After the Future

Saying the Obvious

I think Israel's biggest problem with folks on the Left is that it elected Netanyahu, the Israeli equivalent of Trump. If the Israeli equivalent of an Obama had been head of state when this Hamas attack happened, the reaction on the Left would have been very different. These days, It always boils down to picking a red or blue jersey to put on. So because Netanyahu = the Right Wing "red" Bad Guy, Hamas = the Left Wing "blue" Good Guys. No matter how horrific their savagery, Hamas is fighting the good, de-colonialist fight. Would that things could be so simple.

The question that remains open for me is whether Israel will blunder here, as the U.S. blundered after 9/11, in confusing the need for revenge with the need to find a practical, realistic solution to terrorism.  Invade and suppress does not strike me as a practical, reallistic solution. But they have to do something, right? So here we are.

The Nihilism of the Intersectional Left

What I cannot understand is endorsing, validating, or standing in solidarity with war crimes. That so many student organizations did so is stunning. It commits them to positions anathema not only to the conservatives they often tangle with but to left-leaning liberals and progressives, many of whom now perceive a frightening difference in core values that too many had scarcely pondered before. 

Conor Fridersdorf

Simplistic moralistic thinking finds a way to justify the unjustifiable. It justified the Spanish Inquisition. It justified the French Terror. It justified the Cultural Revolution in China. The people who commit the worst atrocities are those who think they do it in defense of or inspired by some moral principle, and they believe that their actions serve justice and truth and that history will prove them right. The more moralistic the justification, the more brittle the thinking, and the more brittle the thinking, the greater the need to double down and to embrace an emotional fanaticism that blocks out all criticism. 

I have used my phrase 'ontological dizziness' most frequently to describe the kind of vertigo into which people with traditional values have been thrust in response to the dissolution of  the customary cultures into which they were born. They blame Liberals for this, but the post WWII consumerist society and its media are the real cause. These Americans shaped by Middle American customary culture embraced this shift into consumerism because they accepted that it was all a part of what made America great even as it has slowly dissolved the social infrastructure that supported their customs and traditions.

People in such a vertiginous state will grab onto whatever is near at hand to steady them, so they grab onto a guy like Donald Trump, a classic American huckster in the P.T. Barnum mold, and a guy whose gaudy faux success is a parody of the old American Dream. Perhaps there is a kind of comfort in being conned by Trump. What could be more American? 

But we see how the Cultural Left is affected by ontological dizziness in more subtle ways. The Cultural Left seems, relatively speaking, to be more sane because they are better adapted to and so benefit more from the values world shaped by Neoliberalism and its consumerist understanding of freedom. It's harder for the Left to truly grasp the underlying metaphysical nihilism that shapes this values world because their lives are so comfortable in it."I'm not a nihilist," they say to themselves. "I'm a good person who plays by the meritocratic rules, and I have all the socially approved, politically correct attitudes. What's nihilistic about that?"

Only the most self-aware intellectuals on the Cultural Left embrace their nihilistic presuppositions as a basis upon which to develop a politics and public morality. In the postmodern milieu that is still hegemonic for such thinking, there is no possibility for a transcendentally based morality; some other basis must be found, and the result over the last couple of decades has been the emergence of a new juxtaposition of desire (freedom to consume) with the unjust plight of the marginalized (those whose desires are culturally-politically thwarted). This leads to ham-fisted political moral judgments where the only salient moral criterion is where you sit in the hierarchy of marginalization.

The response to Hamas's butchery in Israel by campus groups influenced by this desire/mariginalization moral logic will, I hope, lead to its eventual intellectual and moral de-legitimization. For anyone with a sliver of basic, genuine moral sense, the fundamental vacuousness of this kind of Leftist moralizing has been exposed because until now it has seemed to many people of good will to be moral-ish. What is their moral-ish logic? They will say that, yes, Jews have been historically marginalized, but the Palestinians are being marginalized by the Jews, so Palestinian marginalization counts for more; therefore any horrific thing Palestinians do to fight against their Jewish oppressors is justified. Does the moral reasoning here get more complicated than that? 

Now it remains to be seen if Israel's response will sink to the same level of nihilistic moral reasoning: They started it, so we'll finish it. Will they? 6000 bombs in a few days? Cutting off power and water? Is this strategic or is it just vengeful lashing out?

Putin Going Postal

Just as individual narcissists appear to be inflated egotists but are really insecure souls trying to cover their fragility, narcissistic nations and groups that parade their power are often actually haunted by fear of their own weakness. Narcissists crave recognition, but they can never get enough. Narcissists crave psychic security but act in self-destructive ways that ensure they are often under assault. ...

My fear is that Putin knows only one way to deal with humiliation, which is by blaming others and lashing out. A couple of years ago my colleague Thomas L. Friedman wrote a prescient column about the politics of humiliation in which he quoted Nelson Mandela: “There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated.”

