On The Margins

Saturday December 18, 2004

[ Society ] Geof Stone on Patriotism and Loss

As a guest blogger on Lawrence Lessig's weblog, historian Geof Stone writes about a question on loss and patriotism posed to him on O'Reilly's program. I added my own thoughts in a comment on his note, which I reproduce here:

I think what your story demonstrates is the general and serious moral decay in the U.S. This is due, primarily, to ignorance, lack of proper moral measure and guidance, and a general moral bewilderment. It does not help, that your side, which opposes aggressive wars waged in its name, argues primarily from utilitraian perspective. (For O'Reilly, it seems, the death of Iraqi women and children has never been an issue. This is how utilitarianism can be stretched.) I admire your frankness on the show, as you've described it here. You may have wanted to argue the question with him some more from your position that the war was "unjust" and its avowed intentions only propaganda for a deeply amoral act. What does it mean to "lose"? What does it mean to be "patriotic"? Unless those two terms have been defined, I'm not sure there's any escaping from the claws of O'Reilly on this. On one aspect of your argument, you took the utilitarian approach, namely if it means less people killed, then "loss" is O.K. What if no people are killed on the U.S. side, but there are thousands and thousands of deaths on the Iraqi side, whether the U.S. "loses" or "wins"? (In either case, one can argue that from a moral perspective the U.S. has already lost the war.) This is a case where the utilitarian argument will not work and it is the place where O'Reilly came after you. As I said earlier, I think what needs to be defended is the argument that the war, in its core, is unjust, and not becasue of some pacifist reasoning but because of its great moral cost and the lives of the innocent lost, for dubious, if not totally evil, purposes, even after victory was declared and Iraq fully invaded. (The utter destruction, from air and land, of Fallujah (the city of masjids), an urban area in an already occupied land, serves simply as a stark reminder of the moral quality of this war. Only in April, the occupying forces had managed to kill 800 people in 3 days of invasion from air and land, 600 of them women and children, according to hospital reports from Fallujah. In the most recent invasion, the first building occupied was the hospital. )

2004-12-18 15:10:48.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.