Frank’s Case Book

“There may be honest differences of opinion as to government policies; but surely there can be no such difference as to the need of unflinching perseverance in the war against successful dishonesty.” — Theodore Roosevelt.

The goal of the 1973 Endangered Species Act was “to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species … depend may be conserved.” If the Secretary of the Interior determines that the habitat or range of an endangered species is threatened by human activities, then those activities can be curtailed. In practice, the act has been both praised and criticized. It has maintained habitat for endangered species, but has sometimes done so at the cost of jobs for humans. The reduction of federal lands available for logging because these lands encroached on the habitat of the endangered spotted owl is one of the most famous and controversial applications of the act.

Successful application of the Endangered Species Act depends on the unbiased identification of habitats crucial to the survival of endangered species. The importance of this responsibility makes recent events disturbing.

The Canadian lynx is endangered and the government is trying to assess its range. The location of Lynx hair samples found in the wilderness are an important means for this assessment. A number of Federal and State employees were discovered taking hair samples from captive lynx and submitting these as if they had been obtained from the wild. Some of those involved claimed they were just trying to test the accuracy of the lab to which the samples are sent, but such tests were outside the specific study protocols. That explanation has the foul stench of deception. Some believe the fudging of data as a means to prevent development is widespread. The Washington Times cites a retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist as saying, “I’m convinced that there is a lot of that going on for so-called higher purposes.”

In Piper City, KS just outside of Kansas City, biology teacher Christine Pelton determined that 28 of 118 students were guilty of plagiarism on a biology assignment. Pelton awarded the students a zero on the assignment. After protests by parents concerned about the effect of poor grades on the competitiveness of their children in the college admissions race, the school board investigated. The Board found that the students had indeed plagiarized material, but thought the punishment too severe. The Board then directed Pelton to raise the grades of the affected students. Pelton resigned in protest.

The Enron energy company and its accounting firm, Authur Anderson, engaged in misleading, dishonest, and perhaps illegal accounting practices to hide the true financial status of the company. The result is company bankruptcy and the decimation of the savings of investors and employees. The efforts to untangle the web of deception woven by this dishonesty still are not complete.

These and other instances point to a growing cultural acquiescent to dishonesty, particularly when honesty and integrity prove to be inconvenient. There always seems to be an easy justification or rationalization. The dishonesty is always in service of a higher cause, whether it is environment, economic advantage, or simply higher school grades.

It would be easy and perhaps a little too much fun to blame the spread of dishonesty on former President Bill Clinton’s studied dissembling in a federal civil rights case. While Clinton may have raised deceit to a high art form, he was not the cause, at least not the sole cause, of the cultural acceptance of dishonesty. The trend existed before Clinton’s presidency.

If we want to look at intellectual sources for this tolerance, we might try to blame Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. He argued that truth may not be as absolute and universal as we had supposed. However, most people do not read Nietzsche, and fewer accept his analysis.

Unfortunately, conservatives and free market libertarians may be partially to blame for tolerance of dishonesty. One of the virtues of free markets is to tame and sublimate otherwise aggressive animal impulses into constructive market competition. This virtue can simultaneously be a vice. Markets are notoriously amoral schemes aimed only at practical measures of success. Only the result is important. Such a neglect of means relative to ends diminishes the importance of means. It habituates the public to an ethos of indifference to honesty and integrity.

In order for free market societies to successfully exist, they cannot rely on markets as the only instructors of morals and molders of temperament. Governments are instituted to provide an honest legal structure within which free transactions can confidently take place. However, the cost and awkwardness of prosecutions means that such enforcement will be reserved for only the most egregious violations.

By-and-large, enforcement and self-control must arise organically from the culture. Shame and embarrassment in the face of peers can act as powerful social constraints. Intermediary institutions, religious, private and civic, can engage in moral instruction and nurture our better natures.

Those who believe in the power of markets, who believe that countries and economies should be organized and directed by free markets, have an additional obligation to insure the character of their citizens and the success of those intermediary institutions that form such character. Not surprisingly, social institutions that rely on individual self-direction and self-rule are dependent upon the wise and honest use of this freedom.

