A Thinking Reed

Category: Politics

  • Chuck Hagel and the need for a “serious” antiwar candidate

    The latest news still has Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel delaying his decision on the possibility of a presidential bid.

    While it’s true that Hagel isn’t strictly anti-war or non-interventionist (and, indeed, has been a big supporter of the Bush administration on most issues), his relatively critical voice would be welcome in the primary debates, especially when the top three GOP contenders dissent little, if at all, on the Administration’s foreign policy (John McCain partly excepted, who is, if anything, further to the right than Bush). And unlike, say, Ron Paul, the quixotic libertarian congressman from Texas, a Hagel candidacy couldn’t be easily dismissed.

    Moreover, the Democratic field hasn’t exactly distinguished itself with antiwar zeal, with Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama all making threatening sounds about Iran and equivocating on Iraq (NM governor Bill Richardson and, of course, Dennis Kucinich are exceptions to this trend, and, perhaps not coincidentally, polling in the single digits).

    The fact is, it still seems to be conventional wisdom that bellicosity equals “seriousness” about foreign affairs, which is the sin qua non of having a snowball’s chance of getting elected. Any suggestion, say, that the idea of a global, generations-spanning “war on terrorism” and its attendant consequences for things like civil liberties and the treatment of prisoners might be an overreaction to a serious, but not existential threat has thus far been a one-way ticket to political irrelevance.

    That’s why having an indisputably “serious” candidate like Chuck Hagel in the field, someone who takes a more moderate line, could serve to move the debate in a more reasonable direction.

  • Big Sister

    I’m not a Barack Obama booster, but this is pretty amusing (via Andrew Sullivan and not affiliated with the Obama campaign so far as I know).

  • Preventive war is “inherently pernicious”

    Andrew Bacevich urges Congress to renounce the Bush Doctrine:

    The fifth anniversary of President Bush’s West Point speech [where he promulgated the “Bush Doctrine] approaches. Prior to that date, Democratic leaders should offer a binding resolution that makes the following three points: First, the United States categorically renounces preventive war. Second, the United States will henceforth consider armed force to be an instrument of last resort. Third, except in response to a direct attack on the United States, any future use of force will require prior Congressional authorization, as required by the Constitution.

    Of course, as Dana Carvey, in his GHW Bush persona, used to say, na ga happen. It’s a nice fantasy though, to think that our military policy might be brought into some semblence of conformity with our constitutional principles, not to mention the principles of Just War.

    At the very least, it would be interesting to see the question put to any and all of the prospective presidential candidates of both parties whether or not they embrace the principles of the Bush Doctrine and whether they consider preventive war to be a legitimate tool of policy.

    If there’s one element of traditional Just War theorizing that’s taken a beating over the last five years, it’s the requirement that war be a last resort. Granted that last resort can be a fuzzy concept; after all, there’s always something else you could conceivably try, however improbable. But the very real danger, one that Bacevich has expounded on at length in his book The New American Militarism, is that war has become a routine tool of policy.

  • Christo-fascism, again.

    War correspondent Chris Hedges has the latest entry in the impending Christo-fascism sweepstakes with his new book, cleverly titled American Fascists. Read the Salon interview here. LA Times review here.

    The MO of a lot of these books seems to consist of cherry-picking the few people who actually adhere to a “dominionist” ideology and then imputing that ideology to the mass of evangelical Christians. Or, alternatively, supposing that the masses are so dumb or easily led that all that’s required is some catastrophic event to get them marching in lockstep. So all evangelicals become “dominionists” in embryo.

    Interestingly, Hedges offers a Rumsfeldian “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” type argument against the objection that we don’t, in fact, seem to be on the brink of fascism. In fact, there seems to be a curious symmetry between the arguments of the Christian right alarmists and some of the more feverish arguments on the right about the impending takeover of Islamism. Both see a minority with a dangerous ideology, but then fail to note the disparaty between the ideology and the ability to actually carry out their schemes. They also both imply that the co-religionists of the radical minority are potential recruits to the fringe movement (whethere they’re evangelicals or Muslims). But what is the plausible chain of events whereby the “dominionists” or the radical Islamists actually succeed in establishing control of America?

