Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
- Rudyard Kipling
"[W]e are in a long war against al-Qaida; that drone strikes do effectively kill terrorists; that, in fact, they inflict fewer civilian deaths than bombing campaigns, boots on the ground or any practical alternative; that, in fact, civilian death rates are dropping sharply as the CIA gets better at this. Acting brutally abroad saves lives at home."
To provide the requisite philosophical underpinnings for this policy he cites the works of Machiavelli, boldly arguing that politics requires a special brand of morality, one enunciated in the formula 'the ends justify the means.' Or, as Brooks states, it is simply "not possible to rule with perfectly clean hands." The real world is far too complex and dark to seriously confront with unsoiled idealism or that outmoded vestigial organ known as a conscience.
Brooks argument is riddled with logical fallacies and sundry other problems, most notably the omission of a single concrete fact to shore up his argument. In attempting to outline a 'realist's' approach to the so-called Global War on Terror he ironically relies completely on the philosophy of Machiavelli, a writer who died in the 16th century -- hardly an apposite source for negotiating the dramatically altered geopolitical realities of the 21st century.
More to the point, however, is the fact that even if we are to accept Machiavelli as a legitimate source for America's foreign policy, Brooks' use of The Prince and The Discourses can only be described as a gross misapplication of Machiavelli's works.
To start, Brooks assumes that Machiavelli's The Prince, in particular, can act as a powerful manual of statecraft and thus function as a guide for Obama et al. in their role as guarantors of America's security. The problem with this assumption is fact that the political unit of the Italian city-state -- the political context addressed by Machiavelli -- functioned upon a set of criteria that is fundamentally different than that of the modern nation-state. Instead of playing an active role in the lives of its inhabitants, the rulers of city-states had a minimal presence, generally felt during times of taxation or war but seldom outside of these limited interactions.
Contemporary notions of an active government with more than a purely extractive character, and most certainly the heavy-handed ideal envisioned by Brooks, would have been unintelligible to a 16th century city-state's inhabitants -- including Machiavelli.
Yet more critically, The Prince is above all concerned about the dynamics of power: how to obtain, secure and prolong it. The goal is not to solve outstanding social problems or improve the lot of the people -- indeed these issues are never addressed in the tract -- but to establish a conceptual framework through which personal control of the state is maintained. While Brooks is not entirely wrong in claiming that the envisaged result is social harmony and security, this is seen as a byproduct, the paramount concern of the work being the consolidation of personal power.
And in contradistinction of Brook's notion of the government and the public good, the well-being of the people in The Prince is most often determined by what the ruler -- I will not use the term government since, again, the work is about personal control, not republican governance -- does not do. Revealing much about his own time and place, Machiavelli writes that the best ways to ingratiate one's self with subjects are by not raping their women, abstaining from excessive taxation and otherwise staying out of their lives. These instructions appear may bizarre until the reader realizes that the 'people' were as much a potential threat to the 'state' as outsiders since the 'state' ultimately amounted to the will of one person, a fact that has apparently eluded Brooks.
These critiques of Brooks' argument meet him on his own terms, namely the assumption that Machiavelli's philosophy should be at all taken seriously. Yet as every student of political science knows, it is highly likely that he was being disingenuous when he penned The Prince since it was written with the express purpose of enabling him to enter the good graces of the Medici family, an unscrupulous coterie of political bigwigs notorious for their venality and whose personalized form of rule Machiavelli most likely reviled. (To say that Machiavelli was ambivalent about the Medici family is to to put it lightly, considering he was tortured by them following their seizure of power.)
________
In truth, if one carefully examines the content of the 'ends justify the means' formula elucidated in The Prince and of which Brooks waxes so lyrically, it becomes eminently clear that this mantra is little more than distilled folly glossed with the most self-serving (and shallow) intellectual chicanery conceivable.
At its heart is the assumption that there exists two discrete phenomena of 'means' and 'ends.' Also assumed is the equation that as long as the brilliance of the 'end' outshines the repulsiveness of the 'means,' the later is justified no matter how repugnant it may be.
While the dichotomy of 'means' and 'ends' is helpful for the purpose of conceptualizing a goal and the steps needed to realize it, the distinction is in itself rather superficial and not very helpful beyond this most prosaic of functions. In the real world the so-called 'means' do not so much obtain an 'end' as breathe it into existence, in the process becoming inseparable from the 'end' itself. A goal and the steps towards its realization are fluid and seamless, not divisible and readily discernible. The corollary to this observation is that the 'result' once breathed into existence becomes itself a 'means,' distinguishable only in so far as being a punctuation mark along a continuous stream of existence or being.
To explain this point a few concrete examples shall suffice. To placate the desire to become rich a person may work furiously in order to save up a certain sum of money. Yet once this sum is reached their desire will likely only be temporarily satisfied. After a brief interlude they will, in all likelihood, desire even greater wealth or grow increasingly preoccupied with their finances as now they have more to manage/lose.
The greed-infused 'means' leads to a greed-infused 'end,' the two becoming indistinguishable as the covetous person becomes engrossed in a mutually compounded cycle of desire and paranoia.
