Part One — Prologue
Part Two — The Purpose
Part Three — The Ideology of Change
Part Four — Class Distinctions: The Trinity

[Class activity: Notice how many times Alinsky undermines and erases the very concept of morality, then turns around and declares something to be moral or immoral.]

On a psychological test that aims to discover how honest a person is, you will find a question similar to the following:

You find a quarter in the coin return of a payphone. What do you do?

A. Return it to its owner.
B. Keep it.

A habitually dishonest person who is trying to appear honest will almost always chose A, whereas genuinely honest people will chose B.

Why?

Because truly honest people know that under the circumstances, there’s no way to find the owner, so you can keep the quarter with a clear conscience. The habitually dishonest, on the other hand, have lost the ability to tell the difference between honesty and dishonesty. Like a blind man who raps his shins on the recently moved coffee table, he lacks the sense that would tell him when the situation has changed.

And that’s what we end up with here, in the second chapter of Rules for Radicals: Of Means and Ends — an attempt by an intellectually corrupt person to appear intellectually honest.

But it’s an epic fail, as you’ll see in a bit. I have run into some fairly sophisticated cases of moral equivalence arguments, but Alinsky’s are so clumsy as to be pathetic if they weren’t so dangerous.

As promised, Alinsky’s eleven “rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends,” with commentary afterwards:

1. One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue. Corollary: One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of conflict.
2. The judgment of the ethics and means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.
3. In war, the ends justifies almost any means.
4. Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
5. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
6. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
7. Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.
8. The morality of a means depends on whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
9. Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
10. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.
11. Goals must be phrased in general terms like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” “Of the Common Welfare,” “Pursuit of Happiness,” or “Bread and Peace.”

[If you're pressed for time, scroll down to The Tell; that's the meaty part of this essay.]

Now, before I begin to take this guy’s arguments apart, let me say that the question of means and ends is a truly perplexing one, and it always deserves serious, sober consideration at all times and in all seasons. It’s not enough to state simply that “the end doesn’t justify the means” and leave it at that, because that statement is true only sometimes.

Unfortunately for those who want morality to be clear-cut, the means and ends question has to be considered on a case-by-case basis. An action that is right and moral in one instance may be horribly wrong in another and vice-versa. I’m reminded of William F. Buckley’s famous example of one man who pushes an old lady into the path of an oncoming bus and another man who pushes her out of the path and into safety. Are we to condemn both men for pushing around old ladies?

So I’m afraid that the first thing Alinsky asserts about means and ends is actually true:

That perennial question, “Does the end justify the means?” is meaningless as it stands; the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, “Does this particular end justify this particular means?” (24)

However, as you might imagine from the list above, his approach to the question heads off in a direction utterly different from where ethical people (Right and Left) would go. As he puts it,

The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process — he who fears corruption fears life.

“Corruption” in this case might mean “getting your hands dirty” or “breaking a few eggs to make an omelet,” which most moral people recognize is often necessary to bring about good ends. For example, neo-neocon has written some good essays about choosing the lesser of two evils (a similar quandary to means and ends), the price of keeping our hands clean, and pacifism.

However, Alinsky does not differentiate between “getting your hands dirty” and “doing something patently immoral.” He identifies no degrees of “badness” at all, in fact, because he has already established “morality” as a self-serving posture, a cloak that people wear to appear respectable while doing as they please.

Fretting about morality is a waste of time, to boot, because “[t]he means-and-ends moralists or non-doers always wind up on their ends without any means.” (25) Furthermore, “[t]he non-doers were the ones who chose not to fight the Nazis — they were the ones who privately deplored the horror of it all — and did nothing. The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.” (26)

Hence the first rule: Only those who are not involved have the luxury of nattering on about morality.

Question for Alinskyites: How does the first rule apply to the armchair quarterbacking and anklebiting during the Iraq war? How does it not apply?

The Tell

It’s in the justification for the second rule — “The judgment of the ethics and means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment” — that we find the “quarter in the coin-return slot” question that reveals Alinsky’s moral bankruptcy.

