America's Place in the World - Learning from History

Andrew Bacevich gave the 2012 George C. Marshall Lecture in Military History, and as one would expect from Bacevich, it was scathing, insightful, and a joy to read.

I would strongly recommend you simply click on the link above and read his comments, titled "The Revisionist Imperative: Rethinking Twentieth Century Wars." They are well worth the time. But for the sake of the discussion here, let me give the very brief summary: Bacevich argues that the US drew the wrong lessons from the 20th century because we look at the wrong bit of history. We focus major attention on the Second World War, and conclude that massive applications of American military power can defeat tyranny and restore justice. While Bacevich quibbles somewhat with this interpretation of World War II, his larger argument is that we forget lots of history which teaches different lessons.

I'd like to suggest that greater knowledge of the period prior to America's entry into the war might lend lessons which better suit the present day. America had only a limited presence in the wider world, much of it characterized by businessmen, journalists, and diplomats. Our power was far short of omnipotent. What could we do in Manchuria or Sudetenland? Very little.

This situation is well attested in that most popular of media: Hollywood. Think of Rick in Casablanca or, more recently, Mr. Jackson in The White Countess. From watching films such as these - rather than The Sands of Iwo Jima or the like - one learns that Americans are in constant danger of being overwhelmed by the complexity of foreign locales and the pace of events that happen there. Our American protagonists are not powerless to effect change, but their power is considerably circumscribed by events beyond their control. Moreover, men like Rick and Mr. Jackson bring about change only rarely through the power of the gun; more often their American dollars or their intimate knowledge of local cultures and politics carried the day.

A foreign policy based on this set of historical memories - rather than on the Second World War - would not simply retreat from the world, but would choose its battles wisely. It would not abolish the use of military force, but rather than seeking to build fleets of aircraft, it would focus on diplomacy, intelligence, and the application of soft power, particularly through NGOs and businesses. It strikes me as precisely the kind of foreign policy the present age demands.

Containing China - The Historical Analogy with Japan

The following commentary comes from William D. O'Neil via H-War:

The irony of the hand-wringing over "containment" of China is that we've been here before, only no one seems to be able to remember.

As early as the 1890s, widespread alarm was evident in the United States over the specter of Japanese expansionism. This was a mixture of raw ethnocentrism and cold strategic calculation. At the same time, being the kind of country it was (and largely remains) there was no great unity in American views, and many unhesitatingly supported Japan's economic and political ambitions.

Both the Roosevelt (TR) and Wilson Administrations pursued policies of appeasement, while simultaneously building up the navy. The real departure point was the Twenty-One Demands affair of 1915. In the early 1920s the political elites in both countries attempted to build a basis for cooperative relationships, but the rise of very strongly ethnocentric groups in both nations undercut these efforts. Nevertheless, Japan and the United States managed to maintain reasonably productive relationships at many levels during the 1920s, notwithstanding some rather nasty clashes in China, and the ill-will generated by the laws excluding Japanese from American life.

Unfortunately for Japan, the military services fell under the leadership of extremely ethnocentric officers, and the Great Depression undermined those who wanted to advance Japan by economic means. The military came to power, teamed with neoconservative civilians. Japan was in a cycle in which the ethnocentrists would precipitate some expansionist action they saw as essential to national security, the west would respond negatively (even if only symbolically so), and this would evoke fears of "encirclement" (i.e., containment) leading to further expansionism to break out of the "iron ring." Thus even though the anti-Japanese ethnocentrist elements in the west did not hold particularly strong political positions in the 1930s, a self-amplifying positive feedback loop was established and maintained.

Eventually it was the external forcing function of Nazi aggressive expansionism at the other end of Eurasia that tipped Japan into war with the west. It is very possible that matters would never have reached such a pass absent the predominately exogenous shocks of the Great Depression and European War. At the same time, these shocks need not have been fatal had the ethnocentric elements not gained such dominance over Japan.

Despite many changes, the overall sociopolitical constitution of the United States remains much as it has nearly always been. There are both ethnocentric and cosmopolitan elements and neither is likely to be able to establish long-term dominance in the control of the nation's affairs. The United States will thus continue to act somewhat erratically within bounds determined by a broad consensus on basic economic and strategic interests -- which do not in themselves dictate any fundamental conflict with China.

