Patrick Lawrence: Undivided Loyalties
To What Do We Dedicate Ourselves?
There is a story about Walter Lippmann it seems useful to relate as much of humanity lapses into misapprehension, sudden animosities and ferocious divisions along who knows how many lines—political, ideological, religious, partisan, “identitarian.” I will relate it on the thought that Lippmann, who got some things right in his long life, mostly during his younger years, and later on many things very wrong, can tell us something about where we ought to stand as Israel’s pathological violence rages on and a civilization—Western civilization—falls apart as we speak.
Lippmann, the celebrated editor, commentator and author attended a dinner party in Manhattan one evening, and at the port-and-cigars stage of the occasion the host announced an intellectual amusement. All those who advocated socialism were to stand on one side of the dining room, and on the other those who favored the capitalist system. The guests duly divided. And when they were done sorting themselves out, Lippmann sat pointedly alone at the table—the ultimate in either indecision or a refusal to stand for one thing and against another.
I do not recall where I heard or read of this incident—or, indeed, whether it is true or apocryphal. My guess is that it would have occurred, assuming it did, in the late teens or early twenties of the last century, given that socialism vs. capitalism was then a question people of Lippmann’s kind would find interesting and that Lippmann, later in life the liberal Cold Warrior par excellence, parked himself literally in the middle of the matter.
Whenever and however it was, since hearing or reading the story I have thought many times about Lippmann as he sat by himself at the dinner table. One could argue he was a pitiful waffler, refusing to take a stand on a critical question of the day. Of what use are such people, you might ask. On the other hand, you may have it that Lippmann did take a stand, this stand being that there are virtues in both of the social and economic systems at issue, and it was his right to defend his position, a constituency of one.
I tend to the latter view as a matter of principle, but, in Lippmannesque fashion, I am somewhat divided: I see merit in the thought that Lippmann ought to have recognized his time as one that required of him a clear statement of where his loyalties lay.
Are there passages in the human story when those alive are not called upon to declare their allegiance to one of the forces of the era and their opposition to another—when they can drift along in the waters of the status quo? Maybe there are—during periods of relative peace and social and economic equilibrium, for example, assuming there have been such periods, and I am not at all sure there have ever been any. But I will leave this question unresolved, as it is not my immediate concern.
My concern is now and here. And now and here those alive face a daunting reality: We do not live in any such peaceful time, to put the point mildly. We live in an era of violence, viciousness, injustice and cruelty that, if not unprecedented by way of scale and magnitude, is down there with the worst for its craven immorality and inhumanity. This adds another to the numerous responsibilities we bear in exchange for some time on Earth. We are called upon to declare ourselves and what we stand for. We are obliged —whether or not we accept this obligation, and the majority of us don’t—to act on what we stand for. We ought to make clear to what we dedicate our loyalties.
In our time there is no sitting alone at the dinner table while the rest of the world descends into division and disorder, this is to say. Not when the real-time atrocities in Gaza occur daily and nightly. Many, many people understand this. One of the refreshing things to arise from the Israelis’ diabolic conduct, if one can find anything refreshing in it, is the surge of protests, demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of activism spilling onto American streets, campus quads, and other public spaces. The Palestinian Youth Movement, Within Our Lifetime, Jewish Voices for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine: These are among the many groups organizing and leading these actions. They are to be commended all the more for the disgraceful bans and denunciations they have faced but not flinched from.
Hardly is our present circumstance unique to us, we the living. Going back just a century to keep things simple, from the 1920s onward, one had to stand on one side or the other of fascism and then Naziism. Then came the Spanish Civil War, and then World War II. During the Cold War the incessant propaganda had it that there was only one side, but, beginning with the fact that the U.S., not the Soviets, started the Cold War, it was of course not so simple.
Somewhere during the Cold War decades, American citizens became American consumers and lost track of what it meant to stand for something. In this latter condition, most Americans drifted along under the illusion that disengagement and apathy were defensible, even desirable, or that the world was too complicated to bother about and in any case, it came to a moral blur, everything colored a sort of Graham Greene gray. Well, yes, the CIA deposed Jacobo Árbenz as president of Guatemala, but he imported the Communist threat in our hemisphere. Etc., etc. There is a straight, unmistakable line all the way to, well, yes, Israel is killing civilians in Gaza, including many children and women, but Hamas is a terrorist organization, and Gazans are loyal to it.
We do not enjoy the luxury of self-illusioning in the Cold War mold, and those who think we do merely add another layer of illusion. As many of us understand, the circumstances of our time require that we get up from the dinner table and declare our allegiances, our loyalties—not least on our streets, village greens, and campuses. Chief among these circumstances is the United States of America as it conducts its business in its late-imperial phase.
Since when has this been so? I acknowledge various answers to this question, but mine is since the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. That is when the American Century ended, as I have argued many times in this space and elsewhere. That is when America grew profoundly uncertain of itself and when the policy cliques in Washington began to act not out of a dangerous confidence so much as a dangerous desperation. It is from that date that the U.S. became the principal source of a global disorder that has no equivalent in the post–World War II decades.
This disorder tipped into savagery in broad daylight when Israel began, with plentiful American support, its barbarous campaign to exterminate as many of the Palestinians of Gaza as it can before world opinion forces it to stop, while permanently displacing those it has not murdered. What we witness as the Israel Defense Forces attack Gaza is the exercise of power with the merest pretense of decency, morality, or humaneness to veil it, to dress it up for the pitiful wafflers among us. It would take a Hannah Arendt to tell us if the deployment of power in this fashion is unprecedented in modern history, or in postwar history, or according to some other parameter. I would compare it, at a minimum, with America’s barbarity in Southeast Asia from the mid–1950s to the mid–1970s.
Israel’s condemnable campaign in Gaza and America’s encouragement of it make it very clear, beyond all ambiguity, that the question of our time, the issue on which we must declare ourselves if we are to guard our morality and our very humanity—if we are to remain loyal to ourselves—is power. Nobody can sit at the dinner table on this question.
The trouble with the question of power is that so few people are willing to acknowledge the primacy of this reality, to define power properly, and, yet fewer, to confront power in any kind of authentic, effective way. Lots of people, lots and lots, like to look as if they dedicate themselves to boldly challenging power. But it is too easy to get lost in identity politics, one or another political party or pre-party formation—the Democrats, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the like.
I do not wish to diminish the worthy efforts of those acting in defense of gender rights, abortion rights, the rights of minority populations and other such causes. But these are most usefully understood as subsets of the true cause, the cause that deserves our undivided loyalties, the cause that frees us to confront power as it must be confronted. I would call this the human cause at the risk of coming over simplistically. Wasn’t this the lesson King learned late in his life—that the fight for racial equality requires those waging the fight to confront power altogether?
Israel’s atrocious conduct in Gaza is a moment for us alive today just as it was a moment for King when he recognized that American conduct in Vietnam could not be understood separately from the question of who Americans wanted to be and what Americans wanted America to be. MLK’s turn against the Vietnam war, it is worth contemplating in our current circumstances, was inspired by a graphic photo essay on the children of Vietnam severely disfigured by napalm that was published in Ramparts, one of the great experiments in independent journalism during the 1960s.
The wellspring of King’s convictions, I think it fair to say, was his conscience. It was to his conscience, to his faculty of individual discernment, that he was indivisibly loyal. Our consciences should enjoy our undivided loyalties today in the same way. The rest, how we understand our time and what we determine to do in the matter of power, will flow directly and clearly from this.
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