Check this out: I’m going to quote at length because it’s so unbelievable:

To us the Declaration of Independence is a glorious document and an affirmation of human rights. To the British, on the other hand, it was a statement notorious for its deceit by omission. In the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Particulars attesting to the reasons for the Revolution cited all of the injustices which the colonists felt that England had been guilty of, but listed none of the benefits. There was no mention of the food the colonies had received from the British Empire during times of famine, medicine during times of disease, soldiers during times of war with the Indians and other foes, or the many other direct and indirect aids to the survival of the colonies. Neither was their notice of the growing number of allies and friends of the colonists in the British House of Commons, and the hope for imminent remedial legislation to correct the inequities under which the colonies suffered.

Jefferson, Franklin, and others were honorable men, but they knew that the Declaration of Independence was a call to war. They also knew that a list of many of the constructive benefits of the British Empire to the colonists would have so diluted the urgency of the call to arms for the Revolution as to have been self-defeating. The result might well have been a document attesting to the fact that justice weighted down the scale at least 60 percent on our side, and only 40 percent on their side; and that because of that 20 percent difference we were going to have a Revolution. To expect a man to leave his wife, his children, and his home, to leave his crops standing in the field and pick up a gun and join the Revolutionary Army for a 20 percent difference in the balance of human justice was to defy common sense.

The Declaration of Independence, as a declaration of war, had to be what it was, a 100 percent statement of the justice of the cause of the colonists and a 100 percent denunciation of the role of the British government as evil and unjust. Our cause had to be all shining justice, allied with the angels; theirs had to be all evil, tied to the Devil. In no war has the enemy or the cause ever been gray. Therefore, from one point of view the omission was justified; from the other, it was deliberate deceit. (27-28) (emphases mine)

Let’s just take a moment to let the moral bankruptcy of that passage sink in.

“Yes, your honor, it is true that I beat my wife every day and twice on Sunday, but her application for a restraining order neglects to mention the five times that I beat her only a little, and that once I got her some flowers, and that last time she bought a new dress, I didn’t tell her it made her butt look fat.”

“Deliberate deceit.” This is the tell. This is how you know that Alinsky is so steeped in dishonesty that he cannot tell that he’s not describing an act of deceit at all.

And this is also why you should regard anyone who reveres Alinsky with due suspicion. If they bought this crap argument (and the others like it), they are themselves dishonest. ::coughobamacoughhillarycough::

To exemplify Rule 3 — “In war, the ends justifies almost any means” — he provides this:

Churchill sides with the Soviets in WWII because it is practical to do so, and when asked about the moral conflict, he replies, “I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons” (29).

Alinsky unintentionally refutes himself by using this example. It is true that the Allies joined with the Soviets to fight the Nazis as a matter of practicality. It is also true that their stratagem was successful. It is also true that because of this moral compromise, millions suffered and died behind the Iron Curtain. Alinsky might point back to that Yin and Yang stuff he was on about in The Ideology of Change, but it doesn’t erase the fact that this “corrupt” means eventually resulted in a “corrupt” end.

Second example: Lincoln during the Civil War suspended habeas corpus, ignored a directive of the Chief Justice of SCOTUS, and used military commissions to try civilians, citing public safety as the end.

His defense of Rule 4 — “Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point” — is too boring to replicate here, and it elucidates little that I’ve not already shown.

Rule 5 — “Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa” — means that the more weapons you have at hand, the more liberty you have to ponder the ethics of using one means or the other. If you can defeat your enemy with either a single bullet or an atom bomb, for example, surely using the single bullet is more moral than using the bomb.

The corrollary is that if you have only one way to achieve your end, you can’t be bothered with whether it’s ethical to use it.

Rule 6 — “The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means” — receives no exposition from him, and neither shall it from me.

The defense of Rule 7 — “Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics” — consists mostly of one pithy statement, “There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.” This idea is also encapsulated in “Success has a thousand fathers; failure none,” but perhaps Alinsky should go ask the Rosenbergs how their successful treason worked out for them.

For Rule 8 — “The morality of a means depends on whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory” — he employs some more historical sleight-of-hand that is considerably less clumsy than the reframing of the DoI but is still a mess:

When we dropped the atomic bomb the United States was assured of victory. …Defeat for Japan was an absolute certainty and the only question was how and when the coup de grâce would be administered. For familiar reasons we dropped the bomb and triggered off as well a universal debate on the morality of the use of this means for the end of finishing the war.

