This morning's LATimes carries a piece on the
Israeli-Lebanese conflict that keys into something I was thinking about over the weekend. During a
surprise visit to Beirut, Condoleezza Rice was urged by Lebanese leaders to get the US into action, some kind, any kind.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and other senior officials made it clear to Rice that they wanted an immediate cease-fire and expressed dismay with what they saw as America's implicit endorsement of Israel's continued bombardment of Hezbollah targets around the country, Lebanese officials said.
Rice, meanwhile, is pressing for a "sustainable cease-fire." The Times signals what that means in practice by immediately following her words with a summary of the current fighting. What's going on here is the same pattern that the Bush administration has fallen into in nearly too many examples to list: use the PR apparatus to make it look like you're doing something, while in fact nothing's happening. As
Digby and
Billmon make clear, that inaction has spectacular consequences - which the Administration blithely ignores as it goes on about its business - of doing nothing.
That lack of response is immoral - and deeply puzzling. Survivors of Hurricane Katrina appear on television, begging for food and water. Yet the government...does nothing for long, agonizing days. Iraq has been turning into a bloody clusterf*** for three years, and now finally appears to be unraveling altogether. Yet the government does nothing. And now, two states (including one of the US's closest allies) are tearing each other apart without regard to civilian populations.
And yet the government--
David Welch, assistant U.S. secretary of State, expressed confidence in the day's diplomacy, saying Americans were "now firmly in the picture and leading the diplomacy."
He denied that the talks with Berri were contentious, but acknowledged that Berri was emotional in describing the damage to Lebanon during 13 days of fighting.
Rice made few public comments during the visit to Beirut, and gave no hint of American negotiating goals. But aides said the talks were looking for an agreement that would allow world powers to help the Lebanese government suppress Hezbollah and extend its control into the south of Lebanon, where it now has no presence.
In remarks to reporters in Tel Aviv, Israel's defense minister, Amir Peretz, said Israel was interested in diplomacy only after it achieved its military goals.
"The military moves will create the scope for the diplomatic moves," he said. "We have no intention of allowing the diplomatic agreements to derive from weakness -- no way."
The most popular explanation of this horrific lack of response is that the Administration is torn between the depraved ideologues - the neocons, the Dobsonites, the free-market privateers - and weak realists, whose power only extends to keeping the first group on their chains. Other explanations booted about: they're all waiting for the rapture (I'll deal with that one separately), they're insane, they're sociopaths, they're sociopaths and insane.
There are merits to each claim.
I prefer an explanation that is at once simpler and more complex, though. When Hannah Arendt wrote about Adolf Eichmann's lack of imagination, her proximate target was Eichmann's inability to conceptualize the consequences of his actions. He was a sociopath, in other words, or something close to it. That fits. The true evil of this administration might reside not in its leadership, which may be too insane to understand the difference between right and wrong any longer, but in the nameless, faceless functionaries who carry out the insanity as a matter of duty.
But Arendt was also relying on philosophical language to diagnose a problem in modern morality: if we are all independent moral actors, capable of realizing and doing what is right without interference from external authority, how is that some of us choose to do what is wrong instead? Eichmann thought he was doing the right thing by doing his duty and a little more; he couldn't see a larger picture. Again, this fits. Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld - certainly the neocon cabal - no doubt believe they are doing what is right by thinking strategically. It's just that as someone said of Goebbels, they have both feet planted firmly in the air.
Arendt argues that Eichmann simply lacked the capacity for self-reflection. The moral imagination is the ability to speak "I" to the world, and hear the response of "Thou". Eichmann couldn't do it. His world was "I" and "I."
You know where this is going, don't you? Whether the Bush Administration's inability to think without ideological blinkers is a cause or a symptom of their problems, the result is the same. There is no "Thou" in their world, only those abstractions to be acted upon by their strategies. When an unnamed aide in the Administration derided the"reality-based community", he was putting reality in apposition to religion. He was jeering the possibility of opening the loop the Administration had so firmly welded shut:
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Of course Lebanese civilians don't matter. Neither do Israelis, for that matter. Or Iraqis. Or poor Americans. In this world there is only those who act, and - well, that's pretty much it. If you're not re-making history, you don't really exist. So why would Rice press for an immediate cease-fire? She doesn't really see the civilians, and neither do the people she works for.
The horror in this, as I think Hannah Arendt knew, is not so much what such people can accomplish on their own, but what they can cause others to do. Like supertankers, they create powerful currents in their wakes. They can suck you right under, and keep right on going.
The question for us becomes: what do we do about it? As I've said before, democracy is at a profound loss in dealing with those who can't even conceptualize partners in the process, let alone equal partners. In the Bush Administration, we are presented with a problem that is almost unprecedented in American politics: in a system based in large part on voluntary cooperation, how do you deal with someone who simply won't abide by the rules? (They're at it again with their signing statements, by the way. Take that, you reality-based ninnies!)
The popular suggestion, I suppose, would be to toss them from the game. If anyone can come up with articles of impeachment that will stick and a Congress that will enact them, I'm good on that.
But as good as that option feels, it's not consistent with the diagnosis I've outlined above. Nor is it consistent with my beliefs, in some ways. The challenge of the moral imagination and the challenge of the gospel as I understand it are the same here: to think outside the box. We are free people: not free from tyranny, but free for the capacity to imagine a different world.
Casting W. and his crew into the outer darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth sounds very appealing. Mighty fine, in fact. But if what we accomplish is to remove him and his followers from the list of those to whom we must respond, what exactly have we accomplished? Short-term relief, and the problem is still there.
Better, I think, to start to think long-term while the shorter run plays out. How is it possible to structure the game system to lessen the chance that we come to this awful pass again? Who is not at the table now that ought to be? What, exactly, would we want the world to look like when we are done? This will no doubt strike some as interminable day-dreaming. But there's nothing to say that this kind of imaginative work can't go on while other, more immediate responses are put into action. And the fact of the matter is that regardless of what action we take, others with less ability to see the Other will continue to take their own. To my mind, that takes imagination out of the realm of dreaming and into that of moral imperative.