Abraham Lincoln:

It is easy to conceive that all these shades of opinion, and even more, may be sincerely entertained by honest and truthful men. Yet, all being for the Union, by reason of these differences, each will prefer a different way of sustaining the Union. At once sincerity is questioned, and motives are assailed. Actual war coming, blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this, as before said, may be among honest men only. But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.

Nick Catoggio:

To be a populist is to be a victim and to be a victim is to lack agency, blameless for your own terrible choices. The elites have failed and so the people can’t be held responsible for not merely ignoring their advice but doing the opposite. If we end up with a measles outbreak next year because parents won’t vaccinate their kids, that’s not the parents’ fault. It’s Anthony Fauci’s fault for having misled them early in the pandemic about masks.

Nick Catoggio:

Numerous writers have tried to put their fingers on the full-spectrum norms-implosion in the country’s zeitgeist right now—the “great upheaval,” “decivilization”—but whatever you call it, there is a sense that Americans have sized up various Chesterton fences protecting political and cultural institutions and are spoiling to kick those suckers over just to see what happens.

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Malcolm Guite:

I have found that in the composition of sonnets the form itself, far from constraining me, gives me freedom. It enables me to say things with a power, a concentration, a fully embodied form, that a freer and perhaps more rambling exercise in vers libre could not attain. This paradox, that we find freedom through form, has been frequently attested and indeed explored by poets who have chosen to write in form, particularly in the sonnet form. Samuel Daniel, the Elizabethan and Jacobean poet who wrote a sonnet sequence called Delia, puts it very well in his A Defence of Ryme: “Ryme is no impediment to his conceit, rather giues him wings to mount and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight.”

Time and again I have had this experience of being carried “beyond my power” to “a far happier flight.” Something far more generative, more creative, is drawn from me in the very exercise of keeping to my self-imposed boundaries. The “bounding line,” as William Blake called it, is, in the very act of setting a boundary, concentrating the energy of the poem, like the banks of a river channeling the current that might otherwise dissipate in a tepid lake. The poet in Timon of Athens says poetry is “a current [which] flies each bound it chafes.” The very effort to channel it is what gives the current force, and of course the “bound,” the end of the line, or the turn of the sonnet can sometimes be overrun to great effect – the poem can fly the bound. Yet even that freedom to play with and stretch the rule is not an effect one can achieve without the self-imposed rule.

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William Carlos Williams:

                         It is difficult

to get the news from poems

            yet men die miserably every day

                         for lack

of what is found there.

How right Williams was, and how literally so.

Peter Pomerantsev:

Did the [Ukrainians’] Russian relatives really “believe” [that the Bucha atrocity was fake]? That’s the wrong question. We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth.… Polls in Russia concluded that Putin’s supporters thought that “the government is right, solely because it is the government and it has power.” Truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power.

I really think this is one of the most important things to have some understanding of. I have friends and relatives who tend to make excuses in Russia’s — or, rather, Putin’s direction. When I mention the Bucha massacre, they don’t even know what I’m talking about. When I explain it, they are merely skeptical. (As far as they’re concerned, Russia withdrew from the Kyiv offensive “in good faith” until the US and UK burned the deal because… military industrial complex, etc. And they have now been listening to that narrative on repeat for nearly three years.)

So as I see it, the first problem is memory. I recently heard Megyn Kelly saying something typically dumb about Ukraine-Russia and she added something like “We [Fox News] covered this [the 2014 Russian invasion and the Minsk Accords] in real time. Why doesn’t anyone remember this?” But what she doesn’t say is that they covered it in exactly the opposite way they cover it now. But she doesn’t have to say that because none of her listeners or today’s Fox viewers remember it anyway. (It’s worth keeping in mind, back when RFK Jr. was picking up steam last year, he sat in front of Sean Hannity and spun the most outrageous and obvious historical lies about the Minsk Accords, with zero pushback from Hannity and nothing but nods from the audience.)

Anne Applebaum, who has worked closely with Pomerantsev, said in her 2003 book Gulag, 

If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered—viscerally, emotionally remembered—what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way—which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.

We are not even a little immune, in our own way, from this memory problem. 

Beyond that, I have constant questions about how this happens. It’s not just a matter of weighing evidence and determining what we “believe.” In fact, “weighing” hardly ever comes into it at all. It’s more often and more simply about who we are listening to, and occasionally why we listen to them. (If only we all stood outside the local shop and listened to the radio together! 🙂) You can’t weigh evidence that you never hear or don’t remember. And I’ve never been confident about just how consciously any of this takes place. 