    This isn’t to say that both groups couldn’t cause a lot of trouble, though it has to be pointed out that Islamists have actually succeeded in killing thousands of people, whereas it’s hard to point to any significant political victories for hardline Christian dominonists. Fear-mongering about “Christianists” also seems to overlook what seem to be far more plausible explanations for things like US foreign policy. The fact that the policies of the Bush administration, for instance, don’t depart in any radical way from what has been the bipartisan doctrine of “full spectrum dominance” ought to tell against imputing excessive influence to the Christian right. As should the fact that very little traction has been made in the areas supposedly most important to the Christian right on Bush’s watch (e.g. abortion, school prayer, gay marriage, etc.).

    What frequently seems to happen is that positions which, in themselves, would seem to be legitimate matters for debate in a democratic society, such as how far abortion rights should extend or what the proper relationship between religion and the state is, are taken to be part of a sinister “totalitarian” ideology by secular liberals. Thus, anyone who presses those positions in the public square becomes not just a political adversary, but an enemy of the open society as such.

  • Animal cloning and "granting things their space"

    I don’t suppose it’ll come as a surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I think that cloning animals for meat and milk is a bad idea. Leaving aside the health considerations, what bothers me is that it’s one more step in reducing animals (and, by implication, the rest of nature) to the status of commodities or resources which are entirely at our disposal. Animals are viewed as raw material to whom anything can be done in order to increase their productivity (and the profits that generates). Cloning is one more step away from the semi-mythical idyllic family farm toward the complete mechanization and industrialization of animal husbandry.

    In his interesting book Animals Like Us, philosopher Mark Rowlands argues that this instrumentalist view of animals (and nature) has implications in the way we treat other human beings. Seeing the world around us as fundamentally a resource for our use has a “spillover” effect in our perceptions of the value of persons. “This is the logical culmination of the resource-based view of nature: humans are part of nature, and therefore humans are resources too. And whenever something – human or otherwise – is viewed primarily as a resource, things generally don’t go well for it” (p. 196)

    It’s hard not to see similarities in the application of cloning to the meat industry and the application of similar technologies to human beings. Embryos – i.e. nascent human life – are turned into a commodity to be used either for reproductive technologies or for scientific research. Lauadable as the goals of some of these enterprises may be, the instrumentalization of human life is disturbing. And one of the reasons it’s so disturbing is that we have a hard time articulating why we find these sorts of things disturbing. Our public language of costs and benefits doesn’t incorporate values that may transcend the starkly utilitarian. Satifsying people’s felt needs (e.g. for cheaper meat; or, perhaps more accurately, for greater meat industry profits) without creating tangible harm to people’s health is all the government spokesmen permit themselves to be concerned with.

    This doesn’t mean that I think we should embrace the views of some extreme environmentalists that human beings have no special worth, or that it’s wrong for us to use nature for our benefit. I think a recovery of the sense of the natural world as God’s good creation would, if taken seriously, go a long way toward creating a more humble approach to our dealings with nature. For instance, we might come to see animals as having their own role in God’s providential ordering of the world, beyond being things which exist solely for our use. There are tantalizing hints in the Bible of God having a covenant, not just with human beings, but with all flesh (cf. Genesis 9)

    Expanding on this in his article “The Covenant with all Living Creatures,” philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark (about whose political philosophy I blogged a bit the other day) argues for taking the idea of just such a covenant seriously. Clark concludes:

    The covenant God made, we are told, in the beginning and affirmed since then, is to grant all things their space. `The mere fact that we exist proves his infinite and eternal love, for from all eternity he chose us from among an infinite number of possible beings’. Every thing we meet is also chosen: that is a good enough reason not to despise or hurt it.