I submit that if the atomic bomb had been developed shortly after Pearl Harbor when we stood defenseless; when most of our Pacific fleet was at the bottom of the sea; when we were committed as well to the war in Europe, that then the use of the bomb at that time on Japan would have been universally heralded as a just retribution of hail, fire, and brimstone. … The question of the ethics of the use of the bomb would never have arisen at that time and the character of the present debate would have been very different. Those who would disagree with this assertion have no memory of the state of the world at that time. They are either fools or liars or both. (34-35)

You’ll have to put me in that last category, Saul. First, you don’t know that the debate about the atomic bomb wouldn’t have surfaced, because there was always the problem of the Soviets getting the bomb, which they would have done, and that always added to the passions around the debate.

Second, I would much rather have been in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than in Tokyo during the fire-bombing. That you and your fellow travelers have attached a mystical degree of evil to the atomic bomb and radioactivity in general (SCARY! SCARIER THAN SCARY!) says more about you than about the debate. The choice was between one swift devastation or the prolonged agony of invading the Japanese mainland. Do notice that the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb. Please forgive me if your eighth rule does not provide me with an adequate yardstick for this situation.

For the ninth rule — “Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical” — we get the stultifying dull moral equivalence argument. Yes, Saul, the opposite sides of a war have a perspective that is 180° out of phase with the other side. What else is new? But tell me, if one side is fighting to liberate the slaves and the other side is fighting to keep them captive, do your rules provide any way to say that one side is just and right and the other is not?

I really dig the justification for Rule 10 — “You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments” — for its utter moral bankruptcy. Here we get more of Alinsky’s formulation of morality as a posture that serves the end. He cites Lenin: “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns, then it will be through the bullet.” (37)

He then goes into a long explication of why Gandhi’s passive resistance wasn’t an example of people being highly principled but rather of the oppressed using the only means at their disposal. Whether Gandhi actually was the moral giant he is often thought to be is debatable, and Alinsky’s argument has some merit on the practical level. It’s true that the Indians had no weapons or the strength of numbers at first, and that Hindus were fairly passive to begin with.

Alinsky’s observation that “Gandhi’s passive resistance would never have had a chance against a totalitarian state such as that of the Nazis” is something that pacifism absolutists should keep in mind. Passive resistance worked against the British because the British Occupiers were generally decent people for whom decency was important. Passive resistance makes your oppressors look like brutes, and the Brits didn’t like to see themselves that way.

Alinsky also asserts that if arms were available, then Gandhi would have used them. Again, I don’t know if that’s true, and I don’t hold Gandhi in enough reverence to put it past him.

But the point of Rule 10 is that you do what you’ve got to do, then call it moral so you can sell it to the masses.

All great leaders, including Churchill, Gandhi, Lincoln, and Jefferson, always invoked moral principals” to cover naked self-interest in the clothing of “freedom” “equality of mankind,” “a law higher than man-made law,” and so on. … All effective actions require the passport of morality. (43-44) (emphasis in original)

I would be interested to know what “naked self-interest” motivated the men named above to achieve what they said they wanted to achieve. Fighting the Nazis on the seas and the oceans, on the beaches and the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and on the hills was actually a matter of naked self-interest for Churchill? How so? And if his end was different from the victory over Fascism, what was it, and why did he end up vanquishing the Nazis?

Again, Alinsky’s thought processes are an inch deep and an inch wide. (But don’t step in it: you’ll track it everywhere!)

The explication for Rule 11 — “Goals must be phrased in general terms like’Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ ‘Of the Common Welfare,’ ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’ or ‘Bread and Peace’ — contains the following assertion:

The organizer, the revolutionist, the activist or call him what you will, who is committed to a free and open society is in that commitment anchored to a complex of high values. These values include the basic morals of all organized religions; their base is the preciousness of human life. These values include freedom, equality, justices, peace, the right to dissent; the values that were the banners of hope and yearning of all revolutions of man… (46-47)

Lessee. From the Christian tradition we have:

• three theological virtues — faith, hope, charity (love)
• four cardinal virtues — prudence, justice, temperance, courage
• seven heavenly virtues — chastity, self-control, generosity, diligence, patience, kindness, humility

Oh, and also the commandment to agitate the masses so that you can wrest power from the powerful.

Yes, Mr. Alinsky, you’re nestled comfortably within the tradition of all religious virtues, especially that Golden Rule: do unto others because they’ve done unto you.

Next time: A Word about Words, or “Jeff Goldstein, please pick up the white courtesy phone in the pub.”