David Brooks

When grievance and humiliation reach a tipping point in someone or in a group, so does the likelihood of their lashing out violently. There's a phrase for it: "going postal". If one feels powerless in the face of him who humiliated you, you regain a sense of power by walking into his office and blowing him away: "Now who's humiliated, chump? You, that's who, because you're dead. You don't exist and I do. I'm even gonna be on TV now." Or in the case of someone like Dylan Roof, it's not a particular individual you lash out at but representatives who are proxies for the group he blames for his grievance. 

A Few Thoughts on Ukraine

In observing events unfold in Europe over the last week, it struck me that there was a moment after 9/11 when the U.S enjoyed the world's sympathy as Ukraine enjoys it now. We squandered it, though, in the name of vengeance and Neoconservative, hubristic adventurism. And in doing so the U.S. squandered its credibility and the world's good will toward it.

Eighteen months later the streets of the world's capitals filled to protest the U.S.'s imminent invasion of Iraq as they've been doing nineteen years later to protest Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm not saying the situations are equivalent. What was most remarkable was the shift within that eighteen-month period from the U.S. being the good guys to being the bad. At least it's possible for us to be the good guys--we have that potential, even if under blundering, "we-don't-do-nuance", Republican leadership we almost always never realize it. Russia under Putin has never been and can never be the good guys. But for us, there was a lost opportunity then, and we've been paying the price ever since. Iraq was such a foolish disaster on so many levels.

Events since then in the U.S. have further eroded the world's confidence in the U.S. to be a beacon of sane order and democratic values. I'm not surprised at all that Europeans and the Ukrainians themselves didn't trust the U.S.'s warnings about the impending invasion. Liberals should not assume that even though we have with the Democrats' current control of government a short interregnum of sanity, that after Trump the world reverts to its pre-Trump relationship with us. Already the world is making plans for when this sane interregnum is likely to end in the next few years. Already what Americans say or think is not something to be taken seriously in the way that it was. The world looks at America as a fragile democracy, a society in a death spiral that has all but lost its mind with a government that cannot be relied on. 

Ukraine Silver Lining

But Mr. Putin’s savaging of Ukraine, which many of his right-wing supporters had said he would never do, has recast the Russian president more clearly as a global menace and boogeyman with ambitions of empire who is threatening nuclear war and European instability.

For many of his longtime admirers — from France to Germany and the United States to Brazil — it is something of an awkward spot. The stain of Mr. Putin’s new reputation threatens to taint his fellow travelers, too.

“It will be a decisive blow to them,” said Lucio Caracciolo, the editor of the Italian geopolitical magazine Limes, who considered Mr. Putin’s invasion an irrational, and potentially, a politically suicidal move. He said that members of the international ultraright who enjoyed a special relationship and financial support from Mr. Putin were “in serious trouble.” “They put all their eggs in the same basket,” Mr. Caracciolo said. “And the basket is collapsing.” (Source: NYT)

Let's hope so. But such a hoped-for outcome will be paid for dearly with innocent Ukrainian blood.

 

We'll see how this plays out--so many outcomes are possible--but the humanitarian disaster now unfolding in Ukraine makes it clear that Putin is a psychopathic, murdering thug. No more disguising it with propaganda, lies, and sniggering disinformation. If you've been pro-Trump, you've been pro-Putin. And if you've been pro-Trump, you too have been conned by propaganda, lies, and sniggering disinformation. In Putin we see Trump unmasked.  And so now the case should be easier to make to any Trump supporter, who isn't himself a psychopathic thug, that your support for Trumpism is the same thing as support for Putinism. It couldn't be clearer. You want Trump, freedom-loving Trump fans? Putin is what you're gonna get. Don't you see what you're trafficking with here?

 

The world's heart goes out to the people of Ukraine whose only misfortune is to live next to a country whose political system is run by a paranoidal Bond villain with delusions of grandeur. Most people understood that already, but not if you're a Trump or Tucker Carlson fan. I assume, since neither has any real convictions except what's best for them, that they will in coming weeks squirm away from Putin. But we have all that video of their sycophantic ass kissing. If they don't pay a price for that going forward, then really there's no hope for this country. 

 

This should--should--have the  same effect on the American Right that the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 had on American Communists who still clung to a naive idealism that had long before became disconnected from reality. They recognized then that Soviet Communism was a god who failed. Will Americans on the Right recognize now that hard-right Authoritarianism is also a god that has failed?

 

Only willful delusion is possible now, and yet the question remains: how deep into delusion is the Trumpist Right? I still have hope that at least some on the Right will be sobered up by this. And I have hope that Ukrainian resistance and valor will be an inspiration for all of us who see real tyranny for what it is, and still believe that America need not succumb to it.

Bin Laden Toppled More than the Twin Towers

“We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

Bin Laden did not win the war of ideas. But neither did we. To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end. When President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it is “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.” Bush was correct; al-Qaeda could not dim the promise of America. Only we could do that to ourselves.