It was early in the afternoon on June 7, 1981, when F-15’s and F-16’s of the Israeli Air Force lumbered with their heavy loads of weapons and extra fuel tanks into the sky above Etzion Air Force Base in the Sinai Peninsula. Now over twenty years later, the base has been turned over, by agreement, to the Egyptians. Nonetheless, on that day, the planes leaving Etzion changed the world dramatically. The Israeli planes managed to elude radar and Jordanian, Saudi and Iraqi air patrols at they flew over 600 miles at low level through Arab territory to the Osirak nuclear reactor near Bagdad, Iraq. Two hours after their mission began and in less than two minutes, the planes delivered their ordinance on the dome of the reactor. The Israelis managed to destroy the reactor before it was loaded with nuclear fuel and went hot. It is very likely that that single act kept nuclear weapons out of the hands of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. If Hussein had such weapons, the Iranian-Iraqi War and the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait could have been radically different with far more loss of life. Hussein has shown little reluctance in using chemical weapons. There is little reason to believe that he would exhibit much more continence with regard to nuclear weapons.

The Iraqi reactor was built under contract by the French who argued that under their supervision nuclear material that could be used for bomb construction would be difficult to smuggle from the reactor. It is impossible to know for a certainty whether French supervision would have been effective, but more recent international supervision of Iraq with regard to weapons of mass destruction has not been successful. Add this fact to the 1975 remark by Saddam Hussein that getting a reactor would represent “the first Arab attempt at nuclear arming” and it is easy to appreciate the importance of the bold Israeli action.

Rather than expressing gratitude for disarming a dictator, the world reacted with universal, brutal, and severe criticism. The ever-predictable New York Times characterized “Israel’s sneak attack” as an “inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.” United States Senator Mark Hatfield described the destruction of the reactor as “provocative, ill-timed, and internationally illegal.” What time would Hatfield have suggested would have been better to destroy the reactor? Even the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher, who one might have hoped would have known better, thought the attack was unjustified and that it represented “a grave breach of international law.”

The wise ambassadors in the United Nations Security Council unanimously (that means the US joined in) adopted resolution 487 which “Strongly condemns military attacks by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct.”

Now Israel suffers international condemnation for its efforts to stop terrorist attacks on its citizens by attempting to root out terrorists in the West Bank. The condemnation is virtually universal. It does not follow logically that just because the entire world was radically wrong with respect to Israel twenty years ago that the world is again in error, but the precedent it there.

Despite the fact that the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat, in direct violation of the Oslo accords, was arranging for massive arms shipments from Iran, Hanna Kvanno of the Nobel Peace Prize committee wished it where possible to recall the prize from Shimon Peres who shared the 1994 Peace Prize with Arafat. Peres is currently Israel’s Foreign Minister. There was no similar expressed desire to recall the prize from Arafat. Despite the fact that evidence has appeared directly linking Yasser Arafat with financing homicide bombers who deliberately kill as many civilians as possible and the fact that Arafat rejoiced at the bombing of a Jewish celebration, the Belgians are considering indictment of Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a war criminal. Given the uncalibrated ethical barometer of much of the world, reticence in the use of world opinion a moral standard is justified.

Thomas Jefferson argued that the government that governs best is the government that governs least. Though there is some truth to this assertion, it is probably truer that the government that governs best is simply the government that governs best.

Over the last couple of decades, there has been an alliance of sorts between traditional Conservatives and Libertarians opposing “Liberal” big government. Libertarians insist on a minimalist government and oppose, on principle, an ever larger and more intrusive state. To Libertarians economic markets are the preferred regulators of behavior.

Traditional Conservatives, while not necessarily opposed to strong government, were not sympathetic with the uses the Liberals were making of it. Though Liberals attempted out of good intentions to use government to help those in need, their approach has often degenerated into creating, encouraging and subsidizing a dependent class in exchange for political power. It is ironic that the more successful 1960’s Liberalism is in transforming the disadvantaged classes into the middle class, the less need there is for their programs. Their political saliency increases only in proportion to the failure of their policies.

What Libertarians sometimes overlook is that the functional free markets they worship as the regulators of daily transactions do not sprout like weeds from any soil. Conservatives recognize that markets must be planted and nurtured. Libertarians have long accepted the necessity for the rule of law, the regularization of and enforcement of transactions and contracts, and provisions for public order.

Important as such structures are, they are woefully insufficient by themselves. The complex and numerous interactions between individuals require an implicit trust such that in large measure third-party enforcement is not necessary. If every transaction required a regulator, the normal efficiencies of markets would be overwhelmed and destroyed. Markets depend on the character of the people. Markets cannot prosper without an ethos of trust, integrity and honesty. The undermining of this trust by the irresponsible actions of companies like Enron demoralize the markets necessary for prosperity.

