Apparently claiming intellectual nuance by association, Kristof serves up a heapin' helpin' of moral waffles for the New Year:
"So at this time of year, historically an opportunity for ethical reflection, it's time to raise a toast to moral clarity, however scarred it may often be by nebulousness, inconsistency and even hypocrisy, as still preferable to moral opacity."
That's the final paragraph. His conclusion. I find it incoherent and pillow-headed or, in the words of a professor I once knew (who of course wasn't talking about anything that I had written), "confused and inept."
Between the lead and that last sentence, we read the following:
"1. Terrorism is in the eyes of the beholder [...] 2. Wiping out terrorists is sometimes unhelpful [...] 3. In crude military terms, terrorism often works [...]"
According to Kristof, these three statements constitute the holes that "highly nuanced intellectuals" poke in "moral clarity." Yet--as even a brief perusal of the numbered paragraphs in question will quickly demonstrate--the "holes" being "poked" here are in the definition of the word "terrorism," not moral clarity. Kristof flails wildly as he tries to reconcile this purportedly high-powered thinking with something resembling a cause that is good and just, and ultimately informs us--to our great relief--that he is "strongly in favor of President Bush's campaign for moral clarity."
Unfortunately, Kristof demonstrates little awareness of the meaning of the term. He writes,
"Ideally, any private group should know that if it kills civilians, it will become a pariah and discredit its own cause."
That seems clear enough. But wait! We can't have even the briefest moment of unmuddied water, so:
"Perhaps it is hopelessly naïve to seek to make terrorism a universal taboo; perhaps a nuanced moral clarity is a contradiction in terms."
Which suggests what, exactly? That there are instances where, due to nuanced circumstances, the murder of civilians becomes a good, thus invalidating the entire idea of good vs. evil? He claims to be seeking nuance, but he's not. He's setting up a lightweight and highly inflammable straw man, which must be duly knocked down and set on fire. Moral clarity does not imply simplicity, which is, perhaps, why Kristof seems so confused.
He might be given a few points for making an attempt at ethical reflection, but then those points must be taken away from him and given to poor orphans who would make better use of them. As a whole, Kristof's piece admirably portrays a relativist's inability to grasp the meaning of moral nuance...the fact that Kristof believes that the objections he lists leave moral clarity in "tatters" suggests to me that there wasn't a lot of clarity there to begin with.
The moral issue here is not about the meaning of the word "terrorist;" this idea represents a keystone of leftist postmodern pseudo-logic whereby the redefinition of a word changes the reality of a thing or a situation. The moral issue here is that members of an ideologically coherent group with a global reach killed 3,000 American men, women, and children as part a campaign the stated goal of which is to destroy us as a nation. You may call the members of that group terrorists, Islamists, or Big Stupid Assheads; it doesn't matter. What matters is eliminating the threat that they pose to America in particular and to the members of our civilization in general.
Granted, I don't expect scintillating competence on the NYT's Op-Ed page, but this blot of verbiage seemed particularly muddled to me. I found out why when I went to the only "intellectual" Kristof mentions by name: Grenville Byford. Kristof is attempting to glean some moral meaning from Byford's "The Wrong War," and it is from this essay that Kristof receives both his thesis and his confusion.
Having jump-started many a content-free essay in the same way, I am wary of any piece of writing that begins by lifting definitions from a dictionary, even if it is the redoubtable Oxford English Dictionary. Byford uses this as the starting point for a familiar litany: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, one man's civilian is another man's legitimate target, one man's savage terrorism is another man's only means of resistance, and so forth. All of this is based on a false dichotomy of ends and means, whereby Byford seeks to create a simplistic dissonance between the idealistic morality of ends and the practical morality of means. As I've claimed elsewhere, this stems from a confusion about the difference between what is good and what is right. That is: the right thing to do in a situation may not be the good thing to do, because "good" exists as an ideal, far removed from the mud and muck of the fighting monkeys we're pleased to call human beings. Ignoring this distinction results in attempts to judge a practical moral act by the standards of ideal morality, which in turn causes the aforementioned pillow-headedness.
Byford demonstrates this sort of confusion when he writes,
"Usually a correlation exists between the morality of ends and means. People who pursue noble goals tend to be scrupulous about how they achieve them, whereas unscrupulous people and rotten causes often go together. This fact generally makes it possible to have a sensible discussion about political morality without distinguishing clearly between the acceptability of means and ends. The case of terrorism, however, is often an exception and can force us to make difficult moral judgments -- weighing the relative merits, for example, of those who pursue a noble end through questionable or downright horrendous means and those who pursue a dubious aim with great integrity."
History is so replete with examples of noble causes coupled with ignoble means that it is hardly sensible to claim that there is anything remotely resembling a correlation between the "morality of ends and means." It depends on the scale in which the events are viewed. Was the American cause in WWII just? Undeniably. What about Dresden? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Or that young American soldier with the flamethrower who lit up a trench full of surrendering Germans who had quite recently killed two dozen of his buddies on the beachhead at Normandy?
Byford's entire argument unsteadily rests upon such conflation of individual acts and governmental policies, and is girded with utter confusion about the difference between ideal and practical morality. By opening his essay with a quote from a big dictionary, he transmits his intention: this is not to be a discussion about real things, situations, or acts. Instead, it is to be an analysis of language, a mincing of terminology, and a hash of abstraction, which will then be applied to real things, situations, and acts via some mysterious mechanism not quite understood by either the author or the reader. Very popular in academia these days, I understand.
Byford admits as much:
"The Bush administration's war against terrorism is destined to be morally unsatisfying because, if the phrase is taken at face value, it flies in the face of the multifaceted way most people really think about right and wrong."
Examine the logic, here: moral dissatisfaction will result from improper phrasing. This, in turn, rests on the highly suspect--and elitist--notion that people are, well, stupid. That when confronted with the complexities of pursuing our interests and destroying our enemies, the rhetorical tropes of the "war on terror" will throw us all into a paroxysm of confusion and dumbfounded despair. This is because, for Byford, it's not what you do that is important; it's what you say. Again, this is a reflection of a confused notion of "good" and "right," which--far from being a simple problem of terminology--has real consequences in terms of the actions for which Byford feels he can claim moral justification. Because he has conflated the ideal good with the practical right, he cannot distinguish between the longbows of Agincourt and the airliners of New York, and is unable to see that the elimination of the Wahabbist threat of Saudi Arabia begins with Baghdad.
His conclusion is simple enough:
"Interests first, ends second, means third -- this is how America thinks. It should be how it talks as well."
But he doesn't adequately explain is why this should be so.
None of this would really be a problem if such language-based confusion remained confined to the pages of little-read academic journals. But, in the manner of all things fashionable, such fluff has a way of working its way out of such confines and into the mainstream. Then, from an ill-conceived article published in Foreign Affairs, with a bimonthly readership of 185,000, the following statement is eventually birthed in the New York Times, with a total daily print and online readership of over 2,000,000:
"In the next step in the war on terrorism, we're likely in the coming months to invade Iraq in ways that will terrorize civilians there."
Thus, from the soft-thinking postmodernist brain of Byford, filtered through the credulous and confused mind of Kristof, we have the idea that the United States of America is the real terrorist in this conflict.
If--after reading my special brand of babble--you are interested in reading a serious treatment of the moral issues surrounding this conflict, I would direct you to George Weigel's "Moral Clarity in a Time of War." You might not agree with everything he has to say, but it's what genuine moral thinking looks like.
