An Apologia for Sad Songs

This is a reply ... well, a tangential musing, on something Mikaela said in her post on Sad Songs vs. Happy Songs.

"Does the audience really need my help processing good emotions?" In other words, what is the purpose of writing happy songs?

Why does beauty bring a tear to the eye? It seems like beauty at its highest degree is too beautiful to say it inspires mere "happiness". Rather it seems to instill a type of wisdom, which transcends happiness. Similarly great suffering has the potential to instill a type of wisdom that transcends mere "sadness". In his creation myth at the beginning of the Silmarillion, Tolkien assigns to Nienor among all the Vala the unique combination of mourning and wisdom. As a personality of melancholic temperament, Tolkien had I think an insight into the connection between wisdom and sadness. And as a Catholic, he had access to that Faith's at-first odd combination of ultimate optimism and immediate resignation to suffering. John Paul II wrote of something similar in his letter on the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering, saying that there was a profound depth of meaning and wisdom to be found uniquely in profound suffering. There are always people embittered by the Problem of Pain. But the fact that there are some people like Immaculee Ilibagiza and Walter Ciszek show that such hard-earned wisdom is there to be found.

Also related to this probably is an essay Edgar Allen Poe wrote about The Raven (I read it a while ago and don't have it in front of me): Poe wanted his poem to invoke beauty, and he felt it was easier to invoke beauty from the context of tragedy: in the case of The Raven, a lost love.

All this is to say that I think Mikaela is on to something when she is at peace with the predominantly melancholic nature of her inspiration. "Even when I am offering something more positive," she says, "there is still an element of the bittersweet."

Art's object is beauty, and beauty and its attendant wisdom are usually appreciated better through suffering, when we have a chance to grow our souls, than in happiness, where we have no incentive to change. And suffering in general cuts deeper than happiness, reaching to parts of our soul that, being human, are destined for the divine, and for which nothing on this earth can ultimately suffice. So a certain restraint in happiness, a knowledge that no present happiness is truly enough, a certain "element of the bittersweet" is appropriate to beauty, and wisdom, and art. In the same way, a certain restraint is also required in sadness and mourning, due to the knowledge that no good thing is truly gone if we are destined for God, and no bad thing can ultimately conquer us if He be with us.

Despair, apart from its being psychologically damaging and generally unpleasant, is a factual error, since Forgiveness exists beyond our most awful capacity to sin or even dream of sinning. But while God wants us to be happy, He does not want us to be taken in by anything less than the Best, so programmed into us is a nagging melancholy, stronger in some of us than others, the slightest of twitches from our deepest depths, meant to recall to us that whatever makes us happy here, is not ultimately enough.

We have as humans an infinite capacity for happiness, and we seek pleasurable highs, mimics of real happiness, in all the most intense experiences in life: from sex to drugs to bungee-jumping to mathematics (or whatever floats your boat). But we only really do justice to this amazing human capacity when we temper each happiness and enjoyment with a reminder that there is always a Higher and a Greater, and what is more tragic than losing a great love and a great reward at the end of the road because we were distracted along the way by a shiny toy? It's so easy to be distracted by whatever plays the role of Shiny Toy at various stages in my life, but it seems that only true beauty, and art that is truly beautiful, manages to remind me of the Greater Beauty waiting for me.

Learning to Love the Watcher in the Water

"It is hard for one man to catch another's spirit and put into print the things that drive him on."

Fr. Ciszek said this about the challenge of communicating what was inside him to the priest that helped him write the book he really wanted to write. I don't know what book I really want to write, but I do know it is difficult to communicate deep realities inside oneself--whether you're communicating to others or just setting them out for your own understanding. There is such infinity and depth to what lies underneath the human person. Most of the time it lies undisturbed. Occasionally it is stirred and we would rather it had not been, for we do not know what to do with it once we have accustomed ourselves to living on the surface of things. Yet there is a watcher in the waters of our souls, and it does not have its origin in us. Not to say it is foreign to these waters, for it alone knows them thoroughly, and it is we that have our origin in It. So the Watcher stays beneath the depths, the powerful accepting a humble place in the soul of the weak; the expert letting the amateur sail the ship; and only occasionally does the Watcher stir the water so we can see ripples, but usually we think the ripples are from the winds above and outside, not thinking--not even daring to think--it could be something beneath. And surely never guessing that when the Winds are worst, the Watcher has begun to sail while we, cringing, would give up the ship.

