we want to be sure not just that  it's risky, but that (1) people can't be trusted to make their own decisions about it, and (2) the consequences of people deciding for for themselves would be so dire that they are worth the cost of a certain infringement of liberty.

I think that most of us agree that freedom is valuable in principle, but what we disagree about, sometimes passionately, on is how valuable it is. And if we don't talk about that head on, then we are liable to talk past each because the value of freedom sets the terms of the debate:  how severe must be the potential consequences of allowing people to do something, and how certain must must we be that those consequences will actually occur, before we take away their freedom to make the decision themselves.

So how much do you value freedom, really? I will make it simple by making it multiple choice: none at all, a little, or a lot? You don't really need to answer yet, because there is a litmus test.

By a show of hands, how many people believe this: if something does more material harm than good, then it should not be allowed. It is not an uncommon position, though it is far more common in Europe than in the America, or especially Texas. The people who believe that are the people who do not value freedom at all. They believe that even this much perceived material benefit justifies deploying the forces of law against their fellow citizens, or fellow subjects in places where this is really believed.

How many people believe this: If something does substantially more material harm than good, then it should be banned. These are the people who value freedom a little bit. For them, it takes this much to convince them to take someone's liberty away.

The third option is  this: A person’s behavior should not be constrained, or his property seized, by force, except for compelling reason. If you affirm that statement then you place a high value on individual sovereignty. Traditionally, that is the American way, and especially the Texan way, though we are moving in another direction these days.

The million dollar question, more important than the particulars such as tonight's, is which of the three answers is correct: how much should we value freedom? That is a big question and I am not going to try to really tackle it heer. But the struggle between those who value individual sovereignty a lot, and those who value it a little, or none at all, started long ago and it has been eternal. I would say it started in Genesis, with the duality between Abraham and Nimrod, the tyrant of Babylon. It was instantiated in the battle at the "hot gates" of Thermopylae, between the Greeks and Persians, and in the battle of Marathon that ended that phase of the struggle.  It was the theme of the American Revolution, the Texas Revolution, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.

No one thought they were on the wrong side of any of those conflicts -- just as no one thinks they are on the wrong side today. But if you aren't familiar with those historical events I suggest you read up and then ask yourself, what was the deep difference in values between one people and another, in each case, that kept them from getting along? And then ask yourself and which side of those things you would have been on. If you'd found yourself a citizen of Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union, or the Persian Empire, would you have been a dissident? Or would you have simply gone along, or at least played it safe,  like almost everyone did? Like almost everyone is now.

I have argued that liberty under God (or liberty under natural law), is one vertex of a "values triangle" inhabited by the possible core value systems of a society. The thesis of the upcoming articles is that this is the best corner of the triangle to inhabit. Technically, the thesis has two parts: (A) that honor and truthfulness are more morally laudable than their opposites, and (B) that we ought to place a high value on individual sovereignty.

Claim (A) is practically equivalent to moral realism: the thesis that the notions of moral right and wrong are meaningful and important. That is to say, while it is logically possible that morality is real and important, and yet that truthfulness and honor play no part in it, this position does not have a lively constituency.

As far as defending moral realism itself, if someone holds robbery and rape in the same regard as lawfulness, providing for your children in the same regard as abandoning them, and productive employment in the same regard as drug peddling and welfare, then I am willing to count them out of my audience.

So the substantive debate (about which vertex of the values triangle is best) is between individualism and statism: the eternal struggle between Abraham and Nimrod, Leonidas and Xerxes, Saxons and Normans  Whigs and Tories -- and,  in the 20th Century, between the Allied and Axis powers, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Taiwan and China, and (as an extension of the latter)  South and North Korea.

It may seem I've already skewed the argument by citing notorious and established evils as if they were typical manifestations of statism, and assuming that these evils embody statism in the same sense embraced by American and European progressives. In fact, this is what I claim. I understand, however, that the claim is not only nontrivial; it is exactly the substance of what must be shown. A compelling moral argument consists of showing that valuing one thing over another leads to a clearly better or worse state of affairs, and these notorious evils are the clearly wretched states of affairs in our modern collective memory.

I am going to focus on the Nazi, Soviet, Shintoist, and Chinese communist movements -- what I will call the four Great Evils of the 20th Century. These Great Evils are recent enough to be familiar, and yet distant enough (with the exception of China) that, with sufficient information, reasonable people can come to agreement on their absolute wrongness. So here is the three-part thesis of the next sequence of articles:

The Nazi, Shintoist, Soviet communist, and Chinese communist movements were evil.

All four of these Great Evils  were realizations of the same idea.

The core values and arguments of the four Great Evils were the same as those of contemporary American and European progressivism.

One thing that makes (1) and (2) immediately plausible is that the US and UK were the common strategic enemies of all four Evils. The statist powers did, of course, also often oppose each other -- like orcs -- but the US and UK, like Gondor and Rohan, were never in enmity during  the 20th Century. Since the vision of liberty under God has been most purely realized in the cultures of the UK and US, we should naturally expect that the opposite view would be the one taken by their common historical enemies. It is no coincidence that their common historical enemies are the Great Evils.

What makes (3) immediately plausible is what the Evils have in common with progressivism at face value: 

centralization of power in the hands of the national government, 

antipathy toward Christianity and Judaism,

antipathy toward the bourgeoisie (entrepreneurs, businessmen, and professionals -- what Plato called the orderly class)

loose interpretations of constitutions and laws, in deference to the will of bureaucrats and national executives, and

pushing state authority over education and the rearing of children.

The deep similarities between totalitarianism and progressivism will seem implausible to some people for three reasons. First, progressives firmly support democracy. Second, progressivism is not obviously evil, while Shintoism, Naziism, and Communism seemingly were. Third, while we are moving toward progressivism, we are not purging dissidents or launching wars of national aggression. These are addressed in the following paragraphs.

On the first point, it is a little known but well worn fact that freedom, not democracy, is the antithesis of tyranny. Stalin, Hitler, and Mao each rose to power on waves of popular support (and for that matter, so did Julius Caesar). Though they murdered over 100 million of their own countrymen between them (not counting war casualties) to consolidate permanent and absolute power, the evil dictators of the 20th century ascended through essentially democratic processes, and were loved by most of their subjects while they reigned. The enemy of dictatorship is the senatorial class, not the plebeian. Through history, the tyrant has aligned with the lowest classes of society, in opposition to the middle class, the upper class, and the constitution.

On the second point, the great majority of the people of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia, and Communist China did not believe their societies were becoming evil, or (later) had become evil, and nor did any serious majority of outsiders.  The horrid wrongness of these ideologies was not contemporaneously obvious, from within or without, except to rare sorts of people -- who were considered by their neighbors to eccentric, paranoid, and idealistic. Thus, we should not be at all surprised if the agents of evil here and now appear to be sophisticated, high-intentioned, and slickly amiable from inside of our own society. They have always come as the smiling salesmen of towers to heaven, have always claimed the moral high ground, and have been widely successful in taking it.

On the third point, societies have a great deal of inertia in their concrete behaviors and habits -- and, for this reason, it takes time for changes in their thinking to filter down and really change their doing. For example, German intellectual trends of the 19th Century lead very gradually, though inexorably, to German national behavior in the early 20th Century. By analogy, the rudder on a man-of-war can be turned quickly. The ship itself takes time to turn, but the turn is sure to come if the rudder stays in place. If we have turned our rudder for the rocks, how much comfort should we take that our ship is still in the clear? and how long should we wait before we get serious about turning it back? 

It is a hard and pressing question, for each of us, whether we would have been one of those rare, brave souls who firmly opposed the evils of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Hirohito -- and the answer, on principles of raw statistics, is probably not. But we should hope and strive to be that sort of person, and to move toward that ideal of heroism if we can discern the direction to go. 

I will claim that the two most important attributes of the value system of a nation are (1) where it falls on the scale of individualism vs. collectivism, and (2) how much value it places on virtue.

There are group differences between cultures in their degree of virtue, and of course also in their degree of individualism. If we imagine societies plotted on a graph, with individualism on one axis and virtue on the other, we might be tempted to imagine a square with four vertices representing the extremes. In fact the picture is a little different: individualism tells us to whom we ultimately owe our duties (to human institutions or to principles of natural law), and virtue dictates how much those duties count in determining our behavior. The less they count, the less it matters to whom they are owed. Thus, when virtue in a society breaks down, the society loses social capital: a sense of duty people have to contribute resources, or take personal risks, for the perceived general good. Such a sense of duty is the glue of a society; and one in which this sense of duty breaks down too far either falls apart, is conquered by a stronger neighbor, or exists in a state of tyranny held together only by fear and greed.

And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. [Genesis 11:3]

So rather than a square, we have a triangle of value systems for nations -- with dutiful individualism at one vertex, dutiful collectivism at another, and whip-and-carrot tyranny at the third. Thus, at the extremes, a nation is either like a pack, a hive, or a chain gang. The latter two share a common attribute of statism: that resources are allocated largely for and by the state -- the difference being the degree to which the contributions are voluntary, or at least made with good cheer.

Imperial Japan fell near the corner of pure collectivism. Suicide attacks are the calling card of the forces of pure collectivism. Al Qaeda and Hamas are also examples.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein inhabited the corner of chaos -- largely because the various tribes and factions under his rule did not share a culture or ideals with each other or with their leader. True to their general form, the forces of chaos scattered in the face of grave danger, since they are held together mainly by fear and bribery in the first place -- which do not hold up as inducements in a hard situation. For another example, consider Haiti, which has undergone violent regime change 32 times since winning independence from France in 1804, and would likely no longer be a political unit if it were not located on an island.

For an example near vertex of lawful individualism, recall the summary statement of American values:

We are each instruments of a higher power, before which we are all equal, except insofar as we acquit ourselves through our actions.

The axioms of American values are individualism and objective moral accountability. This is precisely the orientation of the third corner of the triangle.

The tension between individualism and collectivism manifests itself in lively debates between reasonable people, and violent conflicts between strong sovereign nations. The tension between virtue and its opposite is less climactic, because virtue has no positive opposite. The opposite of virtue is simply the animalistic self indulgence to which we are all tempted. An iysh chamac [Hebrew: man of wicked violence] does not lie, cheat, rob, and rape in order to wreak havoc on society; he does these things because they feel good to him, and he lacks the virtue to abstain. 

When a society moves away from virtue, it is not a  calamitous clash, but a pernicious, creeping rot. It is not that the Devil is without advocates; it is that they are distributed, autonomous, and disorganized by their nature. They do not have a grand plan or even a leader. Of course, neither did the bubonic plague.

The Rot was manifest in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and of the Tang Dynasty. It is likely to have played a part in the declines of many civilizations. However, only those with unequivocal hegemony, such as Rome, are able to withstand external conquest once they begin to decay .  Thus, only such nations can rot so thoroughly that their moral decline can be clearly documented before they collapse. The United States is just such a martially dominant power. Also, it has also begun to rot.

The Rot -- the erosion of social capital -- results from two distinct factors: the erosion of the sense duty in general, and the loss of shared identity and ideals (in a word, multiculturalism).  Either factor suffices, and America is suffering from both. 

The minimal responsibilities of a man are to refrain from theft and assault,to protect and provide for his family, and to create something valuable through his work.  First things first:  below are the rates of violent crime in the US from 1960 to 2011:

This doesn't look bad once we hit the 90′s, until we compare it with something else:

Crime began falling in the 90's not because there were fewer criminals, but because they were isolated from the wider community through incarceration. The cost of this was quite massive. From 1982 to 2006, the monetary cost of law enforcement in the US increased five fold.