    By “grant[ing] all things their space,” Clark means, among other things, allowing them to live “according to their kind.” This requires us to recognize that animals have their own telos, under God, that may be quite independent of our interests. To clone animals in order to make them “better” from the point of view of our purposes is, it seems to me, a pretty clear example of refusing to grant them their space.

  • A uniter, not a divider

    Gerald Ford, R.I.P.

    I’d say the pardoning of Nixon is outweighed by the fact that he presided over my birth, surely a great boon to the Republic.

    More substantively, he doesn’t seem to have done nearly as much active harm during my lifetime as a number other presidents I can think of. For one thing, he avoided war in the Middle East. And he did appoint John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court, who is currently holding the line against some of the more unfortunate encroachment of executive power that the current administration favors.

    Of course, not having started any wars or presided over any massive expansion of government power, he fatally blew his chances of ever being ranked as a “great” or even “near-great” president by historians.

    P.S. On the other hand, I’m reminded that President Ford was the first to inflict both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on the long-suffering American public.

  • Stephen R.L. Clark’s "anarcho-conservatism"

    I’m on vacation, visiting the wife’s ancestral homeland of Indiana. Blessedly free of online distractions for the most part. Hence the relative dearth of posting.

    But I have been reading a really interesting book by philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark called The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. Clark has written on a variety of topics, from animal rights to natural theology. He seems to be a Christian Platonist of some sort, but also with a strong bent toward understanding human beings as parts of nature and continuous in a strong sense with other animals.

    The present work attempts to look at political and ethical issues in light of seeing human beings as quite literally political animals. Clark arrives at what he calls “Aristotelian anarchism.” Contrary to the Hobbesian view that posits the necessity of a strong state to keep us from a perpetual state of war, Clark’s Aristotelianism sees humans as social animals who naturally form communities.

    Hobbesians, including most modern liberals, justify the state on the ground that it is what ideally stiuated rational agents would choose. But this, Clark thinks, masks the fact that the state is essentially brigandage writ large. No one actually consents to the existence of rule by the few over the many, in any sense that would seem to be morally significant. And when political philosophers argue that they would choose it if they were “truly rational,” what they often seem to mean by “rational” is “good liberals like us.”

    Of course, even if the state isn’t legitimate in the sense that any of us have ever actually consented to being ruled by other men, the ever-present fear is that it’s the only thing that stands between us and social chaos. Besides the obvious point that, given the historical record of governments in terms of murder, theft, and oppression, the cure may well be worse than the disease, Clark points out that state power may yet be intrinsically wrong:

    No one is to enslave anyone, nor coerce anyone except to prevent such enslavement or absolute coercion. No one, in particular, is to force another to do what he/she does not him/herself consider right: that is, to treat another source of action merely as material. … State power is born in conquest, not in free contract, and has no more right to its prey than any other robber band. (p. 33)

    The statist assumption is that top-down control is the only means of establishing social harmony, but the anarchist’s claim is that the “peace” provided by coercion is actually just war in another form, and that, moreover, there are other means by which social order arises.

    Like other anarchists, Clark distinguishes two means of securing social cooperation: the military (or political) means, and the economic means. The former uses coercion to compel behavior and its use tends to result in a caste of rulers who lord it over the rest of us. The latter includes free exchange, gift-giving, and other positive-sum forms of social interaction. The anarchist’s political agenda, Clark says, is not to impose some utopian blueprint for the perfect society, but to replace the military means of civil association with non-coercive methods.

