The Art Of The Compromise - Part I

Kim du Toit
June 26, 2005
10:58 AM CDT

James Lileks has an excellent screed about the nature of compromise, in which, by taking aim at a screeching liberal, he makes a telling point about foolish consistency:

I’m often accused of intellectual rigidity and slavish devotion to a monolithic bloc of ideas because I believe B, D and T, and those ideas are also shared by those who chant A through Z every day on their sites. There’s also a certain assumption that if you like A, F, M and X about pop culture and art, you must therefore share certain ideas about optimal tax rates and relations with international organizations.

Absolutely. And I can say with complete truthfulness that I encounter this attitude, every single day I post something.

Because I am a conservative when it comes to guns, for example, people seem to think it inconsistent that I don’t have a problem with abortion; but what people don’t understand is that I agree with reasonable restrictions on both, as an absolutist position on either is totally ridiculous, as I’ll show in a moment.

“Reasonable restrictions”? Yes. I mean “compromise”, and all appearances to the contrary, I do believe in compromise.

The social contract demands, I think, that we compromise with others in order that we get along. If I can agree with anything, I subscribe to this concept. In a situation of no compromise, there you will find absolutism, which, if allowed to flourish, leads to totalitarianism—indeed, the absense of compromise and the enforcement thereof is the very definition of totalitarianism. And I’m not just talking about political totalitarianism, either: included in this situation are religious totalitarianism, cultural totalitarianism and ethical totalitarianism. Thus the Islamic theocratic state mandates death for infidels; the Nazi state mandates death for subhuman races; the Earth First! state thinks technology is abhorrent; and the Right-To-Life state is quite okay with firebombing abortion clinics.

The art of politics, and the key to a functioning society is compromise. Given that totalitarianism is undesirable, but that every compromise is the beginning of the slippery slope away from a particular principle, the nature of the compromise is important.

Absolutism is easy; compromise is difficult. Which is why I look on unbending principle with suspicion—in fact, I think that absolutism is the kingdom of the simple-minded.

And before anyone starts accusing me of becoming a wet noodle relativist, let me explore some of the thorny issues involved, here. I’ll start with, what is for me, the easiest.

1. Guns

Anyone who has spent more than two minutes on this website should know that I’m a huge supporter of the Second Amendment, and the right of the People to be armed.

I think that any and all personal weapons should be available to anyone who asks, without restriction or hindrance. Derringers? Aisle 3, madam. Full-auto AK-47s? Aisle 26. Short-barreled shotguns? On the other side of the .50 Barrett display, sir.

But mine is not an unqualified support of the right to bear arms. I don’t have a problem with some restrictions: I draw the line at the universal right of someone to buy a crew-served anti-tank gun at Ace Hardware, without first undergoing at least a little investigation of their background. I have a problem likewise with individual ownership of hand grenades, RPGs, Claymore mines, belt-fed machine guns and A-10 tankbusters. I’m not saying personal ownership of these should be impossible; just that, for the general welfare, the State should make sure that prospective purchasers are not insane or malevolent.

I don’t think that this is an unreasonable compromise. But to hear some of the 2A absolutists, I’m almost as bad as Senator Chuck Schumer (GFW, NY).

2. Environmentalism

We all want clean air to breathe. But air does not have to be 100% clean (in fact, given the circumstances of Nature even sans Man, it never is that clean anyway). Most especially, it doesn’t have to be that clean, if simon-purity comes at the expense of people living their everyday lives.

In fact, as a society becomes more successful, and more affluent, their environment becomes cleaner and cleaner. If you want to see litter, visit any poor African country (or, for that matter, any inner-city ghetto). If you want to see polluted air, try any Chinese city—despite the fact that there are relatively few cars, and hardly any eeeevil SUVs.

Houston (which is lousy with SUVs, trucks and huge Detroitmobliles) has pretty much the most disgusting air in the United States. But Houston is a sylvan glade compared with Calcutta, Shanghai or Mogadishu.

Yes, the air in London used to be so filthy that it caused some people to die of respiratory failure, as lately as the 1950s, and yes, the banning of coal fires did much to cleanse the air. But to think that you’re going to clean London’s air completely is fantasy—in fact, you’d have to close London down completely—and to the environmental absolutists, this would be just fine.

Too bad it’s moonbattery of the most egregious kind.

3. Abortion

I hate abortion, and I wish it would disappear completely. But it won’t.

Now what?

Would banning and criminalization of abortion make abortion disappear completely? Of course not. Abortion has persisted in the human condition for millennia, despite all sorts of restrictions and bannings.

So: we’re stuck with it.

Now what?

Let’s start with the opinion (and I’m afraid that it is just an opinion) that life begins at conception. Well, that really depends on your definition of “Life”, doesn’t it? If life means sentience, you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you to convince me that a 2-month fetus understands concepts like love, self-preservation and the need to eat and drink.

If life simply means “existence”, then all sorts of ugly situations start to occur—for example, if a baby is created in vitro, and the lab technician accidently drops the petrie dish on the floor, are you going to charge the technician with negligent homicide? Why not?

Here’s where the compromise begins.

If we can agree that “life” can be defined as “survivability outside the womb”, then, to a large degree, the problem becomes simpler: in fact, the abortion “problem” almost disappears. (And yes, I’m fully aware that the line of “survivability” increases every year—but at some point, it is going to reach an impasse; just don’t ask me when.)

What we do know is that babies born as soon as 26 weeks after conception survive—I have a good friend who has 14-year-old twins as proof—and we also know that to describe the medical effort and treatment of such severely-premature babies as “heroic” is a rank understatement. 26 weeks, for the calendar-challenged, is six months plus two weeks.

