An essay from a history class 2017.
Blips on a Radar Screen: Remote Foreign Politics in the 21st 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 18th and 19th centuries. But the 20th 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 20th 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 4th 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 21st 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 20th 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 20th 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.
References
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpmK79wdHPE
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWFX19JL_LM
- Gunther Anders, Hiroshima is Everywhere (Quoted by Norman Wirzba, On Learning to See a Fallen and Flourishing Creation)
- 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.
- http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Showbiz
- http://news.gallup.com/poll/164282/support-syria-action- lower-past-conflicts.aspx
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoPBb3xJPYQ
- 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.” - 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.
- Vaclav Havel, in his New Year’s Address, 1990:
http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-speech-1-1-
90_0c7cd97e58.pdf - Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat