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    Self-Determination, Now

    by

    Article published May 1978.

     

    Along with its corollary, self-determination, nationalism unites and divides the modern world.

    It unites us with others by offering one of the few practical means remaining in modernity over overcoming what Tocqueville called “individualism”: the tendency of persons in large states to isolate themselves in a small group of family and friends, with little or no involvement in civic or political life. We individualistic moderns , so proud of our autonomy, nonetheless feel an obscure desire for what surpasses ourselves; we feel the pull of sociality, the attraction of the political community and passions. Nationalism promises to free us from our own limitations, to make our lives mean something larger, greater than an individual life would mean. For many, it does just that.

    But nationalism also divides our world. Quebecan nationalism would sunder Canada; so abhorrent is this prospect that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that least violent of rulers, has promised to use force to resist it. Northern Ireland soaks in it own blood. France, the birthplace of modern nationalism and recently, with de Gaulle, its most eloquent defender, finds troublesome ferments of dispersion in its own provinces.

    But Israelis need not search the world to know of this atomization. More than any place on earth, the Mideast feels not only the exaltation of nationalism but its agony. In that sense the Mideast, above all Israel—the alien nation in a sea of Arab nations—is the place where the character of the modern world reveals itself. Those who imagine that a mere high-sounding phrase like `national self-determination’ will justify the establishment of a `Palestinian’ nation-state should think again. The existence of such a state would threaten the existence of the Israeli nation-state.

    What accounts for this inner contradiction of the principle of national self-determination, this principle that seems to create and destroy itself almost simultaneously? A comparison of Israel and the proposed nation-state on the West Bank reveals more than contemporary intellectuals and politicians prefer to consider.

    Israel is a parliamentary regime, which is to say it is a regime on the primacy of speech. One may deride speech, as General de Gaulle did; it can’t defend a country against tanks. And of course de Gaulle was right. The stereotypical parliamentarian, jabbering while dictators act, was the tragicomic exemplar of Western Europe before each of the world wars and, to a lesser extent, since. But Israel more than any country has learned de Gaulle’s lesson. Israel has not committed suicide by talk. Israel talks while keeping her eyes open and her guard up.

    But she does talk, and seriously. One can take Israeli talk seriously in part because it defends itself with deeds, but also because that talk reflects the meaning of Israel. Parliamentarians talk in order to win consent. Consent entails willingness, but it is no small thing to ask: on what basis do I will this policy or that? Needless to say, much parliamentary talk appeals to the passions—fear, avarice, most if not all of the deadly sins. But it also appeals to reason. Rightly understood, consent is reasoned willingness.

    In talking and listening to one another, Israelis reflect and choose. By virtue of its parliamentary form their country minimizes the inevitable effects of chance and force. This produces a nation that admires merit—what is defended by reasoned argument. And because Israel admires merit it is less under the sway of comfort, money, the easy life—all of which may quickly yield to force and rhetoric. Speech inevitably lets reason in, as force does not. The cleverest rhetoricians fell to Socrates, who could only be silenced by force.

    A regime like Israel bases itself on genuine self-determination. What is a human self if it is not one hat governs itself by means of the distinctively human attributes: speech and reason. Such a regime, though capable of dealing forcefully with other nation-states, prefers to deal with them by speech. But only if those nation-states share its fundamental understanding of human nature can this dialogue means anything other than a charade.

    In contrast, the nation-state proposed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization shows no promise of meaningful parliamentarism, any more than seen in Egypt, Syria, or Iraq. The `self-determination’ proclaimed by PLO officers confines itself to the will of the ruling elites. That will has little to do with reasoned speech. For them, consent is a problem resolved by force garnished by violent rhetoric.

    `Consent’ conceived that way reflects a radically different understanding of human nature than that displayed in real parliament. Not merit but chance rules such countries: the chance of who happens to get the power to impose his will for now. Reason serves force and force serves the ruler’s will–inverting the moral universe of genuine self-government. It is no accident that military, not civilian rule characterizes these regimes.

