  These "open letters" were written almost exactly one year and a half ago to Professor Ruth Rosen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and historian of American women at University of California, Davis. She had speculated in this urlLink piece that someday the world could abolish war much like it had abolished slavery. It was the sort of sentimental meditation that was very common in the months preceding Operation Iraqi Freedom. Immediately, my spidey senses were tingling at the presence of a pernicious error. Not only do many forms of slavery persist, like in a trans-Pacific brothel trade that reaches the Bay Area, but Rosen has even published a book on prostitution in early 20th century America and just should have known better. New Left pieties are so silly, and yet so widely held by Baby Boomer left-liberals of varying militancy and by my contemporaries, their usually insufferable children.
Anyhow, your knight in shining armor rode in both to rescue human chattel from discursive obscuirty and to defend wars (like those that end slavery) from comparison with human bondage. During a visit to my parents in a Chicago suburb I composed the following: Professor Ruth Rosen, Though you and I differ in worldviews, I have enjoyed reading your columns thus far. I must begin with a remark on a factual error in this one, "World Without War? " (The San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, December 26, 2002). Slavery (by whatever definition) is not, as you assert, banned worldwide: the People's Republic of China is a glaring offender, as your colleague Debra Saunders recently urlLink noted --and as the Rainbow Co-op grocery store in San Francisco prefers to ignore while choosing to boycott Israeli goods. The chattel enslavement and sale of Africans still continues in Mali and Sudan, though only the occasional public commentator cares to mention it.
One sometimes hears shadowy tales of brothel slavery in Southeast Asian cities, catering to wealthy entrepreneurs and their functionaries. We know these human traffic lines reach brothels in San Francisco. Then there are the various states of quasi-slavery in the leftover Leninist states, for what is freedom in a nation run like a giant prison camp, as in Cuba and in North Korea? Let us not forget the unfree labor conditions of sweatshops and agrarian peonage in many of the less developed market economies. The latter might be a semantic stretch of "slavery," but you get the idea. The point being: illiberal portions of human society are the sanctuary of such atrocities; the liberal democracies like the U.S., Britain and others merely subtracted themselves from the chattel slavery clientele.
Worth noting: they destroyed the slave economy through war, liberty brought on the bayonets of progressive empires. The pan-African sales apparatus did not disappear as a result. It took the Arabian Peninsula much longer to quit buying, and the legacy there is eerie: their African slaves tended to die off rather than survive into emancipation and posterity. I hope you would agree with the spirit of the preceding criticisms, even if your article lacked mention of the horrors that provoked them. It is a disservice, however, to leave them unsaid. Your pedigree is in the New Left, but do not forget one incontrovertible grain of truth from the Old Right: this world is imperfect, and by all evidence, it is imperfectible.
On our troubled planet, I expect people will always fight, some early and for self-interest, some latecomers and out of sympathy, some because they were dragooned. Unfortunately, the downtrodden, the righteously indignant, can be unsavory as well, complicating our ideas of just causes and fair fights. The medieval French Jacquerie descended into rape and massacre of noncombatants, later the Nat Turner revolt and the guerrilla movement in Belgian Congo did roughly the same. Too often, the black Sudanese are defended against their would-be captors by pubescent paramilitaries, and too often, the underage soldier is an immature war criminal in the making. There are countless other similar examples. Political unification, so long thought to be the mechanism that would end war, has proven unreliable as well.
Just look at the Basques/Euzkadi and at Northern Ireland (hardly out of the woods) in the entrails of the European Union, and many more in the multiethnic failed states (and failing states) of the post-colonial and post-communist worlds. Would a more unified future world be free of its Ulsters, its Lebanons, its Kashmirs, its Balkans? Even under improved social conditions, a few malcontents can spearhead what they themselves consider war, albeit war writ small. (Remember Thomas Friedman's recent column on the "Arab/Muslim basement," the extremist and active few, as more dangerous than the "Arab/Muslim street," the displeased but inactive many? ) What of the militiamen dotting the rural United States? Or their opposite numbers on the Left, like C. Clark Kissinger's Refuse and Resist umbrella organization, conceived by way of a union between his Maoism and the calamity of the 1992 L.A. riots?