Carlos Lazoda

Spencer Ackerman makes a similar if more detailed argument in Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Destablilized America and Produced Trump. Read it if you still need to be convinced that when all is said and done bin Laden's attack succeeded beyond his most optimistic expectations. Yes, he was eventually caught and killed, but he succeeded because he could count on the U.S. to respond as stupidly as possible to the 9/11 attack. Bin Laden toppled more than the Twin Towers, he toppled what was left of our collective sanity, and there's a good chance that might in turn lead to the toppling of America as an open society and liberal democracy. This isn't over.  

One of the most effective tactics of the warriors of the Near East dating back to ancient Greek and Roman times (and earlier) was feigned retreat and then counterattack. Genghis Kahn used the same tactic. I'm too lazy to look up a particular historical example, but they are numerous. Let's say the Parthian light cavalry confronts a Roman army. They play to the Roman ego by pretending to panic and hightail it. The Romans are elated and give chase until the find themselves in a trap. The Parthians turn around in a place where they have all the advantages and then decimate the Romans with their archers or some other ambush-like counterattack. Disaster ensues.

You play to the overconfidence of the foe, or you insult their manhood, ego, the need for vengeance, or use some other ploy to cloud their better judgment, and sure enough they respond with expected stupidity. Anybody who points out that maybe giving chase isn't such a good idea is pushed to the fringes--not a real patriot, a coward. So disaster inevitably ensues. You'd think Westerners would have learned by now. But Bin Laden knew that was unlikely. As Lazoda puts it quoting Richard Clark--

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

In other words, American complacent cluelessness was followed by fanatical vindictiveness. It's as predictable as poking a hornets' nest. The American reaction to 9/11 showed little more intelligence or shrewdness than an insect's. That kind of predictable stupidity is easy for a shrewd adversary to manipulate. 

Lance Morrow recently wrote an astonishingly stupid Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled "You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity". He gives as an example Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also talks about the stupidity of the Democrats twice trying to impeach Trump likening the Democrats to Wile E. Coyote to Trump's roadrunner. This is the guy who wrote in Time magazine a few days after 9/11 " A Case for Rage and Retribution". Here's the nut of it:

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage... Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred... This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started."

I don't know if Bin-Laden had a chance to read this article, but if he did, it would have been a very strong indicator to him that he'd succeeded.

One of the chief characteristics of "stupid" is not to recognize it in oneself. For someone like Morrow everyone else is stupid, never him. Let's get after them chickenshit heathen Parthians and teach them a lesson. But what's really, truly astonishingly stupid is to fall for their ploy over and over again.

Conservatives like Morrow are prodigies of projection--they never quite grasp that the stupidities that they see in others are projections of their own. Whenever you hear someone on the Right accuse the Left of something nasty, criminal, or stupid, they are almost always talking about themselves. The more unhinged the accusations, the more deeply rooted the projection. It would never occur to Morrow that it is he and the hate- and vengeance-driven minions on the Right who most resemble the benighted Mr. Coyote. As Morrow says, stupid is as stupid does. 

Update 9/12/21: "See also After 9/11 the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong" by Garrett Graf. An excerpt:

Rather than recognizing that an extremist group with an identifiable membership and distinctive ideology had exploited fixable flaws in the American security system to carry out the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched the nation on a vague and ultimately catastrophic quest to rid the world of “terror” and “evil.” [See my  post on "Naive Idealism"]

At the time, some commentators politely noted the danger of tilting at such nebulous concepts, but a stunned American public appeared to crave a bold response imbued with a higher purpose. As the journalist Robert Draper writes in To Start a War, his new history of the Bush administration’s lies, obfuscations, and self-delusions that led from Afghanistan into Iraq, “In the after-shocks of 9/11, a reeling America found itself steadied by blunt-talking alpha males whose unflappable, crinkly-eyed certitude seemed the only antidote to nationwide panic.”

Cixin Liu: Democracy and Culture

In a 2018 New Yorker profile of the Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, Jiayang Fan writes--

I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country [China] a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when the Trisolarans, preparing to inhabit Earth, have interned the whole of humanity in Australia:

The society of resettled populations transformed in profound ways. People realized that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government. . . . Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell.

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. 

And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,” he said. “I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don’t know.” The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, “Here’s the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done.”

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of “The Three-Body Problem”: “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”

The most interesting part of this excerpt is the sentences I've highlighted in the last two paragraphs, "The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice". And then her assertion that her "belief in individualism and democracy are principles to be upheld against all outcomes". 

Fan betrays the cluelessness of cosmopolitan elites that I described in my post last week about the military and foreign policy establishment. It is not ironic or inconsistent at all that Liu can see the danger that democratic governance would pose to Chinese society while at the same time embracing life as it's lived in a liberal democratic society.

Liu's view is more complex, and he is right about Fan if indeed he sees her as brainwashed. She is a 'type', even if she doesn't think she is. She thinks of herself, I'm sure, as an independent, critical thinker. She writes for The New Yorker! But she's just mouthing the cosmopolitan Liberal talking points. Her editor doesn't pick up on it, because he or she is also brainwashed, i.e., captured by his or her unconscious presuppositions.

