Some things I tried looking up today to absorb:
- akrasia
- natural law theory
- ages of the main cast for The Conjuring
The results of my attempts:
- Nope!
- Some of a podcast and then nope!
- All older than I am (whew!). But James Wan is younger.
Akrasia, of course, is the Greek word that means acting against what you know to be right. It's acting against your better judgment. I wanted to explore that idea of crossing a line vis-a-vis the story of the Alabama special election in 2018 for Jeff Sessons's old seat.
Doug Jones, Democrat, was running against Roy Moore, Republican. Matt Osborne, a Democratic activist, had long been sounding alarms about online Russian influence of USAmerican campaigns. Fed up with no one listening to him and deeply disturbed at the thought of "Senator Roy Moore," Osborne sought and got $100,000 in Democratic funding to hire a staff. That staff created two Facebook pages/groups that purported to be Moore supporters who also strongly believed in alcohol prohibition (Alabama has several dry counties). Vote for Moore, who will ensure prohibition in more of Alabama, cheered the pages (and the advertisements from the groups--really Osborne's staff--put together)
Here's the logic behind this: prohibition represented a potential wedge issue for Republicans in Alabama. Mostly urban business Republicans were against prohibition. Mostly rural cultural conservative Republicans were for it. Moore was himself a cultural conservative, but to win he needed robust support from urban-business Republicans. By amplifying a signal that Roy Moore=prohibition, Osborne's crew sought to water down Moore's support.
Jones won. No one is quite certain if or how much Osborne's actions helped, but the answer is probably "yes, a bit." In an On the Media interview with Osborne, host Bob Garfield put the burning question to the activist: Isn't what you did wrong? Osborne's response was, basically, Well, they do it too, and It'd be wronger to refrain from using every tool at our disposal to stop Roy Moore.
The ends, it seems, justify the memes. (I'm sure someone else has come up with that phrase, but I refuse to Google it to find out.)
But. Osborne is likely correct that this sort of thing has been going on for quite a while. He's also right that this sort of thing is going to happen more and more and more. On the internet, no one knows you're a false flag wedge strategy. I'm not sure, however, that he's right that the only way to fight fire is with a bigger flamethrower. That road doesn't lead to very nice places, and it gets to those bad places very quickly.
Are those bad places, though, worse than Senator Roy Moore would be (at least in Democratic eyes)?
Natural Law theory is the thread of ethical and legal philosophy that suggests that humans have an innate, trans-contextual sense of certain moral constants, such as "killing someone without justification is wrong." When a state law or community precept runs counter to that natural law, you have the right and duty to disobey the non-natural law. Trump's new commission on natural rights celebrates this notion.
It's a venerable, makes-common-sense idea. C.S. Lewis draws on it some in Mere Christianity. Martin Luther King, Jr., references something like it in his writings on civil disobedience. As I see it in practice, however, it tends to get wielded by conservative foes of feminism, racial justice movements, and LGBTQ rights. Just how does one determine whether your strong moral conviction about X qualifies as a "natural law" as opposed to being the revered but idiosyncratic practice of your group or tradition? How does a claim to natural law justify itself? Defend itself? How does one critique it? In practice, I tend to see natural law invoked to baptize prejudice in the waters of legal authority and rationality, as in same-sex marriage violates natural law.
Additionally, if natural law really constitutes trans-historical moral common sense, a moral truth apparent to pretty much everyone human, then you have to wonder how useful it is in legal practice. It's like declaring blood circulation in the body as a natural law. Sure, that's how things work, but how many laws get passed that violate it? Most laws that shock the conscience make perfect moral sense from a particular ethical or legal point of view. "Don't kill humans without justification" offers us all the spacious, inviting loophole of justification.
That said, there is a desire for there to be a sense of rightness that transcends human laws. We want there to be some kind of ethical patch of land to stand on that extends beyond the edifice of a human legal system so that we can observe and judge that edifice from outside. This system sucks. Here's why.
Something like that this sucks, it seems, cries out to be articulated around the Osborne activism. I want some ethical criterion beyond tu quoque and cynical pragmatism that can call into question the "do anything to win" mindset here. Or at the very least I want such acts to be framed as something closer to akrasia: yeah, I did it. I didn't feel good about it, but I did it. I want something to underline the "evil" in "necessary evil."
Anyway, that's what I should have written and read about today instead of recharging my brain, meeting friends, and watching The Conjuring.
More tomorrow,
JF
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