Please help.   I require the assistance of someone who is at least as competent a Latin grammerian as the surly centurion portrayed by John Cleese in "LIfe of Brian."  Knowing this place as I do, I have no doubt that there are some. 

See, today, while reading the post on Russ Feingold's letter to Obama, I identified what I believe to be the central problem in the way what passes for discourse in our country works.  And because every argumentative pattern needs a convenient label, and all labels sounds more impressive when translated into Latin, I need the help of a reasonably competent Latin grammarian. 

The problem I am trying to label is a pervasive and pernicious form of reductionism, reductio ad pugnum I want to call it, assuming that's the right case.  Reduction to conflict. the reduction of morally and factually complex issues to simplistic manichean dichotomies. 

Feingold wrote Obama an intelligent, thoughful letter putting him on notice that he's disturbed by the notion that some of the Guantanamo detainees could be deemed subject to indefinite detention without trial.   He uses the words "likely unconstitutional," but he also notes the reasons why that, even if it is constitutional and otherwise passes legal muster, the idea is conceptually disturbing and potentially dangerous to all we hold dear as a nation. 

Feingold's letter frames the debate in exactly the way I think it should be framed.  He questions the legality but also acknowledges the inherent limitations of questioning the constitutionality of a bill that hasn't even been drafted yet.  More importantly, to me at least, Feingold recognizes the immense moral and practical complexity of the problem and at least implicitly acknowledges that that there is no answer to the problem of what to do with these people that can fully disperse that murky grey complexity. And yet, the headline of the story here is "Feingold To Obama: Preventive Detention Is Unconstitutional" [emphasis added], 

When I was in my twenties, I was filled with the intense actinic light of moral and factual certainty about most everything except whether there was a God.  I dimly understood from observation and inference that as I got older, the painful clarity of that certainty would be obscured by a miasmic accumulation of experiences in choosing between bad and worse, between indispensible expedience and immutable principle.  Those experiences come in many variations: times we chose to do what seemed good, and found it caused great harm. Situations where we did the right thing for the wrong reason and the wrong thing for the right reason.   And even then, in my twenties, I was slowly learning the importance of picking my fights and I understood, even then, that over time, all those fights left unfought would exact a toll. 

So it goes.  We get precious few chances in life to choose between unquestioned good and unalloyed evil.  By the time middle age hits, we've seen some things that were  entirely black, but hardly any that were unsullied white.  After a certain point, we find ourselves feeling grateful for the rare occaisions when we can tell which of the two evils we must choose between is actually the lesser rather than having to guess.  And, most intolorably of all, all too often, choosing the path that seems most rightous often entails paying a personal price.  We find that it is well that virture is its own reward because, most of the time, that's the only reward you'll get for being virtuous.

That same experiences, however, teach us to approach brightline moral certainties with caution because it turns out that the future--at least as we experience it--is a stochastic process.  But we also learn that unquestioning acceptance of moral complexity is in itself morally hazardous.  That constant awareness of moral complexity imposed upon most of us by our life experience can easily enable a complacent moral paralysis in the face of true evil. 

So it was, for example, with slavery.  In "The Road to Disunion,Vol. I," a book I've slowly been working my way through between "fun" books, William Freehling suggests that what, to us seems to have been a false perception of moral complexity was one of the major factors behind the continuation of slavery in the border and middle south between 1787 and abut 1850.  Outside the Deep South "black belt," it was widely recognized by southern elites that slavery was wrong and should, somehow, be gotten rid of.  However, the problem of how to do it seemed, to them, to be intractable.  In his twenties, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed on behalf of a new nation that that all men were self-evidently created equal.  As an old man, weighed down by the financial pressures self-inflicted through a lifetime of almost manic overspending, he found himself paralyzed by the seeming moral and factual complexity of the problem and, in the end, manumitted only two of his slaves in his will. 