The Chinese system, with its narrow leadership base and lack of regular mechanisms for turnover of power, gives an illusion of a steady hand on policy. But it is even more vulnerable to ethnocentric capture than its Japanese counterpart of the 1920s. Even if this takes place, even if it occurring right now, it need not have effects as terrible as those of World War II, but it would run a very uncomfortably great danger of doing so. The seeming prospect that China is contemplating its own replay of the Tsinan (Jinan) Incident over the Senkakus is anything but reassuring.

Some have objected that no military conflict could eventuate because of the threat of nuclear weapons, but these are not the words of anyone who knows or reflects on history. Ever since humankind has been fighting wars, for at least 100,000 years and very probably longer, unlimited conflicts have always threatened and frequently enough resulted in the destruction of both of the combatant societies. History says very clearly that such a threat may dampen the risks of war but cannot eliminate them. Indeed, the very fact that it is apologists for China (which by any rational calculation would inevitably suffer far more severely in any nuclear exchange) who invariably raise the nuclear specter speaks eloquently of the limited (albeit very great) power of the threat of annihilation.


This post first appeared on Statecraft & Security.

Microphones and the Mass

And while we are on the topic of technology and the sacred, I would like to pass on a short article from the most recent edition of First Things about "Marshall MacLuhan on How the Mic Transformed the Mass."

The article doesn't offer a definitive stance on whether microphones are good or bad for the Mass, but is rather an invitation to consider a phenomenon we normally ignore or are not even aware of. The article is sure to be met with glib objections by some (exhibit #1), but Professor White does a good job of pointing out why the change in the way Mass is celebrated was so momentous. For a religion such as Latin-rite Catholicism to go from observing the most solemn moment of the Mass in silence through clouds of incense to listening a man read the text from the Missal out loud is a huge change, which might not even have been considered in the 1960's.

And while we are on this topic, I should close with an even more shocking quotation from Ernst Jünger: "Where it identifies the dominion of technology with the dominion of Satan, the priesthood possesses a deeper instinct than where it places a microphone next to the Body of Christ."

Ernst Jünger on Technology (2)

In The Worker Jünger makes three key points about technology. Before going any further, however, I should add that while I disagree with Jünger’s positive evaluation of technology, I do agree in many respects with his analysis of technology.

The first point is the key to understanding Jünger’s analysis of technology: technology is “not a neutral power” (keine neutrale Macht). In most discussions of technology today, however, the key premise is exactly the opposite: technology is neutral, and everything depends on what use one makes of it. Indeed, this common starting-point makes some intuitive sense. Most people tacitly define technology as a machine or tool that gives us a method for doing X in the quickest, most effective way. Technology is simply a means to an end. Everybody wants to achieve their own ends, and they want to do so as soon as possible. If the same technology can be used to achieve two opposed ends, then the technology itself is neutral. By this view, the two opposing armies in a war have distinct ends, but both armies use guns. The guns themselves are neutral. It is the goodness, or evil, of the goal of the war which makes the guns either good or evil.

The best way to understand why technology is not neutral is through an analogy. On at least one occasion Jünger compares self-identification with technology to “mastering the language of the worker.” The idea is that technology pervades and shapes how we view the world, just as language does. This was certainly the case in Nazi Germany. Both Eric Voegelin and Josef Pieper laid great emphasis on the fact of the Nazis’ perversion of everyday language in the Third Reich. The importance of language should be obvious to any American who observes how PC language has penetrated into politics and academia in this country. Certain words that were in common use fifty years ago are now banned from polite conversation and neologisms deployed to change public opinion. When, for instance, was the last time a prominent politician or academic characterized sex acts between two members of the same sex as “sodomy”? Removing that term from the public vocabulary normalizes same-sex sex acts, as well as eliminates one more vestige of Christianity in our culture. (The exception proves the rule: One summer, while working on petitions for the involuntary commitment of sexually violent persons, I was struck by the number of times I came across the term “deviate sex” in the psychological reports.)

This does not mean that if technology is bad, then every discrete act that employs technology is necessarily bad. To take the analogy of language one step further, even if a language has become corrupted it is not evil to use that language at times. Or, to use a different analogy, even if a government has been thoroughly corrupted, not every action it takes is necessarily bad, though a government has tremendous power to shape its citizens’ worldviews and to implicate them in its crimes. And that is the important point for Jünger: technology is not neutral because it has a worldview of its own and shapes worldviews.

