For one thing, I would resign my post of responsibility. For another, I would grow a beard, change my name, and either (a) become a hermit, reckoning myself unfit for the company of others or (b) devote myself to good works.
I believe the power of apologies is vastly underrated.
Speaking for myself, the squeamishness would get to me. Can one die of stress?
I would rationalize, lie, and hold on to power as tightly as possible in the hopes of avoiding punishment. Then I'd spit on a hippy.
I nominate Adam Kotsko for Minister of Conscience!
How about doing everything within one's power to undo the wrong and make things right?
Alternately, the "no one could have foreseen this" excuse seems to have some mileage left in it.
"A mistake of enormous magnitude, for example, on the scale of the Iraq War...." Send in more troops, of course!
S. and I wonder about George Bush Senior--we both agree, he's this very Shakespearean figure. I saw a video of him from CNN recently in which he broke down in tears while talking about his sons. He was there specifically speaking about Jeb, and that only enhances the drama (what's Jeb done to make anybody cry?). In Bush Sr. you have this ambitious man who built up a fair name for himself, but whose sons were never fit for it, and whose granddaughters will surely fritter away whatever is left of the kingdom after his son's reign. And Barbara (elder) has made comments that Bush Sr. doesn't advise Bush Jr., yet Bush Jr. turns to Bush Sr.'s consiglieres for help, and Bush Jr's war couldn't be more different from Bush Sr's for a war with the same country. It would be a wonderful story if it weren't happening.
he's this very Shakespearean figure
Polonius, specifically.
Colin Powell recently gave a whole bunch of money to his alma mater (one of the CUNY campuses?) to study and promote minorities in public service. Good works are important, but a full public confession would be better, I think.
if you found yourself in some way responsible for a mistake of tremendous magnitude, for example, on the scale of the Iraq war
But mistakes like this are never so simple as taking your eye off the road and hitting a cat or something. Presumably, you weigh the information you have and make a considered decision. So I'm not sure that conscience necessarily kicks in at all. The reaction is probably more one of shame and regret about tarnished honor. In that case, what you do depends almost entirely on the society you're in. Right? In Japan, dishonored executives still sometimes kill themselves. Here, well, what?
8 is marvelous to me.
It depends on whether I honestly thought what I'd done was morally right. If I measured it as on par with sticking up for civil rights decades before the world was ready, then I'd feel self-righteous and high-horsey.
If it was a military strategy, where there are many means to an end, I'd be torn up that people didn't like me. LOVE ME! LOVE ME! I'd probably pander.
I don't really think there's anything Colin Powell could do at this point to expiate his many crimes. A public apology would be a help, but really, what someone needs to do is leave him in the library with a bottle of whisky, a Webley .38 service revolver, and a pointed hint. I mean, My Lai, Iran-Contra, the Shia in '91 and lying to the UN? How do you start to make redress for that lot?
Colin Powell I'm angrier at, and sadder about, than most of them. I heard him on the News Hour last year sometime, and what kills me is that he sounds like my father; around the same age, and same accent (working class NY that got eddicated). You just get the sense that he wasn't crazy, and wasn't stupid, but was up there lying like a champ anyway. And he didn't even come out of it with anything much for himself.
There's a line from A Man For All Seasons: "What does it benefit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul. But for Wales, Richard?"
Here, well, what?
Bite down on a vile of squeamishness, of course.
13 gets it exactly right. Powell ought to be a pariah.
For most mistakes, it's best to own up to them and then do your best to fix or improve them. I've kind of shanked one class I'm teaching this term, and it's incredibly stressful, but I just have to chalk it up to experience and fix it next time. Bush seems both temperamentally and functionally unable to own up to the mistakes here. Politically, too many bogus rationales for the party will collapse. Personally, well we've belabored that one haven't we.
But there has to be a discontinuity at some point. If the magnitude of the mistake is great enough, the honorable thing is definitely to quit. Maybe the continuity with the first truth is that you keep living your life trying to correct and amend for what led you to make such a colosally stupid error in the first place. But recognizing the error means also recognizing your unfitness for that office.
What would Aristotle do?
