What about mao?

While reading William Pfaff's engaging if overly broad exegesis of the cultural and historical framework of current global conflict, I came across this risible assertion: "the present U.S. government ... In its treatment of enemies has reverted to a barbarism last experienced in Nazi-occupied Europe." On the assumption that Pfaff is familiar with the great assembly of despotic villains whose state-sponsored crimes have occurred since 1945 (Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, etc.), not to mention the horrendous atrocities perpetrated by most of America's recent enemies against POWs (Viet Cong, Al Qaeda in Iraq, etc.), can he possibly consider this statement true? I hope that Pfaff's argument is not born of an unwillingness to apply Western standards of "barbarism" to non-Western peoples.

BO HARRISON

Durham, N.C.

THE AUTHOR REPLIES:

Two objections are made to my claim that man does not, or has not, morally improved over the years. Instances of social, political, legal, or institutional improvement or progress are cited, which I did not and do not deny (although the argument that they reflect a collective moral development must deal with regression as well as progress: compare twentieth-century ideological and totalitarian Europe with nineteenth-century bourgeois and constitutional Europe. I will leave aside the question of what has happened in our own country).

I simply do not believe that men and women today are, in essential respects as moral beings, improvements on Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, or the meanest of their contemporaries, or for that matter, the Magdalenian cave painters. I am talking about the moral nature of (fallen) man, which in my understanding is unchanging. I understand our responsibility in life and in history to be a struggle against evil and adversity while recognizing that this is (as the Greeks put it) a Sisyphean endeavor. Therein lies the achievement of human grandeur. It would be interesting, though, to hear from a theologian on this matter; my own position originates in religion, as well as in a sixty-year engagement with contemporary history.

Contemporary society--since God was declared dead--has tended to assume that moral progress must be taking place collectively. In my view the people who hold this belief in the advance of secular civilization towards some redemptive goal (the myth that inspires all ideologies, including the American) do so as an unacknowledged--or unconscious, but indispensable--alternative to nihilism.

In response to Bo Harrison: I compared U.S. government policies (avowed or otherwise) on torture and arbitrary imprisonment to those of Nazi Germany because this seemed more appropriate than comparisons with Mao, Pol Pot, etc. We and Germany are both members of Western civilization, formed in its values. Mao and Pol Pot must answer to their own civilizations, those of China and India (Cambodia is a product of the two). Historically, these civilizations have often considered the West to be barbarian--not without some justification.

WILLIAM PFAFF