Victor Davis Hanson: The Look Back – Why are we split over the war since 9-11?

Two views are emerging about our post-September-11 world. One is angry, but also therapeutic — and most often embraced by the Left. I think it goes roughly like this. Removing the Taliban in our initial rage might have for a moment seemed necessary, but things now in retrospect have proved not much better than before in Afghanistan and might well get worse. There was no need for the Iraqi campaign. Thus the Europeans and moderate Arabs were right that chaos would result and terrorists multiply in its bitter aftermath. Sharon has only antagonized the Palestinians, set back the peace-process, and made America’s war far more difficult. Mr. Bush’s unilateral rhetoric and vainglorious posture have needlessly offended the Europeans, who now have recently developed a real dislike of the United States and likewise complicated our task.

Here at home the Patriot Act and certain dangerous new jurisprudence are greater concerns than any prior inability of rounding up sleeper cells. No wonder almost every day an Al Gore, Howard Dean, or Ted Kennedy is screaming or yelling about something. It doesn’t feel good to have so much money, education, and sophistication and still not be able to stop this dangerous course of events — that are the “worst ever,” “unprecedented,” and “a new low” in American history.

The other interpretation is somewhat tragic, largely upbeat about our recent accomplishments, and held by those on the more conservative side. Given the bleak options after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the prior murderous history of Afghanistan, and the depressing landscape of the Middle East, the past three years are nothing short of miraculous: Taliban gone; constitutional government emerging; and a good man like Karzai trying to end fundamentalist terror. Saddam, his sons, and Iraqi genocide are now over with. And despite the daily turmoil, Iraq is likewise inching toward some type of consensual government in less time than was true of a more sophisticated postwar Japan or Germany. There is a good chance that the Israelis will leave Gaza; suicide bombing is vastly reduced; a new fence will give both sides a breather until — and if — a legitimate Palestine government emerges to negotiate final borders.

As far as our “allies” go, Mr. Bush simply tore off the scab of the preexisting wound of Europe-American relations, in which the subsidized protection offered by the United States in the post-Cold War had far earlier led to an array of conflicting passions on the continent, arising out of an increasingly anti-democratic EU, envy, dependency, and resentment. In America proper — without much erosion of our daily ease and freedoms — we have rounded up scores of terrorists and thus so far avoided another mass murder. Consequently, conservatives are more likely to speak in calm tones than either scream for resignations or in wild-eyed fashion cite conspiracies that are destroying America.

How to adjudicate these two conflicting views of the present situation? We cannot. Why so?

When some of us see suicide bombers we do not surmise that we are up against a new unstoppable phenomenon arising out of poverty, oppression, and American exploitation, but think back to what Kitchener did with the Mahdists and our own grandfathers with the Kamikazes. When we conjure up Afghanistan and Iraq, we factor in thousands of miles in distance, 30 years of mass murder, the nature of the Middle East, and thus can easily imagine much worse might have occurred than what has transpired. We don’t conclude that 9-11 was an accident or something caused by an overweening US, but inevitable given our appeasement of a past quarter century.

Which view do most Americans embrace—the tragic or therapeutic vision? Probably neither. Instead the majority just wishes things to go well and usually sides with those who can offer them the most reassurance in the present danger. Still, this should be an interesting election, the most ideologically clear-cut choice of candidates that we have seen since 1932 or 1968. Gloomy, frustrated utopians and oddly upbeat optimistic pragmatists will each offer the American public widely different views of Iraq—and therein of ourselves as well.

There's big difference between utopian thought and optimism. It's odd and fun to see the big hearted role served by Bush and the Republicans.

Read this yesterday, can't remember where.

A simplistic reading of your "tragic" versus "therapeutic" views could be read (and I suspect will probably often be read) as "classical-Judeo-Christian" on the one hand and "Enlightenment-modern liberalism" on the other hand. This reading is plausible based on the traditional view of the Enlightenment as holding some sort of 'idea of progress' as inevitable, human nature as perfectible, and a Rousseauean view of the state of nature. This contrasts, of course, with what I understand to be classical views of human nature (e.g. stoicism) and, of course, the traditional Judeo-Christian Biblical view that man is inherently sinful (since the Fall unless one is a supralapsarian), and human nature corrupt and fixed.