So yes, the truth may be a treated as a subset of power, but it also ends up a subset of memory, opinion, and whim. Doing things for the sake of power may be in there somewhere, it may even be at the root, but I suspect that when it is, perhaps excepting those few who are extraordinarily vigilant of their own conscience, power may ultimately be a motive that only God can uncover.

In any case, “power” has become another one of those “you keep saying that word” things for me. Especially when we’re talking about the average citizen (i.e., any person I actually know or even have met), it does nothing to explain anything to me, and I suspect that unless we are quite specific about who we’re talking about and why (and no, “the Russian people” is not specific enough), it will only ever prevent anyone from understanding anything about anyone else.

Hannah Arendt:

Ever since the radical criticism of religious beliefs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it has remained characteristic of the modern age to doubt religious truth, and this is true for believers and nonbelievers alike. Since Pascal and, even more pointedly, since Kierkegaard, doubt has been carried into belief, and the modern believer must constantly guard his beliefs against doubts; not the Christian faith as such, but Christianity (and Judaism, of course) in the modern age is ridden by paradoxes and absurdity. And whatever else may be able to survive absurdity—philosophy perhaps can—religion certainly cannot. Yet this loss of belief in the dogmas of institutional religion need not necessarily imply a loss or even a crisis of faith, for religion and faith, or belief and faith, are by no means the same. Only belief, but not faith, has an inherent affinity with and is constantly exposed to doubt. But who can deny that faith too, for so many centuries securely protected by religion, its beliefs and its dogmas, has been gravely endangered through what is actually only a crisis of institutional religion?

Nick Catoggio:

Ultimately a scandal is a scandal if the public, not the press, says it is. Americans who didn’t care about coup attempts, criminal convictions, and dark pledges to persecute political enemies surely wouldn’t have cared if Trump had violated the esoteric and already crumbling norm against firing FBI chiefs before their 10-year term is up. I find it strange and a bit unsettling that otherwise clear-eyed Trump critics persist in the illusion, post-election, that the people still retain a civic conscience that’s capable of being meaningfully shocked if only the media applies enough voltage. […]

…Numerous writers have tried to put their fingers on the full-spectrum norms-implosion in the country’s zeitgeist right now—the “great upheaval,” “decivilization”—but whatever you call it, there is a sense that Americans have sized up various Chesterton fences protecting political and cultural institutions and are spoiling to kick those suckers over just to see what happens. Which should make conservatives very nervous.

Nadya Williams:

We do not speak enough of virtues and the merits of character in and of themselves, but the U.S. legal code—it too the work of fallible men—does contain helpful language here. Consider the concept of moral turpitude, generally defined as follows:

An act of baseness, vileness, or depravity in the private and social duties which a man owes to his fellow men, or to society in general, contrary to the accepted and customary rule of right and duty between man and man.

The definition is deliberately vague, as intent is part of it. But the general idea involves community, relationships, and ultimately citizenship, making it political in nature. 

That word ‘but’ seems out of place to me. I think it could read, “The definition is deliberately vague, as intent is part of it. This is because the general idea involves community, relationships, and ultimately citizenship, making it political in nature.”

Williams continues:

What kind of person behaves in a way that disrespects “the customary rule of right and duty between man and man”? In other words, what kind of man (or woman) behaves in such a selfish manner, abdicating all responsibility to the good of others and the state, as to disrespect his own role to society? The definition acknowledges that we are not our own, we did not make ourselves, and we do not live as islands or masters of our own tiny universe. Indeed, in a flourishing state, our own well-being is contingent on that of others, and so, good and moral citizenship involves respecting our duties to others. The existence of the category of crimes of moral turpitude, one could say, acknowledges the necessity of a well-ordered anthropology in a society. How we think of ourselves vis-à-vis others matters. 

An essay from a history class 2017.

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Blips on a Radar Screen: Remote Foreign Politics in the 21^st Century

In Roland Emmerich’s 2000 film The Patriot, the character Benjamin Martin is called to the General Assembly in Charlottesville to vote on support for the Continental Army in the war against the British. “Mark my words,” he said. “This war will be fought not on the frontier, or on some distant battlefield, but amongst us, among our homes. Our children will learn of it with their own eyes — and the innocent will die with the rest of us.”¹ It’s a sobering reminder of what war was often like in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. But the 20^th century tells us a different story — one of ballistic missiles and television screens.

