Confronting Barbarians

Vladimir Putin is in danger of becoming nekulturny. It’s the Russian word which is translated as “uncultured”, but which is a far worse insult in Russian than it sounds to an American ear.  You might get a bit closer by translating it as “barbarian.”  That’s what George Will correctly (surprise!) calls Putin for telling the Russian parliament that Crimea is all Russia “needs.”  Will points out that when something is what you need or desire, thinking that creates an unfettered right to it constitutes the mark of a barbarian.  That understanding actually goes back to Freud, who in Civilization and Its Discontents defined deferred gratification as the enabler of civilization itself.  To that list we have since added taming the horse, brewing beer, roast beef, Dionysian revels (substitute Mardi Gras or October Fest) and a variety of other things, but recognizing that just feeling you need something does not entitle you to grab it out of someone else’s hands is in fact what separates us from barbarians and toddlers.

Any parent has probably at some point had an instant urge to smack their toddler for that grabbing, but instantly knows better than to do so.  It’s a learning process for both toddler and parent.  The problem gets harder when you’re dealing with a barbarian holding a spear.  You may have multiple bigger spears and feel perfectly justified in using them.  But is there a better way?  Being civilized imposes a need for deferring gratification on you even if the barbarian does not share that need.  You probably impose some intermediate response like making the size of your spears really clear while trying to slightly improve the barbarian’s understanding of what being civilized really means – you know, it’s like dealing with a teenager.  That’s graduated response and essentially what foreign policy in these situations is all about.

The problem is that part of you feels ashamed from backing away from a fight in a good cause you know you could win.  That’s the situation Robert Kagan describes this morning in the Washington Post.  Polls show that Americans clearly prefer a foreign policy embodying a graduated response to Putin with a minimum of spear shaking and a maximum of non-violent alternatives like economic sanctions.  The polls also show a dip in Obama’s popularity for following that approach.  On a broader horizon, Americans clearly elected Obama to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce our military commitments and pursue a more nuanced foreign policy, and they now show disapproval for his doing just that.  Kagan ascribes these paradoxes to that sense of shame for having done something sensible rather than something more gallant.

That’s of course the feeling any parent of a teenager knows – it accompanies “staying cool and conserving your ammunition.”  It’s also one of the discontents of being civilized.  It has its limits of course.  Exceeding those limits was what got Europe into trouble with Hitler at Munich.  Failing to preserve limits leads to disaster.  You’ve got to know when and how to say “That’s it!”  But mainly you need to know how what you do sends the proper message.  It’s best when that message is, “Welcome to civilization; you can put away that spear now. And no, you can’t have what you just grabbed.  That’s not the way we do it here.”

Translating that message into foreign policy moves can be very messy.  It’s hardest when hotheads maintain positions carved in stone.  The lesson for grabbing should hurt but not hurt to the fighting mad” point, and when people are already fighting mad, that gets very delicate.  The Obama Administration seems on the right course for now.  It’s not getting much credit for that now, but credit in complex situations generally comes as hindsight. 

The results will be measured by outcomes, and that’s what remains, perhaps deliberately, fuzzy.  Is the takeover of Crimea to be considered a fait accompli? If so, what happens with the Tatars?  The wrong answer to that question could lead to protracted bloodshed.  What about Russia’s possible future “need” for a guaranteed land path to their naval base at Sevastopol?  Or their opposition to being surrounded by states like Poland with ties to the EU and NATO?  We want neither surrender to barbarians or a return to Cold War days. This is a time when our foreign policy people need support, not disparagement.

Fondness for Battle

Standing on the bluffs above Fredericksburg, watching futile Union charges uphill into his thundering cannons, Robert E. Lee observed, “It is well that war is so terrible; else we should grow too fond of it.”  I’m afraid we have, nowadays in the pitched battles waged daily between our political parties.  Neither blood nor ink is spilled any longer in these unceasing wars – it’s so much easier to pour out the mutual hatreds and slanders via the internet – but the consequences remain terrible.  Families go without food stamps they need for feeding their children, drinking water is polluted, health care is lacking, diseased poultry is uninspected, businesses are bankrupted, future disasters are precipitated by current inactions.  The parties each charge the other with actions designed not for the benefit of the country but to promote the party’s own fortunes.  And both parties are right about that.

