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The Duty to Win

If we believe our goals are just, we have a duty to achieve them. But it seems that good people handicap themselves by their own morality. Immoral people can do whatever is most effective, but aren’t moral people constantly constrained in what they can do, and doesn’t this make them less effective? (Tenth in a series that starts here , and how did this get so out of hand anyway?) Since the start of Obama’s presidency, for example, the Left has been in a conversation about whether we’re more committed to winning—getting legislation through Congress—or to maintaining the norms and procedures that have kept the country going until now—such as the filibuster in the Senate. We, at this point in time anyway, like to see ourselves as defending democratic traditions against those philistines on the other side. Isn’t there merit to this position? No, says Sri Krishna. I read the Mahabharata not long ago, and this not only comes up, it turns out to be one of the well-known puzzles of the...
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The Performance of Strength

There’s a lot of angst on the left about whether the performance of strength is counterproductive, inviting a backlash, leading to a spiral of escalating violence, and alienating people who might have been allies. Maybe. But I think the concern can be overblown, and I think there’s a real argument to be made on the other side. (Ninth in a series that starts here ) It puzzles me and my friends on the Left why so many people buy into Trump’s bluster and bombast, but it shouldn’t. He may be a weak man, but he performs strength. For many people that’s enough. And it’s not just Trump or the Right—someone recently challenged Joe Biden in an open meeting about his age and Hunter Biden’s problems, and a video surfaced of Joe yelling at the guy and challenging him to a push-up contest. All my allies on the Left cringed over it but Joe lost nothing in the polls and I’m willing to bet there’s a large (male) swathe of the country that loved every minute of it. Joe was defending himself and ...
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The Performance of Victory

The performance of a virtue—victory or strength or what have you—feels wrong to me and I think to many on the Left. I think many on the Left distrust strength and displays of strength, perhaps because it seems to run counter to values of pacifism, perhaps because it’s generally those with institutional power who perform strength against those with less privilege. And they distrust the display of strength because it feels like bluster. But I’m a martial artist too, which means that one of my tribes makes a distinction between peace and pacifism and sees strength and the ability to use it as a path to peace. I think there’s a truth there that is worth studying. (Eighth in a series that starts here ) When the Allies won in WW II they weren’t just victorious, they performed victory. They occupied the land, took over and restructured the governments, put key leaders on trial. In the case of the Japanese Emperor renouncing his divinity, they told the population how to think. They impo...
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Recovering the Tribe

Leaving a tribe that has lost its way, abandoning the group entirely, is always an option. But it’s an isolated response in that it rescues the person but not the tribe. Is there any way to recover a tribe that has drifted towards evil? I think sifting through historical examples actually offers some hope. (Seventh in a series that starts here ) Case in point, Nazi Germany. We didn’t just end the war, we conquered the Nazis. We occupied the country and dissolved the government and put the leaders on trial. We left no doubt that the country was defeated and their leaders had failed. We set up new systems—and then we turned them back over to the Germans. And the Germans did the hard work of facing their failings, recognizing their faults, and building up a new society that would not repeat the errors of the old. Same thing in Imperial Japan. They didn’t do as well as the Germans in facing up to the problems of the old order, but after a total defeat and occupation that included t...
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Leaving the Tribe

So to sum up: It seems that people make their choices and in those choices are blind to the consequences, since no one can see the future. But the consequences are latent in the choice. A person’s own character makes one choice congenial over another, one tribe congenial over another. Because the choice to be is intertwined with the choice of tribe. Perry Smith chose to be a murderer and sought a tribe to join that would reflect and further his choice—and ended up with Richard Hickock. Robert Mueller chose to be an upright lawman and joined a tribe that would help him do so. We are social beings and work out our destiny in concert with others.
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In Praise of Great Men and Women

I’d like to look a little more closely at my last example: if your tribe is leading you into conflict with a person of integrity, should this not be a signal that you have gone off the rails? If we are known by the company we keep, we hold each other’s values and integrity in trust. I depend on my community to notice when I stray and pull me back, and vice versa. Despite all our individual failings, and recognizing that any of us can stumble, still we are moral touchstones for each other.
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I vs. Us

I choose my tribe because it is congenial to me. I  like  being a nerd; I  like  finding out the intricate details of this or that body of knowledge. I like martial arts. I like, overall, the Left.   (Fourth in a series that starts  >here< .) But the match isn’t perfect. I mentioned before that when the Left starts censoring its songs to be less ableist, so we can no longer “stand up” and fight, they’ve lost me. But they haven’t lost  me —I laugh, and I’m a bit annoyed, and I put up with it. Because in the end it’s a minor point and I agree with the major goal of inclusivity. It’s an example of tribes tending to be self-reinforcing and getting more extreme. I think this is a bit too extreme, but extreme in the service of a worthwhile goal. And I expect that once they’ve played with it a while the community will come to the same conclusion and back off a bit. So an important aspect of the tribe is the values around which it coheres. Values...
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