Pundit Don't Preach

Against moralism in political commentary.

Thinking in terms of right and wrong may cloud your grasp of politics. So argues our friend David Polansky, who was last on the podcast to explain why the modern nation-state messed everything up. Today, he explains why excessive moralizing is messing up our understanding of politics and history. Enjoy!

— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor

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It has become a truism to say that “everything is political.” But being obsessed with politics is not the same thing as being good at thinking politically. It is striking, in fact, how many political discussions are conducted in essentially judicial language. Americans too often think that the purpose of political observation is to discern rightness or fairness, such that politics itself basically cashes out as applied morality and law. The great diplomat George Kennan once criticized the American tendency to view international relations in legal and moral terms. This tendency, he wrote, “runs like a red skein through our foreign policy.” That red skein has since gone global. 

Recently, the liberal writer Matthew Yglesias noted how the affective connection many Palestinians have toward the idea of the Nakba, while understandable, may in fact be an obstacle to achieving a better settlement. To which the socialist editor Nathan Robinson retorted that their desire to return to their familial homes is perfectly legitimate, particularly given the historic longing for Israel among diaspora Jews. Now this is a pretty clear instance of trying to adjudicate competing claims in a legalistic way that does little for anyone in political terms. Because the question is not whether the Palestinians or anyone else have a “right” to their revanchism (why wouldn’t they?), but whether it has proven good or useful for them to maintain it in this way.

Assuming we could answer such a question, the trouble is that it presupposes a certain dubious position of objectivity on our part. It assumes that it is possible for America to take a disinterested stance toward geopolitical conflicts. “Disinterested” is almost always now used to mean “uninterested,” as in: not engaged by something. But “disinterested” in fact refers to the other meaning of “interest” — the one having to do with the possibility of advantage or gain.

This latter meaning is an important and frequently desirable criterion at many levels of activity. We would generally prefer that, e.g., NBA referees be disinterested. And of course, impartiality is a fundamental requirement in judicial affairs. Judges are obliged to recuse themselves from hearing certain cases; jurors are similarly expected to disclose conflicts of interest, and the process of voir dire allows the opposing counsels to further screen for potential prejudices. Tacitus introduced his history of the early Roman Empire by declaring his intention to write sine ira et studio — without anger or fondness. It is no accident that the personification of justice is routinely depicted as blind in the associated iconography.

The thing is, where world politics is concerned, disinterest is not really an option. American hegemony has contributed to the illusion that we can operate above the system — but it might be noted that powerlessness has had similar effects on many Europeans. Nonetheless, we are all players in the game, not referees (and it is certainly not lost on other states that America is less than objective in its dealings). We inevitably start from a position of involvement in the world, which means we have existing interests, such that we can not meaningfully ask what is right, without adding right for whom? Every country enjoys — to greater or lesser extent — a given geographical situation, natural resources, industries, histories with neighboring or distant counties, and so on, and all of these inevitably condition its foreign goals. To suggest otherwise at best represents a kind of unreal perspective — what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called the “view from nowhere.” 

The point here is really not to insist that realpolitik must prevail or that politics exists in some sort of dimension beyond good and evil. The point is rather that the ethos of political action points toward responsibility with an eye to outcomes rather than justice as such. Indeed, it may be that adhering too closely to a suprapolitical morality entails the surrender of political responsibility. Fiat justitia, pereat mundus — let justice be done, though the world perish — is not in the end a usable guide to political practice.

Thus, to insist that people have a right to something is not the same as saying they have the capacity for it — much less that you are going to bear the obligation of providing them with that capacity. Many stateless peoples in the world today arguably have a right to a state (or at least as much right as plenty of peoples with states). What then?

The Hungarians, for example, had every right in the world to revolt against their Soviet puppet government in 1956, but encouraging them to rise up with little chance of success (as we did) was not the height of political responsibility — much as the present rhetoric around our support for Ukraine focuses too much upon what they deserve rather than what is achievable and what cost. Conversely, such discussions have a way of emphasizing whether Russia’s security claims are legitimate in principle rather than whether they might be satisfied in practice with less loss of life.

Or consider another case with current relevance — and one that has lately re-emerged as a model due to its parallels with the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict: South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement took the view that the removal of a wicked regime was a sufficient goal in itself, and in its absence a healthy majoritarian civil society would naturally flower (in this their outlook was oddly similar to the neoconservative view of Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s removal). Indeed, their indifference to the actual outcome of their preferred policies has been so total that most liberals are not even aware of the political and economic conditions that have prevailed in South Africa over the past three decades, such that they now routinely (if dubiously) uphold it as an example for other countries to follow.

Now this is very much not a defense of apartheid, which was an ugly and morally corrupting system (just as the West Bank settlement project has inarguably corrupted the Israeli state). Rather, I am pointing out that merely opposing — and even ending — apartheid rule was not enough. The elimination of a particular evil does not exhaust the obligations of political responsibility, particularly when it leads to other evils.

The irony here is that I am ultimately making an ethical argument — that in applying a mistaken rubric for political action the judicially-minded types risk behaving unethically. But I will conclude with a pragmatic claim as well: that while power and security can insulate us from the consequences of a great many of our decisions (leaving those elsewhere to pay the price), the bill inevitably comes due for those who treat global politics as a gigantic courtroom. And these habits of mind are I suspect ultimately inimical to the prudent management of America’s global interests over the long term.

In any case, doing so successfully does not require the suspension of judgment altogether but rather the application of phronetic rather than legal judgment. Phronēsis means a kind of practical wisdom by which we assess specific cases in order to choose the correct action. And when it comes to international politics, precisely because we often deal with extreme cases operating at the (literal) boundaries of political life, they do not readily admit to clear legal authority —both in the sense that there is no recognized common government to appeal to, and because written law itself is a limited guide.

Thucydides, in his description of the Athenian statesman Themistocles, gives perhaps the best account of what phronēsis entails: “he was at once the best judge in those sudden crises which admit of little or of no deliberation, and the best prophet of the future, even to its most distant possibilities.”

Now, this is an extreme instance, and beyond this it is probably not reasonable to expect the typical observer to possess great prudence in political matters. But this is exactly the point: the education and native capacity of the average person is limited, especially where complex and distant events are concerned. And it is so much more unreasonable to expect that person to be able to formulate considered judgments about those events, though the combination of social media and a 24-hour news cycle have produced both a false sense of proximity and an obligation to opine on an impossible volume of global developments. 

The result of this excess of news coverage, combined with an impulsive desire to form opinions, is that we fall back on morally satisfying but unsubstantial legalistic-moralistic judgments on everything that passes under the sun. 

My point is not that we should all somehow lever up to become little Themistocleses. But we could do worse than to attempt to think more politically, rather than morally or legalistically. To ask not “What is right or wrong in some cosmic sense?” but, following Raymond Aron, “What would I do in the minister’s place?” 

Barring that, we should work to restrict our horizons to those where our judgments may be informed by something solid and real. What this usually means is: LOG OFF.

See also:

The Modern Nation Messed Everything Up

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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