The Free Thinker

"Where has the world headed after 1989?" (Ian Buruma):

The way it looks now, liberals, in the "progressive" American sense of the word, may actually have been among the losers of 1989. Social democrats were always despised by communists, and vice versa. But many socialdemocratic ideals, rooted in Marxist notions of social justice and equality, were thrown out, like the proverbial baby, with the bathwater of communism.

This process was already underway before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the free-market radicalism of the Thatcher-Reagan era. Society, Margaret Thatcher once famously declared, doesn't exist. Only individuals and families counted. It was everyone for themselves.

For many people, this had the ring of liberation - from overregulated markets, overbearing trade unions, and class privilege. That is why it was called neo-liberalism . But free-market radicalism undermined the role of the state in building a better, more just, and more equal society. Neoliberals are not so much interested in justice as in greater efficiency, more productivity, the bottom line.

At the same time that neo-liberals were slashing and burning their way through old social-democratic arrangements , the left was dissipating its energies on cultural politics , "identity," and ideological multiculturalism. Democratic idealism was once the domain of the left, including social democrats and liberals. But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save "Third World" culture, no matter how barbaric, from "neocolonialism ," than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al) simply because they opposed "Western imperialism."

As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists , but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests.

This explains why Italians, and later Thais, chose business tycoons to lead their countries. They hoped that men who managed to accumulate so much personal wealth could do the same for their voters.

Yet the rhetoric of idealism has not quite disappeared. It merely shifted from left to right. Once the left abandoned the language of internationalism - democratic revolution, national liberation, and so forth - it was taken up by neoconservatives . Their promotion of American military force as the strong arm of democracy may have been misguided, crude, arrogant, ignorant, naïve , and deeply dangerous, but it was indisputably idealistic .

It was none of those things except the last. It was not naive, but shrewd; not crude, but subtle and farsighted; not ignorant, but based on a rich understanding both of the Middle East and, more broadly, of human nature and the meaning of political liberty; not arrogant, but humble enough to do for the other guy what we'd like him to do for us if we were in his situation; not misguided, but vindicated by the event.  It was not even dangerous relative to the alternative, for in the long run allowing totalitarian dictators who owe their rise to the West to oppress their people and defy international law is more dangerous than the short-run risks that were involved in the Iraq War.  But yes, it was idealistic.  And it is because it was idealistic rather than "realist" (i.e., amoralist) that it was shrewd, subtle, humble, courageous, and successful.  To try to deny or marginalize ideas and ideals is to rule out the existence, ab initio, of the main factor that matters in international affairs.  To think straight is to have an ideology.

Insulting Our Allies

"America and eastern Europe: end of an affair?" (The Economist):

AFTER two decades of sometimes fervent Atlanticism in the ex-communist world, disillusionment (some would call it realism) is growing. At its height the bond between eastern Europe and America was based, like the best marriages, on a mixture of emotion and mutual support. The romance dates from the cold war: when western Europe was sometimes squishy in dealing with the Soviet empire, America was robust. When the Iron Curtain fell, ex-dissidents and retired cold warriors found they had plenty in common. America pushed for the expansion of NATO, guaranteeing the east Europeans’ security. In return, ex-communist countries loyally supported America, particularly in providing troops for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That relationship is now looking more wobbly. A new poll (see chart) by the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank, shows that western Europe is now much more pro-American and pro-NATO than the ex-communist east. Until last year, the eastern countries swallowed their misgivings about George Bush, while the west of the continent writhed in distaste at what many saw as his administration’s incompetence and heavy-handedness.

The ascent of Barack Obama has boosted America’s image in most countries, but only modestly in places like Poland and Romania. Among policymakers in the east, the dismay is tangible. In July, 22 senior figures from the region, including Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa, wrote a public letter bemoaning the decline in transatlantic ties.

One reason is that the Obama administration is rethinking a planned missile-defence system, which would have placed ten interceptor rockets in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic, in order to guard against Iranian missile attacks on America and much of Europe. That infuriated Russia, which saw the bases as a blatant push into its front yard. Changing the scheme—probably using seaborne interceptors—risks looking like a climb-down to suit Russian interests.

Poland is also worried that a promised battery of Patriot air-defence missiles, originally to protect the interceptors, may now be only a temporary loan of dummy rockets for training purposes—“just a sales exercise”, says an official in Warsaw, crossly. America says it never intended to station real rockets there permanently.

The administration also botched its participation in Poland’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the start of the second world war on September 1st. Other countries, including Russia and Germany, sent top people. America, initially, offered only a retired Clinton-era official. William Perry, who was a notable sceptic about NATO expansion. After squawks of dismay, Jim Jones, the national security adviser, went too. But Poles sensed a snub.

Sorry, Eastern Europe!  How many allies does Obama think we can afford to throw away?  Russia is the #1 threat to international law and world peace right now.  A wise foreign policy would focus on strengthening trans-Atlantic ties and using all peaceful methods to make Russia withdraw from Georgia.  But Obama seems to think that helping the good guys and opposing the bad guys isn't nuanced enough for someone with his Ivy League credentials.