We see what is outside ourselves, but we only understand with great difficulty, and then only by relating it to what we find already inside. Conversely, what is inside ourselves we cannot see, yet we have the capacity--oh the infinite, divine capacity, the highest of all that is human!--to understand without seeing. So we live for sight, clinging unnaturally to our eyes. But we die without understanding, cloven unnaturally from our minds. For our minds are a great and terrible thing, and incomplete without the heart.

The Watcher is the heart, or rather is closer to our heart than we are, we who live safely in our minds. We have sought the truth with our minds, but what we have found was not enough, because man does not live on truth alone. There are other categories that cannot be broken down, and we live on them all, and die a little when they are gone like a parent who sees their child leave them, or better, like a child who does not know he hurts himself when he seeks to hurt a loving parent.

So it is that I found truth, so much truth, but I could not make it make me good, for I still had fear, and fear is not the enemy of truth, but of love, and love I did not understand, and therefore thought I was not capable of it -- either of giving, or receiving, or meriting. And thus I was not the whole person I know God means me to be: one who is good as God is good, by knowing myself and knowing Him more like He knows me and knows Himself, and by loving in both what I know to be true).

And by serving, in love, the good I am granted to see in myself and in God, I understand truth all the better, and I love better, and become more good, more like God, and in being more divine, am most fully human.

But most of the journey toward this true, good, and beautiful wholeness of being, and of being human, we fear the Watcher, and the Winds, and anything that would stir the surface, for we do not easily grow up. And by grow up I mean growing altus, for altus means tall, but also deep, and a man may only truly stand tall if he is deep. So we do not see, from reading the ripples above, that what the Watcher actually traces in the water is our answer to the Winds. We wish for a change in the weather, to give us calm for one evanescent moment, or for a god that would control the chaos from outside. Instead we have a God that allows us to control the calm on the inside, but only if we are willing to duc in altum, to put out into the deep, and find that which makes all weather meaningless, because that which has true meaning, true Beauty, and unspeakable Goodness that we fear to dare we may taste, is already With Us.

Merry Christmas, everyone! I pray you all are granted the gift of seeing the extraordinary and poetic in what has become prosaic to us only because we have forgotten our sense of wonder, and what is closely akin to wonder: gratitude. Cheers!

Today's Cool Etymology

First of all, we've gotten several interesting comments and questions over the past few months, and I wanted to say that I look forward to responding to all of them soon. Thanks to everyone who expressed support of The Bitter Scroll. :-)

Anyway, on to my cool discovery of the day. I was already aware of the collection of words related to measuring, stemming from the Indo-European root *med-. We get words like measure, meter, and metric. The first thing I noticed on wikipedia's list of PIE roots is that this root also yields the Latin meditari and English meditate. But perhaps even cooler is the list of English descendants: there's metan/mete, which makes sense since meting things out implies measuring how much everyone gets; and then there's this item: ǣmtig/empty in Old/Modern English. Seeing the mt root surrounded by the adjective ending -ig and the privative æ- meaning "not," led me to realize that "empty" simply means "unmeasurable, unmeasured."

Incidentally, does anyone know what happened to the online Index of Indo-European Roots on bartleby.com??

Tolkien, Anglo-Saxon Melancholy, and Depression

I imagine when one learns to survive with and manage depression, seeing the happy phrases and manner of those who haven’t suffered from it must be like someone from war-weary Middle Earth looking in at the innocent and oblivious residents of the Shire. Either you are bitter, and both envy and resent the peace of the Shire and seek to waken its residents to the "real world," or you somehow manage to use your dark experiences for good, seeking to protect its peace, because somehow you value its very innocence and obliviousness. And just as you are in a world that they do not know, and in which they could not (and one eventually realizes, should not) live, so also, they are in a world that you can only visit but not fully live in (this side of death / a great sea-voyage to the undying West). I hope when I am out of the darkest parts of my depression, I will have the strength to be a Ranger, with enough patience to respect the Shirelings of life, specifically for their ignorance of the Dark.

So as you may deduce, this blog suffers from its writer’s chronic lack of interest even in interesting things that is typical of depression sufferers. This being a rather recent diagnosis, I’m finding that writing about it does indeed serve a purpose, and conversely as well, that the inspiration I feel from the whole creative and artistic world (including writing, even my incomplete snippets of poems) seems to come closer than anything else to lessening the cold grip on my heart which is typical of my ironically named subtype: atypical depression.

