October 04, 2007
Can't "see" what's right in front of him...
I was thinking of fisking this piece, Delusion of Exceptionalism, by Paul Campos, October 2, 2007, Rocky Mountain News. (Thanks to Orrin.) It's full of slippery arguments and logic flaws I'd enjoy shining a spotlight on. But what's much more interesting to me is that he never lays a glove on the kinds of argument that he is criticizing, because, I suspect, he is incapable of even "seeing" them. He has a blind spot...
...But his view is shared by legions of liberal hawks, who five years ago lined up behind President Bush's proposed invasion like so many well-trained parrots, thus providing crucial political cover for the extraordinary decision to invade a nation that no rational person believed posed a real threat to the United States.
Consider the words of The Washington Post's Richard Cohen: "The Iraq war is not the product of oil avarice, or CIA evil, but of a surfeit of altruism, a naive compulsion to do good. That entire collection of neo- and retro-conservatives - George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and particularly Paul Wolfowitz - made war not for oil or for empire. This is why so many liberals, myself included, originally supported the war. It engaged us emotionally. It seemed . . . well, right - a just cause."
The irony is that Cohen is on one level correct. I have no doubt that both the neo-cons and their liberal hawk enablers believe that their devotion to neo-imperialism is based not on the crass considerations that have always driven international politics, i.e., power and money, but on a virtuous urge to use whatever means were necessary to bring what Mark Twain referred to as The Person Sitting in Darkness into the light of freedom, democracy, etc., etc.
That every imperial power since the dawn of time has claimed exactly the same thing has not the slightest effect on this touching faith in the purity of our own motives.
Similarly, it never gives the nationalist pause that he would burst into incredulous laughter if he were to hear a citizen of any other country make such claims.
The American nationalist believes that, in the words of Michael Cohen of the "liberal" blog Democracy Arsenal, America is "inherently good," and that therefore our imperialist adventures have nothing in common with those of other great powers....
When people say that America is "inherently good," they are usually making the very opposite of a nationalist claim. They are NOT saying, as a nationalist would, that America is valued as a piece of ground, or a race, or a volk, or for its military conquests. Rather, America is really a set of ideas, good ideas, and those ideas are transferable, including transferable to other nations. And those nations could become as "good" as us by adopting these ideas. That's the opposite of nationalism.
We actually see this "transferability" every day, in the way we assume that immigrants can come from everywhere and become Americans. If you "get" our ideas, then you are an American. Professor Campos would not consider it bizarre if someone who immigrated from Bormenia ten years ago were to proudly say that "We Americans are inherently good." (He would hate the sentiment, I assume. But he wouldn't think it was crazy for a newcomer to consider himself American.)
From the earliest days some Americans have argued that we should practice an idealistic foreign policy designed to transfer our ideas to other places. But this has traditionally been a liberal idea. We are all proud to have helped bring democracy and human rights to countries like Japan and Germany and Italy. But it was liberals like FDR and Truman who were behind this sort of policy, and conservatives who tended to say we should not meddle.
Now I assume that Profesor Campos is somewhere on the left/liberal/progressive side of politics. Yet he seems to find this great liberal idea incomprehensible. It's not just that he opposes it—some Americans have done that all through our history. It's that he can't even "see" the idea that is fascinating to me.
This is just one more scrap of evidence for my oft-argued thesis that most "liberals" are now nihilists. That the ideas that once underlay liberalism have leached away, and that they are wearing liberalism much like the Invisible Man wore clothes and bandages to cover up his nothingness... And that the Iraq Campaign has them foaming at the mouth precisely because it is a liberal project, and thus shines a spotlight on what leftists have become...
Posted by John Weidner at October 4, 2007 09:42 AM
Similarly, it never gives the nationalist pause that he would burst into incredulous laughter if he were to hear a citizen of any other country make such claims.
Does he actually believe that? If Japan decided tomorrow that they were ready, willing and able take down the North Korean regime, who exactly would object? If they cited reasons of both national interest and a belief that it was the right thing to do for the Korean people, who would doubt them? Certainly not the neo-cons, liberal-hawks or the "nationalists", whoever they are.
