Losing Moral Ground

These days the world of morals and the world of politics seem poles apart. Political leaders secure the approval—or at least the passive acquiescence—of large majorities of citizens by appealing to the worst within us. President Reagan won overwhelming re-election by resorting to coded racist messages ("the South will rise again"), by inspirational jingoism (the United States is "back standing tall," having wiped away the stain of humiliating defeat in Vietnam and Iran by trouncing Grenada), and by celebrating selfishness in its many guises.

Orwellian words to soothe aching consciences come off the assembly line faster than the missiles. Good anti-communist, authoritarian governments such as Marcos' regime in the Philippines and Pinochet's Chile don't "kill" people any more. They engage in the "unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life," according to the State Department. In the Pentagon, peace is known as "permanent pre-hostility," combat as "violence processing," and the Grenada invasion as a "predawn vertical insertion."

The appearance of being moral, as Henry Kissinger once put it, is more important than being moral. The U.S. government is resorting to ever more sophisticated techniques to defuse the moral qualms of citizens about what it does in their name. And at the same time, its policies diverge ever more sharply from the best moral traditions of the nation: encouragement of democracy, tolerance of ideological diversity, dedication to international law, and promotion of Third World development.

The principles are still professed, but the policies negate the principles. South Africa, Chile, the Philippines, and Pakistan receive support. A regime declared "Marxist-Leninist"—a designation that a former Reagan administration ambassador to Nicaragua considered an inaccurate description of the Sandinista government—is targeted for destruction. After placing mines in the harbors of Nicaragua, the United States defies its international obligations by ignoring the World Court's jurisdiction over the matter. The vice president celebrates religious liberty in El Salvador, where the archbishop was murdered while saying Mass, and condemns religious repression in Nicaragua, where the archbishop attacks the government from the pulpit each week.

Official rhetoric still proclaims our dedication to a world in which the weak have rights as well as the strong, but the operative policy is that enunciated by the Athenian generals who subdued the island of Melos: the strong exact what they wish and the weak yield what they must.

AS THE FOREIGN policy of the United States becomes increasingly isolationist and nationalistic, the American people appear to approve of the show of raw power abroad. The election results lead to the conclusion that jingoist rhetoric; demonstrations of force in the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Central America; and heavy increases in the military budget that sacrifice essential health and social services make large numbers of Americans feel better about their country and themselves. It is critical to ask why this is so.

Even as the returns were being counted, the Reagan administration staged a crisis about non-existent MiGs in Nicaragua that a high official characterized as an "exercise in perception management." It is now commonplace to note that image has crowded out substance.

"New ideas" are advertised but not explained or defended. It is now widely assumed that crafted TV spots, scurrilous direct mail appeals, and presidential news management are the irresistible secret weapons of reactionary politics. Any stain left on a candidate by his own mud-slinging TV messages is carefully expunged by professional image polishers. As he bowed out of public life, Walter Mondale apologized for being a lackluster TV performer.

Much of the reporting on the cynical exercise of power reflects the same cynicism. Instances of official trickery are not always suppressed. Sometimes they make the front pages. Thus, for example, the Scowcroft Commission appointed by Reagan found that the "window of vulnerability"—on which the president had campaigned for office two years earlier—was non-existent, continuing a long tradition in which the bomber gaps and the missile gaps of election time disappear once the alarmists take power.

Commentators usually point this out in a spirit of wry resignation. That's the way it is. They sure fooled us that time.

By acquiescing in policies that flagrantly violate their professed religious and political beliefs, the American people lend moral authority to what the government does in their name. The pressures to conform to a prepackaged, market-tested view of the world are considerable. Hate and fear are simpler emotions than love. The search for truth requires the recognition of complexity, logical inconsistencies, and the dialectical nature of reality; packaged truth dispenses with it all, "offers" the voters a Manichean drama of good and evil.

There are few clear voices holding up an alternative vision. Liberal politics has deliberately eschewed that role. Politics is presented as a series of problems to be solved, and government is offered as the pragmatic tinkerer that can solve or manage them. It is not surprising that that view has been decisively rejected by the American people in the last four elections. The political Right has offered people a moral angle of vision through which to view the world, but that view is partial and, because it sees only what it wants to see, it is dangerous.

