Reductio ad Historiam

How would history have judged a man who could have saved thousands of American lives but chose instead to adhere to some misplaced and misguided sense of idealism? – Michael Goldfarb

I’m sure that there are others who could do a better job of this than I, but for the time being how about: likely by way of the same morally repugnant rubric through which “history” “judges” as courageous and heroic a man who ordered the slaughter of thousands of innocent Japanese? Which is to say, only by ignoring those judgments which mark as “a crime against God and man” any act of war “directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants”, or as a crime of war the “attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended”. Such judgments, however, have no purchase on the verdict of History, which moves undaunted toward the exculpation of the victors with the sort of disregard for elementary principles “idealism” that appeals to such empty abstractions are invariably intended to effect.

If the basic standards of ius in bello governing conduct toward civilians and prisoners of war do not apply to us, then they do not apply to anyone – and this is true no matter the cramp such standards may put on our desired modes of operation, or the corrective they may be to our typically congratulatory self-assessments. Sometimes it’s only by overturning the myths of our past nobility that we can face up to the sins of the present.

Addendum: Sorry, but while I’m on the subject:

I have not fully formed my thoughts on torture, yet. I think I am against it but with this one exception: if I have a choice between saving say, 5 million lives in a nuke-contaminated Chicago or being able to say, “but at least we didn’t waterboard that guy,” I am inclined to think I would go for torture. The 5 million might still die, it’s true, but at least I won’t have to answer for standing idly by and watching it so that my morals might remain intact. I will take the chance that my moral failing in that instance will simply join my other moral failings in life, and then God and I will work that stuff out.

Actually, you have to work out your moral failing, in either case, don’t you? If you torture, you have to work it out. If you allow millions to die because you’re “too good” to torture, that’s another moral failing you have to work out. And what is the moral failing? Not trusting that God will help you work that out.

Maybe when you don’t have an idea that you and God can work out your moral failings, you have a tougher time dealing with them? I don’t know. But “who saves a life saves the world, entire” may come into play here. I don’t want to kill the guy I’m torturing. But I want to save 5 million lives.

(This from a prominent Catholic blogger, mind you.) So far as I can make it out, the “reasoning” – such as it is – goes like so:

1. People who refuse to violate inviolable moral principles are really being selfish, by keeping themselves all pure just so that they can brag about it; so
2. It’s okay to violate inviolable moral principles; and furthermore
3. Even not violating an inviolable moral principle is a moral failing, both because of (1) above and also because
4. Really trusting God means trusting that he won’t hold you to account for violating inviolable moral principles; so
5. Torture away, the Church’s categorical proclamations to the contrary notwithstanding; since after all
6. The best way to “form your thoughts” on moral matters is just to ignore the relevant Christian doctrines and agree instead with your Republican friends.
   

Which, in short, is how we end up with this. Casuistry would be too kind, really.

Filed under: morality, religion, torture, war

Crimes of War, Now As Then

Via Will, Julian Sanchez tries to explain to Michael Goldfarb that the fact that Harry Truman was a war criminal does not mean that Bush and Cheney weren’t. Here’s key graf:

I realize it’s probably not a position taken often at the offices of the Weekly Standard, but the suggestion that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes is not, in fact, crazy or rare.  A Japanese legal review concluded as much two decades after the fact, Albert Einstein claimed before the fact (in a letter to Roosevelt) that the use of an atomic bomb would be a war crime, and indeed, the Wikipedia article devoted to the debate serious people have been having for 60 years contains a lengthy section titled “the bombings as war crimes.” To the extent it’s a controversial claim, it’s controversial because we don’t like calling U.S. presidents war criminals, not because it’s a difficult question whether obliterating entire areas inhabited by large civilian populations with the flimsiest of military targets as a pretext should now be regarded as a war crime.

Anyway, read the whole thing, and see this post for a first-hand account of what Truman wrought. I addressed the dangers of mythologizing the past at some length in this post, too.