It is obvious to me that Liu is not contradicting himself in saying that democracy is not right for China now even though it is for many Western societies. That doesn't mean that a Liberal Democracy will never be right for China. It has to find its own way, it has to grow from the seeds that we see were sown there in Tiananmen or in Hong Kong. The problem for the Chinese, as for all societies, is to live in the tension between the realities on the ground and one's idealistic aspirations. One might see that as dancing in one's chains. Not a bad metaphor for the human condition in general.

As I wrote in my Bobos post recently, I believe that the French and American declarations were a profound evolutionary step forward for humanity.  And while I also believe that the Liberal Order to which those declarations gave shape is currently near collapse, that doesn't mean that we stop evolving.

I believe that we will find a way to preserve what was best in the Liberal Order, particularly its ideals regarding liberte, fraternite, egalite. I believe these ideals are universal and transcultural, but I also believe that even the Western societies in which those ideals were first articulated were not politically or morally mature enough to realize them except in a very preliminary way. We are seeing in the U.S. slow collapse of the constitutional framework designed as a first attempt to realize those ideals. It was bound to fail sooner or later because its contradictions and shortcomings were just too profound. But there have been and will continue to be repeated attempts to overcome these contradictions. What number of republics is France up to? I've lost count. 

The ideals that shaped the Liberal Order are seed ideas, and they germinate and grow in different ways in different soil conditions. The country that soon after the articulation of the ideals in the Declaration became the slave state known as the U.S.A. was simultaneously an interesting embodiment and a mockery of those ideals. And the country that soon after became France's First Republic very quickly unraveled into a military dictatorship. And France ping-ponged through the next 150 years between right and left in its own peculiar French way.  

Indeed, it's very much an open question whether whatever level of its realization of these ideals the U.S. has achieved will survive in the U.S. to the end of the decade. But even if we regress into an era of dark, fascistic politics, which is a real possibility, I believe that the political DNA of these ideals is strong enough that it will eventually restore the U.S. to its better self.

How much stupidity and suffering we must endure between now and then remains to be seen. But perhaps we need to wander in the wilderness for a while in order that it might become clear to everyone that the ridiculously obsolete U.S. Constitution has to go so that a new one, better adapted to realities in the 21st Century and beyond, can be formulated. I have lost all patience with the U.S. Constitution fetishizers, whether they are Liberals or Conservatives. 

But the important point is that neither American or French society was ready in the late 18th century to become a truly open, egalitarian democracy, and neither has truly become one today. But each in its a few-steps-forward-then-a-step-backward way has made progress. So the mistake is to think that because we do from time to time take a step backward that progress isn't possible.

So the mistake, therefore, is to think that the ideal is wrong because societies cannot embody it immediately--or permanently. This is the mistake made by eastern European autocrats or the Chinese who believe that Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere delusional. But it is also a mistake that Neocons and others in the foreign policy establishment, for whom Anne Applebaum is a representative type--make in thinking that a Liberal Democracy can be imposed by force or fiat in Iraq or Afghanistan--or China. And so it's also the mistake made by all cosmopolitan elites--for whom Jiayang Fan is a representative 'type'-- who are smugly complacent in thinking that their embrace of Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere better, and so therefore any society that doesn't embody its ideals is deserving of their opprobrium. That in Fang's words, "democracy and individualism [are] principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes." This is rank, naive Jacobinism. 

The seeds of these ideals are have been strewn everywhere, and if there are places, like China where they have sprouted and then been stamped out, other seeds will keep sprouting and there will be a time when the conditions will favor their flourishing. The Chinese are famous for the ability to take the long view, not something Western utilitarian Liberals are capable of. The Western sense of justice or fairness requires that if some have it now, then so should everybody. Immediately. "Regardless of outcomes". Regardless of how much suffering and chaos the effort to impose it causes. Regardless whether this effort has any reasonable chance of success. This seems to be Fan's view--and the view of most liberal media types. If North Atlantic societies can have Liberal Democracies, why can't China? Why can't Afghanistan? 

Because that's just not how it works on planet earth.

So the challenge is, as always, to live in a metaxic tension between the harsh realities on the ground and the ideals we aspire to in a hoped-for future. The ideals cannot be imposed, they can only be grown, and they grow in the space between the current reality and the unrealized ideal. The mistake is to refuse to live in the discomfort of being neither here or there, i.e., to be naively idealistic like the Neocon Right and Jacobin Left, on the one hand, or to be so cynical as to believe that progress is impossible, that humans are too evil, that life on earth can only be a Social Darwinian eat-or-be-eaten agon. 

The latter seems to be kinda/sorta Liu's vision, and perhaps that is what Fan is really reacting to. It's a little more complex for Liu, but at least in The Three Body Problem the values frame irredeemably Social Darwinist. It's a battle between two factions for whom Social Darwinist assumptions completely circumscribe the antagonists whether on earth or on Trisolaris. On earth there are the Naive Idealists whose disappointment in humanity has made them profoundly cynical about humanity. They have come to be believe that humans as a species are not worthy of survival and so work in collaboration with the invading Trisolarans.