If we can draw the line between “killing a baby” and “terminating a pregnancy” at five months, then the “abortion” issue, as such, becomes pretty much a moot issue.

And yes, I know that many of you regard a fetus as a baby. That’s the compromise I’m asking you to make, horrible and uncomfortable though it may be.

But the extension of “a fetus is a baby” is totalitarianism. As I said earlier, if a fetus is a baby, are you going to charge a pregnant woman with child endangerment if she’s smoking a cigarette? Or not wearing her seatbelt? Or flying in an airliner? And if you aren’t, why not?

Or, if we use Albert Jay Nock’s favorite argument, suppose you got your wish: abortion is now a criminal act. Now what?

For starters, bear in mind that we live in the United States, where one state can decide one thing, and be in direct conflict with another. So the reality of criminalizing abortion is that some states would immediately pass laws or amend their contitutions to legitimize it.

Now what?

Is the state of Georgia, where abortion is illegal, going to prosecute its citizens for having an abortion in Florida, where it isn’t? Roe, meet Wade.

Of greater importance is exactly how a state would go about prosecuting “abortion criminals”—or, how it would enforce those laws. Think about the intrusiveness of policing involved in preventing abortions from taking place, and if that doesn’t give you the cold shivers, not much will.

The problem with compromise in life or death issues is that it is uncomfortable precisely because it’s about life or death. Which leads me to my next point.

4. Capital Punishment

Longtime Readers will know that I’m a supporter of capital punishment, simply because I feel that if someone has disregarded the precepts of society so utterly, that there is no reason why that person should be accorded the right to life when they have removed someone else’s.

That doesn’t mean I support a bullet in the back of the neck ten minutes after the guilty verdict, however. Courts of law are human institutions and are therefore subject to all the fallibilities of the human condition.

And I know that in the past, humans have been wrongfully executed (Edward Evans instead of John Christie, for instance). But in recent times, and especially where the convicted have been given plentiful chances to appeal their conviction, the incidence of wrongful execution is… zero. That’s right: since about 1960, not a single person in the United States has been executed and subsequently found innocent of the crime.

A whole bunch of innocent people have found themselves on Death Row, of course, but at some point, they’ve been released—in other words, the system worked.

(And, incidentally, I think that DNA evidence, where such exists, should be a mandatory test in establishing guilt if a capital murder case is involved.)

So apart from the “wrongful execution” reason, the only other reason to abolish the death penalty is if one believes that life is precious, or God-given, and should not therefore be taken.

5. Life is precious

If you subscribe to the theory that “life is precious”, but support abortion while not supporting the death penalty, or vice-versa, then I’m not interested in talking to you, because the two positions are contradictory. Either life is precious, or it isn’t: and whether the life belongs to Ted Bundy or a baby is irrelevant.

Similarly, if life isn’t that precious that you support abortion, but it is precious enough that “all wars are wrong”, then I would suggest you look up the word “contradiction” in any dictionary.

Yes, life is precious, and I would give up my own to protect my family or my country. But that doesn’t mean that if my family or country were threatened, I wouldn’t kill the people threatening them.

Sometimes, there are principles greater than an individual’s life, and which sometimes require the taking of human life to uphold. That’s not a bad compromise.

6. Politics

Politics, as the old saying goes, is the art of the compromise, and it’s absolutely true, even though that compromise sometimes sticks in the craw.

Socialistic statism is horrible; so is unfettered capitalism. The first political system suppresses human nature; the second exacerbates it.

Somewhere between the two lies peace and prosperity.

Where, exactly?  Let’s discuss it.

Apart from the nutcases anarchists who think there should be no government of any kind, it’s pretty clear that most people see the need for at least a marginal form of government, to protect and serve the general welfare.

(Note that when I say “general”, I mean just that—the majority—and not “universal”, which is how the statists now interpret the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution. This is the regrettable result of allowing semi-literate oafs and venal statists to create public policy.)

So roads, defense of the nation, enforcement of private property title (the current Supreme Court notwithstanding), and a few other things which, to be quite frank, it’s easier for a collective entity to do, rather than individuals, or even voluntary groups of individuals.

In this sense, it’s easy to see that the U.S. Constitution is nothing more than a document of delegation—where We The People say to government, “Okay, do these things—and nothing more.”

Unfortunately, however, “these things” have been expanded over the years to mean “almost everything”.

Which, by the way, illustrates one of the great dangers inherent in compromise: that the compromise, once made, is always prone to being expanded.

That doesn’t mean that the compromise should never be made, of course—I hope I’ve shown how pointless that is—but what it does mean is that having drawn your line in the sand, carefully and with much preparatory thought, it’s best to sow your side of that line with all sorts of landmines so that it cannot be transgressed with impunity at a later date.

Granting that abortions can be performed before the end of the second trimester without penalty, for example, does not mean that this permission can somehow be extended to scooping out a baby’s brains with a spoon a day before its due date.

That’s murder.

And allowing a torrid screen kiss between Gable and Leigh in Gone With The Wind does not have to result in overt oral sex in The Brown Bunny, made not even seventy years later.

That’s pornography.

And granting government the right to register belt-fed machine guns in 1934 does not mean that California has the right to register handguns in 2005.

That’s totalitarianism.

Compromise is almost always necessary—only death is absolute in the human condition.

But, as we know, compromise is essential in maintaining the polity, and it remains simply to decide, in the political sense, where compromise can be reached, along the line which stretches between Left and Right. Those compromises, as we’ve seen in the above examples, can be wrenching, and some cherished ideals must perforce be compromised.

But for our society to continue to advance, those compromises must perforce be made.