Filed under: morality, torture, war

Freedom’s Underside, Pt. III

by JL Wall

E.D. Kain, on Iraq:

But that should call in to question why we are so dependent on oil to begin with, and beyond that, why we as a culture have shifted so many of our priorities to a belief in unending growth that can and should be enforced by an omnipotent military.

The problem with “the American Way Of Life is not on the table” “is not up for compromise” or some other such better phrasing that’s escaping me this morning doesn’t lie in a devotion to liberty.  But we haven’t defined The American Way Of Life as involving, to a primary degree, devotion to liberty, but to growth, the clearing of the economic elbow room in which we will then practice our liberty.  But when “growth” and “expansion” are viewed as at least as essential as liberty, when reconsidering “unending growth” is a reconsideration of The American Way Of Life even if such growth is not sustainable (except, perhaps, by force — eh, what I mean is anangkê, not bîos or hybris), then we ourselves are compelled to do the compelling.

Which is to say: anangkê esmen — we are compelled — we are required — we are constrained to this course by our choice of this course.  We clear space, ostensibly in which to grow and expand a liberty, but in reality because the past and present benefits have grown comfortable: we haven’t seen the cost, the underside; or if we have, we are less terrified by them than the the unknown nature of a different life.

And we see liberties more essential to liberty constrained, restricted, deemed inessential because they interfere with the growth which is supposed to to allow them to flourish.  Though meant as a force to expand liberty, unrestrained and unending growth (or at least the philosophy thereof) are forces of constraint on our ability to live in liberty.  Yesterday there was a girl on campus shouting very loudly that she had free copies of the Constitution for anyone who wanted them — presumably (I could be wrong) as part of those tea-party-things I’ve heard about.  I was tempted to tell her it was better late than never she’d discovered the document.

Filed under: civil liberties, economics, government/law, philosophy, war

Blaming Religion

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Daniel is right:

Mr. Bush espoused a horrifyingly heterodox religious vision, one far more akin to the messianic Americanism that forms part of what Bacevich has called national security ideology than it is to anything that could fairly be called orthodoxy. To the extent that Linker’s favorite targets, the so-called “theocons,” were more or less entirely on board with what Mr. Bush was doing, even if they felt compelled to use their own teachings in distorted form to do it, they were not championing orthodoxy at all. One might go so far to say that as they became stronger supporters of Mr. Bush, the less orthodox they tended to become, because the arguments they had to employ to defend Mr. Bush’s outrageous actions and gnostic impulses necessarily ate away at orthodox teachings.

It helps to think of what Daniel is exposing here as a variant on the Unicornism Fallacy: that all of history’s greatest villains lacked a belief in unicorns is no reason at all to think that failure to believe in unicorns leads to evil deeds; and in the same way, that Bush and many of his advisers and supporters were Christians is in itself no ground to blame Christianity for what they did. It was the contents of their beliefs that motivated them, and those contents included a host of radical and decidedly unChristian views concerning the permissibility of wanton killing, the inherent goodness of democracy, the possibility of remaking foreign peoples in our own image, and so on. That they were Christians clearly shows that such faith is no sure bulwark against even very serious sins, but then again we already knew that; to move from there to the claim that Christianity needs to be abandoned altogether is, however, not only to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but to insist on drowning it in the ensuing puddle as well.

P.S. In the same vein, tarring opponents of same-sex marriage as “the successors of those who defended slavery and segregation on Biblical grounds” (no, really) is obvious slander, unless by this one means to call attention to the fact that we are all the inheritors of a great tradition of human wickedness; and once again we already knew that, too. If slippery-slope arguments and the insinuation of guilt by association are out of place (as they are!) when used against SSM advocates, then according to what principle may the very same tactics appropriately be used by them?