Book Review: Three Empires on the Nile

Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, by Dominic Green, is a very exciting book, yet I'm not sure I recommend it, because it's not edifying.  It describes the history of Egypt and the Sudan from the completion of the Suez Canal to the Fashoda affair and General Kitchener's victory of the Mahdist troops at Omdurman.  Major characters include Charles Gordon, the brave but gloomy "martyr" of the British Empire at Khartoum, Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, power-behind-the-throne in Egypt after 1882, Khedive Isma'il Pasha, the greedy and spendthrift hereditary monarch of Egypt (nominally subject to the sultan and turned into an instrument of the British and French), Ahmed Urabi, an army officer who led a sort of abortive revolution and was a forerunner of Nasser, British prime ministers Gladstone, Rosebury and Salisbury, Queen Victoria, Muhammad Ahmed "the Mahdi," his successor Khalifa Abdullahi, Arabophile British aristocrat Wilfrid Blunt, and General Kitchener.  Winston Churchill appears briefly near the end.  All these historical figures come to live in Green's book.  But none of them are represented as very wise or admirable.

One of these figures, Charles Gordon, was greatly admired by contemporaries, but his reputation was damaged by Lytton Strachey's biography of him and other heroes of the Victorian era, Eminent Victorians, and opinion has generally followed Strachey in disdaining Gordon ever since.  I found myself sympathizing with Gordon and the other Englishmen, especially Baring, who seems to have gotten the Egyptian economy on a sound footing after the depredations of the extravagant Khedive Isma'il.  Gordon was a little neurotic, and his conduct in failling to evacuate Khartoum as his superiors in London demanded was rank insurbordination-- a bit like MacArthur's in the Korean War.  Yet he was brave, holding out in besieged Khartoum for 300 days in his determination not to abandon its inhabitants to the barbarous religious fanatics of "the Mahdi," and finally dying in hand-to-hand combat with Mahdist troops defending the city he had tried to save.  Whatever his illusions and errors of judgments and oddities of character, he was disinterested, disdaining his own comfort and sacrificing his life for the sake of what he believed was his duty.  Baring/Cromer, Kitchener, Gladstone, Salisbury, Woolsley (another military man), Wilfrid Blunt, and most of the other English characters in the story exhibit a similar disinterestedness.  Sometimes they are thinking of their own careers, looking for praise and honor; rarely if ever of material gain; and never of the harems and slaves that seem to motivate Khedive Isma'il.  When Gladstone leaves Gordon to die at Khartoum, both of them seem somewhat devious and dishonorable, yet they are both acting in the service of high ideals at great risk and unpleasantness to themselves.  Gladstone, a fervent if inconsistent anti-imperialist, endures a storm of abuse and risks the destruction of his political career to avoid being drawn into an adventure in the Sudan, while Gordon's motives, though harder to read, seem to include opposition to the slave trade and a belief that the Mahdi's victory would be a humanitarian catastrophe for the Sudan, a belief which later events fully justified. 

By contrast, the two main Muslim characters in the drama, Khedive Isma'il and the Mahdi, while they have some ideals-- Khedive Isma'il wants to modernize Egypt, while the Mahdi wants to overthrow an Egyptian tyranny and restore Islamic justice-- are not above any cruelty or lust.  Khedive Isma'il is  incorrigibly extravagant and deceitful and ultimately accepts an Anglo-French bribe to go into exile.  He has a large harem, and while he passes laws against the slave trade to appease the English humanitarian lobby, his agents continue to practice it.  The Mahdi is a "holy man" who claims to be appointed by the Prophet Muhammad in a vision, and seems to believe it; and in his youth he practiced a certain renunciation of the sinful ways of the world for which one might feel a limited admiration.  But he too practices polygamy, first taking four wives as a means to various political alliances, later, after sacking Khartoum, taking hordes of concubines (and leaving women not taken as concubines by him and his warriors to starve), and gorging himself on sweets and meats, becoming fat.  In a sense, Khedive Isma'il and the Mahdi are easier to understand: when they get power, they use it to get the things their stomachs and their selfish genes make them want.  The Britons, with their clashing ideals and altruism, are more mysterious. 

Both similarities and differences between a Victorian foreign-policy crisis and a contemporary American one are striking.  On the one hand, modern human rights lobbies are direct heirs of the Victorian humanitarian lobby.  Then as now, humanitarianism could impel imperialism, as military intervention might be the only plausible way to stop horrors.  Then as now, the sovereign debt of an under-developed country was a major issue.  The fictional sovereignty of Egypt after 1882, in which the khedive, a nominal vassal of the Ottoman sultan, became a pawn of Anglo-French and then of British interests as a result of a debt default, is reminiscent of modern episodes in which the World Bank, the IMF, or other international agencies take charge of the policy of a country-- though never, I think, to quite the extent that Victorian Britain controlled Egypt.

One thing that is totally different, though, is that the Victorians seemed to see war as glorious and enjoy it.  The British public seems to have been enthusiastic for imperialism, and young men flocked to join the expedition of Kitchener, with Churchill's mother using all her social ties to get him a place in it.  Journalists and memoirists milked the imperial campaigns for bestsellers.  A certain attitude to war has, I think, been lost forever.  American elites today largely shun the military, while the public respects soldiers but regards them, if anything, as victims.  I think this is a response to World War I, which robbed war of its romance, for better or worse. 

