The first casualty

I'm reading an intriguing book entitled The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop.

The basic premise of the work is that while America as a whole has become very evenly divided, communities are becoming increasingly homogeneous and that polarization is being aggravated by these millions of little echo chambers.

In the part I'm reading now, the author talks about how more and more positions are being taken not because of any ideological or principled basis but out of a reflexive reaction to 'the other side.'

When I was one of the very few on the American left to condemn the Russian aggression against Georgia, I was struck by the ferocity of the criticism against me.

But the fact of the criticism didn't surprise me. I was taking what was perceived to be 'Bush's side' and that was unacceptable.

My critics trotted some token criticism of an alleged Georgian war crime. But it was just that: token. If they really cared that much about it, they'd still be beating the drum for the alleged perpetrators to be brought to justice.

Their main objection was clearly that Georgia's president was too friendly with Bush so he deserved to have his country get the crap beat out of it by the Russian behemoth.

Never mind that this seems grossly inconsistent with the normally expressed progressive position against imperial wars and militarism.

Why do I think it was just token? Virtually no mention of these alleged Georgian crimes were made before the Russian invasion.

And here's another reason: in recent months, both rebel militias and the national army in the eastern DR Congo are guilty of far more extensive, far more brutal and far more devastating war crimes and crimes against humanity than anything the Georgian military is accused of.

Yet there's nary a mention among those who were so quick to condemn Georgia's alleged shelling of the civilian area of one city. The Congolese combatants are guilty of savagery that dwarfs anything the Georgians did, in a manner that's much longer and on a far greater scale.

The only difference I can see is that none of the combatants in the DRC are seen as pro- or anti-Bush so there's no Pavlovian bell to react to.

I opposed the Russian aggression on grounds that were consistent with my ideologies in favor of human rights and against militarism. And I've written several times about the nightmare in the DRC. Both are wrong. And Bush has nothing to do with either.

Bishop talks about this sort of knee jerk behavior in his book.

He points out that the first town in the US to place limits on DNA research was none other than Cambridge, MA, home of Harvard. One of the most liberal cities in America nearly outlawed genetic research in 1977.

But something changed.

When the religious right came out against embryonic stem cell research, however, it created "this reflexive response to that religious point of view", noted a San Francisco scientist.

Liberals like to think that questioning this kind of science is the unique provenance of uneducated, Bible thumping rubes.

So how do they explain this in the home of the most elite university in the nation? Do they forget that a century ago, the progressivism of the time supported eugenics?

I am pro-science but I'm not fundamentalist. When I was in West Africa, a colleague of mine often said to me, "Science without conscience will be the ruin of mankind."

He was no Einstein. He had no fancy degrees from elite institutions. He was a humble middle school biology and chemistry teacher in a tiny village in the West African jungle. I do not know his politics. He may not have been highly educated but he was very wise.

Of course, such knee-jerk behavior is not unique to the left. When Republican George Bush decided to launch his unprovoked aggression against Iraq, Republicans rallied behind him and intoned the mantra that it was treasonous to criticize a president during war time.

Many of these same Republicans were the most bitter critics of Bill Clinton and his decision to launch a NATO intervention in Kosovo. Bill Clinton was a Democrat.

People today are more concerned about being with 'their side' than about being right than anything else. Professed values just get in the war. That's why values get tossed out the window and rabidly anti-war citizens will eagerly get behind pro-war candidates. It's easier to pick a side than to search for what is often a messy, nuanced truth.

They say truth is the first casualty of war. The saying was directed toward conventional military conflict. But apparently it's also true of the culture wars.