Why Godwin's Law?

Godwin's Law is arguably the First Law of the Internet. Dating back to 1990, it actually (barely) predates the World Wide Web itself. Godwin's Law goes like this:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Usenet, if you aren't familiar with it, is a system of more-or-less comprehensive Internet discussion groups that predates the World Wide Web. Discussions in these groups are threaded, so that conversations on a given topic maintain a certain amount of cohesion; they may branch off onto other subjects according to their own bizarre logic, but the process by which a conversation ranged from 16th-century orthography to the No Child Left Behind Act, can usually be discerned by working backwards through the thread.

Godwin's Law has applicability to any other forum of human discourse that follows a progressive (in its adjectival, lower-case sense), threaded pattern. Typically, it only appears when a subject is controversial, but to fully grasp the impact of Godwin's Law, one must recognize how willingly people will divert a conversation into a controversial subject for the fun of it. For example, I can think of a few readers of this blog who, no doubt, can speak with authority on the application of Godwin's Law to discussions of Disney.

In theory, controversial subjects are best resolved through a dialectical process of argument and counterargument, arriving at a conclusion. Threaded discussions are the perfect medium for this kind of debate, because they allow a topic to be broken up into component parts, and each part to be addressed individually. This should serve to simplify and clarify complicated debates.

In practice, few people (anywhere) have the discipline, patience, or intellectual honesty to carry such a debate to its conclusion. Fewer still combine these traits with sufficient subject-matter expertise to be useful in such a debate. (Kevin at The Smallest Minority keeps coming to mind. He combines an extraordinary knowledge of gun control case law, with Sisyphean patience.) Given the incredibly rare chance that you will manage to find one, it is vanishingly unlikely that you will ever be able to range that person in debate against an equal opponent who can also carry the debate to its conclusion. This is why we don't settle the grand controversies of our time through rational debate--because it never works.

But we try. Oh, how we try. And in the end, as Godwin showed, the Nazis keep coming up.

Why?

I propose that there are two factors at work here:

1. The general public possesses a limited knowledge of history. World War II is one of the most widely-recognized historical reference points. On the whole, I expect more Americans to know something about World War II than they do about almost any other political, diplomatic, intellectual, economic, cultural, or legal history topic. No doubt, this observation could be measured through testing, though I would doubt the validity of almost any such test.
2. The one thing that everyone knows about Germany in WWII is that the Nazis were the bad guys, and thoroughly evil. This is agreed and accepted everywhere. There is no other wartime country so thoroughly vilified so long after the fact. Even the Empire of Japan has been partially rehabilitated through reference to European colonialism and racism, and the "victimization" of having been nuked twice. But it is hard to rehabilitate the reputation of Nazi Germany, what with the whole Holocaust. And this is what makes the Nazis a unique tool for debate--our civilization cannot agree on any other unmitigated bad guys.

Most people lack the tools to argue something on the basis of moral philosophy. But arguing by historical comparison is relatively easy. (If you want it done really thoroughly, it helps to be a bona fide historian. I'm available for historical consulting at reasonable rates!) This is why Godwin's Law holds true. Argument by historical comparison is easy, but World War II is one of the few historical reference points common to most debaters and audience members in the modern Anglosphere. Moreover, Nazi Germany is the only political movement/nation-state/society that is commonly agreed to be evil.

There is a corollary to Godwin's Law, that holds that any party invoking Nazis or Hitler in an argument loses automatically, and thereby ends the argument. This is not because comparisons to the Nazis are necessarily invalid (though some certainly are), but because the tactic is so ubiquitous that it has grown noxious and lost all impact.

When we take the whole of American political discourse as a single unit, it has some of the characteristics of an especially chaotic threaded Usenet discussion. Godwin's Law, naturally, applies.

Throughout Bush the Younger's presidency, we were treated to the lesser form of Godwin's Law--the Reductio ad Hitlerum. This is not so much a historical analogy as an attempt at guilt by association. Bush was breezily associated with Hitler, most commonly through Bush=Hitler protest signs, and the formulation "Bushitler." This is a manifestation of Godwin's Law, but a lesser one.

What we are seeing now is a greater manifestation of Godwin's Law. In particular, the Speaker of the House of Representative suggested that protesters at town hall meetings were themselves Nazis. In fact, there had been a swastika in evidence at an early town hall meeting protest, but it had been crossed out--that is, the sign carrier was suggesting that the proposed medical industry reforms in Congress were analogous to Nazi programs. This amounted to a rhetorical error on the sign-carrier's part, although not a substantive one, as I will discuss later. The Speaker of the House's response was both a rhetorical and a substantive error.

The protester was making the argument that government rationing of medical treatments inevitably trends towards eugenics. By putting a crossed-out swastika on a sign, she was indicating that she opposed this. I agree with her. Government rationing of medical treatments does inevitably trend towards eugenics, and I am likewise opposed to it.

When a government panel sits down to write the formulas and rules by which therapies are distributed, they have limited options. They can randomize availability. In the United Kingdom this is called the Postcode Lottery. (The availability of certain therapies sometimes depends on your address.) Or they can ration according to some more rational system. The United Kingdom, trying to move away from the Postcode Lottery, created an organization dubbed the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (acronymed NICE), to make cost-benefit decisions based on quality of life, life expectancy, and cost. Someone has to lose out, and under this system it is generally the elderly.

