Canter Bridge

Who would have thought we’d end up just here, not six full years after September 11, 2001?

A flurry of recent conversations with individuals connected to the United States military have clarified for me just how deep is the divide between two nearly incompatible views. Faced with what our country’s forces are attempting to accomplish in the current crisis, we at home seem drawn irresistibly towards disengagement. Those in the line of fire quite often find this unthinkable and wonder how we got there while they were away fighting.

Network television routinely portrays as victims military families who feel that-far from victimhood-they have made noble choices and willingly bear the attendant sacrifices. Our media’s focus on casualty levels that—each number telling the terrible story of some family’s loss—bear no resemblance to the vastly higher toll of deep conflicts that have consumed our national efforts in the past. This disconnect is perceived by military men and women as missing the obvious point that military conflict kills human beings. Great efforts require such sacrifice, I hear military people saying, and not just the generals and colonels whose age and seniority might be suspected of distancing them from the emotional and physical disfigurement of those who do the bloody work.

At the level of our fundamental understanding(s) of conflict, what it costs, and what it’s for, we are a nation deeply divided into those who make war and those who do not.

Now comes a powerful essay from Robert D. Kaplan entitled ‘Forgetting the Obvious’ (The American Interest II/6, July/August 2007; http://www.the-american-interest.com; see my review of this newish journal on amazon.com). Kaplan’s half-ironic title heads his argument that we are quickly dividing up into a warrior class and a second set of sophisticates who believe in universal values. For Kaplan, the latter is a convenient pretext for believing in nothing, or at least in nothing that is inconvenient or costly.

Though Kaplan’s rhetoric occasionally veers in the dangerous direction of romantic nationalism, his point is decidedly realist. Only people who are rooted in a single place and willingly subject to its contingencies are likely to pay a serious price for anything. Kaplan’s intelligent prose puts one in mind of Paul Johnson’s relentless critique of unrooted universalisms and the men and women who profess them (Intellectuals, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005). Both Johnson and Kaplan are acerbically aware of wordy influence on the part of people who love humanity but have a difficult time with any concrete slice of it.

Kaplan finds that the personal qualities that civilizations have generally recognized as virtues—or even as the virtues—are prominent in an American warrior class that does not lust for war but that is willing to shoulder its burdens when necessary. Though his views of this soldiering subset of the American experiment run rather fiercely against the perspective of majorities in many countries, they seem to me substantially correct.

As a Christian, an American, and an internationalist—usually in that order—I find that the use of American influence and power presses upon me a certain realism. One does not expect utopia or anything remotely similar to it as an outcome of America’s projection of power. Yet neither does one reflect upon power by professing squeamishness about the necessity of it.

At the root of what I would baptize ‘Christian realism’ if I were asked to name the thing is skepticism about humanity’s ability to produce nourishing order with any frequency. Indeed, we seem bent on chaos, which is very close to the main point. The idea that seems to captivate us is that-if we can just back away-then things will work out. As a personal opinion, such faith in innate order is arguably naive. As policy, it is misleading and dangerous.

If the Christian tradition teaches us anything about the company we keep, it is that chaos is our natural state, substituted in fortunate moments and places by a gracious restraint from above.

Niall Ferguson continues to argue cogently that humanity’s bloodiest tragedy is lived in those moments when empire collapses. Stability, we need to be reminded, is not a given. It is a gift or an achievement. Perhaps it is some fortunate combination of the two.

We have bayed after democracy when we might have done better to have sought for a people with few of democracy’s cultural precursors a stable order with some basic representative input from its citizens. Democracy as we know it is a rarity and something of a novelty, not an off-the-shelf circumstance that can be sold to anybody who can be persuaded to buy it on the cheap.

Abu Ghraib notwithstanding—Kaplan helpfully places that debacle aside the much more serious humiliations that our military foes were visiting upon those unfortunate enough to fall under their sway—I continue to agree with Ferguson that America’s reluctant kind of empire is on the benign end of the moral continuum. When students of civilization attempt to describe empire and the empires that human history has thrown up, they find none quite so wary and cautious as the American variety. One doesn’t have to live in Kansas, sans passport, to arrive at this conclusion. Indeed, Ferguson encourages us to believe that the world would be a better place if American empire were a slightly less reluctant enterprise.

Squeamishness again. It dresses up nicely as sensitivity, as enlightened internationalism, and—dare one say it after Kaplan’s powerful critique?—as a noble kind of universalism.

Perhaps, though, it is the opposite of all that. Perhaps it is a way to believe in nothing and to sound quite wise in the saying of it.

Perhaps a society that has known too little of sacrifice needs to learn a certain self-restraint when voicing its quibbles about force, its utopias, and its assumption that the world would fall nicely into place and cease troubling us if we just all came home and got back to the factory. At the very least, those who condone such disengagement owe us and the soldiers we have sent into battle a likely scenario of what would happen then.

Such self-restraint, I think, would not be censorship or groupthink or blind militarism or anything of the kind. What it might be is a mature concession of the benefit of the doubt to those who have shown themselves willing to shoulder the burden of conflict with a self-effacing commitment to what Jewish tradition calls ‘the (re)ordering of the world’. Such people, and those who bear the deep angst of ordering them into dangerous places, do not go about their work perfectly. Nor have the achievements we have asked of our soldiering youngsters in our present circumstance been very wisely laid out for them.

Contrary to historical militarism as it can fairly easily be recognized, the Western powers currently on Middle Eastern soil make war reluctantly. But they do make war. When they return home for too brief a respite, they routinely profess disbelief at the attitudes they encounter here. We should wonder how reasonable people could come to such opposite conclusions about the appropriateness of the battle they undertake.

We should ask ourselves why the most confident verbalizers about the thing live so far from it all, so remote from its small and un-newsworthy achievements, so protected from its costs. I do not say that those who deplore what Messieurs Bush and Blair have got us into should instantly change their minds and applaud the deployment of such Western force in a place that has shown itself unamenable to foreign designs. But we should listen to our warriors with the humility of wonderment. We should ask them what they see happening in Mosul’s dust and Baghdad’s alleys. Some of it, they tell me when I ask, is good.

Indeed, a bit of that kind of wondering might be good for us all. Wisdom usually leads with careful listening. Wisdom often begins with that sort of silence.