Second, technology has the power to shape worldviews because, as Jünger says, it has a “seductive logic” of its own, which is not a “pure” logic (keine Logik an sich)but one which leads to specific ends. The logic of technology alters our relationship to the world and to ourselves. For Jünger, the purpose of technology is to “mobilize matter.” (Note the similarity to Descartes’ desire to use science to make men “masters and possessors of nature.”) Matter becomes something that is to be put at the service of man or, for Jünger, the new man, the worker, so that the worker can attain power. The technological worldview demands submission of nature to man. The process of submitting nature to the worker’s rule does not end until the distinction between technology and nature is eliminated, until technology becomes our second nature. Technology must become something that seems obvious (a Selbstverständlichkeit) for the ordinary man. Indeed, Jünger goes one step further and says that the logic of technology will ultimately lead to the merger of man and machine.

This merger of man and machine no longer sounds as fantastic as it did when Jünger wrote The Worker. The manipulation of genes, the implantation of computer chips into the nervous system, the cloning of entire human beings—all of these may very possibly be realized within our lifetimes. And yet technology’s seductive logic has been at work among us for much longer with technologies that are much more familiar and that seem innocuous in comparison to modern biotechnology. For instance, mechanical clocks have been around for centuries. They were used in the Middle Ages primarily to help monks say the canonical hours at the correct time. However, clocks have ceased to be a tool which we use to measure time and are now machines that shape how we experience time in ways that are contrary to nature, such as standardized time zones and daylight savings time. Another example of the power of technology to make men conform to their machines is urban planning in the wake of the automobile. Most cities in the 20th century were laid out on the assumption that its inhabitants would be driving, rather than walking, through their streets. For those who live in big cities with rush hour traffic jams, the conception of how much time it will take to go somewhere depends on what hour one is leaving one’s house—the “distance” to one’s destination is further at rush hour.

Third, for Jünger technology is anti-Christian because it possesses its own “cultic origin” (kultischer Ursprung). Before dismissing this as mere hyperbole, one should at least consider an example of the cult of technology: Apple products. Apple’s laptops and phones are immediately identifiable because of their minimalistic, futuristic aesthetic. These devices have become objects of devotion among the masses of loyal Apple customers, much of whose success is due to the fact that they keep the modern worker connected to his job at all times. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was practically canonized after his early death from cancer. (Part of this is due to the cult of the entrepreneur in America.)

But, even if it is true that technology has acquired certain cultic features in contemporary America, the question still remains: What exactly does it mean to say that technology has a “cultic origin”? The answer lies in the essence of religion. If technology has a “seductive logic,” and is a system capable of changing our relation to nature and to ourselves, it has a totalizing worldview. Just as Marxism is often characterized as a religion despite its atheism, so too the “technological way of thinking” can be called a religion because it subsumes widely varied areas of human activity under a general worldview.

If technology is a new cult, it necessarily sets itself at odds with Christianity. Jünger says that the orthodox Christian views technology as the “dominion of Satan.” And Jünger’s statement, while extreme, is defensible when we keep in mind that technology tries to eliminate nature or reconfigure it so that it changes in its very essence. When viewed this way, technology is another form of Gnosticism (as used in a broader way by Eric Voegelin): a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with creation that leads to the hubristic attempt to refashion the world.

Jünger in The Worker got many things wrong, and was in favor of many things a Christian should oppose. But, in some instances—and technology was one of them—his analysis should force us to consider some of our basic presuppositions about the modern world.

Ernst Jünger on Technology (1)

It is impossible to discuss the life and thought of Ernst Jünger briefly. Nearly 103 years old when he died in 1998, Jünger led an eventful life: he served with distinction as an officer in the German army in both world wars. He became known as a writer after World War I when he published his journals, In Storms of Steel. In the 1920’s he studied zoology, and in later life become an avid entomologist. He earned his living as a journalist until World War II, when he spent much of his time stationed in Paris. After the war, he moved to Wilflingen, but also continued to travel, often to Africa and Asia. Throughout his life he wrote about his varied experiences. Besides his wartime journals, Jünger also published an account of his early experiments with LSD, as well as a series of futuristic novels, most notably Eumeswil.