In April 2017, many will remember MSNBC’s Brian Williams was (again) made infamous, this time for his remarks on “the beauty of our weapons” as he watched footage of Tomahawk missiles being launched from a U.S. Navy destroyer into Syria.² While his comments may have seemed bizarre — with a particularly odd reference to Leonard Cohen — it is worth a few moments of reflection before judging too quickly or harshly. It would be difficult to argue that Williams was expressing an unpopular or unfamiliar sentiment. After all, the singing of our own national anthem, drawing inspiration from “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” celebrates a certain glory of victory in warfare. And, if we’re honest, most of us at some point in our lives will admit to a high degree of inspiration when a group of F-15 Eagles flies low overhead at a football game, at the very moment the singing of the anthem crescendos into celebration of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” The truth is, this kind of awe is not something new or strange, and can be rightfully grounded in simple and admirable pride in one’s nation and the liberty its citizens and its heroes have fought to secure.

It is worth pointing out, however, that the national anthem is a celebration of the enduring flag — and all that it stands for — in the midst of warfare, rather than a celebration of warfare itself. It is about the endurance of freedom, not a celebration of the beauty of bombs. Thus, Williams’s comment, while not as farfetched as critics made it seem, does provide us with a rare and insightful fact, and one that our national pride, however warranted, often keeps us from considering: we are perfectly capable of celebrating destruction and feeling no remorse in the process, however subconsciously this may occur. Millions of Americans have seen the video of the rockets being fired into Syria; only a small handful of people have concerned themselves with where they landed.

This disparity is true of most military members as well as civilians. When I was a machinist and welder in the Air Force, I remember watching B-1 bombers take off on training missions in Texas, and I remember watching the same bombers take off on sorties from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar to drop their payloads in Afghanistan. In neither case did I give any thought to where those bombers would go or whose lives they would destroy. It was all pride and freedom and glory on my end. It was not until ten years after my military service, when I was travelling to a civilian field hospital outside Mosul, Iraq, that the sobering reality of the other side hit me. Two new friends and I were sitting outside a café in Erbil, after completing a bomb safety course that morning, when an Apache helicopter flew directly over us. As the war machine thumped at the air overhead, it immediately dawned on me that the helicopters flying here were also being used here. They were not out on training missions and they were not flying to another country — and I would be travelling to see their victims the following day.

It’s doubtful that national pride, malevolence, or ignorance can take all the blame for our thoughtlessness. The fact is, warfare has changed, and we have not been diligent in reckoning with the implications of those changes. Once upon a time, when a man killed another man, he could not hide from the violence of the act. Thanks to the copious generosity of 20^th century technology, man, having lost any resemblance to Cain, is truly not his brother’s keeper, and we can all sit back and watch the beauty of Tomahawk missiles taking off in the night — and no differently than if it were a 4^th of July celebration — before turning off the television and going to sleep.

One explanation for the modern marriage between unconcern and destruction lies in the nature of the weapons themselves and is aptly summarized in what Gunther Anders calls “tele- murder.” “At the very moment when the world becomes apocalyptic,” he says, “and this owing to our own fault, it presents the image . . . of a paradise inhabited by murderers without malice.”³ In other words: death out of sight, death out of mind. We can calmly watch rockets fly off to kill and destroy while thinking neither about death nor destruction — much less experiencing them. (This could be thought of as a need to reverse the biblical teaching from “whoever hates his brother is guilty of murder” to “whoever murders his brother is guilty of hate.” One understandably balks at the need to say this.)

Yet, in an age of secular globalism, we feel an increasing sense of duty to a global community. Charles Taylor insightfully notes, “Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have so many people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates.”⁴ While it may be true that we are stretched wider, it hardly seems that we have gone any deeper. In the 21^st century, while certain areas of the world enjoy greater prosperity than ever before, the UNHCR reports “the highest levels of displacement on record.”⁵ The violence of the 20^th century remains a very real experience for much of the world, and though access to the knowledge of ongoing violence and suffering is closer than ever — indeed, never further away than our pockets — our understanding remains distant, and our moral outrage greatly tempered.

While we are so easily and so often shielded from the consequences of global violence, one might point out that I can, on the other hand, go online at any time to access information about crises or pictures of destruction around the globe, whether from war or from natural disasters. Today, distance does not mean lack of access. But, while this may be true, it fails to recognize the human element that is missing, and it fails to understand another important dilemma the 20^th century has left us with: how we “see” the world.

Neil Postman, in his prophetic 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, argues that visual mediums of communication (e.g., television) are not neutral but are inherently trivial and entertaining. In the same way that smoke signals cannot be used for a discussion on philosophy — because “the form lacks the content” — so television is ill-equipped for deep thinking.⁶ While Postman is concerned with the lack of intellectual content in visual mediums of communication, how much more must it lack a relational one. One cannot establish a truly human connection over a television or a computer screen — the form excludes the content and we are left with a version of what Postman calls the “now this” phenomenon.

