So I was stuck in traffic riding my motorcycle to the client site today, which meant that the ride was more contemplative than usual (if I’m riding through traffic, I can’t think about anything but riding).
And I was thinking about Avdeon Carol’s post, and what it is that I find so grating about many people (not including her at this point, since I don’t know her well enough) who share the general “attitude space” I’m trying to talk about.
And I had an idea I just had to try out on you guys.
A long time ago, I talked about the moral importance of hunting – that I felt it somehow wrong for people to both eat meat that they buy in the store and yet somehow they deny their responsibility for the life that was taken for their consumption. For me, having hunted somehow solves this problem: I have taken the responsibility, I have had my hands up to the elbows in the bloody mess, and changed something from an animal to meat for my table.
But when I read much of what comes from the left, I’m left with the feeling that they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.
We enjoy this life because a number of things happened in the world’s (our) history. Many of them involved one group dominating (or brutalizing or exterminating) another, or specific actions (Dresden, Hiroshima) whose moral foundation is sketchy at best.
“Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood,” Hoederer says in Sartre’s “Dirty Hands.”
Part of political adulthood is the maturity to realize that we are none of us innocents. The clothes we wear, money we have, jobs we go to are a result of a long, bloody and messy history.
I see my job as a liberal as making the future less bloody than the past.
But I accept the blood on my hands. I can’t enjoy the freedom and wealth of this society and somehow claim to be innocent. I don’t get to lecture people from a position of moral purity. No one spending U.S. dollars, or speaking with the freedom protected by U.S. laws gets to.
A.L., the problem with the anti-American leftists isn’t that they think themselves, or AmeriKKKa, morally pure at all. The problem is that they seen nothing BUT filth and refuse utterly to acknowlege that, as dirty as it may be, the history of the U.S. (and the West generally) is LESS dirty than than of many (I would say all) other countries.
Some conservatives/blind flag-wavers may have difficulty admitting that they have blood on their hands. But the problem for the far left is the opposite: they refuse to acknowlege that the U.S. is anything but the most corrupt, brutal, evil “regime” in history. That is, they refuse to see that sometimes you NEED to have blood on you hands, both for moral and for practical reasons.
I think you’ve got it backwards.
Blood to meat… gets me thinking about the videos of “initiation rites” at military training camps. One that comes to mind is a soldier’s wings being hammered into his chest as he screams.
Well, don’t we want our soldiers to be tough? You can’t be tough unless you’ve experienced pain. If you can take the pain handed out by your pal, maybe you can take the pain the enemy’s interrogator will give you and know you’ll survive.
It is a room of experience in which our suburban senstivities are sorely tested. And our government’s war on terrorism isolates us. “Continue shopping,” the adminstration says when what I’d really like to do is be part of posse riding the hills of Afghanistan. Oh, well…
Signed, a 42-year-old in Ventura County
–Darryl Pearce
Having blood on your hands is part and parcel of “the human condition”. You can never have moral purity; you can never escape culpability. The Christian concept is “original sin”.
The liberal temperment these days doesn’t want to admit it exists at all, treating it as a mere temporal imbalance — if you’re progressive enough, you can move beyond it.
I don’t think so. I’m not advocating a religious response to the problem per se, but if you can’t at least acknowledge our bloody-minded nature, your reformative efforts will likely make a monkey of you — which is what’s been happening to the far left for years now: public monkey exposure.
Stuck in traffic! How can that be?
Lane split AL, lane split. 🙂
Btw, did you catch the motorcycle show in Long Beach?
Rob Lyman’s comments are on target. But I think what AL was saying (correct me if I’m wrong) is that yes, the uber-leftists do think America is totally corrupt and bloodstained — but their own utopianism blinds them to the fact that anyone governing a large, wealthy nation (including them) would have to make compromises and “get their hands dirty.”
If Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky were somehow given control of the US (God forbid) they would, sooner or later, be forced into a situation of being unjust, if not violent, to someone, somewhere in the country or the world.
That’s not to say that everything done in our nation’s history has been as morally pure as was possible. There were times when better choices could have been made. But here’s one for the pacifists: what about the Civil War — in which much killing and destruction ultimately accomplished the end of slavery? What about WW2, in which even more devastation was necessary (debates over Dresden and Hiroshima aside) to end Hitler’s madness?
Whatever. Rhetorical questions asked of imaginary opponents on a blog comment page are perhaps pointless anyway…
Of all the morally sketchy things this nation has done, why does the bombing of Hiroshima get cited? The use of the atom bomb on Hiroshoma was the moral thing to do, in that it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and likely millions of Japanese lives. That would have been the cost of invading Japan; bombing Hiroshima prevented that outcome. The Japanese were still fighting like demons; a great warrior race with a religious belief in the inviolate nature of the home islands was not going to roll over for us. I suppose we could have tried to starve them out, but that too would have killed tens or hundreds of thousands, and might not have forced surrender without invasion.
At the time, we had only two bombs, so we didn’t have one to waste on a demonstration bombing off-shore or in an unoccupied area. As it was, even the destruction of a major city did not do the trick – the Japanese did not surrender, and the final vote to surrender (after Nagasaki) only came after the Japanese war cabinet had a tie broken by the emperor. In short, the calculation that we would need to bomb two Japanese cities to force surrender was barely correct.
Need I point out that Dresdan was a British operation, not an American, and that the Americans were opposed to Britain’s strategic bombing of civilian population centers? American bombing of Germany was targeted much more on military rather than “morale” targets.