Make a bunch of distinctions, argue by analogy, and close with 'So much, then, for the American empire.'
he wasn't crazy, and wasn't stupid
He isn't crazy or stupid, he just has no moral compass whatsoever.
The problem with someone having an emotional and existential investment in "fixing" a problem they caused is that they won't be willing to admit that it's not fixable. (Examples of such situations immediately spring to mind here.)
Agree with Adam here: I think trying to "fix" what you've utterly screwed up is dishonorable. You should just retreat in shame. This isn't true of all situations, obviously, but for something like the Iraq war, yeah.
It's honestly hard to imagine oneself having made a massive error of that magnitude. My biggest worry is that someday when PK grows up it'll become clear that I fucked up massively in some way, and he'll have to live with the ensuing psychological damage. In which case, I guess I'll have nothing left to do but apologize and try to change whatever asshole personality trait I've got to be less of a bad mom.
18: Excellent, thank you Cala. Analogies must also be somewhat weird, as with wealth, flutes, and instruments generally.
Part of the puzzle comes from the enormity and the impossibility of making good. My intuitive sense is that shanking a class (been there!) is bad, but you can make up for it by learning from the mistakes and perhaps with an apology. But causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, well, it's harder to see what would be up to the task. Am I crazy to think there's something to the .38 strategy?
"But for Wales?" was in mind when I wrote that Althouse update about getting too excited about trivial things. Heh.
leave him in the library with a bottle of whisky, a Webley .38 service revolver
As gswift seems to be working this morning, let me correct this to say that they were .455in, not .38. Huge round. Not that it gives me the slightest pleasure to imagine that massive thing pressed up against Powell's forehead...
Okay, but the problem with the "retreat in shame" idea, for me, would be my massive sense of responsibility. If I'd fucked up, I'd feel compelled to *try* to at least make the situation marginally more handleable before I just walked away from it.
19: That's the thing -- he seems close enough to someone I could empathize with that I can't think of him as anything but a bad person. I don't have any sense of what's in Bush's head, but I think I have a sense of Powell's.
I'd feel compelled to *try* to at least make the situation marginally more handleable
Yeah, but why should you try to fix what you've screwed up. It seems that it would be for your benefit, and not for the sake of the best outcome. That's why retreating in shame is difficult.
21: Sometimes your the only/best one to try and fix it. So give it your honest best. Otherwise, get out of the way and let someone better suited have a go at it.
23: Part of the fun of teaching Plato is the point when the students say, "But, the argument from affinity is... bad?"
22: That's basically what my mom did, and I obviously turned out completely fine in the long run.
29: there's an article by Nick White that starts with the observation that generations of clever undergraduates have thought, hey, the only reason there are three classes of citizens is because Plato needs them to correspond to the three parts of the soul. Plato is hilarious that way.
With Powell, his interpretation of a soldier's ethos seems to complicate things. National prestige, not undercutting the C-in-C, not losing or giving up have for him a higher value than we think they should, at least in a position like Secretary of State.
I've been thinking about that piece in the NYT on Monday, about how the reporters had for forty years protected General Fred Weyand who had told them he recognised that Vietnam was, and was certain to remain a stalemate, in 1967. The story,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/opinion/11fromson.html?ex=1166504400&en=3f928214a2c4708a&ei=5070&emc=eta1
was published without the general's name, and caused a furor. Weyand went on to become the last Commander in Vietnam, and then Chief of Staff. I think they were right to protect him. We need more guys like that, and for all I know guys like that have been talking to reporters all along.
22: "PK, I'm sorry I named you Islamorama DahmermansonPhD. It seemed funny at the time."
27/28: Yeah, but like I said, overdeveloped sense of responsibility.
30: Hm. Scary. OTOH, it's what my dad did, and it's made a big difference in my relationship with him. My mom, not so much, but hey: that's what therapy's for.
FL shouldn't rest easy. The path from misunderstanding the Frege-Geach problem to murder and mayhem is short and easy.
Take Geach's original example:
(P1) If tormenting the cat is bad, getting your little brother to do it is bad
(P2) Tormenting the cat is bad.