Filed under: marriage, politics, religion, war

Leaders Needed

Glenn Greenwald’s widely-cited post from over the weekend on Jim Webb’s courageous push for prison reform is a must-read. I especially liked this bit:

Webb’s commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates how false that excuse-making [that says that taking bad but popular positions is necessary if one is to avoid political risk] is –  just as it was proven false by Russ Feingold’s singular, lonely, October, 2001 vote against the Patriot Act and Feingold’s subsequent, early opposition to the then-popular Bush’s assault on civil liberties, despite his representing the purple state of Wisconsin.  Political leaders have the ability to change public opinion by engaging in leadership and persuasive advocacy.  Any cowardly politician can take only those positions that reside safely within the majoritiarian [sic] consensus.  Actual leaders, by definition, confront majoritarian views when they are misguided and seek to change them, and politicians have far more ability to affect and change public opinion than they want the public to believe they have.

In this context, the unpopular stances Greenwald has in mind concern the drug war, sentencing guidelines, prison conditions, and the horrid condition of a country where blacks are sentenced to prison on drug charges at over five times the rate of whites despite not using drugs any more frequently, but it’s not hard to think of others that fit the bill:

1. The specific question of whether a country with a criminal justice system in the state of ours can really be trusted to administer the death penalty responsibly.
2. The dangers inherent in the legislative branch’s unconstitutional, near-complete abdication of its roles in declaring war, making and passing laws, and so forth.
3. The questions of why, since college is demonstrably not for everyone, we insist on making it a precondition for a productive adulthood, and of how we can extend higher educational opportunities to those with the capacity really to benefit from them while helping others transition into family life and the workplace.
4. The need to rethink our open-ended and essentially conditionless support of the Israeli government, with all its aims and policies, no matter the damage this does to our image in the Middle East and the rest of the world.
5. The importance of a serious national dialogue about overconsumption, excessive indebtedness, and the dangers of fiscal irresponsibility – at home, in business, and in government alike.
6. The need for serious, far-sighted, and no doubt inconvenient (for many) entitlement reform, and the corresponding task of paying down our national debt.
7. The tremendous dangers, both foreign and domestic, inherent in our commitment to maintaining a massive national security apparatus with a near-trillion dollar budget the shrinking of which is a political impossibility.
8. The questions of whether international terrorism might be better opposed by abandoning or at least severely altering the present rubric of the Global War on Terror, and more generally whether the recent history of U.S. military engagement might suggest the need for a serious retrenchment of our far-overstretched armed forces and a recommitment to using American power to serve the national interest first and foremost.

That’s just off the top of my head – what have I missed, and where do you put the odds of finding “actual leaders” who are willing to take these and similar issues up?

Filed under: civil liberties, economics, education, foreign affairs, government/law, politics, torture, war

American Entitlement

Alex Massie has a splendid post on how American liberals, lately of the “Stop trying to force the Europeans to obey America’s orders” school of thought (and thank goodness for that!) when it came to foreign policy, are … well … less enthused about other countries’ free-mindedness when it comes to the financial crisis:

The President has told everyone what to do, so why won’t our friends do as they’re told? Once upon a time – and not so long ago neither – Democrats thought it was important fro friends to speak candidly to friends and stand up for what they thought was right. Now? Not so much. Now friends must remember that their independent analysis of the economic troubles afflicting the globe  counts for nothing and they should fall quietly into line and accept their marching orders from Washington.

As I say, how times change. We’ve swapped a military and foreign policy sense of imperial entitlement for an economic one. How refreshing!

What if the Americans are right, however? Well, maybe they are. But what if they’re wrong? Is it really necessary for every country to adopt identical responses to the current difficulties? How likely is it that there can be a global one-size-fits-all answer? Might there not be some sense in sharing eggs between different baskets? That is, different approaches and regional variation might work better than ex cathedra pronouncements from some of the very people who helped get us all into this mess in the first place. Perhaps not, but the costs of the Americans bullying everyone into following a policy that they themselves admit they have no idea of knowing will work seem, potentially, anyway, to be quite high if they are wrong. And, at least putatively, possibly higher than the benefits that might accrue if the Americans (and Gordon Brown) are right.