Then there is Team Human who understandably see these collaborators as traitors. Team Human, of course, is represented by an international coalition of scientific, military, and security elites because what other humans really count, right? In any event, for these elites the only imperative is the survival of the human species in the face of threat from the alien invaders who are more advanced civilizationally, i.e.,scientifically (does anything else really matter for Liu?). For them survival and continued evolution of the species is an end itself that justifies any means to preserve it. 

But if within an exclusively Darwinist values frame humans as a species have no more cosmic significance than any other species, who really cares about what happens to humans in the future? (The Trisolarans aren't due to arrive for another 450 years!) If there isn't more to fight for--some spiritual ideal, for instance--than simply surviving, is the fight and the human species being fought for worth the trouble? Why not just allow the superior Trisolarans or, more relevant to our current situation, the more faster evolving AI-driven machines to win? Humans had their run, let whoever comes next take the field.

I haven't read the other books in Liu's trilogy, but I suspect he'd say that the continued human evolution through scientific exploration is justification enough for human survival. There seems to be an unconscious Fichtean idealism, and in that what I see as a parodic spiritual impulse, in Liu's vision of ever-increasing scientific and technological development. He might argue that the very fight for survival against the Trisolarans pushes the human race to greater levels of innovation and discovery, that is, to a higher civilizational level. Humans evolve to higher levels of civilization precisely because of the threat to their survival posed by a superior civilization. It's not just species survival that matters, but civilizational (scientific/technological) advancement. That's what justifies human species survival. 

But I'm not going to parse out what's wrong with the logic here because in the end all Liu is really talking about is China vs. the West, isn't he? And if all he really cares about is nationalistic vanity disguised as species vanity, it's not very interesting, at least to me. I'm not denying its motivating power of survival and the need to dominate, but hopefully there is more to being human worth fighting for. 

It's Primarily about Judgment; Secondarily about Experience

The American Conservative ranks the candidates in terms of foreign policy sanity:

Ukraine and the West

The Beltway hawks want to defeat Putin, depicted as a new Hitler by Hillary Clinton, to punish the Russian leader who put a stop to the oligarch looting spree of the 1990s that had sent Russia into a death spiral. Their dream: humiliating Putin, setting off “freedom” demonstrations in Moscow, perhaps a civil war to bring Putin down.

Why, one must ask, is this an American interest? Why would we want chaos in a state which possesses 8,000 nuclear weapons? If the neocons and neoliberals got their way and Putin is defeated and falls, who then assumes power? Or does Russia break into warring fiefdoms with various warlords vying for control? And in this scenario, who, if anyone, commands Moscow’s nuclear arsenal? Is this really the future—with all its attendant uncertainty, desperation, and humiliation—Americans want to see? Truly it is hard to imagine anything more stupid or shortsighted.

I don't talk a lot about foreign policy because it doesn't interest me that much. Monitoring what's going on is about as interesting as reading the police blotter in the local newspaper. It's simply a matter of different gangs fighting with one another to improve their territory and market share. Nationalist sentiment is nothing more than wearing gang colors. It's primitive and uninteresting, but unfortunately, you have to deal with it if you live in a neighborhood controlled by gangs, and we all do. 

So when it comes to foreign policy, we shouldn't look at our own US policy as motivated by anything differently than defending its market share. I honestly believe that at this time in our national development we are collectively incapable of anything better than enlightened self interest. I doubt we are even capable of the enlightened part. Whenever the US gets idealistic about foreign policy, it almost always makes things far worse, especially for the people we insist we want to help. We are collectively incapable of doing the right thing, even if it's clear what the right thing is to do, and usually it's not. Never trust anyone who professes to be an idealist in foreign policy; he is either a charlatan or a dangerous fool. The bottom line is that our shrewder gang leaders realize that they don't have any market share in this part of the world to protect, and that they should leave it alone. It's not noble, but it's sane, and when genuine nobility is not a possibility, sanity should be embraced.

So I am all for the Ukraine getting a higher level of self-determination than it had under the Russian puppet Yanukovych, but maybe the price for getting it is the Ukraine's giving up the Crimea--and, though possible, less likely--some of its eastern borderlands occupied mostly by Russian gangsters. It's a decent tradeoff--give up territory inhabited mostly by people who don't wear your colors in exchange for control over your own still extensive territory.

That's what the terms of the negotiations should be about now, but I doubt that's how the Ukrainians see it. Too bad. Regardless, it's, first, the Ukraine's business, and, second, the European Union's, and the US role should be simply to stand on the sidelines and support any decision these parties come up with that promises sanity, stability, and as much self determination for the concerned parties as seems practicable given the political realities. 

We're approaching the centenary of the beginning of WWI. It started because a Serbian gangster took out a rival Austrian capo. The Austrian gang moved to retaliate, and the Russians mobilized to protect its market share in the Balkans, and this started the chain reaction that led to thirty years that were among the most horrific in European if not world history. It should have stayed between Austria and Russia without everyone else getting in the act. It may have led to disaster for one or the other, but it would have been a limited disaster. The same goes here. 

