December 09, 2005

I think I understand why she's uncomfortable: war and decadence do not go well together. The polity demands that we maintain a high level of gratification and our security. Would the war have any support at all if commodities were rationed? Starting in 1942, gasoline, rubber, sugar, butter, and even some kinds of cloth could only be purchased with a ration card or stamp. When you used those up, that was it: no more for you.

The Greatest Generation may have been up for that sort of thing, but I don't think we are. Ms. Harris mentions the "little patriotic things people did during World War II [...] for show, not for necessity." Those things did more than just create a feeling of involvement for people. They imbued the tangible sacrifices that were imposed upon them by the government with meaning. They provided a rationale for those sacrifices, and this, in turn, lent commensurate weight to patriotism itself. When you put that second or third retread on your car tire, you knew that it was because all of our rubber was transporting our boys across the battlefields of Europe in trucks and returning them safely to ground in fat-wheeled bombers.

In short, privation pulled patriotism from the realm of ethereal ideas and into the practical, day-to-day grind of reality.

With the exception of our soldiers, their families and their friends, today's patriotism exists only in the realm of ethereal ideas.

In the first Comfy Warmonger post, I asked:

What happens to a society when it can wage war in comfort? When its mettle is tested primarily in the abstract realm of ideas, rather than the practicalities of daily life?

Then I copped out. "I'm not quite sure," I wrote, "but I'll bet we'll find out." That's true, to a certain extent...but I think that we're already finding out: in the abstract realm of ideas, we as a society are ill-prepared, vacillating, and weak.

This is a corollary of Stephen Green's Arm of Decision:

Previously, I wrote that in order to win the Terror War, we must "prove the enemy ideology to be ineffective," just as we did in the Cold War. In that conflict, we did so in three ways: by fighting where we had to while maintaining our freedoms, but most importantly by out-growing the Communist economies. I argued that similar methods would win the Terror War. We'd have to fight, we'd have to maintain our freedoms, but the primary key to victory in the Current Mess is taking the initiative.

What I didn't see then - but what I do see today - is what "taking the initiative" really means.

It means, fighting a media war. It means, turning the enemy's one great strength into our own. Broadcast words, sounds, and images are the arm of decision in today's world.

And if that assessment is correct, then we're losing this war and badly.

While we may be expert in the creation and mass promulgation of "words, sounds, and images" in the form of our uniquely American media culture, we are miserable failures at the creation and mass promulgation of effective arguments and consistent philosophy. Our propaganda is clumsy and ham-fisted, our President is inarticulate and leaves the heavy rhetorical lifting to others, and the opposition party is a clamoring mass of contradictory declarations that owe far more to power politics than any coherent moral or ethical construction.

In terms of the development, concretization, and dispersal of ideas, the three media intangibles that Mr. Green mentions are all examples of what Plato called "the bastard speech." [Phaedrus 276a]. He was referring to the written word, but like the written words of his day, modern media are all mere images of "the living and breathing word of him who knows." The admirable man, Plato wrote, is one who

...thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much that is playful, and that no written discourse, whether in meter or in prose, deserves to be treated very seriously (and this applies also to the recitations of the rhapsodes, delivered to sway people's minds, without opportunity for questioning and teaching), but that the best of them really serve only to remind us of what we know [... ] that man, Phaedrus, is likely to be such as you and I might pray that we ourselves may become. (Emphasis mine) [Phaedrus 277e-278b]

We are failing in the effective broadcast of words, sounds, and images because all of our words, sounds, and images are empty. They do not remind us of what we know, because we are in philosophical disarray and thus cannot claim knowledge.

Our cultural strengths have always been in the realm of the practical: production, resistance to privation, and determined action. Today, we produce so much that privation is not required of us, meaning that the primary motivation for action has become almost entirely ideological. It rests upon our ability to form coherent moral and ethical structures, to recognize the importance of those structures, and to become motivated by them despite their intangibility.

However, our educational system has produced a materialistic populace that lacks critical thinking skills, is easily swayed by emotional appeal, and is largely incapable of the focus required for the evaluation of arguments. Furthermore, the media - the industry responsible for implementing Mr. Green's arm of decision - is overpopulated with sterling exemplars of these traits.

Thus, while we face an enemy that takes the most drastic actions motivated by nothing but intangibles, we here in America are spurred into action when our skyscrapers fall, but then settle back into confused debate once that memory fades. Our President's approval ratings rise and fall with the price of gasoline, while the leader of the opposition party tries to convince us that our primary duty to our soldiers in a time of war is to keep them safe.

This all points in a single, distressing direction: we will only become sufficiently motivated when we have endured sufficient suffering, because we are no longer capable of motivating ourselves with principles alone.

What does "sufficient suffering" entail? An airliner shot down on takeoff? A series of subway or bus bombings? I doubt it. That would only serve to further stir up debate, with one side blaming the other for causing the attacks with their actions or their inaction.

No, "sufficient suffering" will probably involve the very thing that, ostensibly, we went into Iraq to prevent: a chemical or nuclear attack in a major city, perhaps even our capital, with massive loss of American life on American soil.

All of this is diagnosis and prediction, not prescription. Maybe I'm just in a pessimistic mood...but given the events of the past four years, I don't see a way to avoid this. It took us two generations to get into this mess, and it will take at least that long to get out of it.

My great fear is that even with such suffering, we will still be unable to rouse ourselves with sufficient determination.

Then, the true "paper tiger" will be revealed: not the American soldier, but the American civilian.