Where the difficulty comes in is that while the original notions of American exceptionalism come from the original Calvinist settlers in New England, by the time of the revolution and the founding of the republic, the vast majority of the founders were not religious in that original sense, but men of their time, conversant with the ideas of the Enlightenment and couching their views of a republic and American exceptionalism in terms of a devotion to liberty that is inconsistent with traditional Christian, and certainly strict Protestant interpretations of sin and human nature. And, certainly, the greatest proponents of American exceptionalism in the 19th century came not from the religious right, as it were, but from the more liberal Protestants. It was religion in Europe, as well as secular tyranny, that was seen as the problem confronting the spread of liberty. American exceptionalism was manifested in a unique combination of an enlightened liberty that encouraged science and commerce and accepted a role for religion. Remember, in the 18th and 19th centuries, only a small portion of the American population, especially in frontier areas, was "churched".

How to understand this? The distinction you do not make, I think, is between the English-Scottish Enlightenment tradition (taken in a very broad sense as to include both Hobbes and Locke as well as the more traditional Enlightenment figures such as Hume, Dugald Stewart and Adam Smith, and possibly to include Kant who coined the term 'enlightenment') and the Continental, primarily French, Enlightenment which gave us Rousseau as well as Voltaire, Diderot, Bayle, Pascal, deMandeville, etc.

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment is notable for never having never entirely abandoned the less than sanguine view of human nature so well described by Hobbes, and the English and Scottish thinkers never seemed to subscribe to the more extreme forms of the idea of progress current on the continent. At most, in them you see hope that reason can be employed to govern or check -- not replace -- the passions inherent in man, and the notion, therefore, that progress is possible. Not that human nature is perfectible, but that individual human beings, using reason, can be better. Which, consistent with the Anglo-Saxon systematic view of the building of knowledge, could (not necessarily would) make society better. This, of course, is consistent with the ideas one finds in the Founders, with American exceptionalism, and with the rise of modern science -- which would not have been possible in a world dominated the earlier Calvinist views.

On the continent, of course the hand of religion -- mostly in the form of ultramontane Catholicism, but often in the form of rigid state Protestantism as well -- was heavier than in England and Scotland. The struggles in French thought from the 17th into the 18th centuries ahs been well described by Georges Hazard in his The Crisis of the European Mind 1685-1715. I am particularly fond of his bon mot that sums the revolution in thought between the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the death of Louis XIV nicely: (from memory so I may be a bit off) "it is as if the average educated Frenchman went to bed thinking like Bossuet and woke up thinking like Voltaire."

Whatever the causes, it was on the continent that the more extreme version of the Enlightenment grew, the one that the right caricatures, if but slightly. [Although, I must say, I studied the Enlightenment with Leonard Marsak, a Francophile who did original work on deMandeville, at UC Santa Barbara in the '70s, and Leonard took the view that even the French enlightenment was not nearly so wedded to the idea of progress as inevitable or the perfectibility of human nature as generally believed even in scholarly circles or as the subsequent French positivists and socialists - think Comte -and later Marxists] And, it was in France the revolution became the caricature of the Enlightenment that so repulsed Burke, with its schemes to perfect mankind. French thought, when it has not been ultramontane (deMaistre), in the 19th century tended to be based on this extreme view of the Enlightenment, whether in the socialists or anarchists. Hegel himself was a conservative, but his philosophy, especially his philosophy of history, seems to me based on the more extreme view of the idea of progress as eschatology. And, of course, Marx comes out of both Rousseau and left Hegelianism.

Someone (Palmer? Peter Gay? ) once described the United States as the Enlightenment's program in practice. Properly understood as the English and Scottish Enlightenment, I think this is true. Of course, then, the communist states of the 20th century represent Marxism's program in practice and the results have been disastrous and tragic. And, of course, their excesses can be tied fairly directly to the underlying view of human nature as malleable and perfectible. Ironic.

The "therapeutic" worldview you describe really reflects a worldview based on Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. This reflects the success of the old left in the universities from the '30s through the '60s, as well as the success of the New Left who were our contemporaries in graduate school and who have mostly filled the ranks of the professoriat since.

I think the tensions in what is now conservatism today very much reflect the fact that those whose views are "liberal" in the same sense as the Founders, the classical liberals if you will, are very much on the defensive, from both the neo-Marxist left and the more fundamentalist religious right.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.