But in practice, being a vast self-reinforcing bureaucracy, care is often distributed according to a system that is random by virtue of being ineffective. Mark Steyn offers a good example in an NRO article today:

I had an elderly British visitor this month who’s had a recurring problem with her left hand. At one point it swelled up alarmingly and so we took her to the emergency room. They did a CT scan, X-rays, blood samples, the works. In two hours at a small, rural, undistinguished, no-frills hospital in northern New Hampshire, this lady got more tests than she’s had in the last decade in Britain — even though she goes to see her doctor once a month. He listens sympathetically, tells her old age often involves adjusting to the loss of mobility, and then advises her to take the British version of Tylenol and rest up. Anything else would use up those valuable resources. So, in two hours in New Hampshire, she got tested and diagnosed (with gout) and prescribed something to deal with it. It’s the difference between health “care” (i.e., going to the doctor’s every month to no purpose) and health treatment — and on the latter America is the best in the world.

In Britain, nobody was denying Mr. Steyn's guest care based on her post code, age, or condition. They simply weren't testing, diagnosing, and treating the problem.

I believe, because I know something about how the American polity works, that under such a system we would see resources diverted according to all manner of political influences. We would find raging debates about whether one interest group was more deserving of better care; whether one race, owing to past neglect, deserved superior care now. And inevitably, over time as the public clamors for improved service (or even marginally fairer service) without increased cost, the government starts to look at places to save money, like the long-term expense of caring for the disabled. Sarah Palin was widely called selfish for not aborting a baby with Down Syndrome. (I searched to confirm that this wasn't just a right-wing meme. It's not. Here's a particularly nasty example from an Objectivist, and another one from a Salon.com blogger. There are thousands more. I don't recommend actually reading them if you have blood pressure problems, but they're there for evidence's sake.)

There is evidently a strong and vocal contingent in our society that considers it grossly immoral to not abort a baby with a disability. Being realistic, there is 0% chance that the United States would impose forced abortions in the case of fetally-identified Down Syndrome. But I could believe that the state might declare that if you do not abort a baby as recommended by government formula, the child is cut off from some or all government-funded medical care, and perhaps other government entitlements, like education. (Of course, the family doesn't exactly get a refund on all the taxes paid for health care to which they are no longer entitled.) It's only fair, right? Why should we let your selfish decision burden everybody else? Whether through hard coercion or soft, the end-result is eugenicist.

I said that the protester's anti-swastika sign was a rhetorical mistake. It was not necessary for her to carry the argument all the way to its natural conclusion, in the most comprehensive eugenics program ever carried out--there are strong arguments against Obamacare short of reference to the Nazis, and the subject cannot be effectively broached in sign form.

But the point remains that there is a eugenicist impulse out there. We breed domesticated animals for desired traits, like loyalty in a golden retriever or mass on a cow. The same system can be applied to humans. It is both perfectly logical, and perfectly inhuman. It is a monstrous disease common to progressives who realize that their plans for a perfect society are fatally flawed because humans are imperfect. When you give government complete control over medicine, you forge a powerful tool. It may take a decade, or a century, before the wrong people get a grip on the handle. But eventually, it will be used to a terrible end.

Without the Nazi example, that argument might seem terribly overblown. Who could believe that government might use its powers over medicine to murder the disabled, if we didn't have the example of a 20th-century nation doing precisely that to 200,000 victims?

If we forge that tool, if we wed political power and control over medicine, I think that soft eugenics are inevitable. They make too much logical sense to the kind of people who will end up with that power.

Godwin's Law exists because the Nazis are familiar to everyone, and because they are universally agreed to be evil. But it does not give us license to ignore the lessons of National Socialism where they are most relevant.

See also: Nazis for Me, but Not for Thee.

UPDATE: Oh yes, mustn't forget carbon impact...

Comments

[Dad]

Too serious a post to bring this up, really, but since you broached the subject I feel the need to thread the needle (mixed metaphors?).

Disney + Nazis = Der Feurher's Face w/Donald Duck: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YroTk6Vobww

[Kenneth Pike]

...

That carbon impact article is amazing. "By perpetuating the human race, women are responsible for more carbon emissions than they could possibly cut."

Just think. If the human race were to simply disappear, the planet would be saved!

This is why, whenever someone says they're doing their part to "save the planet," I ask them, "and what are we saving it for?"

Which suggests a linguistically analogous extension to the rest of this entry. There are several animes and video games built on the premise of an Artificial Intelligence carrying a mandate "to protect humanity" to its logical end: totalitarian government. But when everyone is "protected" not only from external threats but from their own freedom to choose, what exactly are we protecting?

[Chris Phoenix]

I might clarify one point for Kenny that is highly applicable to the natural conclusions in the post. Ultimately, they are not taking away one's freedom to choose (in healthcare, to keep a disabled child, to perform diagnostic tests on the elderly), they are striving to take away the responsibility for one's actions and the natural consequences that come from those actions. This "unburdoning" of our natural consequences sounds strikingly like the plan of someone else... Could it be Satan? (or more easily, Hitler?)