Filed under: economics, foreign affairs, government/law, war

Double Standards

I don’t have much to say about the grand Catholic brouhaha over President Obama giving this year’s commencement address at my alma mater, though despite my initial reaction just to roll my eyes at all the fuss I’ve got to note that I think Bishop D’Arcy makes a pretty good case that the invitation is problematic. Wherever you come down on the controversy, however, there can be no denying that K-Lo just got pwn3d by the Dish:

But it was fine for pro-choice, pro-death penalty Condi Rice, who was part of the team that signed off on torture, to speak at Boston College. Seriously who do these people think they’re persuading any more?

Not me, surely. The question for Andrew, though, is what he’d say if the commencement speaker were Dick Cheney. Yeah, I thought so, and amen to that. But then, why do Obama’s commitments to federally-funded embryonic stem cell research and abortion on demand get a pass?

Elsewhere: Unending irony, indeed.

Filed under: abortion, education, morality, religion, torture, war

“Statism”

Will sticks up for it, and good for him: I deserve to stand accused as often as anyone else, but it’s a largely contentless epithet that serves to do little more than generate bad feelings. And at the end of the day everyone (well, almost everyone) is a statist, and the focus of our disputes is really the question of what kind of state that state should be.

Or is that too quick? There’s a temptation, I think, to make all of this into nothing more than an issue of engineering, as if once the economics are in place people will have no choice but to fall in line. But as we’ve seen before that just ain’t so: our disputes have to do with more than just the empirical questions of how the welfare state is most effectively administered, and all the empirical data in the world aren’t going to resolve things on their own. The case of just war theory can be instructive, I think: as Daniel has observed, the just war tradition can be utilized quite differently depending on whether your starting point presumes in favor of “loopholes” or of “barriers”; if the former, then you’ll tend to find that the just war criteria make your war of choice look a-okay, and if the latter, then you won’t. So maybe progressives are like knee-jerk interventionists in this regard, always ready to pounce on the evidence that supports the case for shiny new domestic programs but much, much harder to persuade when the available evidence seems to point the other way. That’s not at all to say that the project of liberaltarian dialogue can be fruitful in the long term, but only that, well, it looks like that term will be pretty darn long.

While we’re on the subject of war, though, isn’t that the elephant in the room here? I mean, I’m not a tenth the social liberal that Will is, nor am I an open borders devotee, etc. etc., but the fact remains that I wouldn’t think of supporting the GOP so long as it remains the party of bloated defense budgets, unapologetic support for the Iraq war, and bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran, not to mention freedom fries, FISA, the PATRIOT Act, torture, and the rest. That’s statism, my friends, and if Jonah Goldberg really can’t see why a committed libertarian might regard such a party as a lost cause to be jettisoned in favor of an admittedly unattractive other, then he clearly needs to think things through again.

Filed under: government/law, libertarianism, war

More on Linker on Bacevich

Perhaps this is one of those not-infrequent occasions on which it is prudent not to give Damon Linker any more attention than he absolutely requires, but his response to Prof. Bacevich’s articulation of his hopes for the future of conservatism seems to me to have even less going for it than Daniel and Patrick Deneen are willing to credit. What begins as a call for individual financial responsibility, cultural calls for “self-restraint and self-denial”, and an appropriately modest realism in international affairs becomes in Linker’s hands a deeply reactionary call for outright authoritarianism, a rejection of “nearly everything about modern America”, and a demand for “an almost total overthrow of the status quo in favor of an alternative reality”, “a culture in which fixed limits on human choice are set by absolute political, spiritual, and moral authorities”.

