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Dewey/Bourne and Burke/McDaniel ...

Too briefly, I mentioned the discussion between Tim Burke and Caleb McDaniel yesterday. It's the Cliopatriarchs at our best. [ed.: Notice how I neatly claim their work as "ours." When they perform badly, I won't do that.] Perhaps it is best read as Burke, "Soldiering On," and McDaniel in comments, McDaniel, "Some Doubts," and comments, and Burke, "Violence and Agency," and comments. Beyond the comments at each post, they draw attention from The Elfin Ethicist, Newsrack Blog, and verbum ipsum.

This is an important discussion, reminding me in moments of that between John Dewey and Randolph Bourne when the United States entered World War I. If you've not read Bourne's "War is the Health of the State," do so. Even though left unfinished at Bourne's tragic death in 1918, it is a major document in American intellectual history. I am never so close to my libertarian friends, as when I read Bourne. He makes me want to dissociate myself from the war machine that feeds the "health of the state" and wonder if Burke's apparent denial of a right of divorce from modernity means that I must inevitably succumb to the war machine that feeds national maws. One important difference between the Burke/McDaniel discussion and the Dewey/Bourne discussion is that the latter responded to conventional warfare between states, whereas Burke/McDaniel are confronted by a "war on terrorism," in which, whatever the propaganda machine may tell you at any given moment, the enemy is not embodied in a state. In the end, however, I'm not sure that the difference is crucial to the terms of the argument.

In an odd sort of way, Burke's eloquent conclusion --

As a technology of modern power, violence has done all sorts of things. Whatever else it is, it is not mere or simple futility or destruction. Name me a thing you like about the contemporary world and I'll wager that violence–state violence, collective violence, individual violence–played a generative role in producing it.

– only confirms McDaniel's skepticism:

Have three years of war solved the difficulties of our time? Manifestly, no. Have three millennia of war brought us closer to peace? Will committing acts of violence that will be displayed on television screens in our enemies' homes help prevent these horrible scenes from being displayed on our television screens? Not if our enemies are anything like us, and they are.

As Burke says, only the abolition of our enemies puts an end to it. Somehow, I doubt they will be "abolished". All the violent power of modernity hasn't even yet abolished slavery. Burke's confirmation of McDaniel's conclusion suggests that we are condemned to march toward progress through an endlessly violent future. That makes me shudder. It isn't what we wanted for either our children or the children of our enemies.

I started to say, "But, Tim, what of the civil rights movement? I like much of what it achieved – non-violently." And he could rightly answer me that my non-violent comrades often went armed, that much of its achievement was due to the public enactment of violence – sometimes intentionally displayed for a national audience in television coverage of the confrontations in Birmingham and Selma, for example – and that its achievements were confirmed by the coercive power of the state. In a sense, the problem is that non-violence is symmetrically dependent on violence. We apparently have to know war in order to recognize peace.

Behind Randolph Bourne's remarkable essay, "War is the Health of the State," lay William James widely influential pre-World War I essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War." Like Burke, James recognized that state warfare was not a wholly negative thing. It summoned citizens to make noble sacrifices, for example. One of the most disturbing things about the Bush administration's conduct of the "war on terror" is the maldistribution of sacrifice. Why have my taxes not been raised? Why do our politicians not rise to a re-enactment of the draft? Short of those two things, I remain unconvinced that this administration and this nation have the courage for this war. Unlike Burke, however, James did not attribute all the blessings of modernity to the generative power of violence. The challenge of the twentieth century, he argued, was to develop a non-violent "moral equivalent of war" that summoned men and women to ennobling, self-sacrificial service to others. As McDaniel suggests, the twentieth century failed rather badly at it. There were some paltry efforts at it, like the Peace Corps, but the twentieth century studied war like no other century in human history. I want something other than that for our children – both our enemies' children and our own.

Thanks to wood s lot for the reminder. He also recommends: Christopher Phelps, "Bourne Yet Again: Errors of Genealogy," New Politics, Summer 1998.

Posted on Saturday, July 9, 2005 at 3:57 AM | Comments (21) | Return

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