August 19, 2007

• Personal Responsibility

  My readers seem to be deserting me.  I don't know if it's because I persist in trying to be a voice crying in the wilderness, politically speaking, or because I've had less time and energy recently to read THEIR blogs.  Precious  few have messaged me and said, "How are you, John?  Are you all right?  I miss you."  Perhaps that's the nature of the internet.  Actually, it's not too different from real life.

  Anyway, there's quite a thought provoking interview of Noam Chomsky at
  http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=105&ItemID=13555.

  
  

  The title of the interview is "Responsibility and War
  Guilt: A Culture-setting Intelligentsia".  Here's an excerpt of the interview:

  …

  
  

  What about degrees of
  responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we
  learn about how one views oneself often in positions of power or
  authority?

   

  You almost never find anyone,
  whether it’s in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management,
  or almost anywhere, who says, ‘I’m really a bad guy, and I just want to do
  things that benefit myself and my friends.’  Almost invariably you get noble
  rhetoric like: ‘We’re working for the benefit of the people.’ The corporate
  executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the
  friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the
  political leader who’s trying to bring freedom and justice to the world—and they
  probably all believe it. I’m not suggesting that they’re lying. There’s an array
  of routine justifications for whatever you’re doing. And it’s easy to believe
  them. It’s very hard to look into the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, that guy looking at
  me is a vicious criminal.’ It’s much easier to say, ‘That guy looking at me is
  really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it’s
  for the benefit of everyone.’

   

  Or you get respected moralists
  like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called ‘the theologian of the
  establishment’. And the reason is because he presented a framework which,
  essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is
  dressed up in long words and so on (it’s what you do if you’re an intellectual).
  But what it came down to is that, ‘Even if you try to do good, evil’s going to
  come out of it; that’s the paradox of grace’. —And that’s wonderful for war
  criminals. ‘We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.’ And it’s
  influential. So, I don’t think that people in decision-making positions are
  lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. —Or people working on more
  advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they’re doing, they’ll say: ‘We’re
  trying to preserve the peace of the world.’ People who are devising military
  strategies that are massacring people, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the cost you
  have to pay for freedom and justice’, and so on.

   

  But, we don’t take those
  sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist
  commissars. They’ll give you the same answers. But, we don’t take that seriously
  because they can
  know what they’re doing if they
  choose to. If they choose not to, that’s their choice. If they choose to believe
  self-satisfying propaganda, that’s their choice. But it doesn’t change the moral
  responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It’s
  very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.

   

  In fact, one of the—maybe the
  most—elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If
  something’s right for me, it’s right for you; if it’s wrong for you, it’s wrong
  for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core
  somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you
  want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush,
  since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to
  Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he’d be hanged. Is it an even conceivable
  possibility? It’s not even discussable. Because we don’t apply to ourselves the
  principles we apply to others.

   

  There’s a lot of talk about
  ‘terror’ and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is
  that considered reprehensible? No, it’s considered highly moral; it’s considered
  self-defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that’s awful, and
  terrible, and so on.

   

  But, to try to rise to the level
  of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral
  discourse is very difficult. Because that means accepting the principle of
  universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that’s
  accepted, either in personal or political life. Very
  rarely.

  • 7:16 am
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