Incidentally the United States' belligerent foreign policy is the example par excellence of the failure of the means-ends formula. In a misguided attempt to 'protect' the country (and of course oil interests, portfolios and egos) and secure that ever elusive goal of 'peace,' the U.S. government is currently engaged in several covert drone wars. The assumption is that vile 'means,' i.e. mass violence, will miraculously achieve the immaculate 'end[s]' of peace and security.
Rather predictably this has not, nor has ever been the case. The invective, prejudice and enmity required for engaging in this detestable policy has inevitably suffused itself with the 'end,' which has invariably been incalculable suffering, increased hatred, and the augmentation rather than the cessation of fears. Thus the cycle of violence with all its virile displays of power and inane destruction becomes a self-perpetuating, though thoroughly self-defeating, process.
Since Brooks conveniently overlooks that minor impediment to his argument known to the rest of the world as 'facts' it is worth stating some of them here. The highly respected Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found that to date there have been between 473-893 civilian deaths in Pakistan alone as result of America's illegal drone strikes. Pakistan has repeatedly gone on record as opposing U.S. violations of its sovereignty, as the strikes are near universally condemned by the Pakistani people. Several indigenous armed groups, whom the U.S. snidely labels 'terrorists,' have formed as a direct reaction to the American slaughter of their children, homes and villages.
By violating the sovereignty of Pakistan the U.S. has unwittingly supplied fodder for indigenous groups who seek to overturn what is increasingly viewed by Pakistanis as an ineffectual and hopelessly corrupt government. Its alliance with the U.S. has become politically untenable -- how can people stomach a government that allows its 'ally' to raid its borders and murder its citizens? What is most striking, however, is that in trying to eliminate 'terrorism' the U.S. has literally breathed terrorism into existence, galvanizing a new generation of armed groups with potentially corrosive ideologies. And if a destabilized Pakistan does fall into the hands of militant groups they may very well gain access to the country's nuclear arsenal.
Simply stated, America's drone policy vis-à-vis Pakistan is folly of the first order.
Yet this should be no surprise. After all, Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers were bent against the U.S. not because of an intrinsic hatred towards its 'values' but because of real and, quite frankly, well-founded grievances. Unilaterally imposed sanctions on Iraq, or what a top UN official referred to as "cultural genocide," not only resulted in the senseless deaths of 100,000s of Iraqis but served to anathematize the U.S. in the eyes of many Middle-Easterners -- including members of al-Qaeda. The equally shortsighted decision to murder 290 Iranian civilians by shooting down their passenger plane, sodomize Iraqis in order to gain 'actionable intelligence,' or to piss on the bodies of dead Afghans for sport, have also done little to endear the U.S. to the average Middle-Easterner.
If anything, the magnanimity and forbearance of most Middle-Easterners towards to U.S. is truly remarkable in light of this America's rapacious history. The U.S. has ravaged the region for decades, its violence-induced inebriation only interrupted by the occasional terrorist attack performed by the understandably disillusioned individual. In grisly contrast, after 9/11, a tragic but anomalous punctuation mark in this history of gratuitous violence, the American public chose to inflict indescribable carnage on two countries that had absolutely nothing to do with the attack.
________
When all is said and done, Brooks' argument may be smooth but it is certainly not intelligently composed. Above all, it is thoroughly dangerous.
The real problem our society faces is not that it is "awash in TV news segments celebrating the human spirit" and hence fails to comprehend the outlying violent reality, but that we have created this violent reality ourselves. Pundits like Brooks may subscribe to the Hollywood bromide that "you can't handle the truth!" attempting to be an intellectual path-breaker, but, ironically, it seems like almost everyone accepts this atavistic worldview. And not only is this worldview silly but it is, at heart, intellectually stultifying.
If we were to truly engage our world realistically we would realize that throwing bombs cannot solve political problems any more than shredding paper can result in a literary masterpiece. The notion the 'ends justify the means' naively assumes a sterile dichotomy that allows what sane people recognize to be evil to be good. It is a formula that is not only intellectually barren, but entirely convenient and entirely self-serving. Murders, sadists and madmen are granted carte blanche to engage in the most atrocious acts while unfeeling, unthinking pundits like Brooks not only condone their actions but salute them.
The philosopher Martin Buber has written what is probably the most famous vindication of Machiavelli's The Prince, asserting, like Brooks, that it champions a morality of its own (as if you can pick and choose an immutable 'moral' standard to suit your own tastes). Yet airy philosophical ideas can only be evaluated by how they play out in reality. Outside of his academic ramblings Buber was a Zionist who helped justify the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, igniting a conflict that has persisted over 64 years. So much for the envisioned 'end' justifying the 'means.'
Lastly, it most be noted that the sum of David Brook's defense of America's drone wars is a panegyric for contemporary imperialism. Pundits and wordsmiths like Brooks are the Kiplings of our generation, dressing up aggression and exploitation as something that is at once sublime and patriotic. The "White Man's Burden" of our day are the catchphrases of exporting democracy, humanitarianism, or simply trampling upon others for our own 'security.'
Unfortunately, while the content of the arguments of imperialism's apologists are neither original nor particularly sophisticated they maintain their deadly allure.
No comments:
Post a Comment