The Altantic, 2000 June
The Return of Ancient Times
Illustration by Tavis Coburn
Why the warrior politics of the twenty-first century will demand a
pagan ethos
by Robert D. Kaplan
IN 1988, during the Palestinian intifada, the Israeli Defense
Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, referring to Palestinian protesters,
reportedly told Israeli soldiers to "go in and break their bones."
Rabin's standing with the public began to rise thereafter. In 1992
hard-line Israeli voters switched to the Labor Party, only because
Rabin headed the ticket. As Prime Minister, Rabin used his new power
to start peace talks with the Palestinians and the Jordanians. Rabin,
who was assassinated in 1995, is now judged a hero by enlightened
public opinion the world over.
Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post &
Riposte.
More on politics and society in The Atlantic Monthly and Atlantic
Unbound.
From the archives:
"Four Star Generalists," by Robert D. Kaplan (October 1999)
Military history pierces the philosophical fog that often surrounds
the other humanities.
"Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism," by Robert D. Kaplan (June 1999)
"What Kissinger has always offered is a grimly persuasive view of the
human condition."
"And Now for the News," by Robert D. Kaplan (March 1997)
The disturbing freshness of Gibbon's Decline and Fall.
Elsewhere on the Web
Links to related material on other Web sites.
Machiavelli Online
General information about Machiavelli, the text of some of his
writings, and links to related sites. Posted by a graduate student at
the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1970 and again in the 1980s King Hussein of Jordan cracked down
brutally on the Palestinians. Had Hussein been subject to Western
judicial procedures, he might have been implicated in mistreating
considerable numbers of people through his security services. Yet
Hussein's crackdown saved his kingdom from those who would have been
less just in office than he was.
Western admirers of Rabin and Hussein prefer to forget their
ruthlessness. But Niccol� Machiavelli would have understood that such
tactics were central to their virtue. In an imperfect world,
Machiavelli wrote, good men bent on doing good must learn how to be
bad. And in this world virtue has much less to do with individual
perfection than with political results.
By substituting pagan for Christian virtue, Machiavelli explained
better than any political scientist today how Rabin and Hussein could
become what they were. There is nothing amoral about Machiavelli's
pagan virtue either. The late Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin
observed that Machiavelli's values may not be Christian but they are
moral. Berlin implied that they are the Periclean and Aristotelian
values of the ancient polis -- values that secure a stable political
community. (If you want to act strictly according to Christian ethics,
Berlin suggested in explaining Machiavelli, that's fine -- so long as
you don't assume political responsibility for the lives of too many
others.) But even Machiavelli has his limits. By his standards, Rabin
and Hussein are moral, because they used only the minimum degree of
cruelty required to further a virtuous cause. Augusto Pinochet is not.
His cruelty was excessive and his cause was questionable, so he lacks
virtue.
Machiavelli's emphasis on political necessity rather than moral
perfection framed his philosophical attack on the Church. By in effect
leaving the Church, he left the medieval world and kindled the
political Renaissance, renewing links with Thucydides, Polybius, Livy,
Tacitus, Seneca, Sallust, and other classical thinkers.
A tenet of classical philosophy states that primitive necessity and
self-interest drive politics -- all to the good, because competing
self-interests allow for compromise, whereas rigid moral arguments
lead to war, which is rarely the better option. Explaining Machiavelli
brilliantly, the Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield writes in
Machiavelli's Virtue (1966) that primitive necessity is irresistible,
because human affairs are always "in motion": "A man or a country may
be able to afford generosity today, but what of tomorrow?" (Today we
may be able to intervene in East Timor, but what if we have to fight
China over the Taiwan Strait tomorrow?) "Anxious foresight" must
therefore be the centerpiece of any prudent policy. In recent decades,
however, such verities have sometimes been disdained by American
foreign-policy makers, journalists, academics, and intellectuals.