    A country’s form of government—its true form, not always the form it shows the world—reflects its understanding of human nature. Whereas a nationalism based on true self-determination, on what is genuinely human, need not destroy itself by ever-escalating, irrational, absolutist demands both in the world and within its own borders, a nationalism based on will, on force, inevitably attacks the world and convulses itself. For the passions cannot restrain themselves. Absent reason, their only limit is exhaustion, destruction, or imprisonment.

    The establishment of such a nation-state on the West Bank would strike at Israel’s heart geographically, militarily and, most of all, in spirit. By definition that nation-state could never satisfy itself; by its own character it could not. When I wrote that the Mideast is the place where the modern world’s character reveals itself, I meant that it is here and now that the genuinely human confronts absolutist irrationalism. It has done so before; it may do so again.

     

    2018 NOTE:

    Four decades later, not a word needs changing here. The problem remains the same: Palestinian Arabs want not only Gaza and the ‘West Bank,’ but Israel and Jordan, as well. While a ‘two-state’ solution may look good, considered in abstraction, it collides with that (so far) insurmountable fact.

    Solzhenitsyn’s Speech at Harvard

    by

    A Reply to James Reston’s Critique
    June 1978

    Exiled from his native Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement speech at Harvard University on June 8, 1978. Solzhenitsyn spoke of the decline of courage in Western societies generally and in the United States in particular, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. He argued that the security and contentment of Americans had made them morally soft; their freedom had decayed into self-indulgence. Meanwhile, Soviet tyranny had toughened Russians, and these two moral changes, taken together, put into question the survival of genuine freedom everywhere.

    New York Times columnist James Reston issued an indignant reply to the speech. He was especially exercised by Solzhenitsyn’s charge that America’s “capitulation” in the face of the military advance of communist North Vietnamese forces against South Vietnam three years earlier had been “hasty.” “Hasty?” he exclaimed: “After a generation of slaughter?” Solzhenitsyn probably referred to the U. S. Congress’s refusal to grant additional military funding to South Vietnam after American troops had withdrawn, rather than the whole course of the war. But in my response to Reston I addressed another aspect of his critique. 

     

    Mr. Reston sees “a fundamental contradiction” in Solzhenitsyn’s address at Harvard, a contradiction between the assertion that “only moral criteria can help the West against Communism’s strategy” and the assertion that “only American military power and willpower” could have stopped the advance of Communism in Southeast Asia.

    No contradiction: Solzhenitsyn sees that willpower and morality intersect, that there are some moralities that tend to soften human character and others that tend to toughen it. His argument that the nation, Russia, is spiritually stronger than ours doesn’t in any way endorse the Soviet government. The point is rather that the Russians have been forced to become morally tougher because their adversary, the government, is more overtly evil, whereas in the United States evil takes a more seductive, pleasing form and thus eases us into shallower lives.

    In his high-flown praise of American’s “spiritual heritage” as the cause of our withdrawal from Vietnam, Mr. Reston overlooks the fear of our supposedly exemplary anti-war protesters–what Hobbes called the fear of violent death; “belief in the sanctity of individual human life,” indeed.

    Solzhenitsyn would remind us that some things surpass individual human life in their sanctity. The fact that it is possible to hold up the individual life’s sanctity as the American summum bonum demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s point about American moral shallowness more conclusively than anything Solzhenitsyn said.

    As for military power, it is necessary on another level, the level of practice. Only moral toughness can bring a decent country to use military power, but moral toughness without power can find itself imprisoned by tyrants. Or, in a different way, by purveyors of intellectual fashion.

     

    Unsurprisingly, the Times didn’t publish this. But James Reston replied in a letter to me dated June 20: 

    Dear Mr. Morrisey,

    Thank you for your opinion on my Solzhenitsyn column.

    There really is so much controversy on what he said that it would take more time than I have to go into all the details. On reflection, there is rather more in your interpretation of the effects of suffering than in mine.

    Sincerely,

    James Reston

    The spirit of kind magnanimity in that note touches me even today, nearly forty years after receiving it.