There are important ways in which we definitely ought not to be like the Victorians.  In particular, they seem weirdly indifferent to the need to define states and political institutions in a manner that allows for liberty and self-government for the various peoples (e.g., Egyptian, Sudanese) whose destinies they came to dominate.  But I don't know that it would be a bad thing if American, Western European, and Japanese elites had a little more courage and love of adventure, and perhaps even of glory, provided it were mingled with a desire to help less fortunate peoples.

More Nietzsche:

We, who hold a different belief--we, who regard the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating form of political organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where have WE to fix our hopes? In NEW PHILOSOPHERS--there is no other alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert "eternal valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in the present shall fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take NEW paths. 

Note the word: "compel."

To teach man the future of humanity as his WILL, as depending on human will, and to make preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective attempts in rearing and educating, 

One "vast hazardous enterprise and collective attempt in rearing and educating" occurred in Soviet Russia.  Another occurred in Germany.

in order thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto gone by the name of "history" (the folly of the "greatest number" is only its last form)--for that purpose a new type of philosopher and commander will some time or other be needed, at the very idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult, terrible, and benevolent beings might look pale and dwarfed. 

Note this curious juxtaposition: "philosopher and commander."  The ordinary conception of a philosopher today is the professor, the scholar, the writer, the man of contemplation.  Nietzsche is looking for a man of action.  So we should not, I think, look to the universities to see whether Nietzsche's hope for a "new type of philosopher and commander" was fulfilled, but rather to the authors of What is to be Done? and Mein Kampf, who not only wrote and thought, but also took command of the destinies of nations.  And yes, in the heyday of these men, one might say that all that had previously seemed terrible was pale and dwarfed.

The image of such leaders hovers before OUR eyes:--is it lawful for me to say it aloud, ye free spirits? 

Is the phrase "free spirits" here meant ironically?  Nietzsche has already said that his heroes would "compel" mankind along new paths; the opposite of freedom.  Perhaps he means freedom for the "new type of philosopher and commander," not to be extended to, and rather to be at the expense of, "the greatest number?"

The conditions which one would partly have to create and partly utilize for their genesis; the presumptive methods and tests by virtue of which a soul should grow up to such an elevation and power as to feel a CONSTRAINT to these tasks; a transvaluation of values, under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a heart transformed into brass, so as to bear the weight of such responsibility; and on the other hand the necessity for such leaders, the dreadful danger that they might be lacking, or miscarry and degenerate:--these are OUR real anxieties and glooms, ye know it well, ye free spirits! 

They were not lacking.  There occurred, indeed, a "transvaluation of values"; the Bolshevik, the Nazi, said with Milton's Satan: "Evil, be thou my good."  

these are the heavy distant thoughts and storms which sweep across the heaven of OUR life. There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated; but he who has the rare eye for the universal danger of "man" himself DETERIORATING, he who like us has recognized the extraordinary fortuitousness which has hitherto played its game in respect to the future of mankind--a game in which neither the hand, nor even a "finger of God" has participated!--he who divines the fate that is hidden under the idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of "modern ideas," and still more under the whole of Christo-European morality--suffers from an anguish with which no other is to be compared. He sees at a glance all that could still BE MADE OUT OF MAN through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of human powers and arrangements; he knows with all the knowledge of his conviction how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possibilities, and how often in the past the type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths:--he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what wretched obstacles promising developments of the highest rank have hitherto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and become contemptible. 

But Nietzsche does not know what he means by "the greatest possibilities" or "promising developments," which is why he can only express himself vaguely and suggestively when he talks about it.

The UNIVERSAL DEGENERACY OF MANKIND to the level of the "man of the future"--as idealized by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates--this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly POSSIBLE! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows ANOTHER loathing unknown to the rest of mankind--and perhaps also a new MISSION!

Nietzsche would no doubt be glad to know that the new type of philosopher and commander, the incarnation of the Will-to-Power, soon appeared, tearing tradition apart, despising "the greatest number," ravaging, conquering continents.  The Bolshevik and the Nazi appointed themselves the lawgiver and the master race.  They sought to "fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take NEW paths," to build a heaven-on-earth and a thousand-year Reich.

But then something strange happened.  Nietzsche would perhaps not be disturbed that "the greatest number" condemn the new ubermenschen of Germany and Russia as evil, as monsters.  That, he would no doubt say, is the "morality of timidity," the "herd instinct," the voice of the "rabble."  But they failed in Nietzsche's own terms, too.  The will-to-power, it turns out, does not make men strong.  It turned out that the utilitarians, the democrats, the "pigmies with equal rights and claims," the free societies (no need for quotation marks), the men animated by "idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of 'modern ideas'" and "Christo-European morality," the rabble with their "parliamentary nonsense," could squash the Nietzschean ubermenschen like bugs.  The Americans, who had so little will-to-power that even when the Europeans begged them, after WWI, to stay and lead, they brought their conquering army home with all possible speed, defeated, rather easily, the heirs of Frederick the Great.  At times, e.g., in the fire-bombing of Dresden or the nuking of Hiroshima, they even exhibited the cruelty and abandon that Nietzsche idolized; and they did it so effectively precisely because they did not desire it or enjoy it.  

