Elizabeth Pisani, an epidemiologist and blogger (at The Wisdom of Whores), has just published an article in the Guardian entitled “Spitzer’s true folly: A governor who pays for sex should know to mould social policies on reality, not morality.”

Noting that the departing New York governor had championed a tough anti-prostitution law, Pisani writes that “the collective gloating [over his embarrassment] obscures an important truth: policies based on morality, not reality, don’t work.” Further on, she claims: “Morality, which is hard to define let alone to measure, is not a good basis for public policy. Science is a good basis for public policy.” And finally, she informs us that “morality demonstrably collapses in the face of reality.”

That certainly puts paid to morality, at least as far as Pisani is concerned. She appears to be arguing that, henceforth, we needn’t bother ourselves any further about moral problems, and should just charge ahead with scientifically consecrated political leadership. The author’s scientistic desire to do away with questions of ends, and concern herself only with means, is of course an old one. She presents herself as a latter-day version of Dickens’s Gradgrind, who insists that facts alone are all that is needed in life.

But, unfortunately, man is a creature so constituted that he cannot live in a world of facts alone: he has no choice but to live in a world of values as well. One cannot think about means without thinking about ends, as Pisani herself demonstrates when she argues that “if Spitzer wanted to dedicate some of his apparently endless stock of moral outrage to prostitution, he would have done better to crusade for health and safety regulations in the sex trade than for abolition.” Pisani’s moral judgments are different from Spitzer’s, but they are moral judgments nonetheless. She forgets the famous dictum of a man most revered in the world of science, Albert Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.”

It’s possible that Pisani’s confusion arises because of her rather poor command of the English language, and her inability or unwillingness to make proper verbal distinctions. By morality, what she actually means is puritanical moralizing, against which there are indeed many and powerful arguments. But puritanical moralizing is only one possible form of morality, and not even an important one. By mistaking puritanical moralizing for morality in its entirety, Pisani obscures the moral judgments that are the basis for her own opinions—and which, like all moral judgments, are disputable. Instead, she wants us to believe that they are scientific facts beyond question, such as that the earth goes around the sun. There is a totalitarian quality to her approach.

Spitzer’s true folly is not that he let morality mold the social policies he advocated; all social policies are molded by morality. But Pisani’s article illustrates—not intentionally—the wisdom of Confucius’s desire that above all, things should first be called by their proper names, and of his perception of the dangers that lurk when they are not.

American readers might find interesting a most remarkable article by Jonathan Farley that recently appeared in the British liberal newspaper the Guardian. Professor Farley, a Harvard graduate, is a distinguished black mathematician who, working at Stanford, has applied mathematics to the task of defeating terrorism. (Oddly enough, he numbers among his heroes Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, both apologists of “liberating” violence.) The article is an attack on both the legacy of Martin Luther King and the moderation of Barack Obama, whose election as president would, in Farley’s view, be a disaster for American blacks. In an article full of error and oddly muddled for someone whose stock-in-trade is logical thought, Farley seems to imply that the best way forward for American blacks is political violence.

According to Farley, the only thing that the King-led civil rights movement achieved was “the right to spend money in a store owned by a racist who would rather kill you than serve you,” a right for which the movement had gone “begging.” The movement also resulted in thousands of black teachers’ and principals’ losing their jobs, he contends, making racial segregation sound like a policy designed for positive discrimination in favor of educated blacks. Dr. Verwoerd, South Africa’s architect of apartheid, couldn’t have put it better.

I will quote a whole paragraph to give the flavor of Farley’s article:

King’s many worshippers are fond of Gandhian quotes such as “If blood be shed, let it be our blood.” Which is fine if you are merely sacrificing yourself. But King was sending out women, children and old people to be beaten and blown up. Even at the time, as King notes, there were many who viewed this as monstrous. When those little girls were murdered in Birmingham, why should black people not have booted King out and hunted the killers down, like al-Qaida? As King himself said: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”

Farley says that King needed a history lesson, citing a passage from The Sword that Heals, in which King wrote that “non-violence in the form of boycotts and protests had confounded the British monarchy and laid the basis for freeing the colonies from unjust domination.” To which Farley replies: “Yes, that, and colonial minutemen with rifles.”

But in fact India, more than a century and a half later, and far nearer our own times, gained its independence from Britain with remarkably little effusion of blood, at least as between the British and Indians. Of course, this restraint was possible only because both sides retained scruples: as Farley himself writes, “One wonders how well [nonviolence] would work against, say, Hitler’s Panzer divisions.” But his statements that “King built nothing, and taught us only how to take a beating,” and “thanks to him, no African-American today is allowed to bring up racism,” along with his favorable references to the Black Panthers and the Mau Mau, imply that blacks in America are facing the equivalent of Panzer divisions and ought to respond with collective violence.

I have long sought the perfect distillation of the worldview that I oppose, for without such an expression, I have sometimes worried that I am fighting a straw man. But as is often the way, we find what we most seek where we least look, or do not expect, to find it. Recently, I read a collection of essays by the East German writer Christa Wolf, which she wrote in the immediate aftermath of German reunification. Wolf had been an equivocal figure, part dissident, part court critic of the regime. Her reputation suffered when it came to light that as a young woman she had informed for the Stasi. The relevance of this deed to her stature as a writer is not clear.

