Saturday, January 09, 2010

Has American Civilization Become Incompetent?


A little on the philosophical side

By de Andréa

When does a civilization become incompetent?
Many historical civilizations have met their demise simply because of their growing surreptitious civil incompetence.

Sometimes to survive, we have to choose between what we may consider two evils. I've been mulling this question around in my mind in relation to a number of contexts, especially during this last year. They include but are not limited to our inability to truthfully and properly identify our enemy, or put an acceptable stop to Somali piracy, detain a terrorist who can neither be charged nor released, and to think rationally and truthfully about climate change, or rebuild the 9/11 Ground Zero site in an acceptable way and time frame.

This question or one similar to it may come to ones mind while watching ones children—ages six, four, and four months—superfluously get patted down before boarding a U.S. domestic flight while the larger-than-allowed bottle of cough syrup in ones carry-on bag, somehow escapes the screener's humorless attentions, or the discretionary feeling-up under a Catholic Nuns Habit. All this, because we fail to understand who or enemy is.

Yes, terrorists may come in any number of skin colors, and they aren't above strapping explosives to their own children. And yes, the Obama administration did take a half-step toward sanity by ordering additional screening of passengers from 14 known terrorists countries. They include Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, the home of Detroit bound Flight 253’s would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Umar’s father by the way, months before, told the FBI that Umar had gone to Yemen and he was told that he would never see him again. He was afraid that his son was going to do something radical. They still let him on the plane with the bomb. Yes we have become worse than incompetent.

But here's a predictive certainty: Not one infidel (non-Muslim) from any of these countries (or others such as Egypt or Jordan, which were oddly excluded from the list) has ever or will ever become a suicide bomber. The localized case of Sri Lanka's Tamils aside, suicide bombing is a purely Islamic agenda. Note that in the whole of the intifada community there was not a single case of a Palestinian Christian blowing himself up, making nonsense of the view that Israel's checkpoints, curfews, and security fences were the main cause of the terror.

So as Homeland Security, TSA and the rest of the government's counterterrorism apparatus struggle to upgrade travel security in a way that doesn't involve freeze-drying passengers before they board, it's worth noting that we may have finally reached the outer limits of our politically correct and multi-cultural approach to airport security as well as the security of this Nation. To wit, the U.S. government is now going to profile Muslim passengers, albeit partially, indirectly and via the euphemism of nationality instead of religion. Insofar as actual security is concerned, it would be both more honest and effective if it dropped the remaining pretense.

The obvious rub is that profiling goes against the American grain. We shudder at the memory of previous instances of it, particularly the internment of Japanese-Americans and German born immigrants in the 1940s which despite it’s after-taste did prove to be effective.

But a civilization becomes incompetent not only when it fails to learn the lessons of its past, but also when it becomes crippled by them. Modern Germany, to pick an example, has learned from its Nazi past to eschew chauvinism and militarism, so far, so good. But today's Multikulti Germany, with its negative birth rate, bloated welfare state and pacifist and ecological obsessions is a dismal rejoinder to its own history. Parallel to some hate America philosophies, it is conceivable that within a century, Germans may actually loathe themselves out of existence. Does this sound familiar?

In the U.S., our civilizational incompetence takes various forms. For instance, no country in the world collects more extensive statistical data about its own population than the U.S. And no country is more conflicted about the uses to which that data may or may not be put than the U.S. So what exactly is the point of all these statistics, all this measuring, collating and parsing?

Our deeper incompetence stems from an inability to recognize the proper limits to our own virtues; to forget, as Aristotle cautioned, that even good things "bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage."

Thus we reject profiling on the commendable grounds that human beings ought not to be treated as statistical probabilities. But at some point we must decide just who our enemy is; moreover, the failure to profile puts innocent lives recklessly at risk. We also abhor water- boarding for the eminently decent reason that it borders on torture, heck I was water-boarded while in the military as part of my training, shucks, I get water-boarded every time I go to the dentist, fighting for my next breath.

We fail to competently comprehend the Muslim agenda
There are worse things than water-boarding—like allowing another 9/11 to unfold because we recoil at the means necessary to prevent it. Similarly, there are worse things than Guantanamo—like releasing terrorists to Yemen so they can murder and maim again (and so we can hope to take them out for good in a "clean" Predator missile strike). Or worse, release them into our own American neighborhoods because their own country will not take them.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Put simply, we do not acquit ourselves morally by trying to abstain from a choice of evils. We just allow the nearest evil to make the choice for us. Or just as serious, we have a habit of being reactionary rather than preemptive.

And so it goes. We can be proud of how deeply we mourn the losses of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. But a nation that mourns too deeply ultimately becomes incapable of conducting a war of any description, whether for honor, interest, or survival. We rightly care about the environment. But our neurotic obsession with carbon dioxide betrays an inability to distinguish between pollution and the stuff necessary to sustain life itself. We are a country of standards and laws. And yet we are moving perilously in the direction of abolishing notions of discretion, judgment, and competence.

One of life's paradoxes is that we are as often undone by our virtues as by our vices. And so it is with civilizations.

America is no exception…

Think about it,

--- de Andréa

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