IT HAS BEEN a long time since a national leader dedicated to ending the arms race and addressing the urgent planetary problems of hunger, wretchedness, environmental pollution, and massive unemployment has articulated the moral basis of American foreign policy. Moralistic rhetoric is not the same as a moral analysis. Indeed, moralism is the indispensable wrapping for immoral policies. Ritualistic liberal hand-wringing about support for dictators, massive arms budgets, subsidized torture, and the like are shrugged aside as long as people are convinced that the world cannot be different.

The Italian statesman Cavour once said that if we did for ourselves what we do for our country we would all be scoundrels. The state gives medals for precisely the same activities for which it would imprison the heroes if they were acting on their own behalf. As long as the American voters believe in the inverted morality that divides the world of international relations and the world of human relations into two totally separate domains, each with a set of rules almost exactly opposite that of the other, they will continue to acquiesce in a policy of escalating militarism.

There are many social and political pressures and traditions operating on leaders in political parties, churches, unions, indeed in all institutions, that help reinforce moral blindness, particularly in international relations. As a people we are allergic to preachiness in politics unless the preacher is telling us how good we are or how rich God wants us to be. It goes less against the grain to forget morals and to argue for good works on grounds of enlightened self-interest.

In the 1950s liberals used to argue that foreign aid was an insurance policy on peace; the wretched of the earth who "want what we have," as Lyndon Johnson once put it, will come and take it away from us if we cannot be a little generous. Mindless anti-communism in the Third World, it was argued, will produce more Cubas. Military expenditures are bad for the economy and keep us from being competitive in civilian markets. If we behave in a militaristic manner, we forfeit the decent opinion of humankind, and our allies will turn on us.

In the sweep of history, all those arguments, I am persuaded, will prove to be correct. But in the short term, reality looks different. People on the edge of starvation in far-off places pose no military threat to the territory of the United States. A tough U.S. stance in the hemisphere seems to have induced caution about experimenting with the export of revolution in the manner of Che Guevara, especially since those experiments of many years ago were failures in and of themselves.

THE REAGAN RECOVERY was fueled to a significant extent by military expenditures, a method of creating budget deficits that is closest to Lord Keynes' recommendation that, if necessary, we should prime the economic pump by digging holes in the ground and filling them up again. The importance of the dollar as the world currency is still sufficient to give the other industrial nations pause when they are tempted to oppose U.S. policies in, say, Latin America.

There is far more friction between the allies and more open opposition than in the past, but there are limits. The United States lacks the power to run most of the world as it largely did at the end of World War II, but it retains enough power to keep international relations effectively paralyzed because, so far at least, other nations dare not confront the number-one nation except at the margins.

The pragmatic arguments in favor of decency are not instantly compelling. It takes a little thought, for example, to recognize the flaw in a policy that calls for the massive subsidization of El Salvador and the systematic destruction of Nicaragua at the same time. You would have to know that in economic terms Central America is a single region and that the policy is self-defeating, indeed guaranteed to keep the whole region poor and in turmoil.

Most people in the United States don't know that and do not see much reason to learn. So enlightened self-interest gives way to emotional appeals to hate and fear unless it is firmly grounded in a moral vision.

The official view of the moral sensibilities of the American people is as cynical as the policies themselves. The public will support invasions of foreign countries if they are quick, like Grenada, and won't if they are prolonged, like Vietnam. They will support food aid policies that withhold timely food shipments to Ethiopia because that government is "Marxist-Leninist" even as they watch Ethiopian babies die on the nightly news. Meanwhile the politically correct babies of Somalia are saved with U.S. grain.