So, getting your little brother to torment the cat is bad.
Suppose your undergrad is convinced that expressivism is correct but misunderstands the force of the F-G problem, thinking that it's no big deal if the expressivist cannot account for the apparent validity of the above argument. Then, even if they kind of nod their heads to (P1) and (P2), they won't be convinced that getting your little brother to torment the cat is bad. And if it's not bad, why not go ahead with it?
The step from that to tormenting FL is similarly short and easy. Wait, they're doing that already, aren't they?
Ok, Labs, here's a question that I'm surprised no one's asked yet: what do you do about having voted for Nader?
what a bunch of novices.
The obvious answer is: self-medicate with massive doses of alcohol/weed/ludes/whatever until you can't feel the pain anymore.
Do this repeatedly until you wreck your car/liver/heart/whatever.
Die.
Go to hell, there to suffer unrelieved torments for a large, possibly unending period of time.
and Cala?
you forgot the "qua" qualifiers.
I mean, sure it's an unmitigated catastrophe qua attempt to do something good.
But qua unmitigated catastrophe, it's an excellent specimen.
In voting situations, one's own influence as an individual is so infinitessimal that I have a hard time viewing it as something you should beat yourself up over.
I've never been responsible for war on a massive scale, but from time to time I act like a fuckup (as recently as last night!), and I think that shame is a lens: the small mistakes take on enormous proportions when you feel shame, and I'm betting that shame also makes the gross errors seem manageable. I can never leave well enough alone when I make mistakes, and I hate to think it about myself, but if shame acts at all like shock as a self-protection mechanism, it would probably motivate me to hunker down and try to fix the problem.
1) Watched Kurosawa's Ikiru this morning for breakfast. First time. Most reviewers don't seem to notice that the good deed our dying protagonist struggles to complete in order to redeem his wasted life is reversed and negated after his death. All his co-workers so moved at his sacrifice fall back into apathy. Except one. Maybe.
2) Study a commander in a good war, like Grant or Patton or Bradley. It is the job description to send kids to their deaths based on inadequate information and unclear results. Always could have done better. I suppose it is the responsibility and sorrow of good men and unfortunately, an opportuinty and excuse for the not so good.
3) And not just commanders, and not just war. Greene's "Heart of the Matter" suddenly comes to mind. The moral life is triage. I commit hundreds of mistakes and sins every day, most by omission. I don't forgive myself. Christians at least understand self-forgiveness ain't in our job descriptions.
what do you do about having voted for Nader?
Fair question, but a lame response: this was in New York, and I didn't urge other people to vote for Nader, and I knew that my vote wouldn't affect the electoral college. So I regret it, because, in retrospect, the size of the popular vote mattered in a surprising way, but I was pretty causally isolated from the outcome.
Seriously, what I do about it is confess when it comes up -- that's my penace. I'd much prefer to be able to snarl "Fucking Nader voters, it's all their fault."
I think, pace 'smasher and Kotsko, ogged is right about "fixing," for two reasons. One is the slightly old-world sense of honor ogged is citing, and though some of us feel honor obvs. many don't. (Ironically, it's the neo-Confederates and war-mongers who talk most about honor, yet fail notably to exhibit it in this case.)
But two, if I'm allowed to punditize and soothsay, is the much more practical consideration that nobody abroad will allow an administration that has earned as much bad faith as this one to fix this problem. Our normal allies want nothing to do with us, and our friends and enemies in the Arab world don't trust us.
And I'm afraid this observation applies to this country, for the near term, as well as this administration.
So in this case, for this reason, the people who made the mistake aren't going to be able to fix it, be they ever so competent.
43: just narrow the scope of the snarl: ...in Florida!
27/28: Yeah, but like I said, overdeveloped sense of responsibility.
Yabbut the point is that you cocked it up so bad before, you're actually being more responsible by vanishing from the scene than by pressing your hamartic misfixes on an unwilling situation. An apposite word (though kaputtreparieren, which I hadn't encountered before, is maybe even better).
I feel a bit of guilt at having worked on New York Green Party petition drive of 1996 to get Nader on the ballot.