Prior to Williams’s comments on seeing the Tomahawk-lit night sky, Heidi Pryzbala rather candidly remarked that we had seen pictures of chemical attacks and dead children before, “but these things wane with time,” she said, before going on to note just how low the support for Syrian intervention was within the “war-weary” United States. (NB: she says it is we on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean who are weary of war.) Like with Postman’s “now this” phenomenon, the images of dead children go in one eye and out the other. We simply move on, and we can (and must) do it in seconds. (A common example might be when the members of the workplace breakroom realize the news is on television and unanimously agree: “This is too depressing; someone change the channel.”)

Certainly Pryzbala was right about the lack of support. In 2013, two years after the conflict in Syria erupted, polls showed the lowest numbers of approval for intervention of any conflict in the last 20 years.⁷ And even more recently, the highest poll numbers for approval favor only missile strikes — and we’ve already covered just how “personal” those are. But while missile strikes may very well be the best choice of action, it’s worth pointing out that even if 100% of those polled said they would support some kind of intervention, it would mean almost nothing in terms of moral outrage.

In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry said of Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria, “The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children, and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity.”⁸ That a culture considers the use of chemical weapons a moral obscenity is one thing, but whether they are actually outraged by the horrors in Syria is another. A cultural sentiment of outrage would be reflected in citizens who refused to let their state representatives’ phones stop ringing, not by those who once picked up a phone and responded favorably to a question about intervention. The truth is, as far as I can see, there is no moral outrage in sight, and there has not been any for the last two decades — not for any victims of chemical attacks in Syria, or machetes in Rwanda, or AK-47 rounds in Darfur. Yet, even the staunchest noninterventionist or (so-called) moral relativist will inevitably agree that these things should not be.

In his essay critique of Michael Walzer, Gilbert Meilaender writes, “The critic who can bloodlessly articulate [universal principles] in such circumstances — who can be apart and not united — has failed morally.”⁹ And here lies one of the greatest problems of the 21st century, as a consequence of what the previous one wrought: the demands for solidarity among humans are indeed very great, perhaps greater than ever before, but the roots of our human and moral understanding are more shallow than ever. Though seeing, we do not see; though hearing, we do not hear. Honesty demands admission that we show more attention to Netflix and more outrage at broken iPhones than ongoing genocides in Africa or in Asia. In viewing the world through a screen, we can point and say, “That is wrong,” but we continue to fail those who have been wronged. When pressed, we offer only the slightest capitulation — as in a poll. Indeed, the world requires a great deal of benevolence from us, but we are failing in every significant way because we lack an intimacy with the world we seek to affect.

One understandable stumbling block, and a common criticism of intervention in foreign politics, is that the cause of a given conflict can likely be traced back to some form of colonialism or imperialism. Whether this is true in any given case is, in part, irrelevant. Philip Gourevitch remarks that Colonel Logiest, a Belgian military officer in Rwanda who staged a Hutu coup d’état in 1960, “saw himself as a champion of democratization, whose task was to rectify the gross wrong of the colonial order he served.” Gourevitch goes on to point out, however, that justice is not an automatic result of winning an argument: “That legitimate grievances lie behind a revolution does not, however, ensure that the revolutionary order will be just.”¹⁰ Likewise, it follows that, even if legitimate criticisms of America’s involvement in a place like Darfur (e.g., Chevron oil) abound, those criticisms do not justify inaction, and they do not erase current moral obligations to those suffering now.

Vaclav Havel, in his 1990 New Year’s Address to Czechoslovakia, said,

Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt. Let us try to introduce this kind of self-confidence into the life of our community and, as nations, into our behavior on the international stage. Only thus can we restore our self-respect and our respect for one another as well as the respect of other nations.¹¹

Taking what Havel says seriously means, in a sense, not overreacting to past mistakes. The U.S. cannot apologize to the world by merely receding from it — especially not by receding in an increasing posture of self-defense. In order to recover from our own guilt, and to confront the consequences of Realpolitik imperialism, this must be kept in mind.