Accordinging to Freehling, Jefferson and his middle/border south cohorts were transfixed by a comforting fantasy that some perfect set of circumstances could eventually be brought into being that would enable them to get rid of the institution without unpleasant consequences like impoverishing slave owners, or harming the state economy or, *shudder*, having free black neighbors.  All that could happen, they thought, if only damnyankee agitators could be stopped from interferring.  Northern moral pressure, besides being considered hypocritical, was seen as one of the main barriers to the implementation of a program of gradual emancipation (which, in practice was understood to mean the setting of a deadline by which slaves had to be sold south on pain of uncompensated emancipation.)  As long as northerners interferred, those perfect conditions could never come into being and thus, sadly, slavery would continue in the border and middle south.

That perception of complexity seems ludicrous to us today because it rested on the assumption that blacks were morally and intellectually inferior to whites.  Strip that ridiculous assumption away and the appearance of moral complexity vanishes with it.  At least, so it seems to us today, five generations removed from the slaughter at Gettysburg and with our brilliant African Amercan president, brilliant African American first lady and adorable African American first family.  The paralysis of southerners in the early 1800s is a warning to us today--one of many from history--that in the face of real evil, you can choose to hide in that fog of moral complexity but you can't hide from the price.

So yeah, I understand the danger of self-induced analysis paralysis in the face of false complexity.  Fabricating moral complexity is an easy, and oft-used means for the avoidance of hard, but morally imperative, choices. 

But at least as dangerous, and, I think more dangerous at this time and places, is the urge to reduce truly morally and factually complex situations to facile manichean dichotomies. 

The reduction of moral complexity to manichean dichotomy is the the key means by which tyrants, fanatics and charlatans throughout the ages have mobilizing the masses for evil. False dichotomies provide the justification for wars of agression, the fuel for atrocities and are prime motivator of terrorists. "With us or against us."  "We lost the war because we were stabbed in the back."  "They are evil and brutal and subhuman and deserve to be disempowered, interned or killed, and we are good and pure and humane and deserve to rule."  

And even when it is not being used to justify murder, false manicheanism is corrosive to the civic health of a democracy.  As Judge Learned Hand semi-famously put it in 1944, "the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right." Often, one of the main objectives of those who trade in manicheanism is the dehumanization the enemy, the reduction of opponents to caricatures so as to forestall all consideration of even the possibility of common ground or compromise.  Regardless of intent, this is invariably the effect if you buy into it. 

People at the opposing ends of the political spectrum are not immune to the soothing parylasis of perceived complexity and people in the mushy middle are not unsusceptable to a good false dichotomy.  Orwell's disgust with pretty much everyone else in the European leftist intelligencia of the 30s was due to the way it numbed itself to the reality of a leftist regime based on forced labor and mass murder with an anesthetic cloud of false moral complexity.  As to the middle and false dichotomies--hell, I'm in the mushy middle of the Democratic Party and I may well be spinning one right now. 

Still, as a general rule, however wide the political spectrum in a given country, manichean dichotomies are the natural intellectual home of people at the tail ends of the spectrum while appreciation for moral and factual complexity is the natrual baseline for centrists. (Real centrists, I mean, not the motley assemblage of buffoons,cowards and ideologues in the wrong party who get called "centrists" in America these days). 

And therein lies the problem with civic discourse in America today--the primary fora for our discourse, the traditional media, the blogs and talk radio, abhor moral and factual complexity the way nature abhors a vacuum.  The narrative format adopted by our traditional media over the last thirty years demands conflict.  Conflict simplifies the story and makes it much more dramatic.  Conflict sells commercials.  Conflict between black hats and white hads is entertaining.  Hell, conflict between guys in grey hats is entertaining.  It is easier to consume, tastier and more sensually gratifying.  Simplistic conflict is Cheetos for the brain. 

Thus, every story and every issue is subjected to the process of reductio ad pugnum before it is served up for consumption.  And let's face it: most of the time, political blogs and blog commenters, if anything, make the problem worse.

