From: Ira Straus (IRASTRAUS@aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2012
Subject: Re: 2012-#110-Johnson's Russia List/Adomanis

Re: 2012-#110-Johnson's Russia List #35. Forbes.com: Mark Adomanis, The Foreign Policy Initiative's Plan for Worsening Relations with Russia and Weakening American Interests.

Adomanis makes a number of good points. One is really important for understanding American mistakes -- important also for Russians, who often misunderstand these mistakes as clever strategies. It is this:

many American writers advocate "a policy that they favor independent of, or sometimes because of, its negative real-world impact" on American interests.

Adomanis gives a perfectly sound, and elegantly written, analysis of the logical errors of these writers. He makes it obvious that the logic is so bad, so repeatedly, there must be an attitude problem.

He doesn't get, however, to the source of the attitude problem.

Why would people want to do something opposite to their interests? Three reasons:

1. Because of wanting to be "principled" and avoid "double standards" no matter what the cost. Call it fanaticism; or call it moral infantilism. Failure to understand the elementary moral rule prudence. Or to understand the simple fact that there are multiple principles and values, not just a single one to be pursued at all costs. When principles conflict, choices need to be made among them, choices that should vary with circumstances.

2. Because of feeling guilty if we have friends in power abroad who don't "live up to" all our principles, and if we are accused, by outlets like Al-Jazeera and the Washington Post, of having "double standards" for keeping such company. But not feeling the least bit of guilt if we end up instead with enemies who trample on our principles wholesale, since they're not "our" people -- even if we helped bring them to power by pushing over our friends. This perhaps explains the otherwise clinically insane editorial in the Washington Post today, which demands that the U.S. pull out all stops to make sure the Muslim Brotherhood will come to power.

3. Because of a puritanical brand of Protestant morality, which holds, like Kant, that an action doesn't bring moral credit if one enjoys it or gains from it; it's moral only if one has to make an unwelcome effort at it -- if one does it at one's own expense. Please note: this is not mainstream American morality; it is a morality of a subculture, and a rather spiteful one at that. Scholars nowadays recognize that the American Constitution was based, not of Puritanism, but on the moral theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, in which humans have a "moral sense" and enjoy being moral. Thus "enlightened self-interest". How the anti-enlightenment subculture gained so much influence in our foreign policy discourse is a painful question.

To be sure, there's another, more radical subculture that has another, simpler reason:

4. Because America and the West are the enemy. The enemy of the people of the world, the exploiter of the peoples and the environment, the source of war and poverty and all the main evils in the world. Ergo we shouldn't want America to have friends and allies around the world. Our friends are bad and should be vilified and toppled, for the absolutely logical reason that they're our friends. We should stand up for the principles we proclaim when they are most at our expense, because it's good to weaken us.

This last subculture is, no doubt, relatively smaller. But if often has a "cutting edge" role among the intellectual classes. The liberal sector of society has often been described as susceptible to guilt over America; much of the guilt in turn gets oriented by the accusatory narrative generated by the more radical sector. Guilt induces aggression, aggressors cultivate guilt, etc. The late Lewis Feuer worked out the logic of it, or illogic, in his books, getting into heavy stuff about the alienation of the societal superego.

I do not wish to try to resolve here the complex question of what is the best, healthiest balance in a country between self-affirmation and self-criticism. However, I do think we can say that the first 3 attitude-lines outlined above are clearly unhealthy (and the 4th wrong). They are not reasoned modes of self-criticism. They are illogical. Self-indulgent rather than moral. Often grossly immoral. Destructive of others as well as of self.

Why does this matter for Russians? (and Egyptians at this time)? Because otherwise it's almost impossible to explain why so large a portion of the American journalistic and foreign affairs communities advocate postures opposite to American interests.

And because, without the unpleasant but honest explanation of this phenomenon, the natural tendency of the human mind is to sink instead into some kind of conspiracy theory -- that it all must be some subtle omnipotent American scheme to screw others and benefit America in some unseen way. Much of Russian discourse suffers from such conspiracy theory. I hope this note is of some slight value in relieving it.

It's bad enough that America often does things opposite to its interest, and not just regarding Russia; and that these actions often turn out to be opposite also to the interest of most of the world. It only compounds things when Americans get accused of cleverly serving their own interests in the process. The conspiracy theory serves to lock in the mental mistake among Americans -- the reasoning that turns upside-down into right-side up -- not help unravel it, much less cure it.

In a happier time in Russian-American relations, it was possible to hope that Russians, and their friends in America, would -- having just cleared their own minds of most of the old ideological jumble -- help America clear out some of the mental cobwebs that have accumulated in its ideological subcultures, too. Adomanis' article shows that there is perhaps still some chance for giving America a bit of this kind of help.