The problem is that large amounts of money must be raised in our current campaigning by advertising mode of electioneering.  The days are long gone when campaigning was done by shaking hands and kissing babies and issuing occasional quotes.  Now, due to the length of the election cycle, the numbers of people to be reached, and the Citizens United decision, endless cash is required, and it is easier to raise money by instilling hatred of an enemy than by seeking a common goal with those who differ.  Party professionals know that, and hatred is their daily product.  I get at least half a dozen political fundraising emails every day, and none of them is even close to the “love your enemy” message I get in church on Sunday – even when the political email arrives on Sunday morning.  They have grown too fond of their warfare.

George Washington’s farewell address included his famous warning against letting the strife of “party factions” undermine the Republic that he and the other Founding Fathers had devoted themselves to building.  Washington went on to say “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.”  More recently, John Dingell, announcing his retirement from Congress after 58 years, proved Washington right by saying he did so because Congress had become “obnoxious” in its partisanship.  Dingell pointed out that the current Congress had set a record by passing only 57 pieces of legislation and blamed a common “disregard of our country, our Congress, and our governmental system.”   That 57 pieces of legislation going to the White House was less than the number of times the House passed a repeal of the Affordable Care Act knowing in advance it would go nowhere in the Senate.

G.B, Shaw wittily observed that a nation is created by people divided by a common language and united by a common enemy, but when the common language is mutual hatred, the nation can also be destroyed.  We live in dangerous days.  Everything from class warfare to climate change to global terrorism to unending economic stagnation threatens us.  In some possible outcomes, our survival as a democracy is indeed threatened.  Those dangers can be both a threat and an opportunity to us.  One more quote – Aristotle was the first to get into the act of combining “common” and “enemy” into one sentence by writing “Even the bitterest of enemies can be united by a common danger.”  Our fondness for battle has got us into the wrong wars against ourselves.  We need to raise our sights to see the dangers we share and to relearn how to work together on them.  Politicians need to remember, like Dingell, why they set out into politics in the first place.  If it was purely from hate, they are in the wrong business.

By itself, of course, just hating each other less is not enough.  We need to try out things that have worked elsewhere, like the British practice of severely limiting the election cycle, or requiring media to provide free or low cost political ads as a requirement for licensing.  And Citizens United, and the underlying definition of corporations as political people, needs serious rethought. When you need lots of money to campaign, the temptations of lobbyists and PACs are too great.  And “here there be tygers.”  The need for money to get elected has itself become one of our greatest dangers.  Defeating it should unite us.

The Voices of America

One of the interesting aspects of the current wide-ranging discussions about Ukraine is that there seems an American consensus about the topic and a shouting match in the discussion of it.  The consensus is that Putin has gravely violated the sovereignty of Ukraine, that he must suffer serious consequences for doing so, and that while military confrontation must be avoided, economic and political sanctions of all kinds are appropriate.  But you couldn't tell that from the shouting.  President Obama is talking about the costs Putin must bear, while apoplectic senators like McCain are screaming from the podium and senior statesmen like Kissinger and Albright are urging calm. Talk show hosts are, as usual, frothing.

Years ago I sang in an excellent A Capella chorus whose director kept impressing on us that one of the most difficult things in choral music is to sing in unison, “with one voice.”  We were very good at that, but it took hours of practice.  In American politics it’s much harder and may never be achieved.  It’s part of the American culture.  The first CEO of General Motors was known to break up a meeting in frustration because everyone agreed on an important topic.  He treated consensus as a sign that not enough thought had been given to the subject.  It’s part of our history: Massachusetts even threatened to secede over the War of 1812.

What makes it unduly hard these days is the perceived need of politicians of both parties for consistent disagreement with others. It reminds me of the teenager stage when constant disagreement with parents is an imperative.  But they grow out of that.  Emerson noted that ”a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, and I suppose the minds of some politicians are as little as any.  Politicians in our history had no such need.  Henry Clay was a notable hawk during the 1812 War but strongly opposed the Mexican War, as did Abraham Lincoln, who later led us into the Civil War.  And their eloquence did not require shouting.

This of course is just wishing on my part.  As noted, cacophony is part of the American makeup.  Speaking nonsense is one way we exercise our freedom of speech, and we could not endure it if it were gone.  But sometimes it is important that others not part of our culture understand what we are saying, and that is a responsibility that should be understood and accepted by all public voices.  What turned the opposing voices of our past into an American harmony was realistic principle which agreed or disagreed as necessary, without regard to positions taken by the other political party.  It’s been said that part of the current crisis is that Putin does not really understand America, and our political voices are not helping.

It used to be that in an international crisis, domestic political voices quieted down and left the talking to the President.  Talking stopped at the shore line.  It’s not that way anymore, but I can wish that some of our political voices old enough to remember that era would think to bring it back.