Yet I’m not about to turn this blog into a journal of all my dark thoughts and feelings; I have something which serves that purpose already. Instead, I’m noticing a very great affinity, which I may explore here, between my own experiences and moods from depression and those of both Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon worldview generally. Tolkien wrote to one of his children that he felt he was a “kindred spirit” with the Beowulf poet: melancholy, anticipating future disaster in this life, a Christian hoping for victory after this world's long defeat, yet a Christian with a deep respect for his pagan ancestors. I have long felt myself a kindred spirit with Professor Tolkien, and our Germanic predecessors, for reasons linguistic, literary, religious, as well as of personality and worldview. We even like autumn best of all seasons, for much the same reasons. I expect eventually I’ll start blogpost drafts unpacking many of these ideas, since it is a way that my depression and related feelings and interests seem to help me explore and even understand much of the world of Germania and Tolkien. With any luck I’ll finish and publish one or two of those drafts.

An Unexpected Revival of Elizabethan English

This is a great little story I picked up from Per Omnia Saecula:

Convicts use ye Olde Elizabethan slang to smuggle drugs past guards in prison.

This shows in one fell swoop the ingenuity of the human when pressed (even in bad things), and the perpetual adaptability of the tool that is human language.

A Note on Spelling: The word "ye" is not actually the form of "you" seen in phrases like "She canna dew it, Capt'n; she's givin' ye all she's got!" In this usage, it is simply the word "the", pronounced quite normally as "the". The "th" used to have one letter to represent it, which my middle English times looked enough like the letter y that people started just using the letter y to represent the "th" sound in such cases. This usage continued after the original "th" letter ceased being used altogether.

The Ends of Man, Society, and Reason: A Beginning

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the purpose of society and government, and therefore of life (yes, I know, it’s 42). So in the context of my current studies in American founding principles and the whole concept of a “western” moral tradition however distinct this tradition may be from overtly religious moral teaching, I want to outline some of where my thoughts have been going.

First, I think that people’s answers to the “big questions” like Why are we here? and What is the meaning of life? and Is there a God or an afterlife? -- well, I think they can’t not be answered in each heart, and that different answers lead to very different value systems (whether acknowledged or not) and therefore, very different choices and lives. I think that they are difficult questions, and that some of the best lives in history have been dedicated answering one or more or even a portion of these questions. Moreover, I think everyone has some form of an answer for them: whether we experience certainty or overwhelming uncertainty, whether we believe they can or even should be asked, whether our answers feel final or are only “working solutions,” even whether we feel satisfaction or resentment toward what we think the answers are – each of these has implications for our worldview and how we choose to act in it.

OK, with that preface, here’s a tentative outline of my thoughts currently. As humans, we seem to be most fulfilled when we are able to live lives that develop our “higher” powers, i.e., our intellect and will, as opposed to habituating our lives to act by greed or passion. Taking cues mostly from Aristotle here, I’ll say that a certain amount of empirical data, teased out with some inductive reasoning (reasoning from specifics to generalities), suggests that our “purpose” in the universe is most likely related to what we are best at and what will bring us the fullest level of happiness.

We use this logic very naturally with manmade objects. An object with no flat surfaces, pieces falling off, maybe spikes protruding randomly, and which doesn’t stay in one place easily, wouldn’t make a good chair, for example, and couldn’t possible have been meant to be one. (Except maybe as a prank, but only because humor derives from the juxtaposition of things that don’t go together.)  So a life that makes us miserable, causes damage to ourselves and others, wastes the abilities that are best in us, is an equally unlikely purpose for being (humans) with such highly developed rational abilities and sensitivity to good and bad, happiness and sorrow, etc.

Now another thing we (that is, Aristotle and I, for a start) can’t help noticing is that there is a set of complementary (opposite?) ideas that live in tension together as one fact about humanity: that is, that we are both individual and social. Aristotle says we are social beings (“political” actually, but I don’t think he intended the distinction between society and politics that our vocabulary helps us to assume). Yet we are social beings with individual powers to deliberate and choose. So is the meaning of life to be attained together? Sure, to a large extent. Yet a key issue for me is the relationship between geographic and ideological proximity. There are cognitive and precognitive predilections in human nature that tend to make members of any kind of group think or feel somewhat similarly. Yet this fact is countered by things like pluralism in society, intercultural and interreligious contacts, and the modern world’s massive capacity for the communication of facts.