Click here for a FREE Trial Issue of The Atlantic The uncomfortable
classical truths enunciated in the fifth century B.C. by the historian
Thucydides, revived by Machiavelli, and imbibed by Alexander Hamilton
and James Madison -- truths such as Morality and patriotism can best
be obtained through self-interest; Conflict is inherent in the human
condition; The law of nature precludes a republic of perfect virtue
and demands instead a balance of forces among men and groups -- are
often forgotten. The American elite has come to believe that the
solution for humanity is to adopt a few universally applicable
remedies, such as democracy, respect for minority rights, and
free-market capitalism. Whether liberals or neoconservatives, many of
those who came of age in the 1960s have trouble dealing with such
facts as national characteristics ingrained by historical and
geographic circumstance, and violence for its own sake.
The 1994-1996 war in Chechnya illustrates ancient verities to which
policymakers and intellectuals often cannot admit. Chechen fighters
pulled rockets out of the pods of downed Russian helicopters and
refitted them in order to shoot down low-flying Russian planes, and
wore fur masks to keep their faces from being burned by the backfire.
The Chechens fought with a ferocity and an ingenuity unusual even by
the standards of the Caucasus, which can be explained by a
nineteenth-century Muslim warrior tradition against Russian
colonialism. But nowadays thinking in terms of group character is
often dismissed as deterministic: to think of Chechens as Chechens is
to stereotype, denying each Chechen his individuality. Any reference
to tragic histories anywhere -- the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa -- is
similarly tagged deterministic and therefore invalid.
Seeing the future purely in terms of group characteristics and
historical experience can certainly immobilize policy. But it is also
true that outlawing generalizations about peoples and regions
immobilizes meaningful discussion about them. Denying such factors as
history and culture and geography, and denying the effects of these
factors on group behavior, would end the work of intelligence services
and others who try to forestall crises through anxious foresight.
Seneca, the first-century Roman stoic, wrote that foresight based on
probability is all we ever have to go by, and probability need not
mean inevitability.
Statements regarding Kosovo by the Clinton Administration in the
spring of last year are another example of an inability to confront
difficult truths. Because the Administration insufficiently
acknowledged the historical hatred between Serbs and Albanians in
Kosovo, it seemed ill prepared for both the ethnic-cleansing campaign
the Serbs perpetrated against Albanians in response to the NATO
bombing and the retributive attacks by Albanians against Serbs. The
Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, bears responsibility for the
atrocities, but he also had historical memory with which to work. The
Administration sold the war as a moral crusade against Milosevic;
because the American public would tolerate significant casualties only
for reasons of national interest, the Administration limited itself to
a low-risk air campaign. The air war eventually succeeded, but by the
time it did, thousands of Albanian Kosovars had died. Just as good men
must learn how to be bad in order to do good, moral goals often
require "amoral" arguments, or, rather, arguments using an ancient
morality -- arguments the Administration failed to make convincingly.
* * *
Nothing demonstrates the gulf between our lofty goals and the reality
of the human condition better than the refrain "No more Bosnias." In
fact there were several Bosnias in the Caucasus of the early 1990s, to
which the American media and intellectual community paid scant
attention. Abkhazia, Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh all suffered ethnic
killings and expulsions involving more than a million people combined.
The American elite yearns for singularity: if atrocities are rare,
then they are preventable. But the truth is that sectarian killing in
poor parts of the world may for the foreseeable future overwhelm our
appetite for armed intervention. Thus triage, rather than wish
fulfillment ("No more Bosnias"), will define American foreign policy.
Preventing even selected Bosnias will depend on our use of anxious
foresight based on models of historical and geographical circumstance,
national characteristics, and the like, reinforced by strong
intelligence agencies and conflict-resolution teams. We must remember
that human progress has often been made in the space between idealism
and savagery: idealism, by idealizing, ignores difficult facts,
however well-intentioned it is.
Indeed, the more modern and technological we become -- the more our
lives become a mechanized routine against instinct -- the more the
most instinctual forces within us rebel. And in those places that fail
to compete technologically, many young men may become ancient
warriors, raping and pillaging and wearing tribal insignia rather than
uniforms -- as we have already seen in the Balkans, sub-Saharan
Africa, and elsewhere. We will learn that there is no modern or
postmodern anymore. There is only the continuation of the ancient -- a
world that, however technological and united by global institutions,
the Greek and Roman philosophers would recognize and be able to cope
with.