Nor did the ubermenschen get the consolation prize of honor.  It turned out that even Napoleon, a century of admiration for whom did so much to plant the seeds for the world wars and Nazism, could be admired only because he had traces of Christo-European morality.  He did not exult in "the law of thousand-fold perishings"; or to be more specific, he did not commit many murders.  He claimed to be an orthodox Catholic and was crowned emperor by the pope.  For Hitler there were no garlands, no eulogies; he inspired no poets.  There was nothing noble about Hitler, precisely because he had thrown out the old morality.  No heroic death for Hitler; he died in a bunker, by suicide, after marrying a wench-- another indignity, Nietzsche, that despiser of marriage, might think.  And yet it is not that Nietzsche's "new type of philosopher and commander" merely happened to degenerate or miscarry, and I think even Nietzsche might have been honest enough to admit that, could he have witnessed the event.  It was not accidental but essential to Hitler, to the type Hitler represented, that his death was not noble, bold, grand, heroic, picturesque or inspiring, but wretched, pathetic, ignoble, cowardly, and meaningless.  This is simply what happens to men who abandon morality for the sake of the will-to-power.  Nietzsche was too stupid, too wilfully blind to grasp the great mysteries: the meek shall inherit the earth.  And You have scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.

Nietzsche's hopes were fulfilled, in another, ironic way: the destiny he predicted for the ubermenschen, fell to the rabble instead.  It was the great democracies, represented by Churchill and Attlee and Roosevelt and Truman, who would "fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel" -- or, persuade-- "millenniums"-- or at least, decades-- "to take NEW paths."  In founding the United Nations, in forming NATO, in "making the world safe for democracy," they led humanity into new paths of peace, burying, without honors, the age of noble savagery which of which Nietzsche was the ignominious prophet.

The Stupid Doctrine

Bruce Fein:

If the United States neglects to rethink its purpose informed by the genius and practice of the Founding Fathers, it is destined to self-destruct like every other empire from hubris and overreach. At present, the Republic is undergoing a metamorphosis into executive despotism featuring escalating taxes and permanent warfare because of staggering ignorance of the nation's birth certificate among officeholders, candidates and the public.

The Constitution's preamble explains that the national interest of the United States lies in providing for the "common defense" and "secur[ing] the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The Founding Fathers denied that the United States was saddled with either a moral or legal responsibility to implant freedom throughout the planet.

None ever hinted at a national duty to overthrow the French Bourbons, the Russian Romanovs, or the Ottoman Sultans. Nor did they believe Americans would be made either safer or freer by attempting to cram American democracy down the throats of feudalistic, tribal, sectarian or autocratic foreign political cultures, for example, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia or China. The exercise would be futile because the knowledge needed to pluck the flower of democracy from the nettle of longstanding tyranny is beyond human grasp.

Further, these utopian larks would make Americans less safe and less free. Military interventions abroad make enemies by the inevitable killing of innocent civilians in pursuit of actual enemies. Think of the mounting "collateral damage" deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq. Resentments are also awakened by the insult to national dignity implicit in American military bases or occupation forces - a variation of "The Ugly American" by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer.

This kind of isolationism was utterly discredited by the 1930s, when its wages were World War II, with tens of millions dead, including hundreds of thousands of Americans.  It is when we didn't intervene abroad that our enemies multiplied.  There's something bizarre about the type of deference made to the Founding Fathers.  Avoiding foreign entanglements may have been smart then, at a time (a) when the US was relatively weak, and (b) when in an age with no ballistic missiles or mass terrorism, oceans were a better defense than now.  The US Marines fought the First Barbary War against the pirates of Tripoli-- on the other side of the world!-- in 1801-1805, when the US was still far weaker than Britain, France, Russia, etc.  Later, one of the Founding Fathers gave his name to the Monroe Doctrine, presumptuously ordering the Europeans to stay out of the Western Hemisphere, while reserving the right-- frequently exercised thereafter-- of the US to intervene there.  To think that the Founding Fathers' shrewd strategic judgment in the 1780s and 1790s should be binding on the Republic two centuries later, in totally different circumstances, is not only absurd but an insult to the careful but innovative founding generation.  And the phrase "executive despotism" is absurd in the waning days of the Bush administration, with the outcome of the 2008 election unknown.  Despots are, by definition, not hired and fired by their peoples.  Fein is unhinged from reality.

There's Plenty of Blame to Go Around

Everyone is at fault in the crisis in Georgia.

South Ossetia.  It's one thing for the Iraqi Kurds; when the local sovereign government is Saddam Hussein, "give me liberty or give me death" is really the only option.  But Georgia was never Saddam Hussein.  Georgia was offering South Ossetia and Abkhazia a decent deal (autonomy) and they should have accepted it.  Looking to Russia for help wasn't really okay.  Still, you can't blame them too much for preferring their historical overlord to the uncertainties of a post-Soviet republic in economic collapse.  And you can hardly expect them to think through the global ramifications of their preferences.

