Will Morrisey Reviews

Joseph P. Martino: A Fighting Chance: The Moral Use of Nuclear Weapons. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, July 27, 1988.

Fortunately unused since 1945, what are nuclear weapons for? ‘Deterrence of enemy attack,’ we answer. But if deterrence fails, would we really use them? Should we?

‘No,’ reply some would-be realists and many moralists. ‘If the Soviet Union launches a full-scale nuclear attack, we’re all going to die. Retaliation would be pointless,’ say the realists. ‘The intentional destruction of innocent human life is evil,’ say the moralists, ‘and we must never do evil that good may come—if any good could come from a nuclear counter-attack.’

Such arguments might be called irrelevant. The Politburo, for example, cannot assume that either despair or stricken conscience will animate Americans who survive a nuclear strike. Military planners must look at capabilities, not motives. As long as America has the means to retaliate, no enemy can prudently crown his planning with mere hope.

Serious American reservations about the retaliatory use of nuclear weapons affect the Soviets less than they affect us. This is a problem, because a republic never negotiates so much with its enemies as with itself. Despairing realists and frightened moralists do us no good. Their dispiriting counsels result in vague or even self-contradictory political and military strategies designed not so much to meet foreign challenges as to assuage domestic sentiments.

Joseph P. Martino argues that we can expunge “moral evasion” from American military strategy only by considering how nuclear weapons may be justifiably used, not by bluffing and praying that no one will ever use them on us. While affirming the injustice of military attacks on innocent persons—long prohibited by the traditional philosophic and religious doctrine of the just war—Martino insists that wrong policy, not nuclear weapons themselves, has encouraged our legitimate misgivings about ‘Mutual Assured Destruction.’

Americans began by confusing deterrence with defense. Deterrence form part of any coherent defense policy; it should never form its whole. The reason for this is simple. Essentially a psychological or subjective condition, deterrence rests on the enemy’s calculating fear. What we predict will deter our enemy or may not deter him. Thus we try to magnify his fears with plans for mass destruction of innocent and guilty alike, a strategy that may frighten our enemy but also frightens us—or worse, leads some of us to a moral disgust with ourselves and even with democratic republicanism itself.

Martino understands but deplores such responses, particularly those of contemporary ‘Left’-leaning clergymen. He shows the bad moral consequences of anti-American moralism. Communist regimes have killed over 95 million persons since 1917; wars have resulted in 86 million deaths since 1740. Twentieth-century war deaths (some 35.7 million, some innocent and some decidedly not) do not compare to the 120 million innocent lives destroyed by left- and right-wing tyrants. And these numbers refer to survival only leaving aside the qualitative, moral benefits of freedom. To oppose tyranny with nuclear arms can affirm justice, not deny it.

Nonetheless, in one sense pessimists are right. “If a nation has not properly prepared itself it is incapable of conducting a just nuclear war,” that is, one which defends Americans, attacks enemy military targets, and does not directly injure the innocent. “Nuclear weapons can be used in a way that allows us to discriminate between the aggressive Soviet government and the Soviet people.” Even in the so-called nuclear age, peace remains as it was in the time of Isaiah, “an enterprise of justice.”

To prove this, Martino draws upon his impressive knowledge of the history of military strategy and the technical capabilities of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons. Civil and strategic defense can protect our people, our command systems, and our forces, while counterforce nuclear weapons—particularly those with accurate warheads producing low fallout—can destroy the “means of repression” and the military-economic infrastructure of our attacker. “Our weapons must be such that we would be willing to use them” when attacked. Such weapons include strategic bombers, the single-warhead Midgetman missile, the rail-garrison-deployed MX missile, and cruise missiles. All these are difficult to attack, easy to defend, and designed for just-war use.

“Those who object to our acquiring usable weapons evidently want us to spend great sums of money on weapons we know to be unusable, or not to buy any weapons whatsoever.” Either alternative means the slow (or in perhaps, at some point, lightning-fast) disintegration of the political institutions that strengthen moral principles in a world often uncongenial to them.

This book deserves candid study by American citizens at a time when our conflicting thoughts and feelings, exacerbated by election-year hype, may lead us further into poorly conceived policies and treaties. More than a timely study, it may contribute to thinking seriously about American nuclear-weapons policy in the years ahead.

