Freddie summons his inner Kennan:

This is going to necessarily depend a lot on perspective, of course, but I think a huge amount of our foreign policy vision is predicated on assumptions that are radical; our people, meanwhile, don’t understand their radicalism.

Kennan wrote something similar in Russia Leaves the War, quoted by Lukacs in his biography of Kennan, referring to “that curious law which so often makes Americans, inveterately conservative at home, the partisans of radical change everywhere else.” Given his domestic interests, this “law” must annoy Freddie even more than it annoys me, but Freddie is getting at the same truth in his remarks above. This is related to something else that Lukacs observed about Kennan:

Unlike many Americans, George Kennan did not believe that the United States was A Chosen Nation of God, that its people were a Chosen People, or even the Last Best Hope of Mankind; but he believed that there is something unique in the history of every nation, including his own; and that the Cold War, though it had not been started by the United States, revealed some of the unhappy traits of the American mind”: a willful ignorance beneath which there was something worse, a kind of national self-adulation.

The drive for radical change everywhere else–this is a broader, but more accurate, description of what I was trying to say when I referred to pro-invasion arguments that took for granted that “our government essentially has the right to shape and dominate the politics of other parts of the world and to use force to quash resistance to its efforts.” We seek this radical change partly because we do not really understand the world and want to make it more like ourselves, and partly because it gives us an occasion to celebrate ourselves. Both are ultimately a function of pride, but this is then formalized into an entire mythology, capped off by tales of the importance of Pax Americana. The war in Iraq has been a particularly blunt, cruel application of this pursuit of radical change, but it is the pursuit of such change that led Wilson to send our men into the slaughterhouse of WWI, inspired the creation of the Great Society on the Mekong and which has propelled the Second Inaugural’s ideas of American-led global democratic revolution. Obama referred to the “mindset that led to war” in his early primary speeches on Iraq. That mindset is that the world is ours to do with as we please, and anyone who says differently is aligned with malign forces that wish us ill. This radical change is necessarily violent and aimed at the destruction or dramatic reorganization of other polities. Boundaries will be redrawn as we wish (e.g., Kosovo), regimes will be overthrown, and foreign populations will be thrown into upheaval, and it will be an article of faith that everyone affected (except perhaps the dead) are better off. The striking thing is that this is considered to be well within the bounds of normal, respectable, sane discourse, and critiques of these views are considered to be ramblings of a wild and woolly-minded fringe.

Freddie’s remarks here are right on target:

What Americans consider moderation in foreign policy, in comparison with other countries and the history of our country and others, is wildly militaristic, expansionistic and aggressive.

If Bacevich’s thesis in The Limits of Power is correct, and I think it is, this is becoming more the case as time goes on (this is related to the problems of autonomy and consumption discussed in earlier posts today):

The collective capacity of our domestic political economy to satisfy those appetites has not kept pace with demand. As a result, sustaining our pursuit of life, liberty and happiness at home requires increasingly that Americans look beyond our borders. Whether the issue at hand is oil, credit, or the availability of cheap consumer goods, we expect the world to accommodate the American way of life.

The resulting sense of entitlement has great implications for foreign policy. Simply put, as the American appetite for freedom has grown, so too has our penchant for empire. The connection between these two tendencies is a causal one. In an earlier age, Americans saw empire as the antithesis of freedom. Today, as illustrated above all by the Bush administration’s efforts to dominate the energy-rich Persian Gulf, empire has seemingly become a prerequisite of freedom.

I would stress that this only seems to be the case, and that it is illusory, because it remains true that empire and liberty are and always will be incompatible. The former eats and annihilates the latter, substituting for it in our own time autonomy, comfort and indulgence. Another part of Bacevich’s thesis is that autonomy erodes our understanding of citizenship and makes the project of empire unsustainable in the long term, but it is in the nature of such projects that they can live long beyond the time when they should have faded away.

A host of people have responded negatively to Rod’s latest column, particularly this part:

Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom. Look around you: Americans have been poor stewards of our economic liberty, owing to cultural values that celebrate unfettered materialism. Our families and communities have fragmented, in part because we have embraced an ethic of extreme individualism. Climate change and a peak in oil production threaten our future because we have been irresponsible caretakers of the natural world and its resources. At best, the religious right stood ineffectively against these trends. At worst, we preached them, mistaking consumerism for conservatism.

All political problems, traditional conservatism teaches, are ultimately religious problems because they result from disordered souls. In the era now dawning, Americans will learn again to live within limits — and together.