The US today has a greater percentage of its population in prison than any other nation in the world -- free or authoritarian, industrialized or not. So our policies have resulted in the streets being safer -- at dear costs both monetary and human  -- but we have not cured the moral decay behind the rise in crime from 1960 onward. We have simply adapted to it with police and prisons, locks and alarms, and generally cold and suspicious behavior.

As for fatherhood, In 1960, the percentage of children born to unwed mothers was 5.6%. Since then, in the general American population it has increased sevenfold to 40%. The problem is worse among minorities, especially blacks, but it is not a minority or black problem. There have been many-fold increases in out-of-wedlock births among people of every race, and in fact a greater percentage increase among whites. The shame here is in some part the voluntarily unwed mothers themselves, but in greater measure the two million males a year (I wouldn’t say men or dads, because they are neither) who sire children without committing to support or raise them. 

Regarding industry, at any given point in time, every adult person is either (a) employed, (b) looking for work (that is, unemployed), or (c ) neither. The sum of the first two figures is known as the labor participation rate. In 1950, the labor participation rate for men ages 25-44 was around 97.5% [source] -- approximately the percentage of the population that is not completely disabled. Today that figure (from the same source) is around 92.5%. This represents a threefold increase since 1950 in the proportion of men in their prime who are not working and not looking for work, and perhaps a 10-fold increase among the able  bodied. What are these men doing? They are either living off of the government, dealing drugs (or some other illegal occupation), in jail, or living off of their girlfriends. What they are not doing is staying home as "house husbands:" the marriage rate for white, working class men in this age group fell almost by half from 1960 to 2010: from 84% to 48% [Charles Murray: Coming Apart, 2010].

The US Department of Health & Human Service began keeping track of the percentage of households receiving means tested government benefits (i.e., welfare) since 1993, a little over 20 years ago. At that time the percentage was 23%. By 2011, Americans receiving welfare outnumbered those with full time jobs [source]. Today, 35% of American households -- over one third -- receive welfare benefits, and these households account for 38% of children under 5. 

Aside from morality, which measures the resolve of people to do good, the other factor that influences social capital is the sense of shared identity and purpose within a society.  This is not just in decline in America; it is under attack. For example, in 2015 the student council of the University of California, Irvine voted to ban national flags from hanging in the student government commons area [though the ban was later reversed by another body]. Of course this was directed at the only flag liable to be in the commons area: the American flag. The resolution read, in part,  "Whereas the American flag has been flown in instances of colonialism and imperialism...". Moreover, such anti-patriotism is not limited to the West coast. The Dickson County school district in Tennessee recently voted to  ban students from bringing national flags to its campuses, on pain of expulsion. The rationale for this is that flags, most saliently the flag of the United States,  "could be seen by others as offensive".

In a sense, these events of extreme anti-patriotism are isolated: they happen every day somewhere, but they do not happen every day, everywhere. In another sense they are not isolated: these were not measures introduced by lone whacko’s and then roundly voted down; they passed by a majority vote, in bodies elected to represent large numbers of ordinary people, at both ends of the country.

This hoopla about the flag would just be hoopla about the flag -- except that it acts as a barometer of peoples’ willingness to shoulder real civic duties. As a nation's sense of shared identity and purpose declines, so does the sense of duty of its residents -- or so-called "citizens" -- to participate in the political and cultural unit, or so-called "nation". In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam reports the following:

The percentage of eligible voters who vote in presidential elections fell  22% from 1960 to 1996.

The percentage of people who have held office in a civic organization fell 42% from 1973 to 1994.v

The percentage of people who have attended a meeting of the local government fell 35% from 1973 to 1994

Among parents of school children, the percentage who are members of the PTA fell 61% from 1960 to 1997.

In his 1835 classic Democracy in America,  Alexis de Tocqueville noted the exceptional efforts Americans make to solve community problems, with each other, without the government: 

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.

Sovereign: one that exercises supreme authority within a limited sphere --Webster’s Dictionary

I. Castle doctrine

An attack uses lethal force in case we should not be surprised if it causes death. For example, stabbing someone with a knife constitutes lethal force, whereas hitting them with a left hook does not. In all 50 states of America, you are entitled to defend yourself with lethal force against an attacker whose illegal actions place you in immediate, unavoidable danger of grave bodily harm. 

In some states, the legal right of self defense are broader under certain conditions. In Texas, for example, lethal force is justified whenever someone has illegally and forcibly entered your home. Such a principle -- that one has broader leeway to defend themselves inside their own home -- is called a castle doctrine, after the English saying that a man’s home is his castle.

Some people cotton to castle doctrines and some do not. The question I’m interested in here, however, is not whether castle doctrines are right or wrong, but why the name fits. Of course a castle is more practically defensible than, say, a log cabin; but why should it be morally defensible on broader terms? In other words, if a man’s home is his castle, literally or figuratively, so what?

The answer is that castles are stereotypically inhabited by monarchs and aristocrats. Of course the state and its agents, in antique form or modern, have authority to deploy lethal force against hostile invasions of their territory.  If China invaded Mongolia, we would not blame the Mongolian army for responding with tanks and rifles instead of just kicks and punches. The question is whether individuals have an analogous right.  Thus, the question of the morality of castle doctrines is about a certain aspect of individual sovereignty, measured relative to state sovereignty.

II. Welfare

Psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, in a Psychology Today article,  defined liberalism as follows: 

 It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others.  In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. 

Now the bottom 40% of earners  -- almost half -- pay no net income tax, and as a group are disproportionately liberal. Thus, many if not most liberals vote to fund social spending entirely with other peoples’ money. That is one way to "contribute”, perhaps -- but it is not what the word ordinarily brings to mind. It would be peculiar if you and I met beggar, and I said that I care about him so much that I would like to contribute to his welfare, and then I took $20 out of your pocket and gave it to him. 

Moreover, 35% of households in the US received means-tested government aid (i.e., welfare), and fully 48.5% of individuals  -- over half of voting age population -- received some form of government aid (including welfare, social security, medicaid, etc.), not counting military benefits [source]; and these beneficiaries almost certainly account for more than half of liberals. That is a very interesting way to “contribute” -- as if you met a beggar, he said he would like to make a contribution to his welfare, and then he took $20 out of your pocket and put it into his.

If we measure by the money out of their own pockets, the above definition of liberal turns out to be opposite of the truth. Charitable giving is difficult to correlate with political affiliation on an individual basis, because of privacy issues. We can, however, measure charitable giving on a state by state basis. A study conducted over six years by the Philanthropy Chronicle found that if we rank states by per-dollar-of-income charitable giving, every single one in the top third voted for Romney in 2012, while 15 out of of 17 in the bottom third voted for Obama [source]. So when “contribute” is used with its common sense meaning, either Kanazawa’s definition is diametrically incorrect, or, by some weird twist of fate, generous liberals are concentrated in red states and stingy conservatives  are concentrated in blue ones.

Like many subtle things that are put in words, Kanazawa’s incorrect definition can be turned around and made right with just a small change in syntax. What liberals are more willing to do is not to contribute, but to force other individuals to contribute. The morality of state welfare spending is not a question of who pays, who receives, or how much --  but who decides. 

Here again, the authority of the sate to reallocate wealth is an issue of individual sovereignty, which can be calibrated against the sovereignty ascribed to states for the same purpose. If the state opts to allocate your belongings to someone else, then of course its agents are authorized to use force against you in pursuit of that interest, including lethal force in case you resist. On the other hand, if Brazil tried to force Bolivia to pay tribute to feed the Brazilian poor, we wouldn’t blame Bolivia for fighting it. Bolivia, after all, is a sovereign state. Of course that makes a difference; the question is how much.

 III. Abraham and Nimrod

By individualism I mean the espousal of individual sovereignty relative to state sovereignty; and by collectivism I mean the espousal of state sovereignty relative to that of individuals. The duality is broad and abstract. It has many practical manifestations, from welfare entitlements to gun control -- and that is what makes it important. It is what mathematicians call a basis element of one’s value system. The duality between individualism and collectivism is a continuum rather than a pair of poles:  of course states should have  broader authority than individuals, and of course individuals should have a certain degree of autonomy. The question of the relative sovereignty  of states and individuals is one of degree; the degree matters very much, and where a person draws the line places them on one one side or the other of a global historical struggle. In Judeo-Christian mythology, this struggle begins in Genesis, with the meeting of Abraham and Nimrod.

Genesis 10:9 describes Nimrod literally as a might hunter in the face of [Hebrew: panyim] the lord. Some translations, e.g., the God’s Word translation, take this to mean Nimrod was blessed. But being in someone’s face can also mean something else: the Standard International translation reads that Nimrod was in defiance of the Lord.  In any case, both Muslim and Jewish oral traditions and classical literature render Nimrod as an emblem of  idolatry and tyranny, in contrast with Abraham’s monotheistic Godliness. The Koran recounts the meeting of Abraham and Nimrod as follows:

When Nimrod had heard the accusers, he turned to Abraham. “Who is this mighty God you spoke of?”

“He it is Who gives life and death,” answered Abraham.

“But I too give life and death,” said Nimrod. “I pardon a guilty man sentenced to die—then I execute one who is innocent!”

“That is not the way of my Lord,” said Abraham. “But listen to this: Each morning, my Lord brings the sun up in the east. Can you make it rise in the west?”

Then Nimrod grew angry. He had a great fire built, and he ordered Abraham to be tied up and thrown into it. But the fire only burnt away the ropes, and they saw Abraham sitting peacefully among the flames.

In the Jewish version of this story, [Genesis Rabbah, Chapter XXXVIII], Nimrod proposes that we worship fire, but Abraham replies that water extinguishes fire. Nimrod says we should then worship water, to which Abraham replies that clouds hold water. Nimrod suggests we worship clouds, but Abraham counters that wind moves cloud. Nimrod finally suggests that we should worship wind, but Abraham replies that human beings withstand wind. Nimrod becomes angry and casts Abraham into the fire, which he withstands with the help of God. 

Genesis 11 tells how Nimrod began to construct the tower of Babel:

3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.

4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

The Genesis Rabbah suggests that Nimrod’s bricks are a symbol for his human subjects,  the building blocks of society, and that the burning of the bricks alludes to the extermination of Nimrod’s people. 

If Nimrod’s bricks represent people, his tower to heaven represents a Utopian society. It is notable that Nimrod plans to build his tower to heaven from bricks 

And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.  [Exodus 20:25]

That is, a holy altar is to be made of natural stones, not cut stones and certainly not bricks. Under Nimrod’s rule, the human building blocks of society are cut into sameness and treated as interchangeable commodities like bricks – in contrast to natural stones, each of which must be fit into a place suited for it. 

Famously, the sameness of people under Nimrod’s rule extends to their language: the terms in which they think and communicate; and God intervenes to insure that peoples’ modes of thought and expression remain organically varied. One cannot build an autocratic society out of people who are allowed their own ways of thinking and speaking. If one wants to maintain a police state, the most important police are always the language and thought police. 

IV. The Eternal Struggle

The conflict that began with Abraham and Nimrod was also manifest in the Greco-Persian wars, that began at the gates of Thermopylae. It marked the degeneration of the Roman Republic into an empire under the Caesars. It was the moral overtone of the Norman conquest of Britain, and the Protestant Reformation. 16th Century England and Spain could not simply “get along” and fuse together-- partly due to the raw thirst for power of aristocrats, but also partly because they spoke different languages, and held categorically different views on individual sovereignty, with England embracing individualism relative to Spain.

