Napoleon Dynamite v. the Evil Football Star: A Very Imperfect Analogy About Concupiscence and the Darkened IntellectI've angered some more readers. I seem to have a talent for it. And the odd thing (to me, at least) is that when I say things that I think will make people mad, they often aren't, but then I'm blind-sided by people who get angry about things I honestly didn't think were particularly maddening.
Part of it is the fact that I write this blog in a pretty relaxed manner. Lotsa colloquialisms. Lotsa typos. And I tend to use a shorthand which (because I've used it so long) I sometimes forget not all my readers are familiar with.
Case in point: the phrase "sin makes you stupid". This is a Sheaism that summarizes in a half-joking way the Church's teaching that "concupiscence darkens the intellect". In other words, the human mind is always struggling against the effects of sin, which addles our thinking and makes the best laid plan of mice and men go aft agly. It often results in people with a subjective feeling of certitude about things that are not supported by the facts.
The effects of concupiscence are many and manifold but I want to focus on two as an example. Suppose you know a young pup with a crush on a cheerleader. She gives very vague cues that she "thinks he's nice". She smiles at him now and then. She's polite on the phone when he calls. Of course, she's also got a date with the captain of the football team this Friday night and she plans to move out of state next year when she goes to college too. Now if the young pup persuades himself that she is in love with him, that she's going with the football star out of pity, and that her college plans are a coded plea for somebody to help her escape her oppressive father, would you say that pup was deluding himself or lying? Suppose the young pup has a small circle of friends with social skills like Napoleon Dynamite and they all agree with him? Suppose he states to his friends categorically, "Simply put, there can be no doubt that Trisha is in love with me." Delusion or lies?
I think it's sort of either/or. The fact is, he feels subjectively certain, but all the subjective certitude in the world doesn't change the fact that he does not really know what he claims to know. So in a highly technical sense, he is "lying to himself". But it's a far different kind of lie than, say, if the football star were to lure the girl into an empty house in the pretense of visiting his sick old grandmother and then rape her. If the police investigation begins to point to him, he too can darken his intellect by telling more and ever more complex lies to justify himself and his actions. But the gravity of the darkened intellect and the nature of it will be of a radically different order than the kid who told himself she loved him in advance of the facts.
I give these (very imperfect) examples of what I mean by "darkened intellect" because I managed to offend a couple of readers yesterday in the comboxes when I said that the Administration had "lied" when they claimed to know with certitude that Saddam had WMDs. The phrase "Bush lied" has been tossed around with such abandon in the past few years that, not unnaturally, some readers took me to mean that Bush was akin to the evil football star, deliberately and consciously lying about the existence of WMDs in order to rape Iraq when he knew perfectly well they were not there.
That is not, however, what I'm saying. I'm saying that we are faced with certain unavoidable data: namely, that the Administration made a claim of fact, summarized in the words of Dick Cheney, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." No matter how you slice it, this fact claim turned out to be untrue. And no matter how you slice it, this fact claim was the principal support for the first pillar of Just War doctrine, that the threat to our security was lasting, grave, and *certain*. We did not go to war because lack of democracy in Iraq posed a lasting, grave, and certain threat to us. We went to war because the Administration told us they knew for damn certain that Saddam had WMDs and if we didn't go right now, they were certainly be used against us.
Now this faces us with a problem. The event showed that this claim of certitude by the Administration was wrong. In the course of my argument yesterday, I tried to make clear that subjective feelings of certitude are not the same as actually having the facts backing you up. I gave as an example the people who are certain that Mossad destroyed the WTC. They're certain, but they have no real factual basis for their certitude. Their certitude comes from something other than reality. One of my readers managed to infer from this that I am saying the Administration is as dumb as WTC conspiracy theorists. But I'm not saying that. I'm saying that, in the event, we have to account for the fact that Cheney claim of certitude was wrong. In fact, there *was* doubt about the presence of WMDs in Iraq. Some of us still remember Hans Blix.
So we are left with two explanations of Cheney's claim and of the Administration's certitude: the truly Bush-hating one and the charitable one. The Bush-hating one is that the Administration knew perfectly well that there were no WMDs but lied through their teeth anyway. I've never believed this, because I just don't believe any politician would deliberately set themselves up to look this stupid when the deception was inevitably discovered. Consequently, I have to conclude that the Administration "lied" (or rather deluded itself) in the sense of the young buck who persuades himself of far more than the evidence really supports concerning the cheerleader. Saying the Administration talked itself into a certitude that it did not, in fact, possess is to say it lied in only the weakest sense of the term. But it is still to hold the Administration accountable for its loose talk. Because any way you slice it, Cheney told an untruth when he declared that they knew for certain that Saddam had WMDs. Telling an untruth is what is called "lying". He did not know what he claimed he knew, yet he went ahead and talked as though he did.
Yes, there were all sorts of mitigating circumstances that Bush-haters do not grant. The Administration came to its erroneous conclusions by a sort of hothouse process of re-breathing received wisdom and ignoring critics. I see no evidence of a deliberate and malicious intent to deceive a la the evil football star. That's why the Administration was surprised by the lack of WMDs. They couldn't believe they were wrong. But that's not because they'd had solid evidence. It's because they talked themselves into a certitude that they did not, in fact, have, like the Napoleon Dynamite character. Talking yourself into certitude in excess of the facts is not as culpable as lying to cover up murder, but neither is it innocent, particularly when you are doing it to rush to war instead of get a date on Friday night.
In sum, the Administration appears to have chosen to emphasize everything that supported their a priori conviction that Saddam had WMDs and to ignore and belittle every piece of evidence that told against that conviction. It's intellectually dishonest and an example of sin (in this case, pride) darkening the intellect. But it's a very different kind of intellectual dishonesty than simply saying "Hell no, there's no threat from Saddam, but let's lie these suckers into a war anyway!"
I doubt any of this will pacify those whom I have managed to anger. Nor, frankly, do I think what I'm saying here is anything I haven't been saying for years. But I hope perhaps somebody will find it helpful. Like I say, I don't know the way out of the mess, but it seems salutary to try to retrace our steps and figure out how we got here.