Insert here thoughts on the nature and purpose of government. For since we are social by nature, there must be some method for administering society. Abstracting from either the form or the method of establishing this governing function of society, it seems to me the most basic fact of this function is that it serves only half of the individual-social spectrum of human nature. But if man’s purpose is also discernible by (or identifiable with) his nature, neither purely individual nor purely social elements should hinder his (or others’) pursuit of that purpose. Hence the commonplace recognition of truths that, on the one hand, one’s personal choices should not endanger society (no flying planes into buildings), and that on the other hand, society has no claim to hinder personal choices that do not danger society (no legislating my favorite flavor of ice cream).

So whatever the purpose of life is, the purpose of government is subordinate to it. This isn’t to say the state has any role in answering the “big questions.”  But society does.  This is key. Remember, whatever your answers to the Questions are, they will determine how you seek to discover and live out your “purpose.” So in order to live together, people in the same community must be able to discuss and come to some common ground on the Big Questions. The more common ground, the less likely that community’s governing function will be to conflict with the Answers, and thus with people’s living out those Answers.

That much should make conservatives and xenophobes happy.  However the other side of this is that uniformity isn’t the ultimate goal of our intellect, truth is. Here is where visionaries often seem anti-social or even counter-cultural: You have to be, in order to advance the understanding of society as a whole on a given topic. This is why pluralism is useful and good – provided we actually benefit from it by discussing the Big Questions. If people in a society commit themselves to journeying the road to truth together, and at the same time being at peace (to a degree) with not being there yet, that seems to be society at its best.  Sometimes "conservatives" feel so happy and confident in the truths they have found, they indulge in an incredible amount of impatience in demanding that others accede to those truths instantly. This is not realistic or human, and ends up turning people away from those truths. (It is also nothing like the gradual method God takes in Scripture, starting where people actually are, and leading them gradually and patiently.) So pluralism is a good, beautiful, and exciting opportunity for personal and societal betterment.

The worst of both worlds, however, would be a society that attains neither the peace that comes from relative unanimity, nor the peace that comes from knowing the truth. This yields a pluralist society with only one trait truly in common: a despair of reaching meaningful truth, stemming from intellectual exhaustion, hypersensitivity to conflict, and simple frustration that it is so hard to reach answers to questions that seem so natural to ask.

This, I believe, is where nature most seems to suggest the possibility of something beyond it (etymologically, the words for this are “super-natural,” from Latin, or “metaphysical,” from Greek).  The nature of humanity, our abilities, our natural inclinations, and our natural limitations, all seem to point to a gap, a blank space that goes back to the idea I mentioned at the top of this post: It doesn’t make sense that either creation or evolution would yield such a strong need for something that doesn’t actually exist. I’m talking about anything you can conceive of as supernatural or metaphysical: humanity’s seemingly infinite capacity to seek truth, beauty, and goodness, alongside our historically very finite capacity to achieve these things.

In another post, I’ll think more about what this means for the natural limitations of government (as in, not just shouldn’t, but can’t).  As well as how something personal like the natural impulse toward religion (or at least any outward-focused sort of reverence or humility stemming from acknowledgement of our own natural limitations as humans), can possibly have a happy interaction with the public/social side of human nature.

Bitter Scroll Now Hungrier, Bitterer Than Ever

Well, I’m finally giving up on the whole idea of limiting my blog to certain subject matters. My problem is that I have very many interests, and they seem to come in waves. As far as I can discern, the three general passions that I always come back to are linguistics, theology, and political science, and within each, I have progressed through focused interest in various subfields. So rather than limit my blog to one field (of the three) or subfield (say, comparative Germanic linguistics), I finally officially declare this to be a truly personal blog: a web log of my thoughts on what interests me. I still resist the idea of putting up random awkward posts about emotions or deeply personal issues; but all academic or interesting topics that I find myself into at a given time are hereby fair game. This will make it easier to use the blog for my own personal benefit: forcing myself into the process of writing more often, and using that process to clarify my thought processes on topics of relevance to school or elsewhere.

The Truth of Irony

There's a great description of the nature of irony in this article by Anthony Esolen, entitled "Emptying Ourselves of What We Think We Know." The whole article is interesting, but click on page three just for the treatment of irony.

Esolen gives several divergent examples of irony, and manages to boil down the essence as something beautifully oriented to truth and reality, rather than the common conception of irony as simply "saying one thing but meaning another."

