Via the 800-pound gorilla, I find Belmont Club's fine practical example of the "dilettantes' ethics" I referred to yesterday:
To the extent the blogosphere can dispel the propaganda cover willingly provided by the Left, people on the home front can help the soldiers in the field. It is necessary to link the war criminal behavior of the enemy with the studied blindness of 'sophisticates' towards their most heinous crimes. They are twinned; with the former made possible by the latter.
I tend to use "sophisticated" with its Greek etymological roots firmly in mind. Originally, a sophistęs was a master of his craft, or simply a wise or statesmanlike man. But by the late classical period, Sophists were those who taught grammar, rhetoric, politics, and mathematics for money, and the word also gained the sense of a cheat or a quibbler.
The wandering rhetorical guns-for-hire of the ancient world were Sophists, offering to teach anybody how to use the weapons of language to make a case for any position, regardless of its merits. Plato portrayed the Athenian Sophists in opposition to Socrates' search for Truth, as practitioners of the "dissembling part of the art of opinion which is part of the art of contradiction and belongs to the fantastic class of the image-making art, and is not divine, but human." [Sophist 268c-d] Aristophanes suggested that Sophists were under the influence of the "goddesses for idle men," and about these clouds the old Athenian Strepsiades exclaims,
Just to hear their voices makes my very soul take wing and fly, makes me long to chop some logic, blow some elocutive smoke, bust big maxims with little maxims, counterpoint an argument! [Clouds 314]
This 2,500-year old battle continues uninterrupted in today's philosophical and political struggle between relativists and the devotees of logos (reason). The latter hold that there is indeed a "Way It Is." The former hold that there is not, that the world of ethics is a human creation and that all moral positions have equal weight.
I do not believe, as Aristotle wrote, that there is a final end towards which all of our moral thinking must necessarily strive, and neither do I believe that these strivings have their genesis in some divine mandate. But the position that all moral positions are relative, in addition to being self-refuting, does not follow from the idea that moral systems are the creation of humans.
Those who oppose the inclusion of the classical pantheon of Dead White Males in standard curriculums have a vested interest in doing so. Plato reaches across the centuries and illuminates our world through the mechanisms of long-sighted historical perspective. The Europeans who refuse to inspect mass grave sites in Iraq because the evidence procured there might result in Saddam Hussein's execution are indeed sophisticated, just like the media powers who downplay yesterday's insurgent attack on a hospital full of wounded people, yet emphasize American "barbarity" at every available opportunity. They are part of a longstanding tradition.
I am, of course, obliged to note that this does not mean that all American actions are noble and just. What it does mean is that the elocutive smoke blown by the intelligentsia of the Left serves to obscure honest discussion of how their ethical systems apply to a military situation in which the enemy not only does not share that system, but actively hates it and regards it as a weakness. This ideological stance, grounded in the French philosophies of power dynamics, refuses to condemn certain atrocities based on the perceived victimization of the perpetrators.
These are the moralities of the sheltered, the affluent, the disengaged and, yes, the powerful. War is an evil business, and we seek to mitigate it and to somehow improve ourselves by creating rules for it.
But what should we do when our enemies have no such rules and do not desire them?
I don't have a ready answer to that. America's devoted critics, it seems, won't even consider the question.