* * *
Click here for a FREE Trial Issue of The Atlantic The outlines of the
post-Cold War world have now emerged. The evils of the twentieth
century -- Nazism, fascism, communism -- were caused by populist mass
movements in Europe whose powers were magnified by industrialization;
likewise, the terrors of the next century will be caused by populist
movements (themselves an aspect of worldwide democratization), this
time empowered by post-industrialization. Because industrialization
depended on scale, it concentrated power in the hands of state rulers;
the evils of Hitler and Stalin were consequently enormous.
Post-industrialization, with its miniaturization, puts power in the
hands of anyone with a laptop and a pocketful of plastic explosives.
So we will have new evils and chronic instability. The world will
truly be ancient.
The thinkers who will guide us through these troubling but by no means
apocalyptic times will be those who teach us how to discern unpleasant
truths in the midst of crises and how to act with both caution and
cunning. The United States requires a generation of policymakers armed
with a classical education.
Elsewhere on the Web
Links to related material on other Web sites.
The History of the Peloponnesian War
The full text of Thucydides's work, translated by Richard Crawley.
Posted by the Internet Classics Archive.
The curriculum should consist of ancient historians and philosophers
and those who have carried on their tradition: Machiavelli, Burke,
Hobbes, Gibbon, Kant, Madison, Hamilton, Tocqueville, Mill, and, in
the twentieth century, Berlin, Raymond Aron, Arnold Toynbee, Reinhold
Niebuhr, and George Kennan. These are only examples, and a range of
opinions exists within this group. (Berlin, for instance, opposes the
determinism implicit in Gibbon's and Toynbee's grand sweep of
history.)
What most of these men have in common is skepticism and a constructive
realism. Machiavelli and the eighteenth-century Briton Edmund Burke
both thought that conscience was a pretense to cover self-interest.
Hobbes instructed that faith must be excluded from philosophy, because
it is not supported by reason; reason concerns cause and effect, and
so philosophy ultimately concerns the resolution of forces; and in
politics this leads to the balance of power and a search for order. As
distasteful as the ideas of Machiavelli and Hobbes may seem to the
contemporary mind, those two philosophers invented the modern state.
They saw that all men needed security in order to acquire material
possessions, and that a bureaucratic organ was required to regulate
the struggle for acquisition peacefully and impartially. The aim of
such an organ was never to seek the highest good, only the common
good.
The Founding Fathers departed from Machiavelli in placing more faith
in ordinary people, but they did adhere to his ideas of pagan virtue.
Recognizing that faction and struggle are basic to the human
condition, they substituted the arenas of party politics and the
marketplace for actual battlefields.
The same principles have also governed the relationships between
states, which shift constantly for advantage and frequently take the
law into their own hands. In such a world, the theologian Niebuhr
cautioned, America's very dominance would ultimately ensnarl its
destiny with those of many other nations; thus our democratic vision
would be weakened by a vast web of history. Kennan, the statesman,
warned that the more underdeveloped the country, the more ruthless we
must be toward its inhabitants to improve their society. Such unsavory
truths, all descending ultimately from Thucydides' The Peloponnesian
War, are too rarely taught. Our elites are less like Renaissance
pragmatists than like medieval churchmen, sanctimoniously dividing the
world into good and evil.
Ancient wisdom is certainly not a cure for the foreign-policy
challenges ahead. It is merely a way of reintroducing a kind of
thinking, long pilloried, that will be useful in a world where -- for
some decades, at least -- the sheer number and complexity of crises
will test our moralistic certainties. Ancient morality need not
undermine Judeo-Christian ethics. Rather, the sophisticated use of the
one in foreign policy may help to advance the other.
_________________________________________________________________
Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic, a senior fellow
at the New America Foundation, and the author of The Coming Anarchy
(2000).
_________________________________________________________________
Illustration by Tavis Coburn.
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