Irony arises, rather, from the ignorance of unseen or unexpected order (or, as it may happen, disorder), from the failure to note subtleties, or from seeing subtleties that are not there, especially when the ignorance and the failure are highlighted before observers in a better position to see the truth.

I really learned a lot from the five examples he gives on page 4, along with the subsequent elucidations for each one.  Esolen very brilliantly and clearly manages to show irony's versatility: one example uses irony to teach theological subtlety while another points to the laughability of blind pride; one highlights a common sense of justice, while the last efficiently portrays a complex of relationships, intentions, and levels of ignorance that are dizzying when he explains it all out.

Irony provides humans with a way to communicate certain realities in a way that really does them justice: sometimes that feeling of unexpectedness shows just how amazing a truth really is, sometimes communication needs to play on the audience's sense of morality or poetry to drive home a point's real significance. Plus, when we have had to think a bit to figure something out, it stays longer in the brain than. So irony is a higher level of communication than just-another-declarative-sentence, and as Esolen point out, one that applies to communication with and without words (verbal and dramatic).

The Language of Machiavelli

I have recently been reading a great translation of Machiavelli's The Prince done by Angelo Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University. Codevilla’s translation presents to the English-speaking reader much of Machiavelli’s brilliance in using language for his own ends. Codevilla gives a very good editor's introduction, clearly showing the role and impact of The Prince in intellectual history--noting some important patterns of thought that we take for granted today, whose predominance is attributable to Machiavelli. Even more interesting, though, is the subsequent essay on "Words and Power." In this, Codevilla demonstrates some of the devices not of argumentation but of linguistic manipulation that Machiavelli employed to get his readers to adopt his own new (and quite revolutionary) moral standards.

Moral standards are not something that people give up freely, being ingrained in our values and prejudices, and at a level deeper than many people can reason to. What are the two topics supposedly banned from polite conversation? Religion and politics. Why? Because they are the two areas in which, for decades now, politeness gives way to defense mechanisms meant to mask the insecurities we feel when trying to explain (and thus, justify) the beliefs we hold so deeply. (Or maybe why those beliefs have a hold on us).

There are so many human reasons why we believe things--because our parents believed them, because our parents believed the opposite, because there is so much suffering in the world (or our own lives), because we're convinced we're supposed to believe them, because we're afraid of changing our actions or our lives, because we need the stability of being told what to believe, because we're afraid to reason for ourselves, because of the sins of those who believe otherwise, etc.

I bring this up because it was on this level that Machiavelli seems to have meant primarily to engage his readers. He knew he couldn’t get his readers to adopt his new standard of good and evil by reasoning them to it. So he chose to use language on the level of those deeper-than-reason human reasons for belief (fear, pride, desire to succeed, etc.).

Codevilla highlights the significance of Machiavelli's way of using language by contrasting it with Dante. This description of the two writers makes Niccolo look almost ... Machiavellian:

In short, Dante crafted his language to follow the dictates of reason, not of men or of chance. Dante thought language was not to be imposed by power or by convention but to be accepted by reason. . . . Machiavelli knew exactly what Dante meant. He disagreed. He believed that language, like every other human tool, serves the interest of some to the detriment of others. But Machiavelli did not argue against Dante. Instead he baldly accused him of speaking the language of a rival city, of being insufficiently committed to Florence. This did not advance the cause of truth, but it did help Machiavelli prevail with his Florentine audience.

If this sounds too commonplace to be worth pointing out, just remember to keep two things in mind. First, while people did this before Machiavelli, they knew they were doing something "wrong." Machiavelli legitimized this is a method that was "good" by literally redefining the words good and evil (more below). Second, Niccolo wasn't just lying (that's an ancient practice to be sure!), he was crafting a strategy using words deliberately as weapons. Thus Codevilla asserts that for Machiavelli, "Language, therefore, is a most powerful weapon in the struggle for primacy, and one peculiarly suited to the unarmed."

Codevilla didn’t stumble upon the fact that this was Machiavelli’s preferred way of using language by just reading The Prince extra carefully; he found that Machiavelli laid this method out explicitly in other writings: specifically his Florentine Histories and Discourses upon Our Language. Codevilla used to work on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, so unlike most Americans he probably doesn’t have a problem seeing the deeper, sometimes subversive, layers under the surface of much oral and written communication.

Let's look at some details, then. "The most important questions regarding The Prince," says Codevilla, "hinge on Machiavelli's use of words.