Saakashvili.  Georgia's offensive into South Ossetia, even if provoked by months of separatist unrest that was stage-managed by Russia, seems to have been a mistake.  Also, while the claims of atrocities in Tskhinvali cannot be fully confirmed until Russia halts the war and allows for independent investigation, which may never happen, if there were massacres of civilians there, someone is responsible.  If civilian deaths were an inevitable side-effect of the brief recapture of Tskhinvali, was the objective really worth the sacrifice of human life?  If brutality were consciously condoned or encouraged from higher up, or a fortiori if there were deliberate plans to create new "facts on the ground," Saakashvili may have, in some degree, the stain of a war criminal.

The Georgian public.  The Georgian people strongly supported NATO membership and leaned towards the West; in Russia's eyes that's their biggest fault.  (Though Russians I've spoken to seem to think that only the governing clique is pro-Western, though referendum and poll results clearly refute this.)  They also seem to share with other Caucasian peoples an obsession with who owns what land, and an inadequate sense of justice towards other peoples and their rights to land.  Why was regaining South Ossetia and Abkhazia a winning issue in Georgian elections?

The Bush administration.  Georgia can justly claim to be a close American ally.  It has enjoyed extravagant praise from the Bush administration as a beacon of democracy.  And it was part of the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq.  Kerry's charge that this was a "coalition of the coerced and the bribed" was unconscionable, both because many of our allies took risks and made sacrifices from genuine love of liberty and/or friendship for America, and because even if it were true it would be a grotesque diplomatic gaffe.  But in Georgia's case, there was, or at least they hoped there was, a tacit quid pro quo: we'll help you in Iraq, if you help us against Russia/separatists.  When it was not clear what help would be needed, whether we would be willing to give it, or whether they deserved it.  US support for Georgia's membership in NATO membership-- supported by the Bush administration as well as both McCain and Obama-- looks reckless now.

The West generally.  The preponderant power and moral influence of the US and Europe in world affairs give them special responsibilities to be far-sighted, just, and to think through the legal and doctrinal implications of their policies and apply them consistently and even-handedly.  Through interventions in the Balkans and East Africa in the 1990s, and through rhetoric and resolutions, the West has altered the principle of sovereignty being sacred with a qualification that it can be forfeited by governments for certain kinds of extreme bad behavior.  Probably that was right and necessary, and even to call it imperialist is to ignore a certain moral subtlety: that in an age of globalization when everything is tied together, if we recognize a government, de jure or de facto by tolerating its authority in some area when we don't have to, we inevitably become tangled up in the threads of complicity for its crimes.  But the new exception to sovereignty opened theoretical possibilities for new wars and revisionisms, which were sure to come to life as actual wars sooner or later... as they are now, in the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Here a distinction might be made between the Europeans and the Americans.  The Americans have more power than the Europeans, and they also exacerbated the doctrinal confusion with the Iraq War, and failed to clear it up.  But the Europeans helped to encourage a tacit division of labor within the Western alliance, where they were more responsible for diplomacy, soft power, and negotiations, in contrast to American military muscle.  They may, therefore, have had a special responsibility to strive for an environment of doctrinal clarity which could make a negotiations-driven world work.  To wrestle with the tangled ethnic animosities of the Caucasus is the sort of thing the Europeans should have been good at.

Russia.  Russia's sense of primacy within its former empire is not just arrogant imperialism; it comes with some sense of responsibility.  Russians believe, with the help of a state-run media of course, but still, that they are helping South Ossetia, and that they have a duty to do so.  The contemporary Caucasus, with its nasty web of frozen conflicts, is certainly partly the creation of Russian policy.  It's hard to tell to what extent this was a deliberate divide-and-rule and to what extent it was malign neglect.  Certainly Russia seems to relish operating in a shadowy fashion, providing unofficial backing to separatists and so on.  And its animosity towards Georgia is motivated at least as much by anger that Georgia wants to be a normal Western country and have nothing to do with Russia, as by any real concern for the welfare of South Ossetians.  Russia's excessive brutality in suppressing Chechnya's revolt makes it implausible to regard the Russian government as either committed in principle to national self-determination or concerned for the welfare of Caucasian peoples.  For all that, if Georgia really did commit massacres in Tskhinvali, Russia's invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia may be honorable and humane.  But Russia's escalation of the war, extending attacks beyond the disputed areas, its refusal of international mediation, etc. definitely put Russia in the wrong.

Think of Russia as an awkward teenager trying to fit in with the crowd.  In 2001, Russia thought it had a chance to get in good with the coolest kid on the block: the United States.  It got some respect, but still felt looked down on.  Then, in 2003-04, there was a quarrel in the cool crowd, and two of the US's coolest buddies, France and Germany, started dissing the US and forming their own crowd.  They needed cred, so they let Russia in and treated him like one of the guys.  And Russia picked up the new slang of dissing the US and felt like now it was as cool as anybody.  But it turned out that the quarrel was just a phase: France and Germany started patching things up with the US, and the old cool crowd started hanging out again, not with quite the old vibe maybe, but more and more smoothly.  And of course, they went back to treating Russia as a bit of a loser.  Russia couldn't get over its brief spell in the triumvirate of cool.  It kept talking in the old US-dissing slang, and couldn't figure out that dude, that is so five years ago.  So it felt more and more left out, and started hanging out in the corners and muttering "I'm as cool as anybody else."  Finally, just to prove it, it beats up some twerp who was dissing him and kissing up to the cool crowd. 