AS SECRECY HAS become more difficult as a practical matter—despite being sanctioned by ever tougher laws—we have entered the world of overt covert operations. Today the size and power of the news-gathering industry makes it impossible to hide a large secret war like that being carried out by the contras in Nicaragua. Twenty-five years ago the CIA's secret war in Laos could be kept off the front pages, but much innocence has been lost since then. Today's undeclared war against Nicaragua is discussed openly by U.S. officials without admitting responsibility for it. The operation is deliberately overt in order to put maximum pressure on the Sandinistas. It is also covert in order to avoid the constitutional processes of deliberation with respect to war-making.

Thus our most basic foreign policies are carried out without examination of their moral content. No politician asks: what does it do to a people to hear their government year after year dramatize the threat to kill hundreds of millions of innocent people?

Politicians prate about the perils of big government, but none even allude to the development that has totally transformed the relationship of the citizen and the state. The decision about war and peace has been surrendered to one man. Supported only by machines and a few advisers, he decides in the moment of crisis whether to blow up the planet. (That is, if the system works as it is supposed to work. Otherwise that person could be a confused nuclear submarine commander.)

This power is beyond the wildest dreams of tyrants. But the profound implications for democracy of what has happened to us are not discussed within the political process. No one asks how the people can get back some of the power they have turned over to the small-town lawyers, the peanut farmer, and movie actor whom they have anointed with God-like might.

This overriding argument for making our number-one priority the effort to de-nuclearize and demilitarize our security policy is not considered respectable. Anyone aspiring to office who would make that argument would be perceived by the professional king-makers and opinion molders as a bit hysterical, naive, certainly lacking in the gravitas we expect of men with fingers on or near the button. But no one seems to notice that once citizens have surrendered the most basic decision over their lives, progeny, and property to this anointed leader all lesser decisions are affected.

Powers of all sorts flow relentlessly into the same hands. The terrible stakes, the need for swift decision, and the necessary secrecy are all adduced as arguments for concentrating ever greater power in the presidency. Ten years ago during the Watergate scandal, there was much talk of the "imperial presidency." But the president has more power today than he had then to censor, to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens, and to circumvent the will of Congress—all in the name of "national security."

MORAL EXAMINATION IS critical to the idea of informed consent, the only sort of consent that the law recognizes. If, without even realizing it, citizens consent to policies that violate the moral precepts by which they wish to live, their integrity as moral beings is undermined, and the integrity of the political community for which they sacrifice their personal moral principles is also undermined.

There is a difference between the consent of free men and women that is based on understanding, access to information, deliberation, and real, rather than symbolic, participation in the political process and what I would call consumer's consent, the familiar reflex conditioned by advertising that causes the shopper to reach for one brand of toothpaste rather than another. Informed consent requires that the actual consequences of policy be examined.

Moralistic justifications for unexamined policies abound. A few thousand more missiles should be targeted on 250 million men, women, and children because the Soviet Union is the focus of evil in the world. The Soviet leaders repress Baptists and Jews, and they could have even tried to kill the pope. Look what's happening in Poland. The Nicaraguans deserve everything they get; look what they did to the Miskito Indians. Rome had a similar bill of particulars about Carthage to justify its destruction. Joseph Goebbels shook with moral outrage as he explained Hitler's declaration of war against the plutocrats and Jews in the United States. Instant moral outrage is easily manufactured.

But the actual moral content of our own policies—which can be ascertained only by the testing of policy by the standards of either religious faith, ethical principles, or constitutional tradition—gets little attention. As Jesus' metaphor about beams and motes makes clear, members of our species are amazingly tolerant of their own actions. Just by originating with us, acts take on a moral coloration that would never be there had they been undertaken by anyone else.

THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT and the movement against imperialist adventures must be rooted in a deeper understanding of the moral implications of militarism. We need to ask why we are doing things collectively that we would never do individually. Most of us would never dream of taking hostages. Yet we pay with our taxes for hostage-taking on a gigantic scale.

The official policy is to "deter" Soviet behavior—not just nuclear war because we insist on reserving the right to use nuclear weapons first—by threatening to evaporate, burn, mutilate, and poison millions of Soviet citizens who have no control whatever over what their government does. We employ the language of strategy to obscure this moral madness; we should be using the language of crime, for if it is not a crime to destroy the world, even to attempt to destroy it, even to consider destroying it, then the word has no meaning.