Does he in fact confuse the adverbe bene (well) with the noun bene (good) so as to collapse the distinction between doing well and doing good? How does Machiavelli change his readers' notion of virtue and goodness? As we shall see, he regards the meaning of such words as wholly plastic. Therefore, he gradually alters their meaning by changing their context.

He does this by forcing his readers to think of the words in the midst of an onslaught of situations and images that are unpleasant to deal with -- so many that in the end, the tired reader is weakened into granting, perhaps semi-wittingly, that what good is what eliminates such situations:

[Machiavelli's] work, especially The Prince, is filled with tales of gore and treachery. To what end? Everyone knew such things happened. Why did Machiavelli insist on mentioning them so frequently and in such detail? . . . The answer becomes clear when we remember that Machiavelli did not mean to argue as much as he meant to act. The vivid portrayal of political defeat is a fearsome thing. Machiavelli never argues explicitly that earthly suffering and death are the worst fates; he just omits any discussion of the possibility that they are not.

Thus Codevilla shows Machiavelli to be exploring and playing with the aspects of human nature upon which modern advertising would be based -- more than 400 years before Edward Bernays, the man called the father of modern advertising and nephew of Sigmund Freud, encapsulated the psychology of crowds and of the subconscious in his interesting little, rather Machiavellian book, Propaganda.

Marx and later the Soviets would perfect what Bernays had learned from Gustave LeBon's study of crowds into the very simple strategy of making people believe lies (one reliant upon total control of the media): constant, relentless repetition of your message, and mercilessly stamping out any dissent. People start to believe not because they have been convinced, but because they have no mental energy left to resist.

When Foreign Laws Silence Americans' Speech

I’m glad to see a couple of important Senators drawing attention to this subject (and I'm proud of my native state of New York for taking the initiative on it). Sens. Specter and Lieberman co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal pointing to how easy Americans can be sued in foreign courts (like the UK) under libel laws that are heavily weighted against publishers. Note the scenario they use as example:

In 2003, U.S. scholar Rachel Ehrenfeld asserted in her book, "Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It," that Saudi banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz helped fund Osama bin Laden. The book was published in the U.S. by a U.S. company. But 23 copies were bought online by English residents, so English courts permitted the Saudi to file a libel suit there.

As in many areas of modern life, laws are struggling to keep pace. Either they assume outdated business models in the face of creative collaboration and the prospect of name recognition for young artists through file sharing, or the very international nature of communication and information brokering today.

If I make a point to buy a book in German from amazon.de, I don’t have the expectation that I could sue the author in this country, since there was no intention to have major distribution here, even though it was always possible. Maybe our laws do allow me to sue the author in an American court, but I don’t know if they should. Does the truly tiny distribution of Ehrenfeld’s book in the UK really give British courts the right to allow a Saudi to sue an American?

The ability to speak freely and challenge people to give reasons for public actions is a beauty of the First Amendment. While I don’t think it was meant to protect “art” depicting obscene desecrations of the symbols of my (or anyone else’s) faith, the First Amendment was meant for just the type of thing Ehrenfeld is trying to do. Even if she doesn’t have all of her facts straight, the idea is that getting her assertions out in public is worth encouraging, b/c our Founders thought that the public should be the judge of speech, not the government.

The war on terror has (or at least needs to have) a major public diplomacy component. IMHO, the West should be challenging the radical segments of the Muslim world to justify themselves intellectually before the court of public opinion, insisting that you can’t riot or kill people when you don’t get what you want like someone who hasn’t grown psychologically past early childhood. If you are right, you have a legitimate chance to convince everyone. It is this very open and terrifyingly just invitation to justify themselves in public that prompts the terrorist propagandists (and don’t think there aren’t any) to use tactics like suing in British court. It is a type of procedural warfare that allows them to silence unpleasant voices without having to argue reasonably. Hence this interesting facet of the proposed law: “If a jury finds that the foreign suit is part of a scheme to suppress free speech rights, it may award treble damages.” I don’t know how easy or impossible this would be to prove in court, but it’s good that they recognize it as a strategy.

It would be nice if the US and the UK could come up with some joint advisory committee to look at protecting our citizens from their laws when neither plaintiff nor defendant have ever set foot in Britain. In the meantime, if the UK doesn’t do anything, we definitely should. It’s too bad the UK doesn’t see the public diplomacy value to itself in moderating speech laws that are begging to be abused.