Me.  Having been a big supporter of the Iraq War and of the freedom agenda-- "making the world safe for freethinkers"-- I feel a bit responsible for the way the Bush doctrine is being sinisterly imitated by Russia.  Is it absurd for a little person like me, who has no influence on world affairs whatsoever, to feel a sense of indirect responsibility for giving moral support to a venture that set what is turning out to be a troublesome precedent?  I don't know.  But I do feel it.  There's plenty of blame to go around.  Everybody is responsible for this war.

Augustine and Patrick

Augustine of Hippo, 354-430, is regarded as "blessed" by the Orthodox Church and as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.  His Confessions is probably the most intimate book in all of ancient history, and has inspired Christians, I suppose, for a millennium and a half.  His stature tended to increase in the Middle Ages because during the few centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire there was such intellectual backsliding that Augustine's relative intellectual achievements were much greater.  In college, when I was much more Romantic, in the intellectual sense, than now, I was full of fiery indignation with Augustine for his resentment of sexuality, which he converted into a weird theo-biology of original sin, in which original sin is transmitted through the act of conception; this notion, as far as I understand, motivates the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (as distinct from the Virgin Birth, which is reported in the Gospels; since Mary is held by Christians to have been without sin, if original sin is transmitted through sexual conception, Mary too must have been immaculately conceived).  And yet, strangely-- poetic justice perhaps-- my life has come to have some parallels with Augustine's: amorous escapades of youth leading to disillusionment; a glittering intellectual career beckons before while a yearning to a simpler and more carefree life grows within me.  And a common vice too: the passion of argument often leads me to be unfair.

I would like to read The City of God.  I know myself and my time-management habits well enough to know that I could only "read" a book of that length as an audiobook, and I haven't been able to find it.  Hopefully it will appear one of these days.  Even the framing of the question-- "the city of God" versus "the city of man"-- evokes my admiration.

But.  The darkest chapter in Augustine's life is his persecution of the Donatists.  The Donatists were a group of heretics in North Africa-- notice the lack of "scare quotes," for I do think they were wrong-- which held that the sacraments were invalid if conducted by an unworthy priest.  It was a hot topic because many Christians had apostasized in the persecutions by the pagan emperors, and Christians who had remained faithful and suffered were sometimes reluctant to let their wayward brethren return when the persecutions ceased. The Donatist heresy was strong in North Africa.  Eventually imperial laws were passed against them.  The use of force against heretics was an innovation at that time: the Christians had only recently been in a position to do so.  Augustine justifies it in the Correction of the Donatists:

Whence it appears that great mercy is shown towards them, when by the force of those very imperial laws they are in the first instance rescued against their will from that sect in which, through the teaching of lying devils, they learned those evil doctrines, so that afterwards they might be made whole in the Catholic Church, becoming accustomed to the good teaching and example which they find in it.  For many of the men whom we now admire in the unity of Christ, for the pious fervor of their faith, and for their charity, give thanks to God with great joy that they are no longer in that error which led them to mistake those evil things for good,—which thanks they would not now be offering willingly, had they not first, even against their will, been severed from that impious association.

Now, the correct response to this is that the end does not justify the means.  But that starts to seem like a slender reed to lean on if one thinks the end very important-- and if the salvation of souls is at stake, it is.  What is pathetic about Augustine's persecution of the Donatists is that even in "realist" terms, so to speak, it was an act of supreme folly.  The whole of the Christian Roman Empire was on the verge of falling to pagan barbarians, and Augustine was wasting its waning strength on religious feuds. 

Fortunately, a better man than Augustine was then venturing beyond the borders of the civilized world to win by persuasion the souls of those who had once enslaved him, and St. Patrick's Ireland became a source of missionaries that helped create a medieval Christian civilization on the ruins of the fallen Roman Empire.

Augustine's North African city of Hippo is the modern Annaba, a city in Algeria, a country that is now 99% Muslim.  Algeria has not remained loyal to Augustine's Catholic faith, but at least it continues to practice Augustine's method of attaining religious unity.  St. Patrick's Ireland, meanwhile, is one of the most actively Catholic countries in Europe to this day, with Mass attendance at almost 50%.  It would, perhaps, be opportunistic to say that Ireland is Patrick's legacy, the symbol and the fruits of his life, as Algeria is Augustine's.  There have been too many twists and turns in history to make confident claims of causation.  And yet there is something miraculous about the light that burst from the west; and something strange and sad about the ease with thousands of miles of the southern Mediterranean collapsed before the Arab advance; and those somethings may indeed have much to do with the respective characters of Augustine and other persecuting hierarchs of late Rome, and that of the humble missionary, St. Patrick.  (Obviously, these thoughts were inspired by Thomas Cahill's book.)

