Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — July 31, 2005

I have little patience with the historical self-righteousness
that comes so easily to much of the pampered West nowadays. Those
of us born after the Second World War, who have had at least in
physical terms the softest lives of any people who have ever
lived, often seem to find it easy to pass the most severe
judgment on everyone who lived before us, even regarding
situations in which they were struggling for a decent life, or
even for their very survival, against dangers which we have never
had to face, partly and precisely because they did. If we had
been there, we seem to believe, we would have done the
right thing. I sometimes even get the sense from people my
own age (mid-50s) that we have never entirely let go of the pity
we felt for ourselves when we were young, finding ourselves in a
world which, to our aggrieved astonishment, was not perfect.

This readiness to condemn seems odd when contrasted with the
widespread belief that we have no right to judge the actions of
anyone else, especially if we have not walked a mile in his
shoes. Such caution apparently applies to everyone except our own
ancestors, who are vilified for every occasion when they failed
to meet the ethical standards we have retroactively set for them.
“Liberal self-loathing” is the term sometimes given
to this contempt for one’s own cultural past when
it’s found on the left, but that doesn’t seem really
accurate, as the condemnation is not directed toward self
either individually or collectively: the judges do not really
view themselves as being part of the culture they condemn. They
themselves belong to the new, all-tolerant, all-liberating,
all-knowing culture toward which evolution has been working for
millennia and the main task of which is to finish off its mortal
enemy, the old stupid vicious culture. And besides, a variant of
the phenomenon can be found on the right, although it is less
straightforward. I think both instances are at least partly
mutant forms of American exceptionalism, but that’s a
subject for another note.

Rejection of this almost mindless refusal even to attempt to
understand the past should not and need not mean a reactive
attempt to whitewash it. In fact, contempt for the past is
probably at least in part a reaction against versions of history
which painted a too-pretty picture of it. The temptation to
believe our enemies to be thoroughly evil and our friends
to be almost perfect is almost as strong when we look at
history as when we look around us in the present day.
But I recall how stunning
and somehow liberating it was to me to read Swift’s Tale
of a Tub, in which English Puritans are portrayed as
ridiculous fanatics. It was not so much that I thought Swift was
entirely correct about them—he had, of course, his own
polemical goals—as that it was refreshing to get a
different view of them, one in which they were neither the noble
crusaders of one strain of American history, or the evil
witch-hunters of another strain. Perhaps that was the point at
which I understood with my heart as well as my mind that history
was not simple and that those who acted in it were facing a world
in which good and evil, truth and falsehood, were as mixed and
murky as they are to us.

Under John Paul II, the Catholic Church has recently
undertaken an historical evaluation of itself which has been
called “the purification of memory.”
The phrase (I am not sure whether the Pope himself was the author
of it) is meant to describe a process of facing the
Church’s past with the greatest attainable degree of
humility and honesty. But it is not an abstract or academic
exercise; “it is also meant to be an occasion for a change
of mentality and certain attitudes in the Church, as well as the
source of a new teaching for the future, in the consciousness
that the sins of the past remain as temptations in the
present.” (See
this document.)

Something like that, I think, is needed in the United States
with respect to—well, with respect to many things, but in
particular to the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the 60th anniversaries of which are coming
up this week. Those bombings are only the most dramatic and
terrifyingly efficient instances of the general practice of
bombing civilians in which the U.S.A. engaged during the Second
World War. Of course every other belligerent having the
capability did the same, but it is we who now stand in a position
of dominance over much of the earth, and our ability to see the
right path and to follow it will have a decisive effect on the
rest of the world, and will determine whether our future is to be
that of a nation intent on justice or of one devolving into just
another large-scale criminal enterprise, like most of the
world’s now-fallen empires.

We must face, and take responsibility for, the simple fact
that what we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong. I call this
a “simple” fact fully aware that not everyone grants
its status as fact, much less that it is simple. The simplicity
to which I refer is not that of the historical decision, which
was indeed complex, but of the abstract ethical principle: it is
wrong to target noncombatants in war. It is wrong to incinerate
non-combatants in their hundreds of thousands at a swoop. It is
wrong, and, what perhaps most needs saying in our present ethical
climate, even if you have powerful reasons for doing it, it is
still wrong. And if it is not wrong, then our argument with,
say, Osama bin-Laden becomes a question of who struck
first and who had the greater provocation; that is, we have no
principled argument against his methods.

I am not saying that the circumstances surrounding the
decision to use the atomic bomb were such that the right decision
should have been easy. That is exactly the error I want to avoid,
and of which those who defend the acts might accuse me. I do not
even want to evaluate the objective moral culpability of those
who made the decision and those who carried it out. That is for
God to determine. I want to emphasize that there were strong reasons
for the decision, and most of all to stress what is so easy to
ignore for those evaluating such acts from the comfortable, safe,
and omniscient vantage point of the future: that the cost of
deciding otherwise might have been enormous.

If you think it was easy to be Harry Truman in 1945, and that
you would certainly never have done what he did, spend a while
imagining yourself looking at the casualty figures from the war
in the Pacific and contemplating those that could be expected in
an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Think of asking a nation
which had already sent most of its young men into the hell of
modern war to keep sending them, with the expectation that an
even higher percentage of them would not return. Read something
real and unsentimental about the war and imagine yourself as a
soldier who has survived the Philippines or Guadalcanal and would
now face something worse. Think, too, of the nightmare that
would have faced the civilian population of Japan, caught in the
middle of a land war that would involve the entire country until
the last soldier surrendered or was killed. Then imagine that you
could make all these horrible possibilities go away by one or two
acts that would cost no American lives and quite probably fewer
Japanese lives than would have been taken in an invasion.

No, it was not an easy decision, and anyone who thinks it
would have been if only he had been there to make it is fooling
himself. Even one untempted to swerve from absolute principle
would have been, and ought to have been, daunted, to say the
least, by the possible consequences of not doing the forbidden
thing. There is indeed much we might say, much that has been
said, in extenuation of the decision. But what we cannot
and must not say is that it was right.

Why is it important to recognize this? Because “the sins
of the past remain as temptations in the present.” One who
believes that stealing is wrong may, given the right combination
of temptations and pressures, steal anyway. But one who does not
believe stealing is wrong is almost certain to do it regularly.
We Americans have a tendency to believe that if we really, really
need to do a thing, it must therefore be right. I sometimes think
that may be our fatal flaw. But it is a far lesser sin to fail to
live up to the moral law than to reject it.