Jünger is a controversial figure because of his political views (as well as the delight he often takes in describing violence). Always a man of the right, he was a staunch opponent of the Weimar Republic. Today he is often grouped among the leaders of that amorphous movement in interwar German called the “Conservative Revolution,” who opposed the new democratic ethos and parliamentary system of government. One of his more ardent admirers in the 1920’s was Hitler, but after 1933 Jünger found polite ways to decline the dictator’s advances. The novel he published in 1939, On the Marble Cliffs, is usually interpreted as a disguised call to resistance against the Nazis. After World War II, he refused to fill out the British occupation authorities’ questionnaires about his political activities under Nazi rule and was therefore forbidden to publish. He moved to Wilflingen, in the French zone, to escape the British censors. After the war, he continued to oppose democracy. In his 1951 essay, Der Waldgang, Jünger develops a theory of resistance, implying that the Federal Republic of Germany needed to be resisted, just as the Nazis should have been resisted.

For most of his life Jünger elaborated his positions from a secular viewpoint. It was simply assumed that Christianity was dead and was merely of historical interest; any resistance to democracy must come from elsewhere. (This changed only late in his life—he converted to Catholicism when he was 101.) Jünger’s “conservative revolution” was essentially an anti-Christian conservatism, which he tried to elaborate in a few books, particularly The Worker, published in 1932.

The Worker is a difficult book to summarize because of its vagueness. (A decent summary of the main idea, though, can be found here.) Jünger sometimes explicitly refuses to give concrete examples of the social phenomena he is describing, instead giving tautological definitions and telling his readers that they must be blind not to see what he is pointing out. Of course, things which may have been clear to a German in 1932 are not necessarily clear to an American in 2012, especially when it requires plowing through pages of dense German prose. Essentially, Jünger is trying to give an outline of the new social form (Gestalt), the new type of man, he saw rising to predominance. The worker he describes is not a member of Marx’s proletariat or simply even a working man. Rather, he is a man for whom work is his form of existence, who lives in a “total work world.” (Incidentally, some of the phrases which Jünger employs in a positive sense are later used in a pejorative sense by Josef Pieper in Leisure the Basis of Culture.) Most importantly for this post, this new man, the worker, identifies with technology. For a significant portion of the book (§§ 44-57), then, Jünger tries to define technology as the way in which this new man realizes himself in history. What will follow soon are a few reflections on what Jünger had to say about technology, or rather reflections on technology occasioned by a reading of The Worker, since I make no guarantee that I have understood this book perfectly.

The New Look

For those of you who read the Guild Review via Google Reader or another RSS mechanism, you may not have realized that the blog has a new look. The notion behind the change is simple enough: we can't post all the time, because, well, because life happens. Just last week, for example, my wife gave birth to a son. But even when we are not busy writing blog posts, lots of other folks, many of them cleverer than we, are writing. So the new layout gives greater prominence to some of the blogs we read. We do not agree with everything that all of them write, but they are generally thought-provoking, and we think our readers might enjoy them. If you have a suggestion for a blog or link which is not currently featured on the Guild Review, but ought to be, leave us a comment!

St. Clement's Prayer for Election Day

From the First Letter of St. Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, 60-61:

Make straight our steps in holiness and righteousness and singleness of heart, that we may so walk and do such things as are right and well pleasing before thee, and before our rulers. Yea, Lord, cause thy face to appear to us in peace to our good, that we may be sheltered by thy mighty hand, and preserved from all sin by thy lofty arm, and deliver us from those that hate us unjustly. Give unity and peace both to us and to all that dwell upon the earth, as thou gavest to our fathers when they called upon thee with faith and truth, so that we should become obedient to thy all-powerful and most excellent name, and to those who rule and govern us upon the earth.

Thou, Lord, hast given the authority of the kingdom to them through thy almighty and unspeakable power, so that we, knowing the estimation and honour given to them by thee, might submit ourselves to them, in no way opposing thy will; to whom give, O Lord, health, peace, concord, stability, so that they may discharge the rule given unto them by thee without offence; for thou, heavenly Lord, everlasting King, givest to the sons of men glory and honour and authority over the things that are upon the earth. Do thou, Lord, direct their counsel according to what is good and pleasing before thee, that, fulfilling with peace and meekness and piety the authority given unto them by thee, they may obtain mercy from thee. Thou who alone art able to do these and greater good things among us, to thee do we give thanks through the high priest and protector of our souls, Jesus Christ, through whom to thee be the glory and majesty, now and to all generations, world without end. Amen.

This translation, by Charles H. Hoole (1885), comes from www.earlychristianwritings.com. I first encountered this prayer in Hugo Rahner's Church and State in Early Christianity, pp. 22-23, which we read in Richard Dougherty's course in Catholic Political Thought.