    Brzezinski Speaks

    by

    Article published June 1978

     

    In a recent interview with U. S. News and World Report, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski listed what he called the five “priorities” of the Carter Administration’s foreign policy. One comes to expect a fair amount of piffle when listening to `official spokesmen’ for any large organization, public or private. Such people find controversy at once painful and all too easy to come by, so they take care to sedate us with vagueness, irrelevance, and cant. (Those of us old enough remember President Eisenhower will recall his mastery of such techniques; once, when an aide worried about the possibility of hostile questioners at a press conference, Ike is said to have assured the fellow, “Don’t worry–I’ll just confuse them.”)

    Dr. Brzezinski is no Eisenhower, but his piffle quotient surely makes many a functionary envious. The first priority he listed was “to infuse American foreign policy again with a certain measure of moral content.” This amounted to a slap at his predecessor, Henry Kissinger, whose alleged Metternichean realism offended liberals and conservatives alike. While one may have little admiration for Kissingerian moral gravitas–the gravitas is heavy but the morality isn’t–the Carter Administration’s “human rights” campaign’s “certain measure” of morality doesn’t have nearly enough of the right kind.

    The second “priority” is to “concentrate on strengthening our ties” with allies and “with many regionally or internationally important powers that have surfaced in the last two or three decades”–this, “instead of being preoccupied with the contest with the Soviet Union”; Brzezinski quickly added, “that conflict still exists,” as indeed it does. But in view of the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union are the only genuine worldwide powers, such a redirection of emphasis obscures realty. One might well strengthen ties with old and new allies (Israel, for starters) with a view toward the underlying rivalry with America’s true opponent, but never at the expense of becoming distracted from that rivalry. The hackneyed but true observation that we live in a complex world necessitates more clarity of thought, not make-nice muddle-headedness. That isn’t the right measure of morality.

    Speaking of muddle-headedness, the third priority is “to contain U. S.-Soviet competition, particularly through a SALT agreement that would inhibit the arms race.” “This,” Dr. Brzezinski images, “would help generate broader cooperation.” Beyond détente, it seems, Dr. Brzezinski envisions entente. At the risk of disturbing the dreamer, we must ask: cooperating on the basis of what? The extraordinary qualitative differences between the United States and the Soviet Union–moral, economic, social, legal, political, spiritual–simply offer little basis for genuine détente, let alone entente. That isn’t the right measure of morality, either.

    Dr. Brzezinski claims that the Carter Administration “gives more direct attention to those crises in the world which, if left unattended, have the potential for escalating and generating a serious threat to world peace.” Insofar as this refers to the Middle East it is preposterous. One might object to the goals Kissinger wanted, and the means he used in attempting to achieve them; one cannot say he did not give as much attention to this region as Carter and Brzezinski do. Moreover, the United States government is now studiously ignoring the major Soviet-Cuban intervention in the Horn of Africa, satisfying itself with a mild protest or two, hoping that this will be “Russia’s Vietnam.” But Russia helped make America’s Vietnam by massive infusions of aid to the Hanoi government. We can only suppose that the present Administration prefers “developing closer relations” with those newly-emerged countries that the Soviets haven’t bothered to get around to, yet. What is the measure of morality in that?

    Finally, the Administration would “sensitize world public opinion as well as foreign governments to the importance of such new globally significant issues” as nuclear proliferation and arms transfers. Fine: but a pattern appears. Of these five “priorities,” four have to do with comfortable self-preservation and its twin, the fear of violent death. Only the “human rights” issue, with its “certain measure” of morality, adds the leaven of self-sacrifice–or, more modestly, concern for anything other than our bodies–to this half-baked dough. “The central issue,” according to Dr. Brzezinski is that the United States is “again perceived” as “helping to shape a more congenial and decent world.” Congeniality and decency are the sort of pleasant virtues one finds at the cocktail parties Dr. Brzezinski attended when he was an academic. What participants in such gatherings frequently lacks counts more in world politics: the tougher, sharper virtues such as courage and justice that make a statesman less popular but better respected.