OTOH, I wised up by 2000.
FL: Ithaca, huh? Well, that clears up my nagging suspicion that you're someone I went to grad school with.
I think, in some ways, it's exactly the force of FL's "how can you possibly live with yourself?" that makes things so much worse than they would otherwise be. Because as has been noted above, there are two very different ways out: either kill yourself, or convince yourself that what you did really isn't so bad. The second strategy is surprisingly easy, and in fact our brains seem wired for it pretty naturally. Cognitive dissonance reduction isn't just a cool-sounding phrase.
More: Was just on the phone with a friend, to whom I said, "I learned a new word today: 'verschlimmbessern.'" Response: "Did you learn that from Ben w-lfs-n?"
31: You're thinking of a John Cooper article, "Plato's Theory of Human Motivation".
It's really too bad that Plato didn't have any clever people to talk to in Athens; doubtless he would have committed fewer boneheaded mistakes. I guess we just have to face up to the fact that people in antiquity were dumber than we are.
46: Your polysyllabic reason is irrelevant; I'm talking about an internalized *sense*, i.e. feeling. Yes, one might reason oneself into acting against how one feels. But I think the questions were (1) what we *would* (probably) do, not what we think we ought to; and (2) what's the right way to feel. I think feeling responsible is the right way to feel, but I also think that it makes it harder to do the right thing.
Leave it to a philosophy student to fail to recognize the distinction.
I don't see that I failed to recognize it. As ogged says, that's what makes it hard.
50: is your friend a hot lady?
There's also the distinction, which I tried to draw, between "feeling responsible" and the action that feeling leads one to take.
Leave it to a lit person to fail to recognize etc.
51: my bad, sorry. Cooper is funnier anyway.
As for the second half of the comment, I'd say something snide in response, but I'm not sufficiently sure that it's intended as a jab at what no one here is actually doing, viz., suggesting that Plato was dumb.
It *is* hard to convince undergraduates of that sometimes, though. Though it is fun to imagine snarky responses:
"You laugh at Aristotle for believing that the brain exists to cool the blood, but judging from your last set of papers, he might have been right."
58--
my guess is that the second half of 51 is just channeling the voices of the "clever undergrads" mentioned in 31. So not intended as snark directed at anyone here. (since none of us are or ever were clever undergraduates).
59--
look, that wasn't just a wacky theory. He had an *argument* for it.
It's the best explanation for why the hotter sex, sc. male, tends to shed its top-side insulation, sc. go bald. You know, all that hair hinders the cooling cycle.
Whereas women, running cold, need all the help they can get to achieve a moderate temperature, ergo more hair over cooling unit.
How much more scientific can you get?
bitzer reminds me that I formulated as an undergrad an argument that's precisely the reverse of Aristotle's; the hair is there as a heat-dispersion system, radiatiing it out more efficiently into the environment. That's why people with afros are so smart: the roughly spherical arrangement, and all those twists and turns in the individual hair, mean they've got a lot of cooling power, allowing their brains to run hotter—to be overclocked, if you will.
The inspiration for this argument has nothing to do with your own bespringéd locks, I'm sure.
no, no--the sphere works against you. Heat dispersion needs surface area, but the SA of a sphere only goes up as the square of the radius, while the volume goes up as the cube. So you're packing on insulation faster than you're adding dispersal surface.
I'm thinking you must have been wearing a very warm hat when you formuated this argument.
The inspiration actually comes from that scene with the robo-dog in Snow Crash (unless it's in The Diamond Age).
Now, remind me again, of all the solids, does the sphere have the highest or the lowest surface area for a given volume?
What's important here is the reticulated structure of the individual hair. I can bank on that, surely.
Ben, your theory would make sense if hair was actually composed of cells that were metabolizing. Having a high surface-to-volume ratio is always good for dispersing heat. But hair is just dead protein fibers, and isn't at body temperature.
I'd hate to have formulated a theory that doesn't make sense, lord knows.
67: otherwise known as `insulation'; kb's got the right of it.
66: I'm not going to tell you. But the shape of the brain itself is related to increasing surface area, iirc. So maybe it all works if you remove the skull.
