Tag: Hiroshima

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The Feminist Critique of Pure Immanuel Kant

There is an ad in the latest New York Times Review of Books (November 20, 1997) that really shook me up. It is for a book called “The Feminist Interpretation of Immanuel Kant”. It is edited by Robin May Schott, in case you want to order it.

Now, hey, I’d be the first person to say that it’s about time someone over-hauled the old transcendental critique of pure reason, I mean, after all, it’s only been out of date since about fifteen minutes after it was printed, but even I would never have guessed that the feminists would be the ones to put the last nail in the coffin. I’m not sure Immanuel would be pleased. I think he said something like “feminism is destroying our society” or something like that at one point in his career, probably just after his wife left him.

But you know, the next time some dark-minded pundit goes on and on about how our society is just falling apart and things have never been so bad and our youth have really lousy manners, and Hollywood sucks, and so on, I’m going to think about those feminists out there reinterpreting Immanuel Kant and breathe a quiet little sigh of relief. If there is one thing more amazing than any other about our society, its our ability to chew up and regurgitate almost any idea, any image, any concept, and spit it out again as lively and ripe as if it were new.

Like Immanuel Kant. It would have been audacious enough if the feminists had taken on Wittgenstein or Popper, but Kant? So what do the feminists have to say? I don’t know. I haven’t read the book yet. But I’ll bet they accuse Kant of building his entire rigid, rational system of thought on some misdirected patriarchal impulse to rule reality with an iron fist. And I’ll bet the feminists believe that a view of reality more harmonious with natural, empathetic impulses would have worked better. If I remember my college philosophy correctly, Kant was trying to rescue Reason with a capital “R” from Descartes’ radical critique, which consisted of declaring that the only thing you could know for sure was that you existed. Both of them sound a little anal retentive to me. The women probably point out that doing the laundry, cooking, and cleaning, require some pretty fundamental ontological conclusions about cause and effect that can’t be justified by going for a walk every day trying to think up new categories of existence.

Then along comes Sartre who believed we don’t exist in a static sense at all. We are constantly in the state of becoming, and that’s why we are free, unless, of course, your wife expects you home for supper. I’ll bet Simone De Beauvoir had a few precious thoughts about this herself.

Wittgenstein thought we basically constructed a reality in our language, and so our society is really nothing more than a construct of the words we imagine to describe it with. I think the feminists might find a home there. You know how they love to get together and talk. Then there was Martin Heidegger. He believed that mankind had forgotten something very, very important about existence, but what it was we had forgotten he couldn’t seem to remember either, so he joined the Nazi party and continued to teach at a university in Germany throughout World War II. Nothing like a philosophy that stimulates you into positive action! I think the feminists wouldn’t like him. They would think that it’s not that hard to remember the important things, as long as you care about people.

Microsoft Philosophy 1.01

You can tell what philosophy Bill Gates believes in by running a spell check on little known recent philosophers in Microsoft Word and then analyzing the results. Watch:

Philosopher Result Meaning
(Martin) Heidegger headgear groovy
(Imre) Lakatos lactose milk for the mind
(Paul) Feyerabend no suggestions vacant
(Albert) Camus cameos we only see reality in hazy profile
(Dan) Quayle quarrel don’t go into politics
(Hannah) Arendt aren’t we don’t exist, unless we’re banal and evil

Hannah Arendt is the only woman on the list, and I don’t think most philosophers would place her next to Heidegger or even Imre Lakatos in terms of importance, but she did come up with one great idea. While in Jerusalem covering the Eichmann trial (Jewish agents had kidnapped Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal, from Argentina and spirited him away to Jerusalem for a show trial), she found herself at a loss for words to describe the utter mediocrity of this minor functionary who was partly responsible for the deaths of six million Jews, so she coined the phrase “banality of evil”*. Later on, she was sorry that she became so well known for that phrase alone. I have to admit, that’s about the only thing I know about Hannah Arendt myself, but I like the phrase, because it captures the idea that incredibly evil things can result from the actions or inactions of people who perceive themselves as being only minor cogs in a big machine. Raul Wallenberg was a minor functionary, but he saved hundreds of lives. Eichmann claimed that he was only following orders. The crew of the Enola Gay were only following orders when they dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima (victors get to write history so we don’t seem to regard them as villains the way we regard the Germans, Italians, or Japanese). The crew of the Titanic sent lifeboats away half-filled because their orders were “women and children first” and the third-class women and children were still below decks, and the only other people present were men.

That’s the way most people behave– just following orders–and that may be the tragedy of the human race.

So if the feminists find a new way of thinking about reality that can convince most people that they should always do the right thing, even when it goes against orders or policy or whatever, then, hey, I’m all in favour of it.

* It appears that Hannah Arendt was wrong.  The discover of more information about Adolf Eichmann revealed that he was, in fact, virulently anti-Semitic, and fully on board with the plans to exterminate the Jews.

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The Just War Theory

The Christian Reformed Church officially believes that there is such a thing as a “just” war. It’s there in our official church policy, right next to sensual abstinence and charitable materialism.

I liked the 1960’s. Sure there were a lot of crazy ideas in the air, and a lot of foolish ones. And sure, the hippies were naïve and idealistic. But you have to see it from the point of view of someone “coming of age”. You have to appreciate what it was like before t he 1960’s.