It is remarkable how vehemently some conservatives have reacted against this passage. Do any of them really disagree that “Americans have been poor stewards of our economic liberty, owing to cultural values that celebrate unfettered materialism”? Would they really deny that we have a culture that celebrates unfettered materialism? They might reasonably deny that they personally celebrate unfettered materialism, but Rod was speaking generally. Instead of taking seriously an exhortation to self-criticism and reflection, Rod’s critics have, as usual, resorted to whining.

Andrew Stuttaford recited some standard libertarian lines and observed that Tory patricians from the 19th century would have had a good laugh at this. Yes, when I want reliable advice on moral reasoning Victorian Tories are certainly among my first choices for role models. In a post dubbing the first paragraph above to be the worst of the day, Robert Stacy McCain declared that he was not to blame for any of the problems in question, so apparently there’s no problem. Our secular friends were predictably mortified and invoked Jeffrey Hart, but no doubt they will object strenuously to any suggestion that they take moral and cultural problems less seriously than their religious counterparts.

Let’s imagine for a moment that Rod did not use the word soul here, but said instead that “all political problems are ultimately ethical problems because they result from disordered wills.” As far as religious conservatives are concerned, that is what he said, because how one’s will is directed is a matter of the soul’s health and its orientation toward or away from the Good, which is to say God. Consider next that since antiquity the right-ordering of the soul was taken as essential for rightly ordering the polis, and for the entire history of Christianity it has been a fundamental spiritual teaching of the Church that a well-ordered soul keeps its passions and appetites in check. Apparently all of this is supposed to count for nothing, because it intrudes on individual autonomy. That autonomy is really what Rod is critiquing, and the freedom of this autonomy is mainly the freedom of appetite and preference, which individualists mistake for genuine freedom.

I am going to assume that Rod’s critics all believe that men should avoid excess, practice moderation and cultivate restraint–unless, of course, that is all together too “Buddhist” for McCain–and that failure to do so will lead to the formation of vicious, self-destructive habits and actions not in accordance with natural law. This will in turn have deleterious effects on social and political order, and will ultimately work to the detriment of political liberty as appetites that are not held in check from within will be restrained from without. If self-control weakens or fails and natural institutions, such as the family and community, splinter, public authority will take up the slack and increase its power. When a culture of acquisition and consumption financed by vast sums of debt begins to implode, public authority intervenes again to impose regulation (or, in many cases, over-regulation) where license previously prevailed.

We have been living in a culture that encourages the deferral of responsibility, and to one degree or another most of us have participated in it, and this is inconsistent with sustaining ordered liberty. Those who have not participated in this culture, or have done so only a little, should be the least offended by what Rod is saying, because his words are not directed at them. To the extent that we are all paying the price for an era of profligacy, what he says is relevant for all of us.

As you all probably know by now, there is a new blog for secular conservatives called Secular Right. That’s fine as far as it goes, but at the same time I don’t quite see the point. If the point is to say that non-believers and secular people can be conservatives, too, that seems to be something in no need of demonstration or argument. As I have noted before, and I will say again, Russell Kirk could identify conservatism in Santayana, and we might find many other skeptics and secularists as we look back. Having granted that, one would like to see some of these secular conservatives acknowledge more often that respect for a transcendent moral order is an integral part of the conservative mind and some recognition that such an order would have to have been established by God. If the point of the project is to say that modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary, I will have to laugh, because here our secular friends will have then embraced a popular myth that does not have much in the way of evidence to support it. If it is simply to argue for inclusion among other conservatives, I haven’t seen many efforts to cast them or keep them out.

I will repeat what I said a couple years ago when I was objecting to the fad of skeptical and secular conservatives lamenting the tremendous power of religious conservatism and alleged over-reliance on revealed religion:

Of course, it’s true that people of conservative temperament need not have any religion, and it’s also true that conservatism has never strictly been tied to a particular set of religious claims. As a modern and post-Revolutionary phenomenon, conservatives have often eschewed or transcended confessional labels. The good, old days of the Holy Alliance were wonderfully ecumenical and not tied to any particular orthodoxy. Some even say that one of the chief characteristics of conservatism is that it is a kind of social and political thought that need not have much to do with orthodoxy, and a brief glance over The Conservative Mind would seem to confirm that with a parade of a number of theologically latitudinarian and non-religious gentlemen (Paul Elmer More and Santayana being the ones that leap to mind immediately). Bolingbroke was a forerunner of the skeptical conservative, and Humean skepticism is sometimes considered a source of British conservative thought. It has been to my own dismay that the general acquaintance of most high conservative thought with the substance of theology has been limited at best, and it is partly for that reason that I proposed reimagining conservatism in terms of the patristic thought of our Christian tradition.