Now, remind me again, of all the solids, does the sphere have the highest or the lowest surface area for a given volume?
Think about it for a second. Can you imagine a solid with a higher surface area/volume than a sphere? Can you imagine a solid with a lower surface area/volume than a sphere?
65: Snow Crash, yes. Man, what a great first hundred pages or so that book had.
A novel approach to baldness prevention here.
74--
ouch. makes me glad I'm bald already.
talk about your cures worse than the disease.
71--
what's this "think about it" nonsense--a priori geometry? (sneer).
Dammit, get a ruler and go measure some stuff. Aristotle would never approve of doing geometry just by, you know "thinking about it". guy must be presbyterian.
Or how about this: take a surface that wants to minimize its surface area (e.g. a soap film) and now force it to contain more volume (e.g. inflate it).
It makes a tetrahedron, obviously, which proves that the fifth element is pudding, not fire after all.
either a tetrahedron or a quadritattersall.
If you have a job like President of the United States you will have to make many important decisions which are not clear cut. This means some of them will turn out badly. If this is going to bother you unduly you are not fit for the position as this will make it psychologically difficult to acknowledge error and reverse course when that is desirable as it often is.
Increasing penalties for major mistakes is likely to have perverse effects when major mistakes are unavoidable. Better to encourage damage mitigation by not making it unduly difficult for leaders to reverse course. Hence expedient fictions such as a leader only made a mistake because he was badly advised which allow him to dismiss his advisors and start fresh.
Shouldn't the advisors then commit seppuko? Or, if you're too humane, couldn't we put one or two of them in the stocks? Anything besides giving them permanent thinktank and cablenews and beltway insider sinecures!
Seppuko seems beside the point, since that act is an acknowledgment of failure, responsibility for it, and consequent dishonor. Which is the point in issue. I'd take the acknowledgment, if sincere. McNamara may still be benighted, in many ways, but he passes that test, at least.
I'd take the acknowledgement, but I can't say I'd take it far. How would I react to an admission of guilt, error, contrition, whatever from Bush some ten years down the road? Not charitably, I imagine.
there's an article by Nick White that starts with the observation that generations of clever undergraduates have thought, hey, the only reason there are three classes of citizens is because Plato needs them to correspond to the three parts of the soul. Plato is hilarious that way.
I'd say this causality is backwards, and in addition Plato needs all of this to align with his structure of virtues, but did you (or White) have something else in mind?
To the main point: if you're responsible for something as massive as a fucked-up war, you either have to end yourself, or decide that things like life, pain, and happiness don't actually have the value you'd previously assigned to them.
Those responsible would never commit seppuku, though they might fall on their swords—more classical.
I never understood falling on your sword, it seems more like a moment of clumsiness than an existential decision -- and how likely is it if you fall on your sword, that you will be impaled and die? I would think at worst you would get a nasty cut and maybe an infection.
drat, i was hoping google would find me some good diagrams on how to fall on one's sword. (teh idiot's guide to honorable suicide!) You, or a good, good friend, points the sword at your heart, and you fall forward and let gravity work for you. (Work smarter, not harder.) So, if done right (and a job worth doing is a job worth doing right) it will result in death, not in a nasty infection.
Thisbe falling. Not clear what's holding the sword up.
FL's obsession w/Althouse is spreading. I read this post title as 'What would Althouse do?'
The Nader question points at an important issue. In 2003 I was very harsh indeed to some of my friends who voted for Nader. A couple years later I felt I had to apologize, and I did, because in the intervening time I'd learned a lot more about how thoroughly the Republican machine has been rigging elections. It is to put it mildly, far from clear to me anymore that even if all Nader votes had gone to Gore, Gore would have been allowed to become president, any more than Kerry was. So it now seems at best ignorant to rank on Nader voters in either year for creating a situation that, well, they didn't create. The blame should go first and foremost on Republican vote stealing, and it won't be until we get a reliable reckoning of that that I'll feel at liberty to do much more than say "pulling together against a worst case does make sense".
This is much different than being part of the vote-stealing apparatus.