    Non-coercive anarchism (which is to say, just anarchism) rests … upon a method of civil association, not on a perceived goal. That method, the organization of the civil means, has no one obvious outcome, and to that extent the critics are correct to see that anarchists have no definite political goal, no ‘good society’ the far side of catastrophe. Certain possible futures are rejected (as imperial consolidation, bureaucratic world state, military nationalism), but the anarchist methodology is compatible with as many more, including the free market, communitarian federalism and even ‘fractured feudalism’ [i.e. competing and partly overlapping sources of authority]…. (p. 86)

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.
    Nevertheless, he admits that the anarcho-conservative requires a certain kind of patience:

    and that may be easiest for those who can trust in God. If the God of justice will bring the Empire down, and we, God’s people, will be there to see it fall (even if I, in this mortal body, never do), we can afford to wait, and not attempt to rule the world by force. (p. 90)

    This last quote reminds me of John Howard Yoder’s argument that Christians aren’t called to make sure that history comes out right. That’s God’s business. The job of Christians is to be faithful to a certain way of life in the midst of the dawning of the new creation and the death-throes of the old. And certainly non-coercion looms large in Yoder’s vision of what the Christian life is about.

    Clark does recognize that there can be a just war, but he sees this as essentially a defensive action, and not one that should be resorted to in order to bring in some glorious new social order. And, in fact, the support of wars or revolutions is so inherently dangerous to the preservation of the civil means of order, they require a very high degree of justification:

    Just revolutions, in sum, are theoretically possible, on the same terms as just wars. But there is very strong reason to be suspicious of any candidates for that high status. Certainly neither war nor revolution can be just that does not revert as soon as possible to the civil means, to peace. Certainly the very establishment of a war machine will almost always make that return less likely. The means constitute and modify the end, as Gandhi saw. All would-be revolutionaries need to ask themselves which programme is likelier to succeed: armed revolution, with its ensuing injuries to innocents, its creation of another brigand power, or else some unsung, unrebellious organisation of the civil and economic means alongside or out of the way of politics? (p.88)

    I think this is key to the argument. Attending to the means, not just the ends, however laudable, we’re seeking to realize, is necessary for any just social order. Politics often adverts to ends-justifies-the means reasoning. But the anarchist, like the pacifist, is the fly in the ointment, reminding us to scrutinize the means we choose. It’s much easier, in some ways, to coerce people than to earn their free consent. But treating them as ends in themselves, rather than material for our schemes, demands it.

  • Nock online

    The Ludwig von Mises institute has made several of the works of the great anarchist writer Albert Jay Nock available on line (via Tory Anarchist). These are mostly out of print and hard to find works, so it’s quite a resource.

    Nock’s Our Enemy, the State is a classic and, while Nock was considered a man of the Left at the time, he came to have an influence on American libertarian/conservative thought. If I remember correctly, Nock was friends with William F. Buckley’s father. Though it’s hard to imagine the anti-war, anti-statist Nock finding the conservatism of today too congenial.

    See also Nock’s “Anarchist’s Progress” here.

  • Making omelettes

    I’m willing to agree that, other things being equal, a pro-capitalist dictator would be preferable to a pro-communist dictator, but I’m not quite sure what this editorial from the Washington Post is supposed to be getting at. Even granting, for the sake of argument, that Pinochet deserves some credit for the Chilean “economic miracle,” does it follow that the US should’ve aided and abetted the overthrow of a democratically elected government, earning complicity for the ensuing reign of terror to boot? That seems like “ends justify the means” reasoning of a pretty base kind. Why not follow a “hands off” policy that allows other countries to determine for themselves whether they’ll be capitalist or communist or whatever?

    UPDATE: The Economist does much better than the Post.

  • Voting with your fork

    Informative article in the Economist on various forms of “food activism” (buy organic, buy local, buy fair trade, etc.) and some of the complicated realities behind the slogans:

    All food choices involve trade-offs. Even if organic farming does consume a little less energy and produce a little less pollution, that must be offset against lower yields and greater land use. Fairtrade food may help some poor farmers, but may also harm others; and even if local food reduces transport emissions, it also reduces potential for economic development. Buying all three types of food can be seen as an anti-corporate protest, yet big companies already sell organic and Fairtrade food, and local sourcing coupled with supermarkets’ efficient logistics may yet prove to be the greenest way to move food around.

    (via Marginal Revolution)