David Weinberger has had a change of heart, and just in time for the elections, would like to renounce his pacifism ...

Something else broke in me during those years of transition. I went from believing that one is moral by adhering to principles, to believing that principled action can be morally wrong even when the principle is good. If there are times when dying for a principle is the right thing to do, it's not for the sake of the principle but because of the effects a principled death can have.

And, presumably, killing too, but that's not the point, the point is one of soundbytes and slogans, of not understanding, but of simplification ...

In fact, oddly, my pacifism began in the third grade with the recognition of complexity ... So, I am no longer a pacifist if that means I pledge never to use violence no matter what the situation ... But I would like to reclaim the term: I am a pacifist because I want us to go to extremes to avoid using violence. Why? Because violence is the ultimate over-simplification.

But that in itself is a simplification, isn't it? As Matisse said, "You have to look at something a long time to know what Sign it is" and even in seemingly clear questions of right vs wrong, we have trouble ...
fight makes right

I'm an Aries, Scorpio rising; whatever that may mean, I love a good scrap, it's in my nature, and was really in my nature until I cracked some ribs on a kid at summer camp and that was the start of my pacifism -- I learned that our actions have consequences, and while I was never punished for this act of self-defense, it shook me, babe, it shook me way down inside.

Nonetheless ... philosophy is one of my favourite sports (because everybody wins), so what about all this hawks and doves stuff? What about strapping yourself to an old growth forest, or spiking the trees to booby-trap chainsaws, or marching in the streets or hiring strategic assassins and all that counter-me counter-you jazz? What follows is from an (ever so slightly edited) email I sent to JOHO; it came back with the reply I'll post as the first comment, along with the mea culpa additional comment that, hey man, why isn't this discussion online? ... ah, er ... um ... oops?

rectifying wrongs

Dr. Who, on detonating a bomb in an evil tyrant's lair, was asked by his companions why he'd left his pacifism in this case. He replied, "Sometimes you just have to blow them up" -- Krishna too tells Arajuna that some battles are justified, because yes, sometimes there is a complexity that goes beyond the way we wish the world was going.

The older I get, the more I am convinced that human beings respond primarily to connectionist values, that is, their behaviour is determined more by the history of reinforced patterns stored in the associative computing device in their biology than by those tricks of logic and sense we've painfully taught that biology to do. It is a testament to our ability as a creature that we have evolved any ethics or culture at all, so we can hardly expect perfection.

We should instead cheer if we see even the slightest moral reserve.

With the connectionist brain as the stewart of the creature, perceptions become altered to "fit the pattern" and faith, as Bertrand Russell said, "comes after experience, not before". The environment becomes invisible, in that McLuhan sense, and we can continue in our fixed pattern-action mindset regardless of the surrounding data.

We see this all the time, all the time. For example, vendors of sugar-pills for "well-ness" may otherwise be reasonable people. They have no direct experience, but they sell this stuff regurgitating the manufacturer's claims because the profit margin is high and, they say, the "market demands it" -- they don't just excuse the behaviour, they cease to see it.

Why? Because this sale is no longer associated with "bogus" in their minds.

This is how we get rednecks. No, let me correct that: This is how we all become (in some domain or other) rednecked. We repeat the association and it starts to 'feel' comfortable and next thing we know, "Our mind is made up" because we feel we have "In-formed" ourself, it "feels right" and we become "set in our ways", all of which are connectionist metaphors. We burn down forests because we have seen with our own eyes how it improves the land, and we continue to burn them down long after it is necessary, long after it starts to affect the global biosphere, no longer seeing anything beyond the immediate return of a new green pasture.

Most despots, let's remember, believe they are doing a Good Thing.

"Be a good King, George"

So are said the words of King George IV's mother from 1066 and All That, the only book you need to understand British History.

And so, about violent action: Almost universally across the planet, local culture tells us that reformation, redemption and rehabilitation should be our first choice, because the culture has recorded that these work best long-term, perhaps leaving no "retribution" feelings in the target offender.

Nonetheless, according to my cognitive social theory, if the connections in the neural network are burned in too strong, disconnecting them is no longer an option, the rot is set, we can only tear down and start again. As Bob Marley put it, sometimes "total destruction is the only solution."

But then the moral judgement becomes not a question of preserving life because it is precious (which NASA tells us may not be the case,
life may be ubiquitous), but nor is it a case of active resistance -- we now have the issue of validating the righteousness of our mind, on how we can assure that we can in-form ourselves conclusively that this truly is the necessary action and won't blow up in our face as another Vietnam.

Because we are all to some degreee 'rednecked', it is a difficult and complex question to ascertain that it is our target, and not ourselves, too "set in our way" to accommodate the other; to make things worse, history (ie records of culture transcendent of the single lifetime) shows that it is very often not the stronger of the two who is the more righteous; power to destroy appears to be a powerful connectionist reinforcement, an addictive behaviour-mod catalyst.

Most leaders solve this by simply being reckless, leaving it to God -- or more precisely, to the Next Administration -- to sort it out.

Yoko Ono: "War No More"

Thus we return to a different pacifism not out of fear for destruction (every time you blink, thousands of creatures in your eye-lid fluids will die, we kill as we walk across the carpet) but culture asks us to restrain our weilding of this power out of a moral dilema in throwing that first stone that decides which of us is the one beyond redemption, and while hypothetics can twist any turn it likes inside the closed bottle of the perfectly control-group situation, that question of righteousness unfortunately applies to virtually all real situations.

So it all becomes simple again: Because we can never remove the Great Doubt that we've rednecked ourselves (some data is always hidden behind our head), so pacifism, or more exactly non-action, is the better idea for all cases unless you're really really really sure. But because it has it's time and place, violence can have a justification, and so we've also culturally evolved social Law as our check and balance to say you may indeed take action ...

"'Do what thou wilt' is the whole of the Law" (Aliester Crowley)

And then again, to make matters complicated again, let's face it: blowing things up is just so damn much fun.