Moral Clarity in a Time of War

First Things ^ | 01/2003 | George Weigel

[AncientAirs]

In one of last year’s most celebrated books, Warrior Politics, veteran foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan suggested that only a “pagan ethos” can provide us with the kind of leadership capable of safely traversing the global disorder of the twenty–first century. Kaplan’s “pagan ethos” has several interlocking parts. It is shaped by a tragic sense of life, one that recognizes the ubiquity, indeed inevitability, of conflict. It teaches a heroic concept of history: fate is not all, and wise statecraft can lead to better futures. It promotes a realistic appreciation of the boundaries of the possible. It celebrates patriotism as a virtue. And it is shaped by a grim determination to avoid “moralism,” which Kaplan (following Machiavelli, the Chinese sage Sun–Tzu, and Max Weber) identifies with a morality of intentions, oblivious to the peril of unintended or unanticipated consequences. For Kaplan, exemplars of this “pagan ethos” in the past century include Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Reading Warrior Politics, and reflecting on the concept of morality that informs it, reminded me of an old story related by Father John Courtney Murray, S.J. During the Korean War, the proudly Protestant Henry Luce, son of China missionaries, found himself confused by the debate over “morality and foreign policy” that Harry Truman’s “police action” had stirred up. What, Luce asked Fr. Murray, did foreign policy have to do with the Sermon on the Mount? “What,” Fr. Murray replied, “makes you think that morality is identical with the Sermon on the Mount”? Kaplan, a contemporary exponent of foreign policy realism, seems to share Henry Luce’s misimpression that in the classic tradition of the West the moral life is reducible to the ethics of personal probity and interpersonal relationships, the implication being that issues of statecraft exist somewhere “outside” the moral universe. The just war tradition takes a very different view.

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0301/articles/weigel.html

[lainde]

Bttt...Thanks for a very thoughtful article.

[docmcb]

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