Posted by: Mike Plaiss at October 4, 2007 10:06 AMGood point.
Actually I'm always a bit incredulous that other nations who have aquired some of the ideas and we value, and prospered thereby, DON'T seem to get an itch to transfer them to those less fortunate. That seems to be mostly an Anglosphere thing, and even there much milder than what we feel in the US.
Posted by: John Weidner at October 4, 2007 10:25 AM...and it's not like we're just picking folks who are happy, minding their own business, and decide, you must change...unless one wants to argue that killing innocents, invading neighbors, and killing Americans counts as minding one's own business...
...and you can't tell from what I wrote above whether I was talking about Iraq, 2002, or Japan, 1938...or, for that matter, Germany, 1915...
Posted by: Ethan Hahn at October 4, 2007 07:53 PMSo... what is it about some people that they can't possibly believe that when somebody claims a good and noble reason for doing something that they might be telling the truth?
Oh, that's right, they're "deluded." Good of them to clear that up then. (People like that must have a wonderful time in relationships— "She says she loves me, but she doesn't know the real me, so she must be wrong and I must slaughter that delusion before years go by and she skins me in the divorce.")
Posted by: B. Durbin at October 4, 2007 09:20 PMFor anyone interested in a long-winded anecdote that is relevant to this discussion, here it is:
I used to teach English as a Second Language (ESL), and had the very good fortune to have many smart and intellectually minded students. We had countless conversations about world events, the countries they came from, etc. I did most of the learning in that class. I would even go as far as to say that most of what I think I know about the world outside the US came from those conversations. (I have dozens of stories a lot like this one.)
This was all right in the middle of the war in Bosnia (but before we got involved). In fact, I had several students from there, several from Eastern Europe, and a few from the Middle East. Debate had already begun in the US as whether we should get involved. All of my students, including the ones from Bosnia, were sure that the US would NOT get involved. One student from Syria, one of the teacher’s assistants, was pretty adamant about it – “Why would you? You have nothing to gain.”
I had developed a lot of credibility with this group because I actually knew where their countries were, and even a little bit about their histories. (Yes, it is sad to say that they were truly shocked that an American knew where Odessa was, as an example.) So it got their attention when I told them to not be so sure – the US may well get involved.
“Why?”, they asked. “To stop the killing”, I answered. The Syrian scoffed (loudly), and everyone was shaking their heads in disbelief, and a few were laughing. But, like I said, I had developed a lot of credibility with them by this point and they were all fascinated and wanted to know more about my thoughts. Keep in mind that all of these people had only been in the US for a few weeks or months, and I had language barriers to deal with, but I did my best to explain to them that this is the way Americans are. If we believed that genocide was, in fact, occurring in Europe (did my best to explain why that mattered), and that there was something we could do about, that we may well go to war to stop it.
Apparently I did a pretty good job because even the Syrian seemed convinced that this may be so. I could see the wheels turning in their heads as they re-evaluated their thoughts. Then the Syrian, who by the way was an extremely smart young man (he was in college and intended to go to med school), said something that I will never forget.
He said, “Well, then you have a bigger problem on your hands.” I had no idea what that meant, so I asked, “What do you mean?” “No one will ever believe it. No one will ever believe you would go to war for such a reason. So if you do it (go to war), they’re going to come up with they’re own reasons as to why you really did it. This would be terrible for the United States.”
So yes, going to war, even for truly altruistic reasons, can do great damage to the reputation of the US.
Posted by: Mike Plaiss at October 5, 2007 09:34 AMThat's a great story...I just hope that, over time, example after example to the contrary will eventually help the light to penetrate at least most parts of the globe...I mean, it's gotta be hard to figure our ulterior motive in Bosnia from today's remove...and with Afghanistan and Iraq bearing witness to America's idealistic but pragmatic altruism, perhaps the tide will turn...