But of course this is nonsense, since nowhere in Bacevich’s essay does he call for limits on human choice to be “fixed”, nor does he insist that those limits need to be “set” by any authorities other than the choosing persons themselves. The task of conservatism, on Bacevich’s analysis, is fundamentally one of critique, a primarily apolitical (and admittedly quixotic) enterprise that encourages people to get their own lives in order, to recognize and live within the inescapable limits on what can and can’t count as responsible human behavior. Nowhere here do we find, to use what is perhaps the most ludicrous of Linker’s phrases, calls for the establishment of an “authoritarian culture”; rather, the hope is that it is precisely in the achievement of a culture of self-restraint that the culture of authoritarianism can be avoided. It is simply false, then, to say as Linker does that Bacevich finds no value in “consent and individual choice”: instead, the fundamental motivation behind Bacevich’s calls for personal responsibility is the conviction that only such responsibility can provide the sort of background conditions against which the powers of consent and choice can actually be exercised in the first place. Scan the text repeatedly and squint as you might; the authoritarianism of Bacevich is nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, in what has become a frustratingly familiar trope, Linker embeds his criticism of Bacevich’s essay within a broader critique of a more widespread menace, a “paleoconservative sentiment that has growing numbers of champions online and may gather force over the coming years”. And so, having name-checked Burke and de Maistre (but why not MacIntyre and Wendell Berry?) and attempted to link paleoconservative “authoritarianism” and its demand for the “suicide of the critical intellect” with the phenomenon of sexual abuse among the Legionaries of Christ (no, really), Linker goes in for the kill:

… the scandal gives us a glimpse of what awaits those who would submit themselves to an authoritarian culture — namely, credulity, abuse, and humiliation. And it also serves as a useful reminder of why the modern, liberal order, which valorizes consent and individual choice, and which Bacevich appears not to value very much at all, arose in the first place. It arose because the wars, abuses of power, and corruption that permeated political and ecclesiastical institutions in the early modern period convinced philosophers and intellectuals that human beings would benefit enormously from presuming the worst about human motives. If men were angels, we could submit happily to their authority and enjoy the comforts that come from such submission. But men are never angels — least of all those who found and perpetuate institutions that treat those in positions of authority as if they were angels — and so we are left with doubt, skepticism, suspicion, authority limited by consent, and individual freedom of choice.

Let’s get this straight. A group of people who have, over the past eight years, been foremost among the very loudest critics of the wars, abuses of power, and corruption that were the centerpiece of the Bush Republicans’ reign have become in Linker’s hands apologists for authoritarianism, their vision marred by a willingness to treat leaders like angels and throw doubt, skepticism, suspicion, consent, and individual choice by the wayside. A group of people whose criticisms of the Bush regime centered more than anything else on its frighteningly illiberal character, who called for a rejection the empty promises and false comforts of the State and a turn instead to the limited, liberal order established by the founders, have now become the sort of submissive, uncritical, authority-worshipping folk who wish to abandon the Modern project and replace it instead with a society where everyone involved defers to authority by demanding the suppression of doubt. A group of people who spent the past eight years calling out their fellow conservatives for their disastrous credulity and the abuses that were enabled by their happy willingness to submit, standing athwart American hegemony and the expansion of federal authority shouting that we had to assume the worst about the motives and tendencies of human actors, are now victims of the temptation to treat our rulers like angels. And on and on it goes. I’ll leave it to the readers to pinpoint whose intellect it is that has just committed suicide.

At the risk of sounding “more radical than conservative”, it’s hard not to hope out loud for an alternative reality in which Damon Linker is willing to give his targets’ ideas the fair representation they deserve. Now that would be an almost total overthrow of the status quo I could believe in.

(Cross-posted.)

Filed under: conservatism, government/law, war

“McCarthy Bait”

I’ve got a quick post up at @TAC, excerpting and saying a few things about this George McGovern op-ed from yesterday’s Washington Post, in which the ex-Senator calls on President Obama to institute a “five-year time-out on war” instead of sending thousands more troops into Afghanistan. Those wishing to comment are probably best off doing it on the original post.

Filed under: personal, war