Wolf’s collection includes a letter that she received from the prominent left-leaning West German philosopher Jürgen Habermas about the problems of reunification. Habermas displays a certain verbal flatulence, an unwillingness to use one word where ten will do, as well as a fear of clarity (for clarity is what reveals one’s banality). But one passage stood out—the perfect distillation that I had been looking for:

Have we already accepted living with an underclass that includes 20 to 30 percent of the population? Will we too close our eyes to a structural minority of helpless people whose only remaining means of protest is self-destruction and who have no chance of changing their situation by their own efforts?

Habermas’s concern for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy does him credit: it is indeed easy and tempting to disregard such people, and I sense that his concern is genuine. Yet there is something profoundly dehumanizing about his characterization of the problem. What he is saying is that up to 25 million people in Germany exercise no choice at all in their lives, at least over anything other than their means of self-destruction. They are not full human beings, as we are: they are as helpless as inanimate objects.

What Habermas fails to recognize is that self-destruction—which he correctly implies has reached epidemic proportions among a segment of the population—grows out of attitudes to life, beliefs, and mentalities; it is not a mechanical response to a mechanical problem. And one of the beliefs that favors self-destruction is that no alternative to it is possible, because the world is so constituted, at least until the people’s saviors gain power, that one’s choices make no difference to the course of one’s life. This is precisely the belief that Habermas seeks to promote. But it is not true, at least in minimally open societies, as the success of various minorities demonstrates. Habermas and those who think like him are thus purveyors of Blake’s “mind forg’d manacles” that lead to so much misery in the midst of plenty.

A small item in the British Medical Journal recently caught my eye. It was a brief digest of a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the environmental impact of divorce. Researchers from Michigan found that people in divorced households spent 46 and 56 percent more on electricity and water, respectively, than did people in married households. This outcome is not all that surprising: marriage involves (among many other things, of course) economies of scale.

One of the interesting questions that this little piece of research poses is whether the environmentalist lobby will now throw itself behind the cause of family values. Will it, for example, push for the tightening of divorce laws, and for financial penalties—in the form, say, of higher taxes—to be imposed on those who insist upon divorcing, and therefore upon using 46 percent more electricity and 52 percent more water per person than married couples who stay together? Will environmentalists march down the streets with banners reading SAVE THE PLANET: STAY WITH THE HUSBAND YOU HATE?

For myself, I doubt it. Yet these figures, if true, are certainly suggestive. The fact that there will be no demonstrations against environmentally destructive divorcees, who probably emit as much extra carbon dioxide as the average SUV, suggests that the desire to save the planet is not nearly as powerful as the desire to destroy a way of life.

Oddly enough for a man whose election immediately resulted in a riot, Sarko is what stands between France and real, serious social upheaval and violence. For if nothing changes, the situation will degrade further, until a much greater explosion becomes inevitable; and if Sarko cannot make the necessary changes, no one can.

The gravest social problem confronting France is that of young Muslim men of North African descent in the banlieues, the urban wastelands that surround many French towns and cities, particularly, of course, Paris. The nearest analogy that I can draw is to the townships of South Africa under apartheid, though the level of hatred is probably greater in France than it was in South Africa. Of course, the level of hatred is not necessarily proportionate to its justification, and clearly the French state is not remotely comparable with the South African; but many other factors lead to hatred, among them the absence of self-respect. When Sarkozy called the mob la racaille, they were angry because they knew he was right. No one likes to think he is totally expendable and likely to remain a parasite forever.

At the time of the 2005 riots, no one thought to ask the women of the banlieues what they thought: whether les jeunes were heroes or villains, oppressed or oppressors. The French state, in its response to the riots, made the elementary mistake of pressuring insurance companies to pay compensation (which they were not legally obliged to do) for the burned-out cars, thus missing an opportunity to create tension and opposition in the banlieues between the law-abiding and the law-breaking. If car owners are to be indemnified against arsonists, what reason have they for despising the arsonists?

An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice, which it would be a further injustice to punish, has engendered a prolonged and so far unfinished experiment in leniency that has debased the quality of life of millions of people, especially the poor. Every day in our newspapers we read of the absurd and dangerous leniency of the criminal-justice system. On April 21, for example, even the Observer (one of the bastions of British liberalism responsible for the present situation) gave prominence to the official report into the case of Anthony Rice, who strangled and then stabbed Naomi Bryant to death.

Rice, it turned out, had been assaulting women since 1972. He had been convicted for assaulting or raping a total of 15 women before murdering Naomi Bryant, and it is a fair supposition that he had assaulted or raped many more who did not go to the police. In 1982, he grabbed a woman by the throat, held a knife to her, and raped her. Five years later, while out of prison on home leave, he grabbed a woman, pushed her into a garden, held a knife to her, and raped her for an hour. Receiving a life sentence, he was transferred to an open prison in 2002 and then released two years later on parole as a low-risk parolee. He received housing in a hostel for ex-prisoners in a village whose inhabitants had been told, to gain their acquiescence, that none of the residents there was violent; five months after his arrival, he murdered Naomi Bryant. In pronouncing another life sentence on him, the judge ordered that he should serve at least 25 years: in other words, even now the law has not quite thrown away the key.

Continue reading "Real Crime, Fake Justice" at City Journal.