Putin is a silly, strutting gamecock, but while he's a threat to his immediate neighbors, he's not a threat to world order. Not even remotely in the way that a major military conflict in this region would be. That's why it's important for the West not to listen to our own strutting gamecocks like McCain, Graham, NRO, and the gangsters on FOX. These fools are nuisances that need to be prudently managed and contained, but not to be taken more seriously than they deserve. 

What's the Difference between Mandela and Che?

Various notable individuals have lauded Guevara as a hero; for example, Nelson Mandela referred to him as "an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom",while Jean-Paul Sartre described him as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age". Others who have expressed their admiration include authors Graham Greene, who remarked that Guevara "represented the idea of gallantry, chivalry, and adventure", and Susan Sontag, who supposed that "[Che's] goal was nothing less than the cause of humanity itself." ... Praise has been reflected throughout the political spectrum, with the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard extolling Guevara as a "heroic figure", lamenting after his death that "more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, [Che] was the living embodiment of the principle of revolution", while journalist Christopher Hitchens commented that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do—fought and died for his beliefs. (Source)

Yes, I know this post should be about Mandela, but I've had Guevara on my mind, and Mandela's death gives me the opportunity to talk about what I've been thinking about both of them.

Steinbeck's East of Eden is a study of two personality types that define, I think in a profound way, a basic polarity that defines our human nature--the Cain and Abel or imp/angel archetypes.  Cal and Cathy Imps; Adam and Aron, Angels. But these basic archetypes are found everywhere: Tom Sawyer, Imp; Huck Finn, Angel. Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov, Angels; Fyodor, Dmitri, and Smerdyakov,Imps. (See my post on this theme.) 

Neither is morally superior, but the Imps type often gets a bad rap because they are a little too comfortable with their 'falleness' and tend to be transgressive rules breakers. The Angel type is an idealist and rules follower and is often embraced as "good" because he is an exemplar of tribal virtue. But for Steinbeck, Dostoyevski, Twain (and me) he isn't good or better than the Imp type. Like Imps, Angels have a moral task, a life work that they must accomplish if they are to become truly good. It's a harder road, I think, for the angel than it is for the imp. 

Imps are at home in the world and accept the world on its own terms. They are averse to making moral judgments. Some could be simply understood as people stuck in Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage. They live for enjoyment. Rules, laws, moral restrictions are hard for them to take seriously. This can have a naive or immature, good-old-boy character, in a person who lives unconsciously according driven impulsively by fear and desire. For such people the goal is simply to do as he pleases without getting caught. Or the Imp can be more shrewd and cold-blooded as in the characters Fyodor Dostoyevski or Cathy Trask, for whom everything is a calculation regarding maximizing gain and minimizing loss, for whom nothing ever is given without extracting something in return. We see these types all the time in popular fiction in books and on screens. 

Imps thrive on Wall Street. They have no concept of the common good. For them the common good a silly abstraction embraced by people--Angels--who don't understand how the world works. Imps in France in 1940 shrugged and did what was necessary to get along with the Nazis. The Angels joined the resistance--and they got their revenge on collaborators after the war. Angels can be harshly judgmental, and often ruthless in the service of their ideals or mission, but it has to be a mission they beliieve serves a higher purpose than their own self interest. 

Each Imp-dominant personality has a suppressed Angel, and each Angel-dominant personality has a suppressed Imp. The meaning of the gospel admonition to become shrewd as serpents and guileless as doves is for Angels to embrace their suppressed Imp, and for Imps to embrace their suppressed Angel, and in doing so to effect a balance--or metaxis--between the part of us that is attuned to heaven and the part that is attuned to the earth. To effect the integration is not easy; it requires living in an uncomfortable tension between them. It is much easier to be one sided--to be Angel or Imp. It's much harder to be both. 

But to succeed is to achieve a kind of greatness; to fail, or at least not to try, is to remain a soul mediocrity, a stagnant hodgepodge of instinctual impulses and culturally conditioned attitudes and beliefs. The challenge for each is to call the suppressed part of themselves out of the shadows and to integrate it into his personality. This is a moral task, but it is very different for the two types. In popular culture, this moral transformation is mostly described on 'Imp' terms, e.g., the self-absorbed sybarite, the narcissistic careerist who meets the woman of his dreams,usually an Angel-dominant type, who forces a choice, who calls him to commitment and to clean up his act. (See the film Tao of Steve for a classic, entertaining example about the classic move from Kierkegaard's  aesthetic to the ethical. Dickens's Scrooge is the story of a man who when confronted with the choice failed to make the move.)

Less common are stories about the moral transformation of Angels, and if the story is depicted at all, it's a story of their failure. How does this relate to Mandela and Guevara? They are both Angels; one succeeded in his moral transformation, and the other didn't. 