On the other hand, even Spain leaned more toward individualism than the Inca, who they conquered in the same century. Under the Inca before the Spanish conquest, common people were so tooled and commoditized that they were forbidden to vary their diet or clothing from that of their neighbors [The Inca: A Socialist Empire, by Louis Baudin, 1961]:

[Incan Emperor] Pachacutec established and enforced sumptuary laws forbidding the hatunruna to eat anything but common fare or to wear clothing of fine wool, ornaments, or jewelry. The Indians were thus obliged to speak the same language, eat the same food, wear the same kind of clothing, follow the same mode of life, and worship in the same faith. The only break in this uniformity was the variety of insignia used to distinguish people of different provinces or different social rank. For the mass of the population it was a true leveling….

Not only were the Incas' subjects satisfied with very little food, but their manner of preparing and cooking it remained primitive, and they were forbidden to introduce any changes in their cuisine. Maize was eaten roasted or boiled, sometimes with a seasoning of herbs or red pepper; on exceptional occasions it served to make the bread and cakes for festivals and sacrifices.

In case you have not heard -- and I hope you have not -- there is a currently a rap song titled "Bitch Better Have My Money", out by artist Rihanna. The song title is often abbreviated in the press as BBHMM, but it is not abbreviated that way in the song's lyrics. I first heard it on the Tonight Show -- whose producers muted out certain obscenities and racial slurs, though they did air all 32 occurrences of the word 'bitch'.  

Even after Jay Leno took over, and then Jimmy Fallon, I always thought of Tonight as the Johnny Carson show, sans Johnny Carson. Now I think of it as the Bitch Better Have My Money show. So, that's nice.

As of this writing, Rihanna is the best selling digital artist of all time [source]. BBHMM has spent over four months on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #15. The song's chart performance is driven by a hit video, the storyline of which is as follows. A certain man has stolen money from our hero (played by Rihanna herself), or else borrowed it and not paid back. Rihanna and a crew of friends kidnap the man's wife -- who is nowhere implicated in the theft -- strip her naked, torture her, and sexually assault her. Then they murder the husband and take the money back, and then some. The kidnapper/killers dashingly evade a clueless clown of a police officer, and are portrayed unambiguously as a sympathetic heroes who get away with it all in a happy ending. 

Rihanna is black and the victims in the video are white. That might not mean anything towards the video's intended message, or it might. I wonder how Jon Stewart feels about it. My own opinion is that the video deliberately celebrates black-on-white violence; practically all viewers perceive that message; for many viewers it is a central theme; and many share in the celebration.

I googled "Bitch Better Have My Money Review", read the top ten pages, and compiled the opinions that appear. Some pages contain multiple reviews, one occurs on two different pages, and some contain no reviews, for a total of 20 opinions, commentaries, and synopses in the top 10 hits. By that measure, here is a breakdown the 20 most notable and visible opinions circulating about the video in the public consciousness:

Of 13 reviewers who gave or implied an overall opinion, 3 had strongly favorable opinions of the video, 7 had positive overall opinion, 2 thought it was mediocre, and 1 gave a strongly negative overall review. The other 7 reviews did not give or suggest an overall rating.

About 2/3 of reviewers drew attention to the gruesome violence in the video, about 1/3 noted that it could cause controversy, without expressing their own opinion, positive or negative.

About 1/3 of reviewers acknowledged that the video might be perceived as having racial overtones.

1 Reviewer, David Turner of pitchfork.com, gleefully extolled the racial hate theme in the video: "The video's black-ass revenge plot, becomes a turnt road trip and ends with Rihanna's face full of blood after enacting revenge on a bougie, wrinkly white dude. Undeserving whites were scrubbed out by black woman and her crew. *finger nails emoji*"

1 Reviewer, Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic, acknowledges the video as a story of black-on-white racial violence, but excuses this and gives the video a modestly favorable review. Kornhaber writes, "There’s a racial component here, too. It’s likely no accident that Rihanna’s riding with a multicultural female posse and that Roberts’s character inhabits one of the ultimate stereotypes of whiteness—the banker’s prissy wife." Kornhaber  excuses Riana's "bad behavior" by, for example,  comparing the kidnapping to what occurs in the movie Taken.

1 reviewer, Mike Wass of idolator.com (sic), said the content was offensive, and gave that as the reason for a strongly negative review. Wass wrote, "Glamorizing violence against women — not to mention torture and sexual assault — for the sake of VEVO views is a new low for the music industry”, and gave the video 0/10 stars.

In all, out of 20 reviewers, only one condemns the portrayal of kidnapping and assault of an innocent woman by sympathetic protagonists. Not one condemns the murder (whose victim, while not innocent, is coincidentally also not of an oppressed or supposedly oppressed class). Of the two reviewers who identify the story as one of racial violence, neither condemns that aspect: one (Turner) gives it a thumbs up, and one (Kornhaber) excuses it. Kornhaber's excuse is absurd, however; the kidnapping in the movie Taken was done by the villains and clearly characterized as an evil deed, and its remedy is a happy ending. In BBHMM, kidnapping, torture, and murder are the happy ending.

The most typical overall reaction to the video is a morally nonjudgmental description of Rihanna as a  bad ass. For example, JesSkolnik of pitchfork.com, writes:  

This entire song and video is about how one does not [mess around] with Rihanna, which is, any way you look at it, an incredibly bold assertion of power that deserves our respect and a deeper context than ‘is this feminist or not.

The Atlantic’s Kornaber's says

Being bad gets people to talk about her. Being sexy and violent does the same. She did not make this video to make the world a better place; she did it to project an image and get paid. Judging by the response, she’s succeeded on both counts.

and the Huffington Post's Zeba Blay calls the video “ballsy, edgy, explicit, and unapologetic". 

Now here it is. The most important things that can be said about this video are that (1) its supposed heroes are in the moral wrong, and (2) so are its authors for glorifying their behavior. To review the video and not say these things is a cowardly and sickening omission. There will always be that 5% who advocate out loud for the devil, and another 30-40% who do it slyly -- sinking their anesthetic fangs into the neck of a stupefied society. The question is what the rest of us do. If only only one voice in twenty pushes back while the rest sit as silent spectators to an epidemic of moral regression and racial hatred, then we are big trouble.

Zeba Blay of the Huffington Post gave a particularly interesting review, titled Rihanna’s BBHMM video is brilliant, terrifying, complicated. The word complicated is a red flag for me. Some things are complicated like the IRS tax code, and some things are complicated like the cause of the Civil War for an old Southern racist. When one wishes hard not to see the plain truth in front of their eyes, and has to think in twisted rings around it,  it’s complicated. 

Police officers are trained to recognize that when people who are lying or concealing things tend to direct our attention toward complication and obscurity, while truthful people speak straight to the point. For example:

Questioner: Do you have any idea who might have stolen the $300 from the cash register?

Truthful suspect: My guess, if I had to guess, would be the new guy, Dave. It never happened before, and everyone else has been here at least a year. Also, could have been the manager himself. He has a history of drug use. Anyway, what I do know is that I didn't do it.

Lying suspect: I mean, it could have been a lot of people. So many people are in and out of there, you know? You can never tell.

That you can never tell is a liar's greatest hope, and so he draws our attention toward complications, and magnifies issues of confusion, contradiction, and ignorance. In her review, Ms. Blay writes,

This video isn't about feminism, and yet it is about feminism. It isn't about race, and yet it's so very much about race... [and it] says brilliant, terrifying, and complicated things about race and gender.

On August 8, 2015, 19 year old Christian Taylor drove his car through the glass doors of a car dealership in Arlington, TX. Police arrived on the scene treating the incident as a burglary. According to police sources, "Officers established a perimeter and approached the suspect inside. As officers confronted the suspect, there was an altercation during which at least one officer discharged his weapon". Christian Taylor died at the scene. 

The incident made national news. USA Today's headline for the event was Texas officer on burglary call shoots unarmed black teen. The first sentence of the USA Today story begins, A white officer-in-training shot and killed an unarmed college football player... 

The prominent mention of the race is typical today in cases where whites kill or assault blacks -- though not so much vice versa. Some commentators have noticed this with suspicion. In reference to the shooting of Michael Brown, for example, Fox contributor Linda Chaves remarked, This mantra of the unarmed black teenager shot by a white cop. You know, that description in and of itself actually colors the way in which we look at this story. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart responded sarcastically:

Yes, Describing the actual facts of the case really does color the way we look at it. 'White cop shoots unarmed black teen' does sound terrible. Whereas, say, 'hero cop kills alien hunting humans for sport' would put a completely different spin on things.

Stewart draws attention to the distinction between true and false statements, so that if Ms. Chavez doesn't like the "mantra", then she must prefer a false one, say, about space aliens. What Stewart draws attention away from, however, is that there are other possible true descriptions, and that it matters which one is used. Michael Brown could be described as an unarmed black teen, and he also could also be described as a 6'4", 289 pound violent felon. Darren Wilson could be described as a white police officer, and he could also be  described simply as a police officer. My point in this article is that the choice matters, and it is right to hold authors to account for such choices. I am not saying Chavez is right; I am saying that it is disingenuous to counter her objection by saying that Brown was unarmed, teen, and that black, and Darren Wilson was white.

When we see a dog chasing a rabbit, they represent their respective classes of dog and rabbit -- and their interaction can inform us about those between dogs and rabbits generally. On the other hand, when a tan dog interacts with a grey dog, it is essentially an interaction between two dogs. Their basic roles in the event are not primarily a matter of color. Now if someone saw a tan dog bite a grey dog and reported it as tan dog bites grey dog, and then they saw a grey dog bite a tan dog, and reported it as dog bites dog, and they did this 90 times out of 100, you couldn’t say they were lying, exactly -- but you couldn’t say they were telling the truth, exactly, either. They are trying to sell something, and also trying not to look like they are selling it.

Here is the thing. We do not want to waste people's time, and they do not want their time to be wasted. So when I talk to you, I do my best to fill the space with the information you most need to know. You do this too, and we expect each other to do it as part of the social contract. If you were to ask how's the weather, and someone told you it is a little bit cool, and then you stepped outside into a rainstorm, it would be a breech of this clause in the social contract. They didn’t lie -- exactly, but there is a definite sense in which they have violated your trust, and you would rightly trust them less in the future.

When USA Today leads with the race of the officer and suspect in their first 11 words, they are saying something. What they are saying is that these are among the facts you most need to know, in order to understand the meaning of the story. They are saying that this incident should be understood in primarily in racial terms. I am not saying it shouldn't; maybe it should. What I'm saying is that the USA Today article clearly, if almost silently, claims should, and that they are therefore accountable for making the claim.  

More generally, commentators and journalists are responsible for what they say, what they do not say, what they draw attention to, and what they draw attention away from. By virtue of what they focus on, speakers and writers make implicit. but clear claims about what is important and what is not; and someone who draws our attention away from important things, toward what they want us to see and think about to further their own agenda, is deceiving us. This deception can be as devilish as an out-and-out lie. Indeed, it is more devilish, in the sense that it is exactly how the Devil himself would operate.

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?... For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

That was true, too. This more than half, of how modern devils do it -- from Mao Tse Tung to Kim Jong Il. Stewart's shtick about aliens does not seem so funny if we think carefully about that. 

When Stewart calls a particular one-sentence description the facts of the case, as if the only alternative were fiction, he is sliding an agenda across the table, hidden under a sardonic smile. He comes forward about the agenda a few minutes later, though:

Do you not understand that life in this country is inherently different for white people and black people?...  This isn’t about just one man killed in one town. It’s about how people of color, no matter their socio-economic standing, face obstacles in this country with surprising grace... I guarantee you that every person of color in this country has faced an indignity, from the ridiculous to the grotesque to the sometimes fatal, at some point in -- their-I’m gonna say -- last couple of hours. Race there, and it is a constant.

Moral reasoning is normative reasoning about value systems -- that is, reasoning about which value systems are better than which. From the standpoint of utilitarianism, better values are those that better facilitate human well being, in ways and to degrees that reasonable people (or at least the participants to the conversation) can clearly identify when they actually experience them.