Of Klansmen and neo-Nazis? Of neo-Panthers and of what remains of the armed wing of the American Indian Movement? Or the riot-prone anti-globalization and “anti-war” activists whom I knew from Oberlin College and their colleagues elsewhere? Will the voice clamoring for peace--usually the voice of the private citizen and/or the Left, and not the state--be the most effective counterforce to these phenomena? So often the voices of peace shudder to criticize the violent Left, much less rein it in. Paul Berman has described this tragedy of the Baby Boom Left rather well (while still identifying with it).
Anti-imperialism gave (and gives still) excuses to Third Worldist and Communist violence, while merely demanding surrender or appeasement by the other side. The religious pacifist Right is little better: remember the paradox of the Bethlehem Catholic clergy sheltering Palestinian mujahedin while bemoaning the Israeli Defense Forces. The isolationist Right lacks the compassion to work for large-scale peace, but merely withdrawal: peace for the few and the Self by ignoring the many and the Other. Or is a well-prepared regime (or alliance of regimes) striving for security and ordered liberty a better bet for achieving peace in practice? After all, real peace in a world of latent (and not so latent) hostility will begin with either a unilateral defeat or a wary detente, not as an entente. On the contrary, an all-too-easy coexistence can renew hostility for those displeased with social peace.
Comfortable societies were no safeguard against brutally great expectations. What else could explain the Weathermen, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and others like them? They themselves had suffered no contemporary police abuses like the Northern Irish Catholics or African Americans, and thus could not attempt to justify their motives as communal vengeance or as collective self-interest. They chose violence because they chose millenarian idealism, solidarity through conviction. As such, shouldn't we beware the utopian conscience a little more often? Montesquieu said that no kingdom had shed so much blood as that of Christ.
Imagine what he could have said two centuries later about the kingdom of Karl Marx. Either way, it's the same verdict. Equality of condition, like the realm of God, is not of this world, and never will be. Expecting or demanding too much of either, however, can have a hefty body count. The struggle continues, surely, but is it too much for us to subject ideologies and their practice to cost-benefit analysis? Sanctimony kills, both through commission and negligence, but more modest sanctimonies kill fewer people than other, more immodest ones.
William Blake said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The self-consciously best intentions, like premature world peace or heaven on earth, are the express lane to global inferno. At least, all of the lessons of history would seem to teach us so. On September 11, 2001, a mob of xenophobes in a Chicago suburb marched toward a mosque with hopes of destroying it. They were not stopped by peace, love, or conscience in any appreciable sense, for those are intangibles. They were stopped tangibly by a uniformed police force, and one that I suspect was not motivated by deeply held multiconfessional ideals, but by duty and by fear of impending disaster.
Motive without means, however, is nothing. Peace can only come through order, and order through a governmental monopoly on the legitimate deployment of violence. World peace would only arrive through world order. World order will only come--if at all--through existing (if evolving) power structures rather than through an attempt to overturn them or perfect them. Whether right or wrong in their aims, whether violent or not in their chosen means, all rebellions are an act of challenge to the status quo, the consummation of disorder, the opposite of peace. The avowed final goal of most ideologies is peace (and not catastrophe), whether libertarian, theocratic, Bismarckian, socialist, or otherwise.
That imagined destination, however, does not make peace, and in and of itself, never will. It can, however, make catastrophe, and often does. We should know better by now. Until everyone knows better, peace will remain elusive. Sincerely, Adam William Balling History major and former idealist Oberlin College, Class of 2001 Dissident newcomer to San Francisco ******************************** Ruth Rosen wrote back a couple of sentences, saying that she appreciated my sophisticated letter and was (of course! ) aware of enduring slavery, but had not felt like mentioning it.
Besides, she pointed out, all of the "civilized" nations had overcome slavery. Yes, I thought, but what of the densely populated other ones, tenured idiot? Feeling my adversary's argument crumble like dry poundcake, I sent this: Professor Rosen, Thank you for writing back, first of all. I appreciate it very much. I did not doubt your knowledge of current slavery. It struck me that in "World Without War?