"Modernism," according to Wikipedia

Joyless Moralist and I have been debating, in the concept of a recent post "G.K. Chesterton on Democracy and Modernity," the issue of "modernism."  Joyless Moralist sees the critique of something called "modernism" as a common thread in some of the writers we both admire; I am skeptical, not least about whether the term, which I haven't heard before (at least, not in the sense that seems to be implied), is meaningful.  So why not check Wikipedia.  Wikipedia turns out to have a couple of entries labeled "modernism."  The first is an intellectual movement from around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries:

Modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the three decades before 1914.

The term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation.^[1] Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new, progressive and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. In essence, the modernist movement argued that the new realities of the industrial and mechanized age were permanent and imminent, and that people should adapt their world view to accept that the new equaled the good, the true and the beautiful. Modern (quantum and relativistic) physics, modern (analytical and continental) philosophy and modern number theory in mathematics are, however, also said to date from this period. Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist traditions, believing the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated; they directly confronted the new economic, social and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world.  Some divide the 20th Century into movements designated Modernism and Postmodernism, whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement.

Is this the sense in which Joyless Moralist is using the term "modernism?"  C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, two of the writers who are alleged to be critics of modernism, and maybe even Dostoyevsky, are contemporaries of this intellectual movement.  I would agree, by the way, that most of the content of modernism seems to have been rather foolish; today it seems to be, by and large, passe.  However, modernism is this sense appears to be a reaction against the predominant intellectual modes of the 19th century, whereas Joyless Moralist clearly seems to see modernism originating far earlier, as early as Descartes, so that by the 19th century modernism would be well-established.  So perhaps what she has in mind is what is described under the entry Modernism (Roman Catholicism):

Modernism describes a broad body of theological views regarded as heretical by the Catholic Church, including the belief that the Church and Catholic dogma are mere human institutions and as such their nature may radically change over time.^[1] The term was used by Pope Pius X, chiefly in reference to the teachings of Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell. "Modernists" generally did not use this label in describing themselves, nor did they necessarily see themselves as a unified group.

In his encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis of 1907, Pius X declared that Modernism was not only heretical, but even condemned it as "the synthesis of all heresies",^[2] because it undermined defined Catholic doctrine in a fundamental way, denying the idea of objective unchanging truth and authoritative teaching. In his decree Lamentabili Sane, Pius X presented 65 condemned and proscribed errors of Modernism.

The Modernist crisis took place chiefly in French and British intellectual Catholic circles, to a lesser extent in Italy, and virtually nowhere else.^[3] The Modernist movement in Catholicism was influenced by certain Protestant theologians and clergy, starting with the Tübingen school in the mid-19th century. Some, however, such as George Tyrell, disagreed strongly with this analogy; Tyrell saw himself as loyal to the unity of the Church, and disliked liberal Protestantism (Hales 1958). According to Church critics and dissidents of both past and present, in some respects the Church appeared to be reacting to cultural themes that had arisen with Renaissance humanism and had informed the Enlightenment of the 18th century.

The encylical referred to, Pascendi Dominici gregis, makes interesting reading.  Pope Pius tries to describe what modernism is, and to argue against it, sometimes by reasoning, sometimes by appeals to Catholic authority.  One gets the feeling that Pius is not perhaps practicing the utmost academic charity; but to the extent that Pius's description of the "Modernist" can be accepted, the Modernist certainly deserves to be ridiculed for this:

Indeed, Modernists do not deny, but actually maintain, some confusedly, others frankly, that all religions are true.

In politics, the Modernist holds:

The state must, therefore, be separated from the Church, and the Catholic from the citizen. Every Catholic, from the fact that he is also a citizen, has the right and the duty to work for the common good in the way he thinks best, without troubling himself about the authority of the Church, without paying any heed to its wishes, its counsels, its orders -- nay, even in spite of its rebukes.

Which seems wrong to me: I think citizens should be willing to be guided by their churches, for the most part (and churches should be wary of intervening in politics except on key moral issues, like immigration).  This also seems wrong:

For the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church.

I disagree: I think there is something timeless about Christianity, that Christian teachings and the Christian ethos have an amazing power to transcend the erosion and mutation and flux that pervade the rest of the human affairs, so that a devout Orthodox Christian today, teleported to the late Roman Empire, would feel out of place in the secular world, but would feel at home in the religion of the times of St. Jerome and John Chrysostom.  Modernists do seem right about this...

it is inferred that God can never be the direct object of science, and that, as regards history, He must not be considered as an historical subject...  It may be asked, in what way do the Modernists contrive to make the transition from Agnosticism, which is a state of pure nescience, to scientific and historic Atheism, which is a doctrine of positive denial; and consequently, by what legitimate process of reasoning, they proceed from the fact of ignorance as to whether God has in fact intervened in the history of the human race or not, to explain this history, leaving God out altogether, as if He really had not intervened. Let him answer who can. Yet it is a fixed and established principle among them that both science and history must be atheistic: and within their boundaries there is room for nothing but phenomena; God and all that is divine are utterly excluded.