The values of a society, like the values of a person, come in clusters that tend to be constrained by certain laws. Regarding individuals, for example, an American who favors strict gun regulation is more likely than average to also favor an expansive welfare state; etc. Societies operate under similar laws. There is a cluster of symptoms that emerge from the underlying cultural trait of truthfulness, and a corresponding cluster that emerge from its opposite, as discussed over the past few articles. Previously articles have discussed a cluster of symptoms that predictably adhere around a empiricism, in contrast with its opposite rationalism. Likewise, we have seen that there is a cluster of symptoms that adhere around a culture of individualism, by contrast with its opposite collectivism.

If we want to change a culture, or understand how cultures change, it is important to identify such fundamental cultural characteristics, together with the visible effects that emerge from them, in various combinations and circumstances. Since value systems are constrained in this way, an actual society cannot have just any system of values; and one aspect of moral reasoning is the identification of the constraints that exist on value systems, by identifying fundamental cultural characteristics -- such as truthfulness, empiricism, and individualism -- and their emergent cultural effects.

The second aspect of moral reasoning is to determine the eventual effects of various possible value systems, in terms of how they impact the individual well being of the people who live under their influence. Knowledge of history and geography play a crucial role in this, but it is rather tricky business. For one thing, societies are complex things and it is difficult to isolate variables and their effects. For most people, though, I believe the biggest problem is this: it is challenging to grasp what it would be like to live in another society. What was it like to live in the Inca empire? What was it like to live in the 50's in Montgomery, and be black? What was it like to live in Imperial Japan? The Soviet Union? What is it like to live in Singapore? or in Iran? What is it like to be a Christian in Pakistan, or northeastern Nigeria?

People are, of course, used to where they live -- and they think of extremes in the context of what they know. Bad things, of every sort, happen in every society -- but it matters to mind the place of these complaints in a global historical context. Having to ride in the back of the bus is an outrage in its fashion; but having to ride in the back of the bus to a concentration camp is another thing. Being audited by the IRS for your political beliefs is an outrage in its fashion, being beaten with a pipe for them is another thing; and being shot in the back of the head by the secret police is another. Twenty people being shot is different from twenty thousand, and so is the general terror it brings about in a society.

A truthful person is one who values truth, and sees it as lying inherently outside of himself and outside of humanity. A truthful person is reluctant to lie, cheat or steal -- but truthfulness is not merely the absence of such transgressions. Truthfulness is a positive value that inoculates its possessor against against lying, cheating, and stealing, and also drives openness, transparency, humility, courage, and resoluteness.

Truthfulness, especially as a cultural characteristic, is a highly abstract notion; but we can illustrate the value of truthfulness by discussing certain concrete symptoms of its absence within a community. In fact, that has been the goal of the last several articles. Major symptoms of untruthfulness include the following:

high rates of crime and factional violence

rampant abuse of office

the devaluation of women (sometimes including formal or informal polygamy)

intellectual and technological stagnation

Untruthfulness within a culture also tends to have other more minor, but also noticeable symptoms:

gossip -- gossip is virulent and plays a major role in the society.

puffery -- cultural conventions allowing that, under certain circumstances, people are not even expected to mean what they say.

materialism -- extreme value placed on the appearance of wealth through display of possessions.

shallowness --  a culture of boasting and bragging. reluctance to change one's mind, reluctance to apologize for missteps, etc., all as if one has the power to change unflattering truths by denying them.

nepotism -- the appropriation of leadership positions based on connection with those already in power

These symptoms, while perhaps seeming various and sundry, tend to occur in clusters together among world cultures and subcultures. That is, they form what physicians call a syndrome. For someone who has noticed that these symptoms occur together, and wondered why, the identification of the cultural trait of truthfulness is an important discovery -- an a-ha experience. It is an important one because symptoms of a syndrome are best treated by discovering the underlying pathogen. Policies that aim to lessen crime, or elevate women, or stimulate innovation, may have some effect or even substantial effect -- but they are a an uphill trudge when implemented against the current of endemic disregard for the truth. 

The Medieval period in Europe is sometimes referred to as the “dark ages”. We have seen that by comparison with today, it was a time of rampant crime and murder, but the “darkness” refers to something else: intellectual stagnation. While it would be naive to think there were no great books written in the Middle Ages, it would be blind to to ignore that there was something terribly wrong with the pace of progress, by contrast either with the classical period that preceded it, or the Renaissance that followed. On an intellectual timeline, the dark ages were the meat of a giant crap sandwich.

It it unlikely that human brainpower itself devolved with the fall of Rome. So what changed, and then changed again, that had such a dramatic effect on the pace of discovery? It is an important question, because if we do not know the underlying bases of stagnation and progress, we cannot know which one we are slipping toward. We should not rest on the assumption that whatever it is that nourishes a culture of progress will be self sustaining. It has not been in the past, hence the Middle Ages. 

Aristotle wrote that the speed of an object, falling through a given medium (such as air, or water), is proportional to the object's weight, and this teaching was accepted until the time of the early Enlightenment. In his 1638 dialog Two New Sciences, Galileo wrote

In the first case, he [Aristotle] supposes bodies of different weight to move in one and the same medium with different speeds which stand to one another in the same ratio as the weights; so that, for example, a body which is ten times as heavy as another will move ten times as rapidly as the other.

This statement comes from the mouth of Simplicio, who represents Galileo's early beliefs, based on from the common academic sense of the time. The character of Salviati, who represents Galileo's mature beliefs formed after experimentation and reflection, speaks as follows:

Aristotle says that an iron ball of one hundred pounds falling from a height of one hundred cubits reaches the ground before a one-pound ball has fallen a single cubit. I say that they arrive at the same time.  You find, on making the experiment, that the larger outstrips the smaller by two finger-breadths.

We now know, of course, that Salviati was correct, and this is one of several fundamental respects in which Aristotelian physics was uprooted and replaced during the Enlightenment. Aristotle has sometimes been cast as a villain who held back physics for two millennia, but it was not Aristotle alone, or even mostly, who held back physics; every supposed scientist from Aristotle up until Galileo, who accepted the proposition without so much as the mention of a physical test, was a co-conspirator. From the standpoint of modern science, or even post-Enlightenment common sense, one is tempted to ask, What the Hell were they thinking?

The problem, actually, is not what they were thinking, but how they were thinking. The players in the story had as much brain power as any of us do; and Aristotle's theory is confirmed by casually remembered observations -- say, of falling feathers versus falling stones. But it does not stand up to any degree of systematic physical investigation. Aristotle's mistake, then, was to rely too heavily on the aspects of reason that lay entirely within himself. That is, he must have thought very hard, but he must not have looked very hard. Such rationalism is reminiscent of early German logicians' failure to attend to the meanings of mathematical propositions, discussed in an earlier article. One might say that Aristotle's mistake was to idolize himself. The mistake of the Medieval thinkers, in any case, was to idolize Aristotle.

In 1600, just before the onset of the Enlightenment, Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for the following crimes:

holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers;

holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation;

holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as Christ;

holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus;

holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and Mass;

claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity;

believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes;

dealing in magics and divination.

Bruno was convicted, in the large, of having the wrong beliefs -- including, in particular,  the beliefs that the sun was a star, and that other stars might harbor planets and life. In reading the charges against him carefully, note that these beliefs were held to be wrong, not because they were contrary to fact, but because they were contrary to the beliefs of anointed persons and institutions. The modern reader will think I have misused the word wrong, but the point is that the archaic reader would not. What we feel it means for an idea to be right or wrong has changed, and the pace of discovery has changed with it. The reason the Medieval thinkers did not discover the errors of Aristotle was same the reason they did not discover much at all.

A most direct manifestation of the might makes right mindset in Medieval Europe was trial by combat, which is precisely what it sounds like. For example, according to the Lex Alamannorum (code of Germanic law), if two clans raised a dispute about the boundary between their lands, a trial was held where a representative of each clan would thrust his sword into the disputed ground and swear ownership. The swords were then used for their usual purpose, which settled who was in the right.  

Depiction of a trial by combat,painted by Jorg Breu the Younger, 1540′s

Transformative discovery and invention are not things everyone can do, and not things anyone can do every day. They are extraordinary feats, which require extraordinary sensitivity to the evidence that reveals them them -- evidence that occurs, almost by definition, in subtle forms and unexpected places. Now here is the thing: one cannot, at the same time, habitually ascent to being told what to think, or otherwise forced what to think, and maintain an independent intellectual compass with the sensitivity required for deep innovation. As Turing Award laureate Judea Pearl, said 

What Galileo showed us is that you cannot truly search for the truth unless you are free to rebel against the detractors of truth: conventional wisdom, peer pressure, sacred cows, wishful thinking, revered authority and hidden agenda, in short, free to perceive yourself as an agent in control of your destiny, not an object, at the mercy of destiny. [University of Toronto Commencement Address, June 21, 2007]

In a sociology course at Auburn University, I was taught that the shift from hunting-and-gathering to agriculture resulted in a corresponding transition from pastoral peacefulness to the origin of war. No anthropological or historical evidence was given, and I now this is the opposite of the truth; but it is a common myth, and it made sense at the time. The instructor explained that when people had no surplus food, very little personal property, and no use for arable land, there was nothing to steal that was worth the risks of a war or a raid. 

This young instructor had apprehended one very important law of the jungle: you become a target for violence when you possess more than you can defend. But he had missed another: absent a strong sense of moral equality and firm rule of law , women tend to be treated as chattel, and are often targets for kidnapping and sexual slavery. In fact, in some societies marriage is indistinguishable form sexual slavery. Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, observes that among modern stone age people, the most common objective in warfare is to literally steal another tribe's or clan's women. Polygamy and arranged marriage are also common in these societies, and the picture in general is that women and girls are a commodity.

This only stands to reason. In a stone age society, absent both Sam Colt and the rule of law, big men tend to rule. The word for chieftain in many tribal languages literally means "big man", and most of them are, in fact, big men. Smaller men tend have less power, and women tend to have incomparably less still, all by simple reason of the threat of physical violence. For a picture of how that might go, consider the comments of Rachel Plummer, who was kidnapped by Comanche Indians at age seventeen: Anyone who said that a good woman died before being violated had not been forced to run naked, tied by a rope to a horse for a day or two in the sun [T. R. Fehrenback: Comanches, The Destruction of a People, 1974].

The reason men are physically larger than women in the first place -- a phenomenon technically known as sexual size dimorphism -- seems to be that the reproductive success of males is tied to their ability to fight each other over females. Generally speaking, varying degree of size dimorphism among different mammal species are strongly correlated with variance in reproductive success -- or, to put it more straightforwardly, variance in harem size among males [Lindenfors, et. al. Sexual size dimorphism in mammals, p.21]. For example, male spotted seals, who are typically monogamous, are only 10% larger than females -- while male lions, who typically have either zero mates, or an average a harem of 5-6 female mates at once, are about 50% larger than female lions. These are fairly representative of the general trend among species, which suggests that sexual size dimorphism is tied to the variability of reproductive success. But among mammal species, males are typically (though not always) larger even species that mate in essentially monogamous pairs; in most of these species, males are observed to fight for more attractive mates rather than more mates. 

Humans are no exception to this zoological trend.  As noted in an earlier essay, Erik Von Markevik notes that the essential attractor to women is to be an alpha male; and in jungle terms, alpha male largely means big male. Little wonder men are big.