The 1950’s was Frank Sinatra, Leave it to Beaver, Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was Billy Graham and Richard Nixon and John Wayne. It was military bands and double-knit pants, pant-suits and Tupperware parties.  It was Bette Davis and Doris Day and Rock Hudson and, god help us, Barbara Stanwyck, who all, to me, had the sexual appeal of dried potatoes.

The 1960’s was the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jesus Christ Superstar, and blue jeans. It was Woodstock, Janis Joplin, J.D. Salinger.  It was Natalie Wood and Ali McGraw and Faye Dunaway.  It was t-shirts and sandals and free love–whatever that was– and John Kennedy.

It was no contest.

One of the things a lot of people in my generation believed in–don’t puke now–was the PEACE movement. I remember arguing with my teachers and parents and minister about it. They all believed that war was a regrettable necessity, but a necessity nevertheless. They argued that the world was full of violent, evil people, who were just itching to conquer and destroy us, just like the Nazis, and the Communists, and, of course, Cuba. In order to preserve our God-ordained lives as suburban consumers, it was necessary to threaten to destroy all life on the entire planet. There could never be peace as long as there was sin in the world, and there would always be sin in the world.

The more sophisticated among us argued back: they are warlike because we are warlike. They hit back, because we hit first. They threaten to destroy us because we threaten to destroy them.

Hopelessly naïve, so we were told.

The Christian Reformed Church produced a thoughtful document that supported the pro-war faction. But a careful reading of it reveals that the peaceniks were gaining the high ground. This document laid out very stringent conditions under which a war could be considered “just”. The one that was most interesting: the benefits of a particular war should outweigh the cost.

Well, I suppose you wouldn’t have a hard time finding militarists who really believed that the benefits of almost any war outweighed the costs. Benefit: lots of medals. Cost: hundreds of thousands of lives. After reading this document, I came to conclusion that some members of the committee which wrote it were playing a joke on us.

It is of more than passing interest that the current generation of leadership in the West, especially Tony Blair in England and Bill Clinton in the U.S., are baby-boomers, members of the “Give Peace a Chance” generation. And guess what: they are proving us right.

The biggest difference between Clinton and Blair and their predecessors, Thatcher and Reagan, is that Clinton and Blair really do believe that peace is a good thing. (One of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as president, way back in 1980, was to restore the funding for military brass bands which President Carter had cut. Thatcher, of course, charged off to Argentina to save the Falklands for England, tally ho.)

And so we finally have peace in South Africa. Peace has a tenuous grasp in the Middle East. And so you have Blair in Ireland and Israel, and Bill Clinton lending the full support of the U.S. But it is not those two men alone. Baby boomers now hold the reigns of power in industry, commerce, education, and government, and whatever other compromises they have made in their lives, they seem to agree that peace is better than war.

Of course, there are still conflicts and civil wars and other disturbances, in places like Nigeria and Kosovo, and the Middle East could still explode if negotiations don’t make some progress soon. But over-all, has the world ever been in better shape? No, it hasn’t. Last year, there were two significant conflicts in the entire world. In any given year during the 1960’s, there were at least 20.

*

Perhaps the difference in generations is most aptly summed up in a controversy that broke out several years ago between the Canadian Legion and some “peaceniks” in Chatham, Ontario. The Legion was outraged– outraged, I say– that a group of nuns and activists had decided to hold a peace rally in front of the local cenotaph. How dare they! In their protests, the Legion made transparent all their pretty rhetoric about heroism and sacrifice: the truth was, they didn’t go over “there” to die for their country. They went over there to kill for their country. And the monument was not a tribute to the peace they won; it was a tribute to the camaraderie of men who enjoyed dressing up and shooting guns off at each other, and then spending the next forty years boozing it up away from their wives and retelling the same boring stories about “Jack” and “Bill” and how splendidly they gave it to the wicked kraut.

They realized that peace activists devalued their most cherished accomplishments.

I had been brought up to respect these men for the grim work they did of defending liberty and freedom. After hanging around a Legion hall a few times, and after all we’ve heard in the last few years– about the Queen and admitting Sikhs to the Legion halls, and the flag and so on– I was left with the impression that most of these men had some skewed imperialistic notion of “liberty” that didn’t have much latitude in it for diversity or democracy. I don’t think many of these men cared much about the horrible injustices of the Nazi regime, except insofar as particular incidents could be used to paint the enemies as monsters.

More recently, the veterans complained bitterly when the National War Museum revealed plans to include a section on the Holocaust. How dare they? What’s that go to do with World War II? In the U.S., veterans complained so loudly and bitterly that the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. was forced to withdraw an exhibit that merely documented– did not damn or praise, merely documented– the bombing of Hiroshima. In one sense, their actions are a glorious admission of shame. They want to pretend that Hiroshima never happened.

I mean that, absolutely, their actions were a monumental admission of shame.  If they really believed there was nothing morally wrong with Hiroshima they would not have been bothered one whit about featuring it in an exhibit on the war.

I have gone from believing that these men fought out of a sincere belief in democracy and freedom and justice to believing that most of these men still hold the same attitudes and political views that gave rise to many of the 20th century’s military conflicts in the first place, namely, that honor and national pride are worth killing for, and that material wealth must be guarded against interlopers, and that killing in the name of a nation or a flag is honorable and right.