" you referred to its existence as past, without implying its contemporary persistence. Forgive me for overlooking any references in your previous output. The analogy of previously disappeared slavery to the latent disappearance of war seemed false, as the former triumph is an illusion, suggesting we should not remotely expect the latter. It seemed like a poor occasion for your congratulation of humans in general, and a weak foundation for optimism. If nothing else, consider the further blood and treasure, whether indigenous, "multilateral" or "neo-imperial," that would be required to shut down slavery in Africa; hands-off neutralism will never do it. The People's Republic of China, with a UN veto and (as of the Clinton era) long-range nuclear missiles, cannot be touched by forceful outside intervention.
The wait for free and fair labor in the world's most populous state will be prolonged and agonizing, and its course unknowable. My historical knowledge has, I confess, led me to a severe pessimism about the capacity of humanity as a whole. The idealism of Addams, King, Rankin, Gandhi, Einstein, however moving to the conscientious imagination, can be outright harmful if it is naively unrealistic. Take Gandhi: to many, he is the model of moral nobility, even sanctity. George Orwell's critical urlLink assessment of him resonated with me far more. Sainthood and lofty ideals can be too divorced from reality, and are doubly problematic when they originate in the inability to accept the necessary inconsistencies of human life.
Otherworldiness does no social good if it is principally and ultimately escapist, and most people cannot live by the dictates of inspiring fantasy. It is foolish to believe they ever will. Orwell continues: Gandhi's advice that Europe's Jews allow themselves to die so that the world might look with peaceful, pressuring outrage on the Third Reich. Gandhi was well-meaning and utterly wrong, morally as well as practically. Only coercion could be used, and alas, coercive means are an essential ingredient of all organized human life: ergo war stays. Satyagraha and European withdrawal are two (of many) noble-sounding means for the pursuit of peace in our time, but if you seek their monument, look around.
Europe was only integrated as an expensive American protectorate; the European peace should not be attributed anachronistically to a revolution in character. (If our own government should spend more on public healthcare, it couldn't hurt for the "new and improved" Europe--if its stability is not just a pleasing myth or political fad--to pick up more of the tab for our military spending on their behalf and free up our surplus money. Such a change would improve upon the habit of expecting a U.S. peackeeping substitute and then bemoaning its deployment in lieu of continental self-sufficiency. ) South Asian independence instantly let slip the dogs of war, with effects worse than all of the British imperial years combined. Doesn't Gandhi's anti-war naivete deserve some blame for helping to unleash a state of strife on the subcontinent that has not ended? His ascetic ideology was not considerate of his actual society, but only a bastardized and imaginary alternative one.
A more unsentimental politics would not have been lying to and endangering itself on the basis of transcendental platitudes. Burke was correct in claiming that politics is the art of the possible, and conversely denial "ain't just a river in Egypt. " Wishing for what we cannot have, and acting in vain upon those desires, is perilous. Wishing away war is sometimes the best guarantee that it will return with a vengeance. Isn't that even worse than conventional realpolitik? Realism (in the sense of both policy and temperament) creates a better climate for peace than idealism, which often spawns the exact opposite of what it seeks.
That is why the goal of "an end to wars" is such a heinously tragic flaw. Anyway, I've managed to repeat the first letter, so I might as well be merciful and end this one. Is it a shameful thing to believe that the human race entire cannot improve itself very well or very quickly? Because it seems more accurate than the belief that it can improve itself rapidly and thoroughly; accuracy is what gets results. thank you again for corresponding, Adam William Balling P.S. On a different note, you are a specialist in American history, yes?
Might I inquire what period(s), theme(s), topic(s), region(s)? If you had not guessed, I love to talk shop. History first enchanted me at age seven, the "age of reason," and I have never lost my passion for that subject. ******************************** I even tried to be friendly at the end, but Professor Ruth Rosen left our correspondence unrequited thereafter. But hey, Michael Moore never wrote back when I asked him his opinion of "Mother Jones" magazine and Ralph Nader, both of which fired him. I also inquired about his falling out with labor organizer Harlan Jacobson during the interview published in the November/December 1989 issue of "Film Comment.
" Trade union leftist Jacobson did not take kindly to the histrionic lies of Moore's "Roger and Me," despite their shared dislike of big capitalism. Fifteen years ago, Moore did not like being questioned. Apparently he urlLink still does not. Ruth deserves credit for at least playing ball with yours truly in a game with lots of intellectual name dropping. Thank you, Professor Rosen, for teaching me that academically accredited opinion journalists are not so tough. If I'm ever in Davis, let's do lunch. 