Why would men fight over women? This could happen for either of two reasons, or a combination of both: either women choose the winners of fights, and/or else in primitive cultures the women have nothing to say about it, and the victors are in position to take whom they please. History points to a strong measure of the latter on the latter. In the Iliad, Book II, Nestor encourages the Greeks to take to  battle as follows:

For the mighty son of Saturn surely promised that we should succeed, when we Argives set sail to bring death and destruction upon the Trojans. He showed us favourable signs by flashing his lightning on our right hands; therefore let none make haste to go till he has first lain with the wife of some Trojan, and avenged the toil and sorrow that he has suffered for the sake of Helen....

To which Agamemnon, high king of the Greeks, replies,

Nestor, you have again outdone the sons of the Achaeans in counsel. Would, by Father Jove, Minerva, and Apollo, that I had among them ten more such councillors, for the city of King Priam would then soon fall beneath our hands, and we should sack it.

No one, in the poem or in the contemporaneous audience, asked what the Trojan women would have to say about being lain with. It was taken for granted that no one would have anything to say about it, except perhaps what the Trojan men said with their spears. And the Greeks are not bad guys here; they are protagonists.

Around the same time we find, in Numbers 31 (King James translation):

Moses spake unto the people, saying, Arm some of yourselves unto the war, and let them go against the Midianites, and avenge the Lord of Midian.

...And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males.

...And the booty, being the rest of the prey which the men of war had caught, was six hundred thousand and seventy thousand and five thousand sheep. And threescore and twelve thousand beeves.  And threescore and one thousand asses. And thirty and two thousand persons in all, of women that had not known man by lying with him.

We have a good idea how these captive girls were handled, because the book of Deuteronomy gives fairly specific instructions (Deuteronomy 21: 10-13, NLT):

Suppose you go out to war against your enemies and the Lord your God hands them over to you, and you take some of them as captives. And suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you are attracted to her and want to marry her. If this happens, you may take her to your home, where she must shave her head, cut her nails,  and change the clothes she was wearing when she was captured. She will stay in your home, but let her mourn for her father and mother for a full month. Then you may marry her, and you will be her husband and she will be your wife.

The text does not say, in a word, that the Hebrews raped the 32,000 virgins that they captured as spoils of war. In fact, it couldn't possibly say that. The word rape does not occur once in the King James bible, because there was no Hebrew word specifically for rape. The concept of rape rests on the modern Western more that women have the moral authority to say 'yes' or 'no'. But not everyone society shares that view. To the ancient Hebrews, as to the ancient Greeks, as to many primitive people still living today, the notion of “raping” a woman makes no more sense than the notion of "stealing” wool from a sheep. If it is your sheep, either because you bought it, stole it, or captured it wild, and if it doesn't want to be shorn and you have to hold it down by the neck to take some wool off, then it's just a minor nuisance of a stubborn sheep. On a moral level, it is not an incident worth giving a name to.

We do not have to look at ancient history, or at the isolated peoples of remote islands and jungles, to see this primitive sentiment. Rapper DMX, who has been nominated for three Grammy awards and three American Music Awards, and won "Favorite Rap Artist" at the 2000 American Music Awards, sings,

Tryin’ to send the bitch back to her maker

And if you got a daughter older then 15, I’mma rape her

Take her on the living room floor, right there in front of you

Then ask you seriously, whatchu wanna do?”

and, in a separate work,

Night time is the right time for creepin

Vandalize your crib, rape your wife while she’s sleepin'

The group Da Mafia 6ix, the first rap group to win an Academy Award for best original song ("It's Hard out there for a pimp", 2005, from the movie Hustle & Flow), wrote

I had to rape his bitch cause the hoe was stacked

I f*d her from the back, with my gun to her back

The 1991 Columbia Pictures film  Boys in the Hood, which took in $57.5 million dollars at the box office, and was reviewed favorably by 93% of viewers 96% of critics [source],  features the following dialogue:

SHALIKA: - You tell me this, nigga. How you know God's a He? He could be a She. You don't know that.

DOUGHBOY: For one thing, you don't know what the f* I be m*f* knowing. I read about this shit when I was in the pen. It was this book, right, and it was telling life in the perspective if God was a bitch. Said if God was a bitch, there wouldn't be no nuclear bombs, no wars,...because that ain't in a bitch's nature.

SHALIKA: Why every time you talk about a female you say bitch or whore or hootchie?

DOUGHBOY: Because that's what you are.

“Doughboy”, played by rapper Ice Cube, is the main protagonist of the film.

In response to criticism about lines like these, rappers and screenwriters often say that they are just relating life the 'hood, or satirizing it, or joking, etc. But the fact is, as an artist, when you relate life in the 'hood or anywhere else, or even when you tell a joke, you relate it in a way that either glorifies or condemns aspects of the story that are important to you. These sentiments are woven between the lines, but they are felt by the artist and the audience just as clearly, or more clearly, than if they were put directly into words. It is as clear as the color of the sky that the songs and movies above, and slews of others like them, glorify rape devalue women. I would have more respect for the rappers if they weren’t so weaselly about their message -- you can't get lower than having no morals and no balls.

In its view of women, the poetry of tribal warfare has not changed in 3000 years, and probably in 30,000; and the sentiments that surround it are the same in Papua New Guinea as in Highland Park, Michigan. What has changed is that the abject devaluation of women is no longer mainstream in the Western world. But if the Academy Awards, American Music Awards, and Grammys are an indication, it is starting to become mainstream again -- and the lesson of history, as well as geography, are that there is no limit to how far this can go if we tolerate it.

The most extreme manifestation of the devaluation of women is female infanticide, and this has been an accepted practice in many world cultures. It was, until recently, common among the Inuit Eskimos, who felt that the time spent nursing a female baby would delay the mother’s next opportunity to bear a son [MJ Chapman “ Infanticide and fertility among Eskimos: a computer simulation; American Journal of Physical Anthropology Vol 53(2), 317-327, 1980] .  In India, daughters are sometimes killed to avoid the eventual payment of dowries; British colonial governors reported numerous cases of this, and similar reports persist today. In Pakistan in 2010, CNN reported that 1200 dead baby girls were found to have been “dumped” by their parents [Sayah, Reza (20 July 2011). "Killing of infants on the rise in Pakistan". CNN] -- and those are just the ones that were found. 

Aside from anecdotes and discovered bodies, how widespread is female infanticide in Asia? There are about 105 girls born for every 100 boys, and in Europe and North America there are a little more than 105 women for every 100 men. But in South Asia, West Asia, China, and India there fewer women than men, in total numbers that suggest about 100 million missing girls [Sen, 1990]. The ratios by country line up roughly with the anecdotes and rumors of female infanticide, including 50 million “missing” girls in China alone -- which tells us what probably happened to them.   Female infanticide in China is often blamed on their “one child” policy, though the government says the problem is a throwback to Feudal times. In any case, it cannot be the one-child policy alone that is to blame for specifically female infanticide; it is that policy in the context of moral disregard for women and girls. The number of missing girls in Asia today, around 100,000,000,  is roughly equal to the total female population of the United States in 1970 -- so the situation in Asia today could be accurately described endemic gynocide. 

If we ask why this is happening, it is again the wrong question. The right question is not what drives the devaluation of women, which has been the unquestioned norm in most times and places of the world, but what elevates and liberates women. The answer is respect for all people as sovereign moral agents. If that sounds familiar, it is because it is the same principle that weighs in against both aristocracy and spurious interpersonal violence (as discussed in the previous article). Below are graphs showing the historical decline in homicide rates, and the rise of women’s voting rights, in the US.

This phenomenon is not limited to America. Women's suffrage blossomed globally and suddenly in the 20'th century, simultaneous with the bottoming out of violence worldwide. If we think, not in terms of causes of violence and (which also is the natural historic norm), but the causes of peace and safety, then we must ask what key thing going up over time. When that something reached a certain threshold, women suddenly got the vote in country after country -- like popcorn that has reached 400 degrees. Respect for individual human sovereignty explains both the trend toward peacefulness and women’s rights.

God made some men big, and some men small, but Sam Colt made them all equal.  

Sayings like the one above gained popularity in America after the Civil War, in reference to Lt. Col. Samuel Colt, who patented revolver in 1836 and established Colt Manufacturing Company in 1855. We will see, though, that it is not quite the case.

During a battle to secure the French Decauville rail line during World War I, corporal (later sergeant) Alvin York found himself out of ammunition in his rifle, and at the same moment charged by six German soldiers. York drew his Colt model 1911 pistol and began firing. He had no more than eight rounds to score telling hits on multiple aggressive, moving targets in a matter of seconds. York downed all six men.

To put this feat of combat shooting in perspective, one study observed NYPD officers missing 72% of their combat shots overall, including even the majority of shots taken from distances inside of two yards -- and this better than average.  Reports vary from around 10% to around 50% hit rates (not miss rates), with a median  around 20%, for various departments in various years nationwide. Jim Cirillo estimates the chance of an average shooter scoring a hit with a handgun in combat at 25 yards is less than 5% [Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights, p. 29]; so 25 yards is extreme range for a handgun. On the other hand, once the attackers were inside 25 yards, at full run, York would have had only about 3 seconds to react. The vast majority of shooters, including police officers, cannot fire three accurate shots at a stationary paper target in that time. 

The most decorated combat soldier in US history was Lt. Audie Leon Murphy. Murphy’s citation for the medal of honor, earned for actions in Colmar Pocket, France, in 1945, reads as follows:

2d Lt. Murphy commanded Company B, which was attacked by 6 tanks and waves of infantry. 2d Lt. Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to prepared positions in a woods, while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, 1 of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from 3 sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2d Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad which was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued the single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack which forced the Germans to withdraw. His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. 2d Lt. Murphy's indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction, and enabled it to hold the woods which had been the enemy's objective.

Heraclitus wrote that of every hundred men in battle, ten do most of the fighting; but there is one who is a warrior, and it is he who brings the others home. Audy Murphy was the one. He stood 5′5″ and weighed 112 pounds. Colt may have changed the game, but he did not make us all equal. 

What makes big men and small men systematically unequal, in  a certain range of circumstances at least, is the possibility that their transaction will come to blows. But while this still matters, it matters less today than it ever has; and it is not mainly because of firearms. By every measure available, interpersonal violence has been falling steadily ever since measurements have been possible, and most likely long before that. 

In the words of Steven Pinker, the decline in violence, in America and worldwide, is a "Fractal Phenomenon"; it can be seen on multiple time scales: millennia, centuries, and decades. For evidence on homicide rates of ancient stone age peoples, we can look at homicide rates among modern stone age peoples. The observed rates for several tribes from South America and the Pacific are shown below, and compared with those of 20th century US and Europe . These numbers include deaths from both state warfare and murder, and the US/Europe figure includes deaths from both world wars [Lawrence Keeley: War Before Civilization, 1996] .

On a scale of centuries, we have more accurate measurements.  Based on records kept by municipalities, counties, provinces, and nations,  criminologist Manuel Eisner estimated the murder rates in Europe from the middle ages through the mid 20′th century as follows [ "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime", Crime & Just. 83 (2003)]

During the period of sharply declining murder rates from about 1475 to 1950, deaths from interstate conflicts (i.e., war) held steady at roughly 5 per 100,000 [Max Roser: War and Peace before 1945 ], but remained a much smaller threat to human life than criminal murder for almost all of that time. Starting in 1945, war deaths began fall precipitously as well [source]. 

The fact is that we live in, by far, the most peaceful of all times, as the result of a systematic decline in violence throughout human history and prehistory. I submit that what made this peace was the idea, taking ever deeper root over time, that belligerence is wrong, because (other) people are sovereign moral agents. 

The medieval Saxons certainly did not have this idea. Note the opening lines of Beowulf [translation by Lesslie Hall]:

     Lo! the Spear-Danes' glory through splendid achievements          The folk-kings' former fame we have heard of,          How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle.          Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers         From many a people their mead-benches tore.          Since first he found him friendless and wretched,          The earl had had terror: comfort he got for it,          Waxed 'neath the welkin, world-honor gained,          Till all his neighbors o'er sea were compelled to       Bow to his bidding and bring him their tribute:          An excellent atheling!