So the Angel type fails if he stagnates in conventional, rules-following mediocrity. These are the good little boys and girls that priggish adults love, and that the movies hate because they are so predictably boring.  Angels turning sour, however, is another possibility, and one that is worth writing about. Angels who sour come in three basic categories and combinations of them--the Cynic, the Drunk, and the Jacobin.

The Cynic is a lapsed idealist. He rejects his natural idealism as delusional once it becomes clear to him that the world has the effrontery not to conform to the way he thinks it should be. He can be angry and embittered or depressed and withdrawn.

The Drunk is another kind of soured Angel. He seeks escape from an ugly world he cannot abide, especially if there is a better one in his imagination. Dylan Thomas comes to mind. Christopher Hitchens was a combination of this and the first. 

The Jacobin is the most interesting of the three. His response to his discovery of an ugly world is to re-engineer it, to seek to control it, using whatever amount of violence and force necessary to make it conform to the ideal template he has for it in his mind.

Each is a failed response to a shock of some kind that can be an opportunity if the shock is dealt with effectively. And for each of these failed responses recovery is possible. But of these three possibilities, the Jacobin is the most attractive, especially in the young, because at least it's a positive response that engages with the world, and as such provides a better chance of recovery than that provided Drunks and Cynics. But Jacobins can become monsters if they fail.

Both Mandela and Che were Jacobins in their twenties. Che died one, Mandela didn't. The difference? Mandela went to prison, and Che went to Bolivia. Mandela matured; Che did not. Did Che die a monster? I think he did. 

I have Che on my mind because in October I rewatched The Motorcycle Diaries and saw for the first time Che, the two-part film by Stephen Soderberg. The Ernesto Guevara of The Motorcycle Diaries is well named. He is a classic Angel type who pairs up with Alberto, a classic, pleasure-seeking Imp--Che is Hal to Alberto's Falstaff. There is something big-souled and appealing about the twenty-three-year old Ernesto. He has a great, compassionate soul, and he has an intelligence and thoughtfulness that make him stand out. But there was a stubborn, perhaps even compulsive, absolutist quality to him, which is typical of Angel prodigies. That stubbornness--that refusal to accept the world on its own terms--can lead to greatness or monstrousness. 

In Soderberg's film, Che contrasts dramatically with Fidel, who is more practical, down to earth, and as such more human. Che was successful in Cuba because he had Fidel to temper his revolutionary angelism; Che failed in Africa and Bolivia because he was on his own and he had no one he trusted who could balance him out. He had a very hard time dealing with the political realities and the frailties of the people he sought to help. He lacked patience and could barely control his contempt for anyone who was not motivated by the same ideals and willingness to sacrifice as he. He needed Fidel (or Alberto) to bring him down to earth.

I'd argue that Che's story is one of tragic failure, not just because of the fiascos in Africa and Bolivia, but because those failures didn't temper him. If anything they reinforced his Jacobinism and kept him stuck. It's fortunate for the world that he never got into a position where his revolutionary angelism could have been given a wider scope. I'm not saying he'd be as bad as Mao or Pol Pot, but there would be similarities. It's unfortunate that he was shot and didn't spend time in prison to recover himself.

The crisis for Angels is usually a moment when life deals them a harsh blow, and everything depends on how they react to it. Breaking Bad's Walter White was an Angel stuck in conventional mediocrity when the news of his cancer delivered that blow--it transformed him into a bitter, cynical, control freak--a drug-lord Robespierre. Adam in East of Eden goes into an irresponsibly self-absorbed, child-neglecting depression after Cathy shoots and leaves him. Aron in the same book freaks out and runs away when he learns his mother is a madam at a nearby whorehouse. Alyosha Karamazov is devastated upon hearing of the humiliating premature decay of his hero Zossima's corpse. But Alyosha recovers. Those who recover, who find a way of keeping one foot in heaven and the other on the earth, are best described by the Yiddish word, 'mensch'. 

Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's The Yearling is also a success story about three Angel-dominant types, Penny and Ora Baxter, and their son, Jody. Penny Baxter is a mensch, he  is the model of the integrated Angel/imp, serpent and dove.  His wife, however, failed to recover from life's cruel blows and became embittered and depressed. The narrative arc of the book sets up a similar kind of blow that will be dealt to Jody, when he is told that he must destroy his pet deer, Flag. And the question that's implied in this crisis is whether Jody will respond to this blow as his mother did or as his father. Jody's reaction was a lot like Aron's in East of Eden--to run away. But he came back, and Penny's speech to Jody when he returns points out how it's possible for Angels to come down to earth and to live on it as a mensch:

You've seed how things goes in the world o' men. You've knowed men to be low-down and mean. You've seed ol' Death at his tricks...Ever' man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. 'Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but 'tain't easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin. I've been uneasy all my life...I've wanted life to be easy for you. Easier'n 'twas for me. A man's heart aches, seein' his young uns face the world. Knowin' they got to get their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin'. I knowed the lonesomeness he eased for you. But ever' man's lonesome. What's he to do then? What's he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.