Yet by our actions, the American people through their government have systematically shucked the feeble moral and legal restraints that have been put into place over the past three centuries. Always honored in the breach, to be sure, international law has rules limiting reprisals on innocent civilians in time of war. In World War II, with the air raids on Coventry, London, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, the rules barely applied. But never before the era of so-called "deterrence" have governments explicitly based their national security on the promise to murder civilians.

Supposedly our nuclear weapons are aimed at "military targets." In the century of total war, that can be anything. But even if the term were narrowly defined, the distinction between military and civilian ceases to exist once weapons are dropped in large numbers.

According to a 1978 study by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, a typical U.S. second strike would involve striking Moscow with 60 weapons of megaton or near-megaton strength, Leningrad with more than 40, and the next eight largest cities with an average of 13 weapons each. Over the rest of the Soviet Union, 14.4 war-heads would be allocated for every million men, women, and children. The Pentagon has identified 40,000 targets in the Soviet Union.

What does it say about our nation that we can plan such a holocaust? Even if one were to accept the "necessity" of this sort of mass murder, why do we overlook the moral imperative to find a way out? Why is the search for a non-criminal system of national security not the number-one priority of the government?

The moral cost of the deterrence system is enormous: the overthrow of the most basic principles at the heart of our religious faiths, our professed ideas of civilization, and the corruption of the noble impulses that gave birth to this nation.

On another level, deterrence cannot be proved to have worked if the event to be deterred does not occur. The Soviets have neither bombed Washington, nor marched on Paris, either because of their fear of nuclear incineration, or for an almost infinite number of other reasons, including the rather plausible reason that they saw no advantage in doing so. We do know that nuclear weapons did not deter a number of challenges that, according to the theory, they were supposed to deter. Nuclear weapons did not keep Soviet forces from converting eastern Europe into satellite states over the opposition of the United States—though the United States had a monopoly of nuclear weapons at the time—and did not keep a Soviet army out of Afghanistan.

THE ARMAGEDDON THEORISTS who seem half in love with violent planetary death have abandoned the moral responsibility that God has placed upon us. One aspect of that responsibility is to be creators, not destroyers. The injunction to love your neighbors is a call to create and affirm a social order. The only alternative to getting along with co-inhabitants of the planet, to seeing them as human beings, to empathizing with their needs, their fears, and their dreams is fratricidal war, social decay, and personal despair. Nowhere is it said that the neighbors are easy to get along with. And nowhere is it said that blowing up the world is an option to avoid the dilemma of loving unlovable neighbors.

The sick hope that God will soon blow up the world to rescue us from the moral duty of growing up and figuring out how to coexist with the people of the Soviet Union and 150 other countries offers a theological justification for human-initiated holocaust. God is planning to destroy the world. So when we blow it up, we are doing God's will. In a world in which multimegaton weapons have made hash of the just war doctrine—there are no moral ends to be served by a war that can spell the death of everything—the frightful heresy that we are being faithful by destroying God's creation serves as absolution for the theory and practice of annihilation.

More and more the arms race is theater, but the evidence is powerful that the audience reaction is perverse; consciously engendered fear in the adversary produces aggressive behavior as well as caution. In any particular situation, it is quite unpredictable which it will be.

The moral implications seem clear. To close one's eyes deliberately to the warning signs that the abstract theory (for which we are asked to make ourselves mortal enemies of people we have never met) may be wildly wrong violates the most basic moral obligations. As a people we are easily manipulated by all the latest techniques of television and direct mail, not because the magic of the image-makers is all-powerful, but because it is less uncomfortable to listen to the siren song than to probe the moral basis of policies that bring comfort, money, prestige, and false cheer.

THERE ARE MANY other aspects of national policy besides nuclear policy where the moral issues at stake are ignored because they make us uncomfortable. Our indifference to these questions, which comes easily in any event, is carefully cultivated by sophisticated propaganda. As a people we are susceptible to believing lies because they make us feel better than the truth. Lies, because they obscure what is happening, make acceptable to the American people policies that actually violate their most basic conception of themselves.