To paraphrase, the noble Scyld was found an orphan, but later rose to greatness: making war on all neighboring countries, driving their citizens in terror from their drinking tables,  and forcing them to pay tribute; now there was a great king!

Neither did the iron age Greeks [from Homer’s Iliad, book II]:

Nestor: For the mighty son of Saturn surely promised that we should succeed, when we Argives set sail to bring death and destruction upon the Trojans... 

Agamemnon: Nestor, you have again outdone the sons of the Achaeans in counsel. Would, by Father Jove, Minerva, and Apollo, that I had among them ten more such councillors, for the city of King Priam would then soon fall beneath our hands, and we should sack it.

How do you think men would act, who, rather than pulling their eyebrows together, grunt with empathy on reading these lines? And how did we get from there to here? Pinker describes the transition as follows: 

You can see [the trend of decreasing violence] over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years, although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century. One sees it all over the world, although not homogeneously. It's especially evident in the West, beginning with England and Holland around the time of the Enlightenment.

One thing Enlightenment England and Holland had in common, aside from domestic tranquility, was their early rise from totalitarian aristocracy toward republicanism (small 'r', not big 'R'), based on their early adoption of Protestant Christianity. The idea that one man is not entitled to capriciously force another is fundamental here -- whether the would-be force comes from physical strength, skill at arms, or supposed noble birth. In the 20′th century, this was a major theme of the theme of the Nuremberg trials (what might Scyld say to the charge of initiating and waging wars of aggression?), which were a watershed event in international law, and occurred precisely at the inflection point of international violence. The advent of nuclear weapons may have been a factor -- but if there had been a sole nuclear power in the world under the moral axioms of 1450 instead of 1950, the result would have been the exact opposite of global detente. Moreover, nuclear weapons do not explain why war deaths continued a strong downward trend even long after the establishment of global nuclear armament. 

The idea that belligerence is wrong seems like common sense to most readers, and many find it difficult to imagine normal people who do not feel so. The fact is that people have not felt so, as strongly and broadly as we do, except very recently and beginning rather locally. The global ascendancy of such peaceful values, and of peace itself, occurred bound together in both time and place; and one explains the other so naturally that the burden of proof should be on those who posit other explanations. What has made us equal has more to do with Samuel Adams than Samuel Colt: respect for one another as sovereign moral agents. As this vision has unfolded through history, it bought with it an evolution in the laws by which we resolve our conflicts of interest: from the law of the jungle, to the law of noble birth, to the law of individual human rights under a higher moral power.

In their 1990 paper "Causes of Crime",  [Campbell, Anne, and S. Muncer.  Criminal Justice and Behavior 17 (1990): 410-419],  psychologists Ann Campbell and and Steven Muncer report the results of surveys where ordinary people (i.e., not criminologists) were asked their opinions on the chief causes of crime. The top ten answers given were:

poverty

broken families

lack of education

unemployment

peer pressure

bad neighborhoods

racism

race

criminal opportunity

overcrowding

This is a common question, and these are common answers, by experts and laymen alike. I believe they are all wrong answers, and more importantly, it is the wrong question.

I believe the right answer is that the chief causes of crime are dishonesty and contempt for the law. More importantly, the right question is not what makes some people commit crimes, but what makes some people not commit crimes. The answer to that, conversely, is decency and respect for the law -- that is, a commitment to do right, along with a belief that it is normally right to follow the law.

The reason this is the right question is that decency and respect for the law do not exist without deliberate cultivation. That is, criminal temperament is not essentially the presence of something, but the absence of something. A wolf does not, for one second, question the justice of taking a kill from a weaker wolf, or of copulating with an unwilling female; and neither would a boy who was raised by wolves. The difference between a boy and a wolf is that the boy has an innate capacity to learn law and justice; but this learning takes some doing, both by the boy and those around him -- and the chief cause of crime, if one must look at it that way, consists of them not doing it.

If a farmer does not plant and water his fields, he will get no crops. Should he then look for cause of his fields’ barrenness? Should he seek out barren fields, and catalog and study them to see what disease they have? Of course a barren field has no pathology. Rows of corn and cotton, like lawful citizens, have to be cultivated. Empty fields and children, by Grace, are both open to cultivation -- but if the requisite work is not done, then all we get it brush and jungle, and the laws of the brush and jungle -- and it is a little bit odd to ask why. 

It is well known that fatherlessness is correlated with crime. Dave Kopel summarizes a study by Ann Hill and June O’neill, which compared criminality in males from two-parent versus single mother homes, controlling for income, neighborhood, and parental education [source]: 

Almost 70 percent of juveniles incarcerated in state reform institutions come from homes with no father or without their natural parents. Most gang members, 60 percent of rapists, and 75 percent of teenage homicide perpetrators come from single-parent homes. Young black males from single parent families are twice as likely to engage in crime as young black males from two-parent families. If the single-parent family is in a neighborhood with a large number of other single-parent families, the odds of the young man becoming involved in crime are tripled. 

I believe, however, that it is more enlightening to look at the correlation from a glass-half-full perspective.  Good parenting instills respect for the law, both through deliberate teaching and by example. Of course it does. Good parenting is easier for two than for one. Of course it is. And setting an example for a boy comes more naturally for a man than for a woman. Of course it does. There is nothing unexpected and no magic here -- once we think in terms of explaining lawfulness rather than explaining crime. 

That is not to say the justice system is unnecessary. Au contraire, it is absolutely necessary, because our cultivation of lawfulness is bound to be imperfect. As Thomas Paine wrote,

Were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest. 

Law enforcement is needed to keep a lid on things -- but police are indeed the lid of law and order, and not the  vessel. No one knows better than the cops that what makes their job manageable is, as one officer put it, that 99% of people, 99% of the time, obey the law in the first place (that is basically a quote from an article written by a cop, but I can't find the source now).

Another officer recalled that when he dealt with drug gangs, he was usually outnumbered, and in those circumstances he used to always ask himself the same question, "Why don't they jump us?". The answer, he eventually decided, was respect for the law. From what I gather, officers feel (rightly) that this is what makes their job tolerably safe and doable. That is to say, law enforcement officers stand between us and danger, and respect for the law stands between them danger -- danger that would otherwise be severe and continuous on both counts.

Absent respect for the law, and for the role of police as agents of the law, being fined is the same as being robbed; being arrested is the same as being kidnapped; and being pulled over is the same as being run off the road. Of course, people who feel that way are going to be hostile if not violent towards police; and to the degree that attitude reigns, policing becomes unsafe. When policing becomes unsafe, it becomes less efficient and less effective. Incidents that could have been handled by one or two officers now require five or six. Even when officers are available, many incidents that could have called for investigation or intervention have to now be passed over, in deference to the better part of valor. Every incident requires more caution,  more involved procedures, more paperwork, more equipment, and more men. But, as a rule, the breakdown of respect for law does not garner more resources for enforcement -- and so it has the same effect as cutting law enforcement personnel, and, at the same time, increasing their per-person work load, not to mention stress load.

All else being equal; the effects of less efficient policing are easy to predict. But when inefficient policing is the result of eroding lawfulness, all else is far from equal, because now fewer people obey the law in the first place. It is as if the dam cracks open at the very moment the river rises over it.

It is no secret that respect for the law, and for law enforcement, has eroded over the past 12 months in America's inner cities. A person who is engaged in their communities does not even need to check the news to see this; you can see and feel it happening. To the degree that respect for the law is its main vessel, a rise in crime is the predicted effect. Nation-wide statistics will not be available until the FBI compiles them for 2015, which will be well into 2016 or later. But data is available comparing homicide rates in the five largest US cities, for the first half of 2015 vs. the same period of 2014 [Note: I use homicide data because it is most easily available, and is reported fairly consistently between jurisdictions. I used to top 5 cities because 5 is a round number and they are most likely to be available. Statistics are linked to their sources]:

New York: Up 11%

Los Angeles : Down 2%

Chicago: Up 19%

Houston: Up 43%

Philadelphia: Up 5%

Note that while Los Angeles saw  a 2% drop in murder, they have seen an increase in every other kind of violent crime, with a 13% increase in violent crime overall for the first half of this year [source]. Also, St. Louis and Baltimore, epicenters of the recent tension between law enforcement and inner city residents, have seen increased homicide rates by 60% and 33% respectively [source]. All in all, we are seeing, clearly and strongly, what we would sadly expect to see under the prevailing cultural circumstances.

There are things that should be noted here. First, the enmity between the police and American poor, especially poor blacks, is not entirely the fault of the poor and/or black. As Oliver Goldsmith said, The law grinds the poor, and I am sad to say this is particularly true in the United States. I will devote an article to the topic later, but the thrust is that our justice system is essentially inhumane; and if you have ever gotten crosswise of it, or known someone who has, this requires no argument. In my experience, usually, it is not the police who are the problem -- but they are in the unfortunate position of being the face and arms of the problem. In any case, my point here is not to place blame; it is to explain and report the practical consequences of our level of respect for the law, regardless of blame or credit.

Second, there is an important difference between respecting the law and idolizing the state. The difference is whether the moral force of the law is innate or derivative. If the moral force of law derives from a power outside of and above the state, then that moral force is nullified when man-made law comes into clear and decided conflict with the purposes of that higher power. On the other hand, if obeying the laws of the state is the very essence of duty -- as it was for, say, the Inca or the Imperial Japanese -- then civil disobedience becomes inherently wrong under all circumstances.

In summary, criminality is not the presence of something, but the absence of something; so our thinking will be more to the point if, instead of the causes of crime, we ask for the causes of lawfulness. The causes of lawfulness are outstandingly simple: honesty, and respect for the law. Barack Obama, when an up-and-coming senator from Illinois, said it this way:

When a gang banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels someone disrespected him, we have a problem of morality. Not only do we need to punish that man for his crime, but we need to acknowledge that there’s a hole in his heart, one that government programs alone may not be able to repair. 

Some societies are more virtuous than others. This week’s article continues the discussion of characteristics of virtuous versus unvirtuous cultures. The topic here is corruption and abuse of office. 

My wife travels to Vietnam for two weeks almost every year. Every time she goes through Vietnamese customs, she puts some money in her passport before handing it to the Vietnamese customs agents, and when I am with her I am insistently instructed to do the same. The amount is about $20 if we are not carrying anything they might hold up or question (such as electronics or medicine), and from $60 to $100 if we are. Mind you, we are never carrying anything illegal or even reasonably questionable; it is simply part of the social fabric that the agents expect a bribe, as the cost of not holding you up for an hour and making your life frightening and complicated. 

My wife's oldest brother, a very principled man, says that we should not play ball with the customs agents -- but, then again, he has spent time locked in a crate at the Saigon police station without being charged with a crime. In any case the customs agents keep the money every time, and smile back at my wife and myself as if everything were normal. And that is because everything is normal. Bribery is simply part of everyday business for Vietnamese customs -- not for one or two or three agents, but for the entire organization.

Another Vietnamese in-law of mine once owned a fine pen his daughter had given to him, which they were both very proud of. While he was signing documents at the police station in Saigon, a police officer picked up the pen to sign the documents as well, and then put it in his own pocket. The civilian didn’t dare say a word. 

More generally speaking, the most lucrative jobs in Vietnam are the ones that put you in a position to receive bribes. The only way to get a business license, or enforce a contract, is through bribery of the deciding government official.  And how do you get these most lucrative jobs? By knowing the right person, and bribing them. It is not merely that this happens from time to time; it happens to everyone all the time -- and anyone who questions it (e.g., my brother in law) is looked at as if they are impractical and eccentric. Such principled people also live with ever-present and appreciable physical danger from the authorities. 

