Unlike bullets and political rhetoric, reason often stops short. Like bullets and rhetoric, reason often puts forth a single-sided, unchallenged view. Thinking is no longer a safe zone: it is used for deadly purposes. Political leaders and armies have conscripted reason into their arsenals. Insurgents and students deploy it in the service of their cause. As we review the cases, we see reason how reason stops short and trends farther and farther from the truth. It does its most damage when it stops short. Here’s proof.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin says he still recognizes Viktor F. Yanukovych as Ukraine’s president. Nobody has heard from Yanukovych since February, when he gave a press conference after he had disappeared and turned up in Russia near Ukraine’s border. It is a globally accepted practice that when a head of state flees a country voluntarily, has no popular or party support, no longer controls the military, can no longer appoint ministers or cabinet members, and no longer has signatory authority, that person is considered to have been stripped of the power of office. But in Russia, in the logic and reason of Putin, such a person still holds high authority. Reason stopped short.
The recent Ukrainian national election won by a billionaire chocolate maker, Petro Poroshenko, a former Ukrainian foreign minster and trade minister who knows Putin well, was not enough to convince Putin otherwise. Putin’s reasoning not only falls short but steps into a big hole—it ignores the overwhelming presence of a connected series of irrefutable facts. Putin is the communist president who would be the Russian empress Catherine. His subjects silent, fearful of laughing, afraid he or his agents will hear snickering, he declares he is sartorially arrayed in the regalia of power, when his closet (and coffers!) are empty and his tenuous rewriting of history is in free fall.
Putin positions his army on the edge of his reason. Looking down the barrels of very large guns spread across their borders, local populations and even nations rarely object to his fallacies and delusions. Armed threats are persuasive; his words make no case.
Nigeria is a first-class exhibit for reason gone awry and stopped short. The Nigerian government and army and the Northern insurgency of Islamists, Boko Haram, the group who recently kidnapped 296 school-aged girls (followed by another kidnapping of eight more girls), both attack reason in the depth of the heart: the safety and security of children.
Extreme terrorists continue attacks until violently confronted, generally ending in capture or death. Boko Haram has proven to be extreme, killing over 3,600 Nigerians since 2009. The group has carried out a wide range of attacks on towns, institutions and homes. Boko Haram’s idea that western education corrupts a generation and therefore students in schools must be killed is reason stopped short. But the government and military of Nigeria ignore this lesson. In the face of the attacks, the government and military announce good news: extra troops are being assigned to the North; in the face of the brutal kidnapping of school girls, the head of the military claims to know where the girls are located!
This is reason stopped short not to justify threats or perpetuate fear, but to generate false hope.
As do Nigeria’s authorities, American politicians use a fantasy of good will and success as a complement to fear. Nikki Haley claims South Carolina’s lowest unemployment rate since the recession, but stops reason by failing to say the rate is still above the national average. A few weeks ago, in a column, I pointed out she stopped reason short, after being criticized for more than a hundred deaths of children in state custody, when she responded by saying the numbers were trending right and had fallen by 25 percent!
The point is that reason is frequently stopped short in politics. The reasons of fear are more familiar; fear is often stimulated by the omission of facts. But reason is stopped short, too, to inspire false hope—to claim successes whose real causes lie elsewhere, to boast and bolster a political record by lying about the credit, or making flawed, inaccurate, imprecise connections.
Think it through: Nigeria doesn’t know where the kidnapped girls are! It the general did, his announcement, in which in he said he couldn’t tell us, certainly told the one group for whom he needed to preserve the secret, Boko Haram. The only group who can question or refute his claim with authority is Boko Haram—and it is certainly not in their interest to do so. But more so, if the claim were true, he has told them what he cannot tell us; the girls would certainly be moved.
Fear and false hope; the General’s claim prompted both, when underneath his assertion, reason stopped short.