But the typical conservative assumption that man is fallible and not perfectible by human means is tied inextricably to the Christian understanding of the Fall. The skeptical man will say that this is not necessarily so, and that any fool can see that man is fallible without recourse to a doctrine of ancestral sin. But that doctrine is the only thing that makes sense of the predicament of man that preserves the possibility of true meaning. With the Fall, there is also Redemption. With mere fallibility, there is no remedy and so, ultimately, no hope in this world or the next. Further, the detachment of conservative thought from the Christian roots that nourished it in the first place is both a losing proposition and an abandonment of a sizeable part of the patrimony we have received from our fathers. Put simply, without a theological vision (and our tradition points us towards the theological vision of our civilisation’s Faith) conservatives have no meaningful vision of the good life and can only cavil and harumph at liberal, meliorist plans on the grounds of their impracticability rather than for their fundamental spiritual error and hubris. Without such a vision of consecrated order, ordained by God, conservatism becomes obsessed entirely with what is immanent and cannot form any coherent statements about who man is or what his purpose is supposed to be.

If secular conservatives have “pride in Western Civilization,” as Derbyshire puts it, they cannot very well ignore or deride as nonsense the central religious inspiration of that entire civilization, which is Christianity. Are they obliged to accept revealed truths? No, but they can and should pay due respect to the revelation that animated Western societies for most of their history and the traditions of our ancestors that have been tested over time and which have endured to become established customs. If all they are asking for is to “play in the band,” as Derbyshire says, no one is telling them that they cannot.

I wasn’t aware of this but now that I am, the Dish will refer to Mumbai by its previous name. ~Sullivan

This is, if anything, even sillier than complaining about using the name Myanmar. Contra Hitchens, Myanmar is not a “fake” name. It is another name for Burma in Burmese, used when referring to the country in writing, and the fact that it was adopted as the official name by a military junta should not necessarily make it the “wrong” name. The name Bombay was itself the invention of the Portugese that caught on and became institutionalized in the colonial period, and the city has been called Mumbai by speakers of some dialects for quite a while. As Hitchens’ own colleague Chris Beam at Slate wrote a couple years ago:

Speakers of Marathi and Gujarati, the local languages, have always called the city Mumbai.

So really all one is doing by refusing to use the new name is to privilege other dialects over Marathi and Gujarati. Now that‘s a powerful statement.

What is sillier still is to act as if refusing to use Myanmar matters. You are not freeing one dissident or aiding one protester against the junta by doing this; it is a show of solidarity that doesn’t even express solidarity, but simply makes you feel as if you have taken a stand when all you are doing is continuing a habit. The same goes double for Mumbai. You are not making the BJP weaker by your refusal; Shiv Sena is not going to disband out of fear of your mighty refusal. No one is obliged to use the new names, of course, and many don’t, but could we at least not pretend that by refusing the new name we are doing anything meaningful?

Presumably Istanbul should remain Istanbul by Hitchens’ standards, since it was officially renamed by a secularist, despite the rupture with the city’s past the newer official name represents. The change was a symbolic break with the Ottomans, but simply formalized a colloquial name of the city, which is similar to what happened in India. Should we all go back to calling a certain famous city on the Volga Tsaritsyn rather than the neutral Volgograd to show that we are calling it by its “right” name? I doubt Hitchens’ great scruples over using “the right name” would apply here, nor would they have applied to any of dozens of Eurasian cities previously renamed for various thugs and partisans of Hitchens’ political persuasion.

Update: A Mumbai local sets Andrew straight.

I’ll confess that I have no idea what this means, but if anyone needs a comic playwright I believe Noah Millman is available.