John K. Roth and Robert C. Whittemore, eds.: Ideology and the American Experience: Essays on Theory and Practice in the United States. Washington: Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, 1988.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, April 27, 1988.

Easy to compile but hard to design, anthologies and collections usually don’t work. This one is no exception. Exhibiting several of the ‘collection’ genre’s characteristic weaknesses, it amounts to a sort of ‘how-not-to’ manual for any future editor. The editors commit two basic errors, out of which others flow.

Lack of focus is the first one. The topic “ideology and American experience” invites platitudinous meandering on whatever may interest the contributors at the moment of writing. The blah-blah-blah syndrome affects several of the writers here, notably Morton A. Kaplan and co-editor John K. Roth, whose articles unfortunately come last in the volume, causing it to stop instead of concluding. Kaplan runs on about a few issues-of-the-day, to no avail. Roth more spectacularly calls for a “public philosophy” consisting of pieces from Whitman, Santayana, Niebuhr, and Dewey—an artifact that supposedly would animate the “cooperative independence of pluralistic selves.” Don’t be alarmed; it didn’t make sense to me, either.

The key term, “ideology,” receives no consistent treatment. Several contributors invoke the shade of the eighteenth-century French intellectual, Destutt de Tracy, who coined the word and meant it literally: “ideology” meant the science of ideas, in just the same way as biology is the science of life. An empiricist, Destutt de Tracy believed ideas could be studied with near-mathematical rigor, and he did not much think about the epistemological problem: How one can study ideas without generating ideas-about-ideas in infinite regress. This weakness led to subjectivism (most immediately Romanticism) on one extreme, historicism (particularly Marxism) on the other.

Other contributors use the definition current today, ideology as a structure of ideas which may or may not correspond to some reality. This inconsistency makes comparison of one essay to another, one argument to another, almost impossible. The collection becomes a concatenation of monologues, not a dialogue. It’s up to the editors to define terms and make contributors either stick to those definitions or directly challenge them. These editors didn’t do that.

Their second error derives from departing too readily from editing and descending into writing. Unless firmly convinced that they have an indispensable contribution to make, editors of collections of essays should restrain themselves when tempted to throw their own articles into the hopper. Professor Roth’s effort has been noted. Professor Whittemore leads off the volume with a Quixotic attempt to revive interest in the deservedly forgotten writings of Frank Lester Ward, author of “the most important philosophical synthesis yet produced by an American”—faint praise indeed, but alas not intentionally so. Ward’s ‘evolutionary’ democratic socialism, aiming at a regime he called “sociocracy”) amounts to little more than a variant of the materialist progressivism fashionable during the 1870s, when Ward was active. Bizarrely, Whittemore calls Marxism “an outworn and simplistic materialism allied to a naïve epistemological realism.” True enough, but where does that leave the likes of Ward?

The best article here is Douglas R. Rasmussen’s “Ideology, Objectivity, and Political Theory.” “Belief in an objective moral order does not pervade today’s intellectual scene,” Professor Rasmussen politely notes, “and any attempt to treat the claims of the Declaration of Independence as normative truths would almost certainly regarded by many as naïve.” Modern philosophy cannot provide a firm basis for these truths, but Aristotle does, because he does not assume that the way human beings know determines what they know (subjectivism) or that knowledge is mere sense-perception (materialism). Jefferson’s “self-evident truths” need Aristotelian epistemology for their discovery.

There is also a good discussion of Adam Smith by Douglas J. Den Uyl, challenging the popular caricature of Smith as an apostle of greed. Den Uyl does criticize Smith for adopting David Hume’s dualism, the radical distinction between what is (a matter of science) and what ought to be (a matter of sentiment). Den Uyl does not consider that Smith’s exceptionally strong emphasis on economic liberty from political authority may depend upon this dualism.

Another worthwhile contribution comes from Tibor R. Machan, one of the few undoctrinaire libertarians, who offers some commonsense remarks about responsibility as the concomitant of liberty. Gordon C. Bjork argues convincingly that ideas determine economic systems, not vice-versa—and he is an economist, of all things.

These patches of intelligence don’t add up to a rich harvest. Although the papers resulted from a two-year series of conferences sponsored by the publisher, the book betrays insufficient sustained effort by the editors to make the authors speak to one another. The articles themselves are of too-uneven quality. A good collection of essays on ideology in American might be produced. This isn’t it.