Month: December 2006

Taiwanese subservience to communist China is rational; Taiwanese independence is IRRATIONAL.  How do I know this?  ‘Cause somebody from the pro-unification media said so, that’s how!

…an independence movement is not rational.  It is emotional.  That is not easily understood by Americans or Englishmen or Frenchmen, who have little experience of a people aspiring for independence.  Yes, the Americans fought a long war of independence against England, but their yearning for independence was totally different from, let’s say, the Diaspora Israelis, the Basques in Spain and France, Tamils in Sri Lanka, and the people of Taiwan…

You mean, pre-revolutionary Americans sat around and debated the pros and cons of their independence dispassionately, like Vulcans?  And today’s Taiwanese never look at Tibetans being gunned down in the snow, and QUITE RATIONALLY ask, why would we ever want to be a part of THAT?

Please.

What the columnist here doesn’t realize is that rationality applies only to means, not to ends – to how we achieve our goals, not to our goals themselves.  Steven Landsburg gives an example of this on pages 10-11 of his book, The Armchair Economist:

When we assume that people are rational, we emphatically do not assume anything about their preferences.  De gustabus non est disputandum – there’s no accounting for taste – is one of the economist’s slogans.  There is an appalling population of otherwise literate adults who prefer the poetry of Rod McKuen to that of William Butler Yeats.  We do not pronounce them irrational.  Some McKuen lovers might purchase a volume of Yeats with no intention of reading it, because it looks nice on the coffee table or impresses their more sophisticated friends.  We still do not pronounce them irrational.  When we assert that people are rational, we assert only this:  That by and large, a man who wants to read the poetry of Rod McKuen, and who does not care how his books look on the table, and who feels no urge to deceive his friends about his literary tastes, and has no other good reason to buy the collected works of Yeats, will not go out and buy the collected works of Yeats.  And most of the time, this is true.

By the same token, the desire of some Taiwanese to be a part of a Greater Chinese Empire is no more rational or irrational than the desire of the majority to be independent.  Those are merely preferences – obviously with far more reaching consequences than preferring McKuen over Yeats – but preferences nonetheless.  If some Taiwanese block a weapons package for their country over 60 times over two years, they are not behaving irrationally – provided that their goal is for Taiwan to capitulate to communist China.*  At the same time, it is entirely rational for OTHER Taiwanese to doggedly attempt to pass that same weapons package in the face of insurmountable odds – provided that their goal is to keep Taiwan independent.  In short, rationality is nothing more than an amoral tool (that’s amoral, not immoral!) for achieving one’s goals, whether those goals be good or bad.

* We can add extra wrinkles to the argument, as Landsburg has done.  Like McKuen lovers who buy Yeats, some Taiwanese capitulationists might indeed vote for weapons to defend their country because they value the maintenance of their democracy (or they fear of being sent to re-education camps) more than their desire to be part of a Greater China.  Such a vote would not be irrational.  But if a capitulationist was uninterested in keeping democracy alive in Taiwan, and if he felt confident that he wouldn’t be sent to a re-education camp, and if he wanted to be part of Greater China, then we would not expect him to vote in favor of a weapons package for Taiwan.  And this rational and completely predictable response is, of course, what we have witnessed from the KMT over the past 2 years or so.

Heh, heh.   More from the man the China Post recently dubbed a "prolific, witty writer and social critic":

Meanwhile, maverick [independent] candidate Lee Ao* – who won a total of 7,795 ballots, or less than 1 percent of the total votes – said that the results of the [Dec 9th Taipei] mayoral election proved there is no justice in Taiwan. "The results only showed Taiwan’s democracy is a fake democracy and that voters are polluted by partisanship," said Lee.  [Emphasis added]

[* Alternately spelled Li Ao, depending on the newspaper – The Foreigner]

Welcome to the real world, Li, where party candidates have an advantage over their independent rivals.  And no, what the results ACTUALLY show is that Taiwan’s voters are polluted with the silly notion that mayors shouldn’t be lunatics who open cans of teargas inside deliberative meetings, or reveal grainy 40-year old black-and-white NUDE POSTERS of themselves within the legislature.

I remember what good-ol’ Al Bundy used to say at times like that.  Something to the effect of, "My eyes!  Oh God, I think I’m blind!"

(Li Ao vs. Alessandra Mussolini.  While neither would get my vote at the ballot box, I know who I’d rather see nekkid!)

Over at the China Post, Joe Hung couldn’t resist looking down his nose at the electorate, too:

The heart of Khaohsiung belongs to the ruling party.  And the heart won.

[KMT chairman] Ma Ying-jeou appealed to their minds in vain.

In other words, we lost because the voters were nothing but a bunch of irrational boobs.  Oddly enough though, Taiwan’s major independence party is probably toasting Khaohsiung voters right now for their wisdom and perspicacity.  While I’ve seen this sort of sour grapes at the China Post before, I’ve never commented on it.  Cry in your beer the day after if you must, but never, EVER, express contempt for voters.  Particularly majorities.  Tough to get elected when people realize you despise them.

James Soong’s reaction was something of a contrast with Li Ao’s and the China Post‘s.  Must be rough getting a measly 4% of the votes in a crummy race for mayor 12 years after handily winning a provincial governership race with 4.7 MILLION votes.   Yet despite his drubbing, Soong still managed to say that he respected the decision the people of Taipei made in the election.

Can’t quite give him full credit for that though, seeing as though he couldn’t even find it within himself to congratulate the victor afterwards.  What’s the deal with that, anyways?  Bad sportsmanship?  Excessive pride?  Sense of entitlement?  He did the same thing when he lost the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, but those were narrower contests.  This time he clearly lost – lost by a huge margin – and he STILL couldn’t pick up the phone and say, "You sure fought a good campaign.  I wish you well the next four years."

Admitting defeat and congratulating the winner in democratic politics isn’t just a matter of good manners; it’s a way of reaffirming one’s allegiance to the system.  We fought a political battle according to a set of rules, and I lost.  I may not like you or your ideology, but I recognize that the country will be better off if I recognize that you now have the right to lead.  Conversely, the country will suffer if I step outside the system and try to wrest that right away from you.

But beyond that kind of altruism is another reason – a purely selfish reason – why candidates and parties admit defeat after democratic elections.  Recall The Right Stuff, and John Glenn’s response to the press after learning the Soviets have racked up yet another first in space:

I think we ought to be forthright, gracious and magnanimous about this and say, well, the Russian guys just beat the pants off us, that’s all.  And there’s no sense in kidding ourselves about that.  But now that the space race has begun, I think that there’s going to be plenty of work for everybody.

Glenn admits losing because he doesn’t want to kid himself.  He wants America to roll up its sleeves and get to work so it can do better next time.  But if you can’t acknowledge defeat, like Li Ao and James Soong and the China Post, then there’s a big temptation to engage in self-delusion instead: I lost because the election was stolen, or, I lost because the voters are my intellectual inferiors, or, I lost because of a mysterious "assassin’s" magic bullet.

Tough as it may be to admit, sometimes the fault lies not within the voters, but within ourselves.

UPDATE (Dec 14/06):  Wednesday’s Taipei Times seconds my final point here and here.

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