I’m sure the question of India and Pakistan will be at the top of Obama’s agenda; and, obviously, the issues of Afghanistan and the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran and North Korea–which he did mention–do involve Pakistan. But you have to imagine that another president-elect would have used his first big national security press conference to jump all over the national security issue currently getting the most headlines. ~Jason Zengerle

Zengerle also suggests that Obama neglected to say much about India and Pakistan out of a desire to be circumspect and non-dramatic. There may be some of that, but I think the explanation is slightly different. Having already seen the very negative Indian reaction to his Kashmir comments and his perceived “snub” of PM Singh, Obama probably wanted to avoid saying anything that might add to the already volatile situation. There is some similarity to his initial response to the war in Georgia, but he quickly adjusted his stance on that war to full-throated denunciation of Russia. There is already a great deal of suspicion about Obama’s intentions in India, which means that he probably thought it better to say nothing than to risk another controversy so soon and on the heels of a major terrorist attack. Had he re-stated his interest in mediating the Kashmir dispute in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, this would have gone down even more poorly in New Delhi than it did in recent months. As it is, what little he has said about possible Indian responses to the attacks is being interpreted in some Indian media as something like a green light for Indian retaliatory strikes inside Pakistan.

Peter Suderman declares his intention to pan Slumdog Millionaire, and Freddie says that he distrusts the growing consensus of admiration for the film. Having seen Slumdog this past Saturday, I found it thoroughly enjoyable, but you shouldn’t let anyone persuade you that it is a masterpiece. This is not normally my reaction to movies that I enjoyed as much as this one–I tend to suspend my critical faculties and indulge in the most over-the-top praise–but it’s not quite that good. It is very much worth seeing and certainly the best thing by Boyle I have seen, but comparisons with Serendipity, albeit a much grittier version of the same, keep popping into my head. That is an unfair comparison in some ways, as this is much better than that movie, but that is also the word that best describes the plot.

There are what I thought were some entertaining nods to Bollywood tradition, even though this is plainly not a Bollywood movie despite its Mumbai setting, and the story also acknowledges some of the themes of traditional romances. Indeed, the story could fairly be dubbed the dastan of Latika-Jamal. Showcasing the city’s riots of 1993 in one part of the film, it has all the hallmarks of secularist, intercommunal love stories such as Bombay and Jodha-Akbar. The one and only dance number, in a direct tribute to Bollywood films, comes at the end before the credits in an amusing send-up of the corny exuberance of Bollywood romances. These things are fun to notice, but they also remind the seasoned Bollywood fan how close to the saccharine romance and gangster films the entire plot really is. With all respect for the talent of Irrfan Khan, who continues to outshine his co-stars in everything he has been doing recently from The Namesake to Aaja, Naachle, the acting on the whole is good but not outstanding. Anil Kapoor does a passable job as the host. All the same, Omkara has more psychological complexity and depth. Boyle very artfully combines Jamal Malik’s (Dev Patel) appearance on the game show with the backstory, but Dev Patel’s stoic performance leaves you wanting more.

Keeping Gates in place sends the signal that Obama, who faces a host of hard jobs, is not eager to take on the Pentagon at the start of his presidency. ~David Corn

This seems right, but whether we’re talking about spending levels or anything else there was never much reason to think that Obama wanted to “take on” the Pentagon. This is the sort of thing that McCain surrogates wanted you to believe, but it was clearlynot so. Obama’s remarks that he wanted to cut out wasteful spending at the Pentagon could have been made just as easily by his opponent–and they were! As more than a few people noted at the time, Obama and McCain even supported cutting the same kinds of weapons programs. Now before Obama fans begin shrieking that I am saying that there are no differences between the two, let me state that this is not my point and I am not saying that. The point is that no one should ever have confused Obama for a Pentagon-fighting, “defense” budget-slashing type.

I wish I could hire whoever was responsible for managing Hagel’s P.R., because he continues to get credit for things he never did:

Obama may believe that Gates will give him the cover and continuity he needs to carry out his planned withdrawal from Iraq. But so could many others, including Republicans like Chuck Hagel who, at least, opposed the Iraq war.

I would be fascinated to know when Vanden Heuvel thinks Hagel actually opposed the war. If we define opposition broadly, every Democrat in the Senate save Lieberman “opposed the war” at some point because they came around to opposing it openly even though many of them voted for it. By contrast, Hagel voted for it and never really went into opposition in the same way that, say, Clinton eventually did. His critiques of the administration were the sort of thing we come to expect from most Republican realists–carping about tactical mistakes while having no fundamental disagreement with the strategy. What Hagel opposed, and what earned him all of that glowing press coverage starting in late ’06 and early ’07, was the “surge,” which is different from opposing the war. Republicans treated him as if he were a war opponent, which he never was, and antiwar activists desperate for a “credible” mainstream Republican to rally around liked to make the most out of his criticisms of the administration, but it simply has not been the case. Indeed, had Hagel been selected to Obama’s Cabinet we would have seen people rediscover all of this to drive home the point that there are no original war opponents among the principals in his national security team.