Keywords: U.S.-Russian Relations - Russian News - Russia

From: Ira Straus (IRASTRAUS@aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2012
Subject: Re: 2012-#110-Johnson's Russia List/Adomanis

Re: 2012-#110-Johnson's Russia List #35. Forbes.com: Mark Adomanis, The Foreign Policy Initiative's Plan for Worsening Relations with Russia and Weakening American Interests.

Adomanis makes a number of good points. One is really important for understanding American mistakes -- important also for Russians, who often misunderstand these mistakes as clever strategies. It is this:

many American writers advocate "a policy that they favor independent of, or sometimes because of, its negative real-world impact" on American interests.

Adomanis gives a perfectly sound, and elegantly written, analysis of the logical errors of these writers. He makes it obvious that the logic is so bad, so repeatedly, there must be an attitude problem.

He doesn't get, however, to the source of the attitude problem.

Why would people want to do something opposite to their interests? Three reasons:

1. Because of wanting to be "principled" and avoid "double standards" no matter what the cost. Call it fanaticism; or call it moral infantilism. Failure to understand the elementary moral rule prudence. Or to understand the simple fact that there are multiple principles and values, not just a single one to be pursued at all costs. When principles conflict, choices need to be made among them, choices that should vary with circumstances.

2. Because of feeling guilty if we have friends in power abroad who don't "live up to" all our principles, and if we are accused, by outlets like Al-Jazeera and the Washington Post, of having "double standards" for keeping such company. But not feeling the least bit of guilt if we end up instead with enemies who trample on our principles wholesale, since they're not "our" people -- even if we helped bring them to power by pushing over our friends. This perhaps explains the otherwise clinically insane editorial in the Washington Post today, which demands that the U.S. pull out all stops to make sure the Muslim Brotherhood will come to power.

3. Because of a puritanical brand of Protestant morality, which holds, like Kant, that an action doesn't bring moral credit if one enjoys it or gains from it; it's moral only if one has to make an unwelcome effort at it -- if one does it at one's own expense. Please note: this is not mainstream American morality; it is a morality of a subculture, and a rather spiteful one at that. Scholars nowadays recognize that the American Constitution was based, not of Puritanism, but on the moral theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, in which humans have a "moral sense" and enjoy being moral. Thus "enlightened self-interest". How the anti-enlightenment subculture gained so much influence in our foreign policy discourse is a painful question.

To be sure, there's another, more radical subculture that has another, simpler reason:

4. Because America and the West are the enemy. The enemy of the people of the world, the exploiter of the peoples and the environment, the source of war and poverty and all the main evils in the world. Ergo we shouldn't want America to have friends and allies around the world. Our friends are bad and should be vilified and toppled, for the absolutely logical reason that they're our friends. We should stand up for the principles we proclaim when they are most at our expense, because it's good to weaken us.

This last subculture is, no doubt, relatively smaller. But if often has a "cutting edge" role among the intellectual classes. The liberal sector of society has often been described as susceptible to guilt over America; much of the guilt in turn gets oriented by the accusatory narrative generated by the more radical sector. Guilt induces aggression, aggressors cultivate guilt, etc. The late Lewis Feuer worked out the logic of it, or illogic, in his books, getting into heavy stuff about the alienation of the societal superego.

I do not wish to try to resolve here the complex question of what is the best, healthiest balance in a country between self-affirmation and self-criticism. However, I do think we can say that the first 3 attitude-lines outlined above are clearly unhealthy (and the 4th wrong). They are not reasoned modes of self-criticism. They are illogical. Self-indulgent rather than moral. Often grossly immoral. Destructive of others as well as of self.

Why does this matter for Russians? (and Egyptians at this time)? Because otherwise it's almost impossible to explain why so large a portion of the American journalistic and foreign affairs communities advocate postures opposite to American interests.

And because, without the unpleasant but honest explanation of this phenomenon, the natural tendency of the human mind is to sink instead into some kind of conspiracy theory -- that it all must be some subtle omnipotent American scheme to screw others and benefit America in some unseen way. Much of Russian discourse suffers from such conspiracy theory. I hope this note is of some slight value in relieving it.

It's bad enough that America often does things opposite to its interest, and not just regarding Russia; and that these actions often turn out to be opposite also to the interest of most of the world. It only compounds things when Americans get accused of cleverly serving their own interests in the process. The conspiracy theory serves to lock in the mental mistake among Americans -- the reasoning that turns upside-down into right-side up -- not help unravel it, much less cure it.

In a happier time in Russian-American relations, it was possible to hope that Russians, and their friends in America, would -- having just cleared their own minds of most of the old ideological jumble -- help America clear out some of the mental cobwebs that have accumulated in its ideological subcultures, too. Adomanis' article shows that there is perhaps still some chance for giving America a bit of this kind of help.