Do try to keep the America-hating revisionist history to a minimum.
Tim:
You’re right, I should have been clearer there. I certainly don’t think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sketchy…brutally hard decisions to make, but even today firly morally sound.
Not only do I believe that they ended WWII, but that they had a lot to do with the gact that the Cold War stayed cold.
I cited them because they are one of the common citations.
Add Hamberg to the list instead, where we flew alongside the British, or Tokyo.
A.L.
AL,
I agree. I’ve often thought that we should re-institute the draft so that 1. people have to work alongside folks they never would associate with otherwise, 2. and they get to understand a little bit about the tough decisions combat imposes on folks.
(I’m a draftee from the 60’s, btw).
That said, I’m not convinced that most “liberals” are actually in the space your describing. Your description sounds to me more like young, college students and old academics rather than the “average”.
“…they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.”
I think there is, as always, danger in wide generalizations. There are “utopian” liberals who think a society can remain free on good intentions and wishes made on stars, but I think the vast majority of us are sensible human beings who know better.
And, the fact is that there is nothing in the proposed war facing us that will benefit the freedom of the American people.
The world is full of killing poverty, disease, torture, maiming, and other human rights abuses, all of which directly affect the well-being of the entire world, but the only “war” our current government is interested in is one that will directly benefit the oil companies that got them into office.
There might be a side benefit in that the Iraquis (those we don’t kill) might wind up with a better government, but make no mistake, doing good for the Iraqui people is not high on the administration’s agenda.
It’s not that liberals don’t understand that sometimes you have to make the decision to go to war. It’s that we’re sort of picky about why we go.
It’s not that liberals don’t understand that sometimes you have to make the decision to go to war. It’s that we’re sort of picky about why we go.
It’s kind of mean of me to do this, but I can’t help but note that many American “liberals” were eager to go to war in Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo, none of which had even the slightest connection to American vital interests, on purely humanitarian grounds.
Now, confronted with a war which has a strong relation to American vital interests (even if it’s only about oil, which I don’t believe, oil is essential to our economy), liberals are shrieking about how awful war is.
This is kind of unfair to Anne, since I don’t know where she stood on those earlier interventions, and she can’t be held responsible for the hypocrisy of others. But it seems to me that at least some liberals’ idea of “pickiness” amounts to saying we are only allowed to go to war if we won’t benefit from it.
That has to be one of the most ass-backwards ways of thinking I’ve ever seen.
And by the way, who cares about Bush’s motivations, anyway? The question is not “Is his heart pure?” but rather “Is this the right choice?”
Anne:
I’d be careful at stretching my point to assume that it makes me clearly support a war with Iraq (I’m completely flummoxed by this issue today, and my position changes with the wind. I need to sit down and write something and see if I can force myself to any kind of clarity).
It’s not about “this” war, it’s about the assumption that you (and I and all the other people reading this) are somehow sui generis and that our current comfort hasn’t been bought in blood of many kinds. It has, and it will go on to be.
We can try and make it less so (I certainly want to), and to me, the most just justification for violence at the scale of war is that it will, in the long run, lead to less violence. That’s not absurd, it’s often true.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bought sixty years free of large-scale war, and the use of nuclear weapons there is in my mind one of the reasons no one has ever used them since. Does that alone ‘justify’ Hiroshima? Can’t say.
But in weighing the scales, you have to count it. I think people who refuse to do that are deluding themselves.
A.L.
A.L.:
Actually, I was the one who cited Dresden and Hiroshima, not you, so I’m confused as to why you are taking credit for it.
T. Hartin: where was I using “revisionist American history?” The phrase I used was “debates over Dresden and Hiroshima aside.” I.e., these topics are debated and debatable. I did not express an opinion either way on them.
Your own opinion (that the bombing of Hiroshima was absolutely morally correct) is not orthodox historical fact — it is a moral opinion. If I have a different opinion on the morality of a historical act, that does not make me a historical “revisionist.” (Please note that I haven’t even stated an opinion yet.)
Oops… I just noticed Dresden and Hiroshima mentioned in AL’s original post. Were they there before? I thought sticking them in my comment was my idea. Maybe not.
One more on this: I’ll come out and say I am conflicted about our a-bombings of Japan. I do think it’s possible they did save lives — in fact, they may have saved the life of my grandfather, a sailor in the Pacific — and thus may have been responsible for my own existence.
Just stumbled across this web page and had to make a few comments. The issues debated here are interesting and there is obviously a lot of intelligence at work here…one question though, do I detect a bit of arrogance here? I’ve often heard it said that Americans think that the world revolves around them. I do detect a certain “america is the world” attitude. I know that you’re discussing these issues in a fair manner, but just because the USA are have the might doesnt mean that the decision should be theirs as to how to police world affairs. There is a huge history of American interferance in world affairs. Should I go on?
Kevin wrote:
There is a huge history of American interferance in world affairs. Should I go on?
America’s mere existence is ‘interference’ in the rest of the world. The inventions of America have changed the face of the world: airplane, electricity, telephone, telegraph, penicillin, representative democracy, property rights, television, movies, transistor, B-2 bomber, internet, etc.
Kevin, exactly how could we have left the world the same? Should we all commit suicide for these sins?
Selective Service
In my ill-tempered post responding to Matthew Yglesias, I made the statement that …I think they opposed the war because they believe they can have the benefits of modern liberal society without getting their hands…