Anti-Climacus

THE TWO MICHAEL WALZERS: I'm in the midst of working on a paper on the concept of solidarity (having just completed the section on Richard Rorty and his odious views on human rights and solidarity), and I'm currently working my way through some of the smaller works of Michael Walzer. It's truly infuriating to read him, because (for example) in his writing on social criticism (and also, as memory serves, in Spheres of Justice) he takes such anti-universalist and anti-transcendent views, to the point of advocating a very bizarre form of parochialism. But when he writes about actual political problems, all of that seems to fall away and he starts making sense again. To wit (from "The Politics of Rescue," Social Research, Spring 1995):

"...That is why American politicians and military officers have insisted that there must be an exit strategy before there can be an intervention. But this is effectively an argument against intervening at all. Exit strategies can rarely be designed in advance, and a public commitment to exit within such and such a time would give the hostile forces a strong incentive to lie low and wait. Better to stay home than to intervene in a way that is sure to fail...

And yet, sometimes, [interventions] ought to be supported and endured. Consider: if some powerful state or regional alliance had rushed troops into Rwanda when the massacres first began or as soon as their scope was apparent, the terrible exodus and the cholera plague might have been avoided. But the troops would still be there, probably, and no one would know what hadn't happened...

Multilateralism is no guarantee of anything. It may still be better than the unilateral initiative of a single powerful state--though in the examples with which I began, India, Vietnam, and Tanzania, local powers, did not do entirely badly; none of their interventions, with the possible exception of the last, would have been authorized by the UN. In practice, we should probably look for some concurrence of multilateral authorization and unilateral initiative--the first for the sake of moral legitimacy, the second for the sake of political effectiveness--but it's the initiative that is essential."

And what is all of that, after all, but a willingness to announce the universal application of one's own moral beliefs, in a way not at all open to argumentation as duties or obligations (though the entailments of those duties or obligations being open to discussion). I've not yet made it to Just and Unjust Wars, though Walzer informs the reader that this particular essay is meant to be narrowly tailored exceptions to his general support for nonintervention, so I imagine it will be frustrating going.

Oh, and then there's this little bit, instructive for what I take to be obvious reasons:

"(A friend comments: you would stress the wariness more if there were a Republican president. Probably so.)"