Remembering the Cold War Through Dirty Glasses
by LorraineI believe that David Brooks is a smart man. I also believe that deep within him lies a belief in Manichaeism, that is, that the world is divided into dark and light, good and evil, and each person must choose his or her side or thereby lose his soul.
More important for Brooks, each nation must choose its side, or lose its way. For Brooks:
If you were graduating from Princeton in the first part of the 20th century, you probably heard the university president, John Hibben, deliver one of his commencement addresses. Hibben’s running theme, which was common at that time, was that each person is part angel, part devil. Life is a struggle to push back against the evils of the world without succumbing to the passions of the beast lurking inside.
You, and others of your era, would have been aware that there is evil in the world, and if you weren’t aware, the presence of Hitler and Stalin would have confirmed it. You would have known it is necessary to fight that evil.
For Brooks, such a time in world history was defined by clear enemies: those who murdered the innocent, and those who came to their rescue (forgetting the so-called rescuers who turned the innocent away because they were undesirables). You’ll notice in his history that Stalin and Hitler are mentioned, but not Franco, for our response to Franco was shameful, and many good men and women died on our watch while we did nothing.
But, because we knew we were not perfect, Brooks says, we would have been aware.
At the same time, you would have had a lingering awareness of the sinfulness within yourself. As the cold war strategist George F. Kennan would put it: “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”
So as you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting.
As a matter of policy, you would have thought it wise to constrain your own power within institutions. America should fight the Soviet Union, but it should girdle its might within NATO. As Harry Truman said: “We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.”
And you would have championed the spread of democracy, knowing that democracy is the only system that fits humanity’s noble yet sinful nature. As the midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
You would, in short, have been a cold war liberal.
I love this. A cold war liberal. Were these the fine folks that dragged us into the Korean War? Were these the cold war liberals who failed to help the Hungarians in 1956? Were they the cold war liberals who ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion? Did they invade the Dominican Republic?
Cold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s.
Was that before or after we murdered Allende and installed Pinochet? Helped the Argentinian Generals with their Dirty War? Supported the torturous regimes in Africa? And Reagan? What do we qualify him as?
Actually Reagan is missing from Brooks’ entire formulation. Shall we talk about the millions who starved while Reagan played war games? Or the regimes in Central America that butchered their people funded by our illegal arms deals with Iran?
But Brooks has a new champion. Someone he can, well, patronize, because he’s a “young thoughtful black man.”
Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.
Obama’s race probably played a role here. As a young thoughtful black man, he would have become familiar with prophetic Christianity and the human tendency toward corruption; familiar with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln’s second inaugural; familiar with the guarded pessimism of Niebuhr, who had such a profound influence on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Brooks wants us to believe that we can believe in Obama because he will take a Christian approach to fighting evil in the world. And while it might not be the Christianity of a King or a Bonhoeffer, we must be assured that it’s not the Christianity of Urban II, who began the First Crusade.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am a Pacifist, but I do believe that we cannot sit on our hands when evil is being done to others. I believe that, if there is a purpose to our lives, it is that we were put on this earth to help each other out. That means we feed people, we comfort them, we clothe them, and, if need be, we protect them from bullies.
My thoughts about this have been influenced by a wise woman I know from Pakistan, who reminds me that it is not the responsibility of Western women to rescue women persecuted by their religion, but rather to work with these women to empower them so that they may throw off their own shackles.
But reality tells me that sometimes, violence is involved. I’m not a Manichean. There is too much gray within me. But that gray still calls out for justice.
And, as I have stated before, I am not a Christian.
And so, I pull out the speech, the inspiration, that reminds me of my responsibility. It is a responsibility that reminds that a lot of evil has been done in the name of doing good. But it is a responsibility that comes from the artist’s heart, from the rebel’s heart, from a Nobel Laureate’s heart.
“That, I believe, is all I had to say. We are faced with evil. And, as
for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when
he said: “I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.” But it
is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not
to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent
this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we
can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us,
who else in the world can help us do this?
Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great
unequal battle has begun. I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to
the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought, and I know
that certain men at least have resolved to do so. I merely fear they
will occasionally feel somewhat alone, that they are in fact alone, and
that after an interval of two thousand years we may see the sacrifice
of Socrates repeated several times. The program for the future is
either a permanent dialogue or the solemn and significant putting to
death of any who have experienced dialogue. After having contributed my reply, the question that I ask Christians is this: “Will Socrates still
be alone and is there nothing in him and in your doctrine that urges
you to join us?”
It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively.
Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced. But it may be, and this is even
more probable, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a
compromise or else giving its condemnations the obscure form of the
encyclical. Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all the
virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that
case Christians will live and Christianity will die. In that case the
others will in fact pay for the sacrifice. In any case such a future is
not within my province to decide, despite all the hope and anguish it
awakens in me. I can speak only of what I know. And what I know–which sometimes creates a deep longing in me–is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices–millions, I say–throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for men.”
Albert Camus–”The Unbeliever and Christians” from Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
January 24th, 2010 at 1:00 am
Wow! amazing verbage, I totally agree so I am still enjoying this.