If the blow for Che was his failure in Africa, the blow for Mandela was his being thrown into prison for twenty-four years. Everything depended on how they responded to those blows. It could have made them into embittered cynics or  bloodthirsty Jacobins--or it could have given them the opportunity to become mensches. Mandela became the mensch, and Che remained a Jacobin. That's the difference between Mandela and Che, regardless of their relative historical importance. Both were prodigies in their own way, both potential great souls, but Mandela realized that potential while Che did not. 

Mandela's imprisonment provided the context for his 'integration' of serpent and dove, for the Angel in him to develop a compassion that was stronger than his outrage at the  egregious injustices done to him and to his people. He came to accept the world as it was, and yet not to give up his ideals. Che, I would argue, would have benefitted from spending time in prison, too. It might have given him the chance to effect a similar kind of integration. It might have given him more time and perspective. But then again it might have more deeply embittered him.

I think Fidel is a wiser, shrewder man than Che. Fidel is a mensch, and he would have more admirers in the U.S. if his revolution had taken place at a time other than when Americans could only view it through a Cold War lens. History will be kinder to him than American public opinion has been, and he is a bigger, better man than Che was. 

Iraq Ten Years Later

Many decent people after Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, et al., believed that the international community had an obligation to intervene to protect the human rights of Tutsis, Bosniaks, and Kosovars. They were horrified to learn how the U.N. stood by and allowed the massacre in Rwanda, and supported the interventions in the Balkans later in the decade.

This same argument was proposed as a compelling reason for intervening in Iraq. I was astonished at how many people whose thinking and poltics I otherwise respected justified the invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds, arguing that national sovreignty should be superseded when the rights of a naton's citizens were being egregiously abused. It should have been done in Rwanda, and it was good that it was done in the Balkans. Why was Iraq any different? Why was Bush doing anything differently than Clinton did?

Well, there were plenty of reasons that Iraq was different and why the Bush administraton's rationale for invasion never passed the smell test. And the first thing anybody with any nose at all smelled was the oil. The overwrought attempts to connect Saddam with al-Quaeda, the hysteria about WMD--none of it added up. And then when the influence of the neocon Project for the New American Century came into view, it all made sense. This was a geopolitical power grab and an exercise in state building engineered by second-rate, chicken-hawk technocrats. The hubris was fantastical, and the results predictable.

 

Quote of the Day: Peter Kuznick

Americans were very hostile to Britain until the 20th century, till the World War I period, because that was the empire, and we were consciously anti-imperial. John Quincy Adams has a great speech that he made on July 4, 1819, in which he says we don’t go forth in search of foreign monsters to destroy. He says we might become dictators for the world, but we would lose our own spirit as a nation. And that’s what we think has happened, the United States in some ways has lost its soul as a nation. We started to lose that soul in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We lost it during the 1950s with Eisenhower going from 1,000 nuclear weapons when he takes office to 23,000 when he leaves office, to 30,000 when his budgeting cycle is finished. We lost it in Vietnam. We’ve lost it repeatedly, but we think it’s not all gone. That’s why we’re fighting to salvage what we can and turn this around. (Source)

I think that's right, and I've argued before that we may have won the war because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in winning it that way we lost our souls. You can make all the utilitarian arguments you'd like about how it shortened the war, and the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden was worse, but dropping the atomic bomb changed us, it fueled our paranoia, and we haven't recovered. Kuznick is optimistic that we can recover. I want to believe he's right, and I have sanguine moments when I do think we can recover. But it starts with our refusal of empire, and with our assuming a more modest role in the world as one nation among others. 

Ever wonder why so many right wingers are so bent out of shape about the so-called illegal immigrant problem? Many right-wing Americans, especially those who identify with the frontiersman narrative, fear that the Mexicans, from whom 19th-Century Americans stole Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, are looking for payback, and that the invasion of the the southwest by undocumented Mexicans is a stealth strategy by Mexicans to take back what was stolen from them. So put up that ridiculous wall. At a deep, unconscious level that same mentality assumes that the world wants payback for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ever wonder why the U.S. feels the need to have a military budget that exceeds the the military budget of the rest of the world combined? Ever wonder why we're so afraid that we feel compelled to arm ourselves to the teeth? Sure it's economically driven; it makes a lot of important people rich. But there are other, deeper reasons. I'd argue that a big part of it is because we are the only country that has used atomic weapons on civilians to such destructive effect, and deep in our psyche, especially if we already have the paranoid tendencies typical of the hard right, we expect payback.

9/11 wasn't a surprise or an aberration for people with this mindset. It was to be expected, because what goes around comes around, and it proves that we will be destroyed by those who hate us as soon as we show the least weakness. So now we must be frisked at airports, and we must arm ourselves to unprecedent levels, and we must garrison the world. Not because the world hates our freedom, but because we are bullies and we know that all the people we've pushed around over the last sixty years are going sooner or later to push back. At root it's not an offensive strategy, but one one saturated in fear about payback.