Most of us do not think of ourselves as people who would systematically lie to constituted authorities or subsidize criminal activities, including murder and torture. Even the awareness that other people do such things would not justify abandoning our own principles. But here is a sampling of some of the falsehoods included in official testimony of the Reagan administration to support its policies in Central America:

- Despite repeated testimony that U.S. advisers in El Salvador would not "accompany combat operations" but would be confined to "the most secure areas," U.S. military personnel have come under fire at least eight times. This includes the June 1983 sweep by the Salvadoran army of San Vicente province when U.S. military personnel were present during the attack on this guerrilla stronghold.

- In April 1981 a Salvadoran army captain with 16 years of service testified that the death squads were made up of members of the security forces and acts of terrorism "are planned by high-ranking military officers ..." Despite this and much other testimony, Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams told the House Committee on Western Hemisphere Affairs in August 1983 that "we really don't know who the death squads are."

- Four times the Reagan administration certified to the Congress that the Salvadoran government "is making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights" and "is achieving substantial control over all elements of its armed forces, so as to bring to an end the indiscriminate torture and murder ..." Internal U.S. government documents that have come to light point out that intelligence agencies were aware that violence was not down by the time of the second certification. By the third and fourth certifications, the U.S. ambassador in El Salvador was in possession of an International Red Cross cable citing increasing instances of routine torture.

- President Reagan wrote Howard Baker, then U.S. Senate majority leader, on April 4, 1984, that the United States "does not seek to destabilize or overthrow the Government of Nicaragua ..." The CIA manual distributed to the contras, Psychological Operations and Guerrilla War, outlines a strategy that "will literally be able to shake up the Sandinista structure, and replace it ..."

The more morally dubious a foreign adventure, the more it is certain to be wrapped in lies. What is shocking is the equanimity with which the exposure of lies is received. "National security" has been invoked so often over the past 40 years to justify making affairs of state "clearer than the truth," and resistance has been so belated, feeble, and ineffective that we have come to the point when citizens, even congresspersons, expect to be lied to on important matters of foreign policy. But once lies are accepted, even if accompanied by some fuss in Congress, such acquiescence renders inoperative legislation such as the War Powers Act, human rights amendments, and the like that represent the clear will of Congress and the people.

MORE IMPORTANT THAN outright lies in making us comfortable with turning upside down the moral code that operates, however imperfectly, in our personal, civic, and business life are the deadly abstractions. It is safe to assume that in foreign policy any word of three syllables or more obscures more truth than it reveals.

We have already looked at deterrence. Austerity is another. It is a word evoking monkish virtues that actually describes economic processes for paying the "haves" by taking resources away from the "have-nots."

Countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, Zaire, and others have incurred about $800 billion of debts, mostly to a relatively small number of large banks in the United States and Europe. In the high-growth years, these banks aggressively sought the loans; in many cases governments covered the risk. Now the International Monetary Fund conditions its help in staving off bankruptcy by demanding that recipient governments cut basic services and tighten money to the point that unemployment reaches a staggering figure.

The poor keep paying for the miscalculations of banks and high officials. The human toll—children without milk, schools and clinics closed, no drinkable water, no jobs—is hidden in that one sensible-sounding word: austerity.

The development of the rich countries now depends even more on the impoverishment of the world's majority. The same principles are being rapidly enacted into law at home. And the so-called conservatives, under their pro-life banner, are seeking a new prosperity for the middle class by driving more and more of our fellow citizens into poverty and cutting off the funds to feed them, to give them shelter or heat or medical care.

The integrity of a nation, no less than of a man or woman, is measured by how it treats the weak and the powerless. There are costs in comfort, advantage, and easy cheer in facing the moral issues at the root of politics. But until citizens themselves take the lead in demanding and shaping a moral vision of what the nation can be, our politicians will not dare transcend the terrible cynicism that hangs over the waning years of the 20th century.

Richard J. Barnet, the author of The Alliance: America, Europe, Japan—Makers of the Postwar World, was a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and a Sojourners contributing editor at the time this article appeared.