At other times and other places, a little reductio ad pugnum has been, or would have been, imminently healthy.  The reason I think this is a problem here and now is that the process of reductio ad pugnum empowers and enables ideological dogmatism and right now, that dogmatism is eating away the foundations of democracy. 

In fairness, it started on the right.  Reductio ad pugnum is the pony in Ann Coulter's endless one-trick pony show.  Everything is simple and obvious, the world is full of simple moral choices and those who oppose the choices we favor are ipso facto either evil or fools or both.  Rightwing talk radio depends on this stuff.  The Republican Party is now entirely given over to this kind of thinking and relentlessly purges anyone who whines about complexity with totalitarian zeal. It has turned us into a two party democracy where only one party can be trusted with power because the other has become completely deranged.  That's not healthy.  And if the derangement spreads to both parties, it's probably fatal.      

The Republicans, with their long embrace of anti-intellectualism, had long been--at least since the Dixiecrat defection--the natural home to those most susceptable to the allure of reductio ad pugnum. That created a media market for content that feeds into the reductionist mindset and that market almost completely swallowed up the entire traditional media during the '90s  Now, almost every policy discussion is reduced by the traditional media to a story about a clear choices with ineluctable and easily predictable consequences and bloggers and blog commenters on the left and radio blowhards on the right imbue that faux clear and easy choice with the attributtes of a moral imperative. 

This post has gone a longer way down the road to Rambleville than I intended, so let me bring it to an abrubt and graceless transtion to my concluding point.  

What to do with the fraction of Gitmo detainees who are untriable--either because they committed no crime or because Cheney's torture program made them unconvictable in any trial that wouldn't be a sick joke--is not the moral or factually easy issue that those on the left--or the right, for that matter--want it to be.  The presumed illegality of indefinite detention is not as self-evident as those on the left want it to be.  Under international law, nations at war--including this one--have in the past, and now may detain prisoners of war and even civilian enemy aliens, for the duration of hostilities solely for the purpose of preemptively incapacitating them.  During World War II, we detained thousands of German and Italian citizens for the duration--i.e. indefinitely--for no other reason than that a hearing conducted under wartime conditions found that they posed a potential risk to security. 

And no, the potential legality does not make the matter less troubling or more morally simple.  In that very same war, we illegally and disgracefully detained damn near every single person of Japanese descent in the western United States, including tens of thousands of American citizens, without a hearing for reasons that were undeniably racist.   We did so under color of the same provisions of international law that permitted us detain German and Italian citizens despite the fact that international law conferred no right to detain U.S. citizens living on U.S. soil contrary to our own Constitution. 

The danger to liberty, and to our own values, of allowing any "preventive  detention" under claim of war power is clear from our own history--both in World War II and under Bush.  No matter how much one might trust this president--and obviously some of us trust him more than others--what the next one or the one after that might do with the precedent is frightening, not least because of what the one before him did with it. 

But that doesn't make this issue either morally or legally simple either.  Let us not pretend that these guys are, and must be, entirely harmless because our ideology or personal convictions tell us they must be released.   If you advocate simply letting them go in order to vindicate our values and feel morally clean, will you still feel morally clean if one of them is behind a truck bomb that kill hundreds in Karachi or throws acid in the face of little girls in Afghanistan for the crime of going to school?   If we keep them imprisoned until they die of old age, will I feel clean because we forestalled the hypothetical possibility that one of them might be the one who smuggles a Pakistani nuke into New York City? 

The situation is as it is and, in the absence of the ability to change the past or predict the future, there is no right answer nor is it clear which course of action is least bad.  Merely contemplating the moral and factual mess we are in with these men makes me literally feel nauseous.  It makes me thank God that I'm not the one who has to make the decision and I pity the man who does have to make it just as I pity those trapped in the situation, no matter how much they may (or may not) hate me. 

But that nausea is reality and I'm too old to try to soothe it away with some false moral certainty.