One role of government, recognized by traditional Conservatives and not by Libertarians, is to take care to improve the character of individuals, a character necessary for a free people. Such concern might take the form of a tax code that encourages traditional families, private savings for retirement, and contributions to non-profit charities. Such a concern might take the form of anti-discrimination laws that teach tolerance. Such a concern might take the form of strict enforcement of Securities and Exchange Commission laws that reinforce the notion that success is a function of hard work and luck, the not result of fraudulent tactics.

President George W. Bush has proven to be less of Libertarian and more of a traditional Conservative. When he ran for office, he emphasized government-private partnership in providing the community-based services that large government bureaucracies find so difficult to provide effectively. Faith-based solutions have proven particularly effective for problems of drug addiction.

In the recent state of the union address, Bush seems to be concerned about the self-centeredness taught by a society that focuses too much on material acquisition and too little on other values. For too long our culture has said, “`If it feels good, do it.’ Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: `Let’s roll.”’ Bush used the unity in the wake of the September 11 attacks to focus Americans outwards. He asked Americans to personally reach out and help others in their own communities. Bush asked Americans to commit two years somewhere in their lives to volunteering for others, to share of themselves.

Frankly, the expansion of government volunteer programs, like his USA Freedom Corps, may tend to crowd out rather than encourage local efforts. Nonetheless, Bush’s instinct to call upon the better angels of our natures, to ask us to care for those around us, makes Bush a traditional Conservative. Libertarians would deem such considerations outside the legitimate scope of government. For this reason, Libertarians will likely not make good leaders. And in the long run, a government that takes care to help create good citizens, a government concerned about character, is the one that will have to govern least.

It is more than a little unfair to reach back and judge a science fiction novel armed with the perspective of almost half-a-century. Tough, life is rarely fair. In 1953, Ray Bradbury published one of his most famous novels, Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury’s view of the future was radically wrong, except in two important ways.

The fundamental theme of the book is censorship in the not too distant future. Books are outlawed and in Bradbury’s world the role of firemen is not to prevent fires but to incinerate books. Firemen implement the censorship by rushing, sirens screeching, to houses where books are secretly hidden; piling the books up on the front lawns; igniting the piles; and watching as the pages crumble to ashes. Whole houses are sometimes burned to make sure that no books escape detection. The title refers to the temperature at which paper spontaneously bursts into flames.

The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman who develops a conscience. On one book burning expedition, a woman decides to sit with her books while flames consume them all. Montag wonders what could be so important about books that someone would elect to die for them. This, and conversations with an insightful teenage girl next-door, convince Montag to steal books during a book-burning episode and actually read them. This decision radically redirects Montag’s future, eventually pitting him against the forces of censorship.

The modern reader is, of course, struck by many incongruities between the Bradbury’s future and the one that we know. Smoking is popular, cars fly down the road at incredible speeds unobstructed by traffic jams, most women stay at home while their husbands go to work, and nuclear war is relatively common. These are the sorts of simple extrapolations one might have glibly made in the early 1950s. Simple extrapolations of social or even technological trends are rarely correct. There are too many feedback mechanisms.

However, Bradbury accurately foresaw two important cultural phenomena. First, even over fifty years, we would not be able to switch away from the Fahrenheit to Celsius temperature scales. People, at least in the United States, still think in terms of Fahrenheit; and given American stubbornness, this is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. One might have expected a future switch to a more rational temperature scale. The book could have been named Celsius 233.

More importantly, Bradbury accurately foresaw that many will be distracted beyond consciousness by trifling activities. Some are totally occupied, but not active; busy while accomplishing anything. The rapid increase of mind-occupying distractions keeps people from reading and serious thought. The action on Bradbury’s wall-sized televisions substitute for lived lives, much a present day video games become addictive and time consuming. People are pummeled with so much visual and audio information or useless data, that it is impossible to sort out ideas.

As Bradbury explains:

“Cram people `full of noncombustible, data,’ the fire captain explains. Chock them so damn full of `facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.”

Bradbury believes as people are weaned from the disciplines of attention, thought, and patience required to read, that books would first loose currency and ultimately be thought dangerous and banned. In truth, if a society grows so preoccupied that it avoids the serious questions posed by serious books, there would probably be little reason to bother outlawing books. They would fall into disuse spontaneously.

If the popularity of Amazon.com is any indication, despite the growth in distractions, there still seems to be enough time for reading books; well, at least for buying them.

It may have been unfair to judge Fahrenheit 451 too harshly, but unlike many novels, people still read it half-a-century later. This alone should be sufficient consolation to Bradbury.