The British neurologist and author Oliver Sacks once wrote about a patient named Dr. P, who was a gifted musician and music teacher. Dr. P. possessed a unique eye for detail — in an object, in a painting — but curiously lacked an ability to see things “as a whole, seeing only details, which he spotted like blips on a radar screen.” In other words, he understood facts but not substance. Sacks goes on to argue that Dr. P.’s failure to see the whole of a thing was owing to a failure to relate to it.¹²

I had so many ideas about Iraq before going there, and before I ever knew anyone from there. Yet it was in Iraq — that place, that experience — that, as the saying goes, I was given eyes to see. Of course, not everyone can travel to a Middle Eastern war zone. Indeed, I can’t go as often as I would like or would need to, which means we will need to find ways to get beyond our current surface-level understanding and experience of the world if we are ever going to make something like “never again” more than an empty slogan. But when we begin to understand some of the things that (ironically) block our view, whether they are missiles or television shows, we may begin to catch a better view of the world, learn to see more than what’s on the screen in front of us, and speak about the world and about others as one in relation — to see the world face to face.

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References

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpmK79wdHPE
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWFX19JL_LM
3. Gunther Anders, Hiroshima is Everywhere (Quoted by Norman Wirzba, On Learning to See a Fallen and Flourishing Creation)
4. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, pg. 695. Taylor is particularly concerned here with the inadequacy of secular humanism for dealing with the challenges of modern globalism.
5. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html
6. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Showbiz
7. http://news.gallup.com/poll/164282/support-syria-action- lower-past-conflicts.aspx
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoPBb3xJPYQ
9. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism: The
   Tanner Lecture on Human Values, 1985. A brief critique of Michael Walzer’s idea of justice can be found in Gilbert Meilaender’s essay “A View from Somewhere.” Meilaender agrees with Walzer that the problem of the “disconnected critic” is primarily a moral rather than epistemological problem. The lack of connection comes from “a failure to love that which they criticized and sought to change—an inability to be apart and united.”
10. Philiph Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, pg. 60. As Gourevitch shows, the result was “Hutu dictatorship masqueraded as popular democracy.” For a similar argument, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution.
11. Vaclav Havel, in his New Year’s Address, 1990:
    http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-speech-1-1-
    90_0c7cd97e58.pdf
12. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Michael C. Horowitz:

The wheel has turned once again. The United States no longer enjoys the vast lead in precision strike capabilities that it once did. The technology underlying those capacities—conventional munitions, sensors, and guidance systems—has become cheaper over time and accessible to many countries and militant groups beyond the United States. From Azerbaijan to North Korea, other forces can strike some targets with the precision, power, and range that were once the preserve of the U.S. military. They have benefited from advances made in the private sector in artificial intelligence and the widening availability of sensing and communications platforms, such as global positioning systems. With this proliferation of know-how, technology, and weaponry, warfare is changing. Crucially, advances in manufacturing and software have lowered the price of key equipment. A cheap commercial drone equipped with weapons, guided by another cheap drone packed with sensors, can hit specific faraway targets or conduct surveillance operations. And because they are relatively inexpensive, such aircraft can be deployed at scale. Militaries are beginning to realize that they don’t have to choose between precision and mass; they can have both.

Systems of this kind are, in military parlance, “attritable”—that is, their relatively low cost makes the loss of any one system relatively insignificant. They are inferior in comparison with the most advanced weapons deployed by the U.S. or Chinese militaries—an F-35 stealth fighter, for example, or a Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile—but these systems can be deployed at a much greater scale than their more expensive counterparts. Their unit costs are low enough that their aggregate capabilities are more affordable. […]

What’s different today, as opposed to in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, is the scale at which these capabilities are employed—their undeniable mass. Both Ukraine and Russia use, and sometimes lose, thousands of drones per week for tasks including surveillance and combat. Some of these drones are recoverable, whereas others are designed for one-way missions traveling hundreds of miles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced in December 2023 that his country would produce over one million drones in 2024 and has created a separate branch of the military focused on uncrewed forces, informally known as Ukraine’s “army of drones.” […]

It is also much more expensive at present to defend against such attacks than it is to launch them. In April, Iran flung more than 300 weapons, including one-way attack drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, at Israel. With support from the United States and a handful of Middle Eastern countries, Israel repulsed almost all of the weapons. But at what cost? One report suggests the strike cost about $80 million to launch but $1 billion to defend against. A wealthy country and its allies could afford that sort of expense a few times—but maybe not 20 times, 30 times, or 100 times. Fending off this form of attack is not only expensive but also difficult. An assailant can strike at an adversary with a variety of systems; that adversary may be able to repel one specific system but struggle to deal with others. Commanders and analysts are only beginning to figure out how to counter precise mass at scale. […]

The air force is also working with the private sector to produce cruise missiles that could cost as little as $150,000 each, a fraction of the current cost of $1 million to $3 million. For its part, the navy has begun hiring specialists in robotic warfare, created a new squadron focused on uncrewed surface vessels, and experimented with large numbers of uncrewed platforms in the Middle East.

As with MRIs, so go the bombs.