Here is the six-part mission statement of the Vietnamese customs office:

Enforcing the effective management over imports & exports activities and international trade, providing favourable conditions to the trade and production development.

Protecting and contributing to the facilitation of development of national economy.

Protecting revenues.

Fighting against smuggling, combat commercial fraud, protecting the interests of consumers.

Contributing to the protection of economic sovereignty, national security and community security.

Assisting in socio-economic management.

Even if you did not know the bureau is foremostly a machine of institutionalized graft and extortion, you would have to smell something here. The supposed mission is indefensibly broad, and smells generally flimsy and fishy. It doesn't say their mission is to lie, cheat, and steal; nobody's does (and that is important to always remember)! But indirectly, it does.  "Assisting in socio-economic management," really? And in what way does the customs bureau "contribute to economic sovereignty" and "facilitate the development of the national economy" more than, say, the sanitation department or the department of farmland management? From the fact that the organization's central written document is, on careful reflection, full of gibberish, it can be readily predicted that they will abuse the power entrusted them in whatever ways they can get away with. In a culture where people are not even expected to be honest, they can get away with a lot.

Why do the community expectations matter? Let us consider the motives of the customs agents. What do they get from selling their souls this way? Fancy cars, fancy clothes, fancy houses, the coveting looks and glances of neighbors who dream of trading places with them with full knowledge they are lying cheats. This is a community failing, after all. In an atmosphere of honesty, the position would not be desirable even if it were possible. 

Importantly, it is not the entire community that is dishonest; but it is a critical mass of thoroughly dishonest people, whose opposite number are not numerous and energetic enough to marginalize them. It is, as always, a question of the proportion of truthful people within the community, and the strength of their commitment -- more than a matter of policy, or the mere presence of "bad eggs". There are bad eggs absolutely everywhere; in some places they are marginalized by the collective virtues of the community, and in some places they are not.

One evening when I was in graduate school in Athens, GA, I went to a bar with a friend of mine, who was from rural India. I luckily found a parking spot right in front of the pub, but my friend Sajjan questioned pulling into it. 

“Won’t the police wait for you outside the bar?” he asked.

“Why would they?”, I replied.

“To get a bribe”. 

Of course it could happen in America that the cops stalk you outside a pub and then charge you with DUI in order to ask for a bribe, but you don’t expect it to happen as a matter of course.

We can give examples of corruption all day, from any country (including the US), but you have to be immersed in a culture to understand whether these things are normal, or whether they are extraordinary. When a prison tailor helped two convicted murderers escape from a maximum security New York prison, it was an anomaly. When Mexican crime boss Jaoquin Guzman escaped from prison through a tunnel in a way that must have involved complicity from at least five to ten people (probably many more), in both low and high places, no one was surprised. A well traveled (and recklessly adventurous) acquaintance once advised me, purely as a practical matter, that if I ever drive through Mexico, I should hide my cash carefully in case I get pulled over by the Federales -- because if they find it, they will take it. This is consistent with how Mexican citizens view their cops. In a 2013 survey of Mexican citizens, 80% believed the judiciary was corrupt, 83% believed the legislature was corrupt; and 90% believed the police were corrupt. 

The vervet monkey has at least four distinct alarm calls that it makes in response to different sorts of predators: one to signal the presence of a leopard, one for baboons, one for the pythons, and one for the martial eagle. Other vervet monkeys (and even other species who hear the calls) respond to the distinct alarm calls with protective behaviors appropriate to the indicated predator. For example, when vervet monkeys hear a leopard alarm call -- whether it comes from another from another vervet monkey present, or from a recording placed by investigating zoologists -- they respond by scampering up trees and then to thin, outlying limbs where  a leopard could not climb. On the other hand, they respond to a python alarm call by looking around on the ground.

An interesting thing about vervet monkey calls is that they seem to be partly instinctive, and partly learned. Even an infant vervet monkey will make distinct leopard calls, eagle calls, etc; and they will make them at sort of appropriate times. If a baby vervet is startled by a falling leaf, then it is likely to make an eagle alarm call (even if it has never seen an eagle); but if it is startled by a stick, it is likely to make a python alarm call (even if it has never seen a python). As the monkeys get older, they refine their sense of when to make the various calls. The phenomenon is not entirely understood, but it seems that a vervet monkey is born with rough concepts of pythons, leopards, eagles, etc., and some sense of what to do about them, and that they refine these rough perceptions and responses through experience, and perhaps tutelage.

Like vervet monkeys, human beings are born with a rough idea to expect certain things to be in the world. Among other things, we seem to have innate concepts of language, family, food, and fighting, and also a rough concepts of right and wrong. Whatever feeling a vervet monkey gets when it is startled by a stick, it is naturally purposed to be associated with pythons. Similarly, human feelings of conscience are naturally purposed to be associated with certain things, and we call those things right and wrong, among other names. Right and wrong are more abstract, of course, than leopards and eagles, and some reasonable people claim they are nonsense; but even those people are stuck with feelings of conscience, and the practical problem of how to cultivate and refine them -- whether they address that problem by doing something or nothing. Moreover, what they do in response to that problem, whether it is something or nothing, has an impact -- usually a dramatic impact -- on their well being and on the well being of other people. From either a scientific, spiritual, or common sense standpoint, it is only reasonable that the purpose of feelings of conscience is to have a beneficial impact. That is to say, the purpose of acting according to our conscience is benefit our community. In a general sense, this is also the purpose of a vervet monkey's leopard calls.

So, in the same and common sense that an vervet monkey eagle alarm call, made in response to an eagle, is correct, and made one in response to a leaf is mistaken, feelings of conscience are correct just when they tend to guide our actions to benefit our community. One on hand, this merely reduces one abstraction (moral rightness) to another (benefit, or well being); but on the other hand, the reduction makes progress -- because distinctions in well being are the more clear on their face than distinctions of right and wrong.

For example, some cultures or subcultures glorify suicide bombings of civilians from competing cultures as a noble and godly act, and some frown on it as evil. As another example, for 14th century French noblemen, certain verbal insults would demand, as a point of honor, the fighting of a duel. Today we hold killing for that reason very close to the top of the list of morally offensive things to do. This illustrates the often profound and diametric disagreements among people and cultures about right and wrong action. By contrast, it was clear in the middle ages, as it is to us, and as it will be to all posterity, that the Black Death was a no-good situation. Outcomes are easier to evaluate than actions.

This also shows up in state and national politics. Republicans sometimes claim that Democratic policies tend to cause economic recession; Democrats often say that Republican policies tend to cause economic  recession; but no one says "hooray for economic recession".  

In other words, the good is more clear than the right on its face; so defining the right in terms of the good helps clarify what is right. It does not make the answers to ethical questions obvious, at all, but at least it gives us an instrument to take hold of the problem, and tends to give them the status of empirical fact, to the degree we can agree on preferred outcomes.

When a baby vervet monkey sounds an eagle alarm call because a leaf falls surprisingly on its sleepy little head, we smile or even laugh. This is partly because baby monkeys are cute, and partly it is because the childlike mistake is cute. We say to ourselves, "the little fellow mistook a leaf for an eagle", or something like that -- because that call is naturally purposed to refer to eagles. Similarly, if pervasive sword-dueling doesn't really improve our lot as a society, then the old French nobles made a similar sort of mistake -- though it was far less cute -- because codes of honor are naturally purposed (in whatever sense you like) to benefit society.

The claim that, for example, self-indulgent violence is wrong, is a moral claim; and it is a good question what the basis of such a claim is, or even could be. This article is my answer to the question where do moral axioms come from. It is a deep question, on which much of note has been written, and I am not an expert on the subject. At the same time, I have already made some moral claims here, and plan on making more, so I owe the reader at least some account of my thinking on the matter.

At present, I basically subscribe to the moral theory of two-level utilitarianism, as advanced by the English philosopher R.M. Hare (1919-2002). This article explains that standpoint, and to a mild degree defends it. The explanation is more important than the defense.  When I say that one thing is right and another is wrong, I would at least like the the reader to know tolerably well what I mean. Whether they believe it or not is far less under my influence in any case.

The starting point for Hare's view is the classical utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, which in its simplest form says that actions ought to be judged by their consequences for human well being. For some thinkers, this immediately raises the question of how to measure well being. Attempts were made fairly early after the formulation of utilitarianism to define intricate measures of well being -- for example in the form of Jeremy Bentham's felicific calculus. Similarly, notable contemporary utilitarian Sam Harris hopes to see well being quantified using measurements of the brain.

My own opinion is that measurements of human well being are both impossible and unnecessary. The reason they are impossible is that, even if we could understand and measure brain activity, our measurements would have to be calibrated against our own subjective assessments of well being -- about which there will be inescapable and profound disagreement.

If we consider generally the kinds of attributes that can be measured  -- such as time, distance, force, and volume -- they are intuitively primitive, one-faceted things. Even attributes such as magnetic flux, which require sophisticated machines to measure, come in units reducible to length, mass, and time. But when it comes to more complex matters, such as, say, corporate earnings, there are different methods of accounting which give (sometimes dramatically) different results for the same object of inquiry. The profits of a business  seem like they ought to be a simple number; but turn out, like many things, to be surprisingly subtle.  Human well being does not even seem like it ought to be simple. Indeed, it strikes my own intuition as being far more subtle and manifold than corporate profits -- and as inscrutable as the ledgers of a corporation may appear, they are certainly far less so than the web of neurons between our ears. So the idea of capturing well being in an objective number seems fanciful on its face. Perhaps it is possible, but I would not bank on it.

Consider who has greater well being: a heroin addict with a lifetime fix, the Dalai Lama, or Donald Trump. There is informed disagreement on this at least in that, I dare say, none of them would trade places with each other. We might try to help settle the issue by measuring their brain activity. But no matter how well we understood the brain physically, how would we know what quantities to measure, and what formula to apply to them? We would want measure and then computer whatever it is that high-well-being individuals have more of -- which brings us back to essentially the first, intractable question.

The good news, for utilitarians at least, is that fine grained measurements of well being are not needed in order to to ask and answer the most important questions about morality. Clearly, all else being equal, plenty is better than famine; health is better than plague; and peace is better than violent strife. Someone may disagree from the comfort of their dorm room on a late night; I may have myself long ago. But if one travels from their dorm room to see faces wailing in the throes of famine, plague, or violent conflict, it is a step down in a way that sane people, who really experience both, agree on as much as they agree on anything. In any case, I am perfectly willing to limit my audience to those who agree that, say, wealth, health and peace are to be preferred, ceteris paribus, to their respective opposites. 

What's more, I believe that some moral values tend strongly to lead to wealth, health, and peace, for individuals as well as communities;  some moral values tend strongly to lead to their opposites;  it is frequently far from obvious which values fall in which category; and this forms the essential question of the natural laws of ethics. 

In other words, reasonable people, who agree fully that this circumstance is clearly preferable to that circumstance, may still reasonably disagree about what value systems cause this instead of that. So I say that to qualify as a moral axiom, a principle ought to in fact lead to outcomes that people almost universally prefer -- such as, wealth, health, and peace instead of their opposites. Even this most coarse ordering of states of well being, I believe, leaves plenty of unsolved questions about how to behave, and what to value -- and, indeed, the most important ones. 

