"Is" Versus "Ought"

Or the difference between description and prescription

The metaphor of the red pill describes the moment in which each one of us, like Neo in the Matrix, begin to see the world for what it is rather than what we imagine it to be. This distinction between “is” and “ought” dominates a lot of debate on the right today, and it ties in to this week’s post on the differing ways in which each generation sees things in our country.

I thought about this while coming across a random tweet the other day. I don’t know who Ramsha is, but the substance of her post is common to many people involved in politics today:

The idea that the strong do what they will, and concepts such as “international law” and “human rights” are in the end little more than rhetorical devices, is obvious to anyone who has read history. In fact, human rights have been used by the United States to justify everything from instigating the Iranian coup in 1953 to our long and bloody adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fact that this comes as a surprise to someone who has spent so much time studying politics is an indictment of our education system. All those classes, all those papers, all those discussions, and it never occurred to her to ask what happens if someone simply refuses to cooperate.

In January 1991, President George H.W. Bush announced the commencement of hostilities against Iraq. The subsequent Gulf War was going to be cast not as a simple territorial dispute, nor as the United States fighting to protect its citizens or their interests, but as a higher calling, a moral war to protect the weak from the strong. Bush called it the dawn of a new world order:

Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective -- a new world order -- can emerge: a new era -- freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.

By all measures, the Gulf War was a stunning success. In just a few weeks, US and coalition forces expelled Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard from Kuwait. To keep Iraq at bay, however, the US maintained a no-fly zone over the northern half of the country and built military bases throughout the Middle East. The “new world order” of George Bush looked more like Roman-style empire building, didn’t it? The 2003 invasion of Iraq looks more like the strong bullying the weak rather than protecting them, doesn’t it?

In face, every argument that Russia was a bully for invading Ukraine in 2022 can be applied to the American invasion of Iraq. A stronger country invaded a weaker one, claiming that the leader was oppressing his own people compare the plight of the Kurds in Iraq with the ethnic Russians in the Donbass. The US at least went through the motions of presenting evidence of weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations, but ended up doing what we wanted anyway.

Twitter pundit ZMan posted an insightful thread this morning, looking at how our view of war as always being a contest between good guys and bad guys makes it difficult for us to understand long-simmering conflicts:

The reason few people in the West understand the never ending war in the Levant is the West holds to a moralistic and irrational view of politics. Everything is always measured against what is claimed to be an objective moral standard.

The world does not work this way and has never worked this way, as explained by Thucydides in his chapter on the Athenian conquest of Melos. The Athenians noted that everyone has a right, but it is the strong that preserve their rights by dominating the weak.

Israel is acting as it is in Gaza, for the same reason Athens killed all the men of Melos and sold the women and children into slavery. Israel says it is right, because they are strong and can do it. The Arabs say it is wrong because they are weak and cannot stop it.

Again, you might not like it, but this is reality. This is how the world has worked since the dawn of time, because human nature does not change. We nevertheless learn in school that history is progressive, the development of mankind from barbarism to civilization. All our wars are cast as contests between good and evil — the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II — which teaches us to view future conflicts the same way. Russia versus Ukraine is not a conflict over a piece of territory that has been disputed for centuries, rather it’s the evil Putin, the most recent reincarnation of Adolf Hitler himself, warring against the peaceful democratic nation of Ukraine.

This concept isn’t confined to war and geopolitics, of course. Human nature is sinful and fallen, and we are naturally greedy, selfish, deceitful, and proud. Our Founding Fathers recognized this. In Federalist 51, James Madison says:

If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.

That is why we have governments and laws. As a representative republic, our system is designed to give voice to the majority while protecting the natural rights of the minority. Yet that is increasingly not how things work in practice. The Constitution was designed to limit our federal government and allow the people and the states to exercise sovereignty, but today we have a massive unaccountable bureaucracy, a Congress that rubber-stamps the deep state, and different systems of justice depending on the whims of the regime in power.

On paper, conservatives have the same rights to protest as leftists, but the January 6th protestors found out the hard way the difference between ought and is. Contrary to President Bush’s hope for a new world order, the law of the jungle still applies, only the lions and tigers and other predators now cloak their predation in the language of human rights and other progressive shibboleths. You had to stay locked in your home for reasons of public health, but they were compelled to riot in the streets on behalf of a career criminal who died of a drug overdose. Lenin’s conceptualization of who, whom explains a lot more about human nature than our view of the Constitution.

How then shall we live? We have to take the red pill, so to speak, and see things as they are rather than as we wish they were. Recognize that the deck is stacked against us in this country. Understand that appeals to the Constitution or pointing out leftist hypocrisy do not accomplish anything. Realize that we are dissidents in a country rapidly spiraling out of control. The way forward seems mundane, as usual. Teach your children their heritage and how to survive in a changing society. Build strong communities in which you can rely on your neighbors, and they on you. Get involved in politics at the local level — your city council, school board, and county sheriff are incredibly important positions when it comes to protecting your rights. And, of course, stay strapped.

John Adams said that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. We must build a new generation of such people, even as the rest of society crumbles around us. History tells us how times like this play out, so it’s up to us to learn and be prepared. A piece of paper will not stop totalitarians, just as international law did not stop Russia and a concern for human rights did not stop Hamas. Our future is in our own hands.

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