... at least in the sense that the Modernist approach now describes what is almost the universal practice of historians and scientists.  Overall, though, I suppose I agree with Pope Pius that Modernism-the-Roman-Catholic-heresy sounds rather foolish.  But it was surely held by few if any major thinkers, and it is an internal Catholic affair. 

In any case, neither sense of the word "modernism" seems to owe anything to Descartes or to be identifiable with shifts that took place in the 16th and 17th centuries.  On the contrary, a relentless introspective honesty, of Descartes was a leading practitioner and has become a symbol, is an antidote, perhaps ultimately the only antidote, to the type of muddle-headed relativism of which the Roman-Catholic-heretic-Modernists seem to have been guilty.  If you appeal to authority you cannot, without hypocrisy, condemn others who appeal to other authorities.  If you seek truth as best you can with the faculties that God has given you, you have the moral standing to demand that others do the same, and if they are in error, to abandon their errors and accept the truth.

Locke: The Bridge of Tradition

A book idea occurred to me today that I might like to write someday.  It would be called Locke: The Bridge of Tradition.  What fascinates me about Locke is how benign his influence has been despite the flaws in its philosophy-- or even perhaps because of them.  In particular, Locke's idea of property-- something becomes yours because you "mix your labor with it"-- though it resonates to some extent with human instincts, is hard to justify on rational grounds, and is at odds with the property regime in Locke's day, as in ours, a fact that Locke, oddly, overlooked.  And yet, somehow, Locke's doctrines helped to legitimize property in the British and American constitutions, with beneficial consequences that Adam Smith would do much to illuminate later.  Or again, Locke's empiricism helped transform the disturbing questions raised by Descartes, the principled doubter, into the productive platform of modern science.

It is difficult for an American not to think of Locke as a beginning, because our national-historical memory only goes back about as far as Locke's times, and even more because Locke's ideas shaped the Revolutionary/Founding generation.  For that reason, I was fascinated to read this in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy:

What Locke has to say about the state of nature and the law of nature is, in the main, not original, but a repetition of medieval scholastic doctrines. Thus Saint Thomas Aquinas says:

'Every law framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion of law.'...  [N]atural law came to be differently conceived, but no one doubted there being such a thing.

Many doctrines which survived the belief in natural law owe their origin to it; for example, laissez-faire and the rights of man...

In Locke's theory of government... there is little that is original...  In regard to the state of nature, Locke was less original than Hobbes, who regarded it as one in which there was war of all against all, and life was nasty, brutish and short.  But Hobbes was reputed an atheist.  The view of the state of nature and of natural law which Loke accepted from his predecessors cannot be freed from its theological basis; where it survives without this, as in much modern liberalism, it is destitute of clear logical foundation. (Russell, 623-24)

To me, it's fascinating to think of Locke not as a beginning but as an endpoint or even a channel for older ideas.  That's part of what I mean by calling Locke "the bridge of tradition": he served as the bridge by which Aquinian and scholastic ideas passed across the troubled waters stirred up by a line of thinkers from Descartes to Rousseau into modernity and made liberalism possible.  In particular, Locke is a bridge between two historical disciplines: medieval theology and modern economics, the parallels of which I have noted before: each serves, in its time, as the prevailing, almost the officially sanctioned, account of the good life for man; each is in a certain way politically conservative yet also limits government; more generally, each legitimizes the social order.  Natural law has been inherited from medieval theology by modern economics: not that economists accept natural law, of course, by and large anyway, but rather that their models are forever assuming the existence of property rights without being able, generally, to account for them either normatively or positively.

Essential to this idea is a proper horror towards where the light of that tradition-- the tradition of theology/economics, of the rights of man-- fails.  We tend to feel proper horror at the gulag and the concentration camp, the Cheka and the Gestapo, but it's hard to see a larger pattern because our historical memory doesn't go deep enough.  We take the tradition for granted. 

A book project must, I suppose-- for I've never completed one-- start with a hunch, which will then develop in the course of research.  Maybe the notion of Locke as "the bridge of tradition" from medieval scholasticism to modern liberalism is not tenable.  But it would be interesting to explore it.

Bushitler

The Bush=Hitler line of argument is one of the most paranoid, and moderate liberals and leftists tend to avoid it because it makes them vulnerable to being painted with an extremist brush. When George Soros says that America needs a "de-Nazification" program, he is giving a generous gift to Bush-supporters. Indeed, the charge itself sounds fascist, since it appears to call for an overthrow of our democratic order.

And yet I see two parallels. First is the blitzkrieg. Like Hitler, Bush tried to run a war fast and on the cheap, and for the same reason: he didn't think there was public support for a heavier troop commitment to what was probably a war of choice.  Second is that the war was started on a pretext.  Hitler faked a Polish attack on Germany; Colin Powell presented "proof" to the United Nations that Iraq had WMDs.  Of course, it's almost certain that the administration, and indeed even many war critics, believed that Iraq had WMDs.  Even so, that may not have been the reasl reason for war.

But there are two big differences between Bush and Hitler.  One has to do with means, the other with ends.