The primordial form of utilitarianism is act utilitarianism, which says that one ought to perform actions which maximize human well being on the whole. But it seems to many thinkers, including myself, that act utilitarianism fails to explain common sense morality, and cannot be used to profitably refine it. That is to say, put simply, it does not work. The problems basically are (1) the intractability of determining the consequences of individual actions, and (2) the plausibility that certain prima facie immoral actions seem to be condoned by the theory. As for a case of (2), one might propose to abduct a random person (or, better yet, a bad person), kill them, harvest their transplantable organs and tissues, and leave them anonymously in an ice chest at the doorstep of a local public hospital, thereby saving several lives net and improving several others in the process [credit to Dr. Cliff Perry’s medical ethics class for this example]. Now if this does not improve aggregate well being, it is for reasons subtle enough to invoke point (1), on which not all reasonable people would agree if not for our intuitive common (moral) sense.  Thus, if all we teach our children, morally, is to do what improves most people's lives, we might expect such behavior from many of them -- whether it is possible in principle to know better or not.

A more palatable refinement of utilitarianism, which was hinted at by Mill himself, is known as rule utilitarianism. The thesis of rule utilitarianism is that moral teaching ought to consist mainly of rules -- such as thou shalt not steal,  thou shalt not murder, and no law shall be made abridging freedom of speech --  and that good rules are those which tend to tangibly improve the well-being of the societies that adopt them. When stated explicitly as above, rule utilitarianism is reminiscent of Kant's categorical imperative: act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law. The difference is that Kant does not clearly link the principle to the material consequences of of such "universal laws" in the world, as the English-speaking philosophers do. 

Thus, for the day-to-day purpose of living ethically (as opposed to thinking about ethics) deontology (Kant’s view) and rule utilitarianism are substantially similar. They are also both, however, vulnerable to a well known critique, charging that rule-based ethics "collapse" into act utilitarianism as follows: every action satisfying the demand of act utilitarianism (viz., maximizing well being without regard to any general rules) can be justified by a highly specific rule that says do this under precisely these circumstances. The defense of rule-based morality against this criticism forms a good chunk of the contemporary philosophical literature on ethics.

English philosopher R.M. Hare has given an elegant insight into why rule utilitarianism -- or for that matter, common sense morality -- need not collapse into Machiavellian act-utilitarianism. The key lies in our eminent fallibility as human beings. Our actual moral choices are made with limited information, limited intellect, and limited resolve to do the right thing in the first place -- often sorely so on all counts. Consequently, our moral rules must be few, simple, and robust -- where by robust, I mean that a good moral axiom system must engender well being not in the context of its flawless application, but within the environment of the all around ignorance and selfishness that are plain facts of human life. Thus, practically speaking, naked act utilitarianism is for the angels, not for us. Hare does not even give angels that much credit in general; he writes that act utilitarianism is for the archangels.

In contrast to the archangels, Hare imagines a person he calls a "prole", whose capacity for moral intellectualizing is sufficiently weak that -- even if he means well, or pretends to himself to mean well -- he is eminently more likely to do harm than good by deviating from the rules his society. For Hare, both archangels and proles are idealized extremes, and real live folks have a bit of each within them. Thus, people’s moral thinking comes on two levels -- one where we follow the rules just because, and one where we do our best to tap into the archangel within us, step back, and think about how to change or deviate from the rules. 

Importantly, Hare believes that most of us, most of the time, are more prole than archangel:

One ought to abide by the general principles whose general inculcation is for the best; harm is more likely to come, in actual moral situations, from questioning these rules than from sticking to them, unless the situations are very extra-ordinary; the results of sophisticated felicific calculations are not likely, human nature and human ignorance being what they are, to lead to the greatest utility.

Envy thou not the oppressor [Hebrew: iysh chamac], and choose none of his ways. 

[Proverbs 3:31, King James translation]

In his 1883 essay The Duties of American Citizenship, Teddy Roosevelt opens with some particularly interesting words on the foremost duties of citizenship:

In a free republic the ideal citizen must be one willing and able to take arms for the defense of the flag, exactly as the ideal citizen must be the father of many healthy children. A race must be strong and vigorous; it must be a race of good fighters and good breeders, else its wisdom will come to naught and its virtue be ineffective; and no sweetness and delicacy, no love for and appreciation of beauty in art or literature, no capacity for building up material prosperity can possibly atone for the lack of the great virile virtues.

Roosevelt's message has a dual flavor to it. On the one hand it is clearly true. On the other hand, many people find it crass -- and whether you are one of them or not, anyone with a modicum of sensitivity can well imagine that someone else might find it crass in this day and age. The tension here can be resolved by minding to an important but often under-appreciated distinction: that between valor and belligerence. The two share surface features in common; both make for dangerous men. But, then, danger is a manifold thing. 

GIMLE: You speak of him as if he was a friend. I thought Fangorn was dangerous.

GANDALF: Dangerous! And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord. And Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Glóin; for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion.

Enlightened societies fully appreciate the distinction between valor and belligerence, value the former, and frown firmly on the latter. This article illustrates the difference.

During the conquest of Gaul in the 4th century BC, Roman legions under the command of Titus Quinctius Poenus found themselves camped across a river from a band of Gallic warriors. One Gaul shouted that Romans were cowards, and challenged any Roman to a duel. Livy records the ensuing events as follows:

Then a Gaul, exceptionally large in stature, stepped forward onto the empty bridge and shouted as loudly as he could, “Let the strongest man Rome has come forward to fight so that the outcome between the two of us will show which race is better in war.” For a long time there was silence among the young Roman nobles, because they were both afraid to refuse to fight and they did not want to volunteer for such a dangerous task. Finally Titus Manlius, the son of Lucius, who had freed his father from the tribune’s ill-treatment, left his station and went to the dictator. “Without your order sir,” he said, “I would never fight out of rank, not even if I was sure of the victory. If you will allow it, I wish to show to that savage who struts about exulting in front of the standards that I come from that family that threw the Gallic army down from the Tarpeian Rock.” Then the dictator replied, “Bless you, Titus Manlius, for your bravery and devotion to your father and your country. Go and with the gods’ help show that the name of Rome is invincible.”

...The massive Gaul overshadowed his opponent and, holding his shield in his left hand, smashed his sword down with a loud clash on the arms of his adversary, but to no effect. The Roman, his sword at the ready, pushed up the bottom of his enemy’s shield with his own and, inserting himself between the Gaul’s armor and his body, thus making it difficult for his enemy to wound him, he drained his belly and groin with repeated thrusts, and his enemy fell.

Following these events, Titus Manlius became a hero in Rome, and eventually became a Roman consul -- an office on which the American presidency is loosely modeled, whose principal duty is commander in chief of the armed forces (though there were, during the years of the republic, two consuls rather than one).

Titus Manlius was consul during the so-called "Latin Wars", and his own son fought under his command in the Battle of Vesuvius. Manlius the younger also engaged in a duel, and then reported to the consul as follows (according to Paul Zoch, Ancient Rome: An Introductory History, p.78):

"Father," he said, "so that everybody may see that I am my father's son, I bring back these cavalry spoils, taken from the knight whom I killed, after being challenged to a duel."

Manlius the elder then commanded that his son be put to death, for leaving his post without orders.

Livy’s account of Titus Manlius the elder asking for permission to engage in a duel is not given credence by all historians. For present purposes, however, it is not important whether Livy's  account is accurate; the fact is the stories, as told by Livy, form a parable of an important distinction in Roman morality. The difference between fighting in lawful defense of principles and persons, and fighting outside of the law to indulge one's ego, is the difference between valor and belligerence. For a Roman soldier, fighting with or against military orders instantiated this distinction.

There is a good reason the Romans remembered and retold parables to illustrate the distinction between dutiful fighting and self-indulgent violence: it tends to be under-appreciated. Consider, for example,  Bill O'Reilly's interview with American sniper Chris Kyle:

O'REILLY: What struck me in the book, though, is that you considered the people you were killing, the Iraqis you were killing, quote, unquote, "savages."

KYLE: The people I was killing. Not just Iraqis.

O'REILLY: Why did you consider the enemy savages?

KYLE: From their actions. The way they lived day-to-day as far, as the violence they commit on American troops, the beheadings, the rape of innocent villagers and townspeople that they go into just to intimidate them. They live by putting fear into other people's hearts, and civilized people just don't act that way.

O'REILLY: You were so effective in Iraq that they put $20,000 on your head. If one of them had killed you, they would have been paid $20,000. Do you believe that they considered you a savage?

KYLE: I'm sure they did. Honestly, I don't know, and I really don't care.

O'REILLY: So you were committed to killing these people because you, in your heart, believed that they deserved to die? [emphasis mine]

KYLE: I wasn't so much committed to killing them as I was -- I'm committed to making sure every service member that was over there, whether American or ally, came home.

Now Bill O'Reilly is not William F. Buckley Jr. -- but he is not Jerry Springer either, and he should be ashamed of not knowing better than this. As a soldier, it was not Kyle's job to pass judgment on the enemy, or decide what they deserved. It was his duty to engage and destroy the targets of his mission -- whether he thought they were savages, or presumed, like the speaker in Thomas Hardy's poem, that they might be jolly good fellows [note: a nipperkin is a small whiskey glass]:

Had he and I but met

     By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

     Right many a nipperkin!      

But ranged as infantry,

    And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

    And killed him in his place.

This is a US Marine:

This is a Crips gang member:

Both the marine and the hoodlum are dangerous. Moreover, they are both hard men, who may risk their lives against their own material interests. But one fights against enemies it is his lawful duty fight; and one fights to indulge his brutish ego. Only one of the two has any courage, or even uses the word. In a word, the distinction can perhaps be put better in Hebrew than it can in English: one is iysh milchama (a man of war), and the other iysh chamac (a man of wicked violence). It is a sign of primitivism to think of them as birds of a feather, and it is also an epidemic disease of American pop culture, especially in our inner cities. But the fact is, not only are these men not the same; there is wisdom in viewing them as exact opposites. 

Some cultures are more enlightened than others. Alabama today, for example, is more enlightened on the subject of race than it was in the 1960's. Perhaps something else has changed for the worse to counterbalance that, but I doubt it; and if it did, it wasn't a necessary consequence of progress on the racial front. The civil rights movement was not a waste of time and energy, precisely because the value system of a community can be improved. And if that can happen, then some cultures are more enlightened than others.

This fact, of the varying degrees of cultural enlightenment, is a dangerous truth. It has been often used as a pretext for conquest and exploitation: our culture is more enlightened than theirs; so we are going to conquer them and share our enlightenment -- or maybe just rape and pillage, because we are entitled since we are "better" than them. I think many people would make the same inference today, at least quietly in their hearts, and use the advancement of their culture, real or imagined, as a pretext for plunder in subtle forms as well as unsubtle. Many other cultures have, and do today, preach this precisely and act on it. 

It is seldom the whole truth that is dangerous. What is dangerous is to know certain truths without certain related ones; and this is the sense in which a little learning can be a dangerous thing. It is dangerous for a boy to know there are bass in Lake Eufaula, without also knowing there are alligators and water moccasins there. All the same, there are bass in Lake Eufaula; and when a boy asks whether there are bass in Lake Eufaula, it would be wrong to say no. It would also be wrong to simply say yes. The correct answer is, there are bass in Lake Eufaula, but there are gators and moccasins there, too. This works for a boy of any age, if, as he should be, he is taught to respect gators and moccasins as soon as he is taught to angle for bass.

So yes, some cultures are more enlightened than others, but that does not give any society the right to attack or exploit another, or to impose its values on another by force. The gravity of the warning should suffice for anyone who has been duly apprised of the will to power.

Dangerous or not, the fact that some cultures are more enlightened than others is absolutely obvious. At the same time, I remember first coming to the realization relatively late in life, and thinking and talking about it at the time as if it were something deep and subtle.Now it is confusing, and even frightening, to try to imagine what I was thinking, and seeing, and not seeing, up until that point. Obviously, I was brainwashed. It happens.