Civil Liberties Snipit

Most of my friends know that I'm a very big fan of The Best of the Web Today, by James Taranto. It's clearly conservative, but only in the sense that it's incisive in exposing flaws in many liberal articles. And what's more, it's extremely funny. A blog that shows the truth and does so in a hilarious way definitely fits my bill.

 

But the other day Taranto finally disappointed me in his comments about an article in the New York Times magazine which admittedly I didn't understand until I read his criticism:

Will Civil Liberties Self-Destruct?
Christopher Caldwell has a fascinating essay in--of all places--the New York Times magazine, in which he ponders the future of civil liberties:

Just hours before the police arrested 24 British-born Muslims suspected of plotting to blow up as many as 10 airliners over the Atlantic, the British home secretary, John Reid, gave a comprehensive description of how Tony Blair's government saw the war on terror. Reid, who probably knew the raids were coming, called international terrorism the gravest threat to Britain since World War II and attacked civil libertarians as people who "just don't get it." He highlighted a speech that Blair had made little more than a week earlier. Global terrorism, Blair said then, "means traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong as just made for another age."

If you wanted to figure out how the airline plot will change the West, Blair's words would be a good place to start. . . . Blair was not trying to buck us up and steel our resolve by saying that we're at war and that we'll have to pitch in and sacrifice our liberties for a while. He was saying that war has shown many of our liberties to be illusory. The "civil liberties" we know do not bubble up from natural law or from something timeless and universal in the human character. They may be significant accomplishments, but they are temporal ones, bound to certain stages of technology or to certain styles of social organization. Maybe there was something like an Age of Civil Liberties, Blair was telling us, but it is over.

We must say, we are highly ambivalent about this. We are quite fond of our civil liberties and would hate to lose them. On the other hand, we're appalled at the fatuousness of today's civil libertarians, who seem to care more about terrorists' rights than national security. That very much includes the New York Times, with its penchant for compromising national secrets.

In an age of terror, society ought to be able to strike a reasonable balance between civil liberties and national security. By insisting that liberty is an all-or-nothing proposition, civil libertarians make it more likely that we will eventually end up with nothing.

It's not that Taranto is wrong in saying that civil liberties should be held in high regard, it's that he doesn't understand that the physical reality of public interaction has shifted. Technology has changed: we are now on the defensive, simply because offensive technology far overpowers it. It's similar to the Cold War in that regard: with the advent of huge nuclear arsenals we shifted to a strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, instead of contending that we had a viable defense strategy. Caldwell was simply saying that the structure of our society has changed, and that what is possible as a civil liberty has changed. Therefore it's no longer a question of forces competing to give or take away freedoms, rather it is one politician, Blair, attempting to show the world that what is happening is unavoidable.

 

Now, Taranto has a nice point about the "fatuousness of today's civil libertarians", and of course makes a jab at the Times, but he fails to comment on the structural change in society that Caldwell is discussing. Caldwell can certainly flesh out his argument a bit more, so there's a bit more dissection that can happen, but Taranto would be well advised to stick to the thesis of the articles that he criticizes, even if they are very intellectual.