Manicheism and Jansenism at the Root of Politics??
Gunny
European view. The piece appeared on the op-ed pages of the Boston Globe
yesterday.
The problem at the root of US-European discord
By William Pfaff, 11/29/2002
PARIS
THE ATTITUDE of the George W. Bush administration and of the neoconservative
policy community that supplies its ideas is condescending at best to those
who question its actions.
The members of the administration and their backers claim a moral realism
that their critics, specifically their European critics, allegedly lack. The
Washingtonians are ''grown-ups'' (in one particularly unfortunate recent
formulation). Their ''realism'' consists in believing that there are evil
leaders and governments in the world. They are under the impression that
their critics are moral relativists, who do not recognize this.
They interpret a reluctance to go to war against Iraq, and potentially Iran
and North Korea, and an unwillingness to follow the United States in making
radical government reorganizations and restricting civil liberties in an
ill-defined and thus far conspicuously unsuccessful war against terrorism as
evidence of this moral relativism.
One might think it evidence of good sense or an informed prudence, but the
Bush people believe themselves more farsighted than others. This is a
recurrent fallacy in Washington. It was Madeleine Albright, secretary of
state in the Clinton administration, who provided this belief's most
complacent statement when she said that the United States ''sees farther''
because it ''stands taller,'' being more virtuous than other countries.
George Ball, an immensely respected US diplomat of the postwar period,
argued in the 1960s that the United States is ''unique in world history''
because its foreign policy is disinterested. Europeans, he added, ''have
little experience in the exercise of responsibility divorced from ... narrow
and specific national interests.'' He said this in explaining why the United
States would win the war in Vietnam.
Naturally, this attitude does not always go down very well in other
countries and has become a particular irritant in American relations today
with Europe.
The serious formulation of the neo-conservatives' argument says that while
the United States acts on moral realism, the West Europeans have adopted an
idealistic view of international affairs that may be appropriate in the
concerns of the European community but is irresponsible as an approach to an
international order threatened by rogue states and anarchic failed states.
It contends as well that the European view reflects a lack of courage and a
selfish willingness to allow the United States to defend the international
order while Europeans appease rogue rulers and seize shady commercial
advantages that the United States high-mindedly scorns.
In the past year, France and Germany have also been accused of displaying
anti-Semitic sentiments, expediently concealed since Nazi and Vichy times
but now rampant, ignored by a European leadership which in this respect is
no better than that of the 1930s.
In part, all this reflects old cultural attitudes tied to the complicated
relationship of Americans of European descent to the countries their
ancestors left in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in the case of the
neo-conservatives, many of them Jewish, in the attitudes of children and
grandchildren of the Nazis' victims.
It also presents, in an intense form, the same disagreement that has
separated American governments from their European allies on a number of
previous occasions. This, by analogy at least, is a theological
disagreement.
Dualism has always been a powerful tendency in religion, the unmistakable
good - light - confronting darkness and evil. Both Calvinism and the
17th-century Catholic heresy of Jansenism were affected by theological
dualism, preaching predestination and the corrupting force of material goods
and pleasures.
Both had great influence on the American consciousness, the first through
the 17th-century Puritanism that shaped American Congregationalism in the
18th century and the evangelical Protestantism of the 19th and 20th
centuries.
They preached that the world was replete with Satan's snares, and they took
an activist approach (remember not only Prohibition but Carrie Nation and
her hatchet). The Jansenist influence reached the United States via Irish
Catholicism, deeply Puritan in outlook.
Manicheism has become a generalized term (usually of abuse), but the
religion itself originated (not far from Baghdad) early in the second
century of the Christian era and was a synthesis of Zoroastrianism and
Christianity, with several other Asian religious influences.
Its dualism was of eternal war between God and Satan, light and darkness. It
held that evil was physical, not a moral thing. Believers fell into two
classes: the elect, or perfect, bearers of light, and their followers, who
could hope to merit rebirth as elect. All others were sinners, destined to
hell.
Manicheism had largely disappeared in Europe by the 6th century, although it
influenced the medieval heresies of the Cathars, Albigenses, and the
Bogomils. Its dualism is an interpretation of existence that has proven
persistent and seductive. In the United States its religious expression has
weakened, but its influence on the American mind, as it addresses foreign
affairs, is stronger than ever.
William Pfaff is a syndicated columnist.
Jim Sheffield
Gunny you and the Europeans are in denial, Islamic
Facists really do want to kill us. In the sixties,
we had a saying "even paranoids have enemies". You
should read "The Rage and the Pride" by Oriana Fallaci,
a Tuscan. Remember the Tuscans when they were Etruscans
civilized Rome and as Tuscans civilized Europe during
the Renaisance. God bless!
Pax Christi
Jim