StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-02-26/obamas-mideast-policy-the-case-for-sitting-on-our-hands/

“Dear world, sorry about the last 10 years. Peter Beinart on how the new wave of Mideast revolts may finally be ending America’s wasteful war on terror—and why it would have been smarter not to intervene in the first place.

They’re exhilarating, of course. But from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They’re sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been. Since September 11, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those wars have cost thousands of young Americans their lives and maimed many more. And for what? We were told (and I, for one, believed) that in jihadist terrorism we faced a threat of epic military and ideological power. We were told that unless we toppled anti-American regimes and imposed American ideals, the military and ideological balance would tip decisively in our enemies’ favor. “I will not wait on events,” vowed George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address. We were told to wage war because time was not on our side.”

Here is the opening paragraph from the column of Mr. Peter Beinart published on The Daily Beast. It is exemplary of what is wrong with the whole of the ‘Foreign Policy Establishment’ in government or in academia, or as a casual observer synonymous with ‘journalism’. American is at the center of that world, as the earth was to the pre-Copernican religious ideologues. But are we the center anymore? Do are military bases that ring the globe or our nuclear weapons stockpile or our crumbling economy inspire fear, awe or even a certain reverence anymore? I know that I will sound like a naïve school child to the ‘strategic thinkers’ and their political allies but we American are murderous world citizens; a menace to republican values and practices. Our leaders make war on republican virtue, on republican practice as a matter of policy both internally and externally-without apology, even with a destructive gusto. In the name of National Security anything can be rationalized. Out of the sheer poverty of his historical/political imagination or an approaching deadline, Mr. Beinart chooses to valorize Containment and The Cold War as our template for political action in the 21^st Century. It might to chastening to recall that the author of the Long Telegram, George Frost Kennan quickly became disenchanted with his own set of ideas: He had a change of mind on his seminal ideas articulated at the beginning of the Cold War and left the Diplomatic Service for academia. He had a very long successful career as sage writer, thinker and critic of American Policy.         

The Revival of Pragmatism

 New Essays on Social Thought, Law and Culture

Edited by Morris Dickstein

Duke University Press

Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism

Richard Rorty

Page 24

”Polytheism, in the sense I have defined it, is pretty much coextensive with romantic utilitarianism. For once one sees no way of ranking human needs other than playing them off one another, human happiness becomes all that matters. Mill’s On Liberty provides all the ethical instruction you need-all the philosophical advice you are ever going to get about your responsibilities to other human beings. For human perfection becomes a private concern, and our responsibilities to others becomes a matter of permitting them as much space to pursue these private concerns-to worship their own gods, so to speak-as is compatible with granting an equal amount of space to all. The tradition of religious toleration is extended to moral toleration.

This privatization of perfection permits James and Nietzsche to agree with Mill and Arnold that poetry should take over the role that religion has played in the formation of individual human lives. They also agree that nobody should take over the function of the clergy. For poets are to a secularized polytheism what the priests of a universal church are to monotheism. Once you become polytheistic, you will turn away not only from priests but from such priest-substitutes as metaphysicians and physicists –from anyone who purports to tell you how things really are, anyone who invokes the distinction between the true world and the apparent world that Nietzsche ridiculed in The Twilight of the Idols. Both monotheism and the kind of metaphysics or science that purports to tell you what the world is really like are replaced with democratic politics. A free consensus about how much space for private perfection we can allow each other takes the place of the quest for ‘objective’ values, the quest for a ranking of human needs that does not depend upon such consensus.”