Pfaff's skepticism.

How does one respond respectfully and gratefully to William Pfaff, then tell him he is at least a little bit wrong ("Clash of Cultures," June 16)? His remarkable overview of our historic situation has among its many virtues locating historic responsibility with "the West," with us. History has happened, he tells us, the West has been "deliberately or implicitly undermining" other cultures and "it is anachronistic and irrelevant to moralize about this." But, as Pfaff well knows, history did not just happen. Real people made decisions that get summed up as imperialism and colonialism and modernity and postmodernity. Those decisions, those lives, mattered. The question Pfaff leaves us with is whether our decisions, our lives, do.

Perhaps Pfaff has spent too much time in Europe, for his characteristic political realism now ends in worldly resignation. Progress was and is a lie. Once we in the West believed in "secular history as purposeful development toward a meaningful conclusion," but one can only continue to believe such things by "denying the experience of the twentieth century." Change, like history, happens; things will not get better. There is no use going on about it. Pfaff yearns for a "moral universe" (once inhabited by leaders like George Kennan) where "spiritual distinction" took precedence over "material opulence." But he tells us such ideas are "totally alien" to the "dominant culture." Like it or not, we are stuck with Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations--with the addendum that ours is as bad as any. We cannot recover Kennan, and even if we could, he would look a lot like Brent Scowcroft, not Gandhi or John XXIII. And it makes little difference because, Pfaff says, liberals and conservatives alike affirm the priorities and support the powers that got us here in the first place.

Reading this article, I felt the way I did for years after listening to wonderfully intelligent people argue persuasively that, even though there was a pretty good chance that the use of nuclear weapons would end history, we had best keep ahead in the arms race. What was then well named as "crackpot realism" conveniently served elites who loved dialogue about ethics and politics but did not want to do anything in particular. Is there not a more hopeful Americanist spirit that might modify Pfaff's skepticism? After all, there are reasonable political commitments available to Americans--internationalist, humanitarian, and global. It is not utopian to think that we can make space for religious and cultural diversity while patiently constructing institutions to reduce military capabilities and bring measures of justice to international relationships. Pfaff and so many of our generation were inspired by John XXIII's Pacem in terris with its realistic acknowledgement of human interdependence and its idealistic call to shared responsibility for the next steps in human history. Right and Left (all of us are in there somewhere) may have buried those hopes, but resurrection, like history, happens.

We all have our moments when it all seems too much. But then there is a young man in front of a tank in Tianneman Square; a Polish girl, without the use of a leg, driving relief supplies to Bosnia; my congressman arrested to get attention paid to Darfur; students back from Mexico or Haiti or Kenya, asking how we can make things better for the people they have met; Christian peacemaker Tom Fox, murdered by terrorists for accompanying ordinary people in Iraq, shortly after he wrote a journal entry asking Pfaff-like questions about whether it makes a difference. To be worthy of such people, I would like to help build an alternative set of policies for my country, and I am not alone. We need Pfaff's help. Please ask him to take a break, and then, as he has for so long, to once again help us find our way.

DAVID O'BRIEN 

Worcester, Mass.

THE AUTOR REPLIES:

I am grateful for David O'Brien's thoughtful comments, and for the kind words he has for me, but I do not see in his criticisms what I thought I wrote. My essential argument was surely a simple Christian message: Do good, resist evil, but do not expect your reward in this world. My remarks about the West were not a confession of its guilt but a comment on reality.

The West undermines non-Western societies because of its characteristic dynamism and Promethean ambition. It has been responsible for imperialism, colonialism, liberalism, modernism, and postmodernism, and also for cathedrals, modern science, the Enlightenment, international law, Marxism, Nazism, modern representative government, and the political formulation of the notion of human solidarity in the welfare state. It is what it is largely because of biblical religion, which gave Jews and Christians a linear conception of history and belief in a destiny to fulfill. (This also is true of Islam, the third religion of the Book.) Of course individuals made decisions, but did so, and do so, out of the cultural values of their society. In contemporary discussion of this matter, there is a persistent lack of historical imagination and empathy, condemning the past according to the anachronistic standards of liberal-minded Americans or Britons of our own day.

To judge from what O'Brien says, and from the earlier letters Commonweal (August 11) has published on my article, what particularly bothers readers is my argument that man, as a moral being, remains unchanged over the ages, and that we are not noticeably an improvement over the contemporaries of Chaucer or Thucyides, or, for that matter, over Adam. O'Brien sees in this argument counsel of "worldly resignation" and a recommendation against trying to improve society, stop the wars, make a change. Why should this be? If so, I don't take my own advice, since I have spent sixty years professionally telling people and governments what I thought they should do and warning against the damned fool things they mostly did. My argument is that man is and will remain what he (she) always has been. The nobility of human existence, as recognized by the pre-Christian Greeks (whose surviving writings provide our record of man's early thought on these matters), lies in the pursuit of good, or of virtue, in the consciousness that this is a Sisyphean undertaking, and that the fates of man and history are tragic. Merit is found in the action, not in the material result. Christianity confirms this with its teaching of original sin, with its hope and confidence in resolving the meaning of existence in the love of God, and with its insistence on man's duty to transcend the disposition towards nihilism that is part of human nature.

Of course we share responsibility for the "next steps in human history," but we cannot know where those steps will lead, only that it will not be to a heaven on earth. That is the difference between the Christian message and the secular millenarian promises made by the totalitarian movements (false religions) of the twentieth century, and even by the betrayed expectations of a rationally perfected earthly society that were inspired by the Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. Martin D'Arcy, in his splendid book on the Christian view of history (The Meaning and Matter of History, 1959), quotes the American historian Charles Beard on what he learned from a lifetime study of the subject. It is very wise. Beard said four sentences would suffice. When darkness comes the stars begin to shine; the bees that rob the flowers provide the honey; whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad [the contemporary case in evidence is obvious]; and the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.

I might add, as a personal note, that while there is a pleasing romanticism in the notion of myself as clear-eyed son of the American frontier turned to decadence and resignation by European residence, I was a historical pessimist at twenty, made so by the University of Notre Dame. There was a direct European influence in that two of my teachers were wartime exiles, Waldemar Gurian, friend of Hannah Arendt, and Yves Simon, friend and disciple of Jacques Maritain. But much came from the university itself which (under the influence of several remarkable men--most of them American Irish, by the way) was teaching a humanities curriculum that instructed the National Champion football-playing sons of Catholic immigrants in neo-Thomism, the Greeks and Dante, as well as the English classics, and had us reading Bernanos, Mauriac, Acton, Pascal, Burke, Berdyaev, et al. It was all highly un-American, especially for the late 1940s.

WILLIAM PFAFF