One of my intellectual idols is Raymond Aron. Less celebrated than Sartre or Camus-- he never really wrote a work that captured the public imagination-- nonetheless he was a prominent and courageous French public intellectual during a period of radical transformation in the country.
Aron was, by French definitions, center-right (in the United States that would probably mean he was a craven lefty, but I digress), but unlike most on the right he opposed the French involvement in Algeria and wanted to end the war. However, unlike Sartre, for example, he did not formulate his pleas in moral terms. Instead, he crafted his arguments in light of French self-interest. His harsh realpolitik was ridiculed on both sides, but when criticized for his base arguments by more morally inspired figures on the left, he responded with something like "I agree with all of those things, but I am aiming to convince those people who don't agree with me."
So when
Danielle Allen (super smart, interesting, etc.) pens an editorial in the Washington Post about the real concerns reflected in shouts about death panels and how the left should respond... I think two or three things:
1. Thinking like Aron, I wonder if we shouldn't be shaping our rhetoric towards our opponents more.
2. Via this
interview, I don't think the "unintended consequences" that Allen talks about are all that relevant or even that possible. The leap from death panels to living wills is so ridiculous that I don't see the connection...
and
2b. Wonder if you can have a legitimate Aron style moment of reasoning with the likes of Sarah
Palin.
Indeed, I am all for pitching this plan to the opponents of it... However, I think the pitch should be to the opponents you can reason with rather than the wack-job of Wasilla.
p.s.
You've got this paragraph from Allen, judicious in content, form, style, etc.-- explaining that the Palins of the world are arguing from a position of their emotional response to how things
might play out (and using William James to say-- hey sometimes we need to think how people might respond emotionally to things, how nice):
These activists do not claim that the proposed reforms include policies whose explicit purpose is to ration, nor do the more careful among them claim that the policies will establish panels to help people decide when to die. They are not arguing about the semantic content of the policies; that is, they are not arguing about the meaning of the words that are actually in the relevant drafts of bills. Instead, they are considering, as the pragmatist philosopher William James put it, "what conceivable effects of a practical kind the [policy] may involve -- what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare."
Here's what Palin actually said:
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Is Allen giving too much credit to Palin? Yes, of course she is. Does she have a point in giving too much credit to Palin? I don't think so, but maybe I'm wrong.
pps My frustration with this article from Allen lies in her (noble?) desire to look to reason as a corrective to these emotional responses. You can't reason with the emotional... A lesson the academy never seems to remember.
