Men o'War. - Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos - book review

National Review, Feb 25, 2002 by Brian C. Anderson

A final aspect of Kaplan's pagan ethos is a healthy patriotism, as beautifully expressed by the Roman historian Livy, who "shows that the vigor it takes to face our adversaries must ultimately come from pride in our own past and our achievements." Those who undermine American patriotism threaten the nation's future.

The future such an ethos will try to master, Kaplan bleakly predicts, will be full of danger. Darwinian global capitalism is ripping up age- old traditions and spawning terrifying inequalities, dividing the world into a small number of super-bright cosmopolitans, like us, who grow rich from the new world order, and hundreds of millions -- a new "subproletariat" -- who just can't keep up. The unemployed young men of this emerging global underclass, crowded into overpopulated cities and enraged by their poverty, make for a swelling army of potential Islamist terrorists. These new terrorist enemies, Kaplan thinks -- prophetically, since he wrote this book before September 11 -- will be incredibly savage, Homeric "warriors" who will use horrific low-tech weapons to offset our vast technological advantages. Only America will have the power and wealth and civic virtue needed to defeat these resentful warriors and make the world less dangerous -- if, that is, our leaders are sufficiently attuned to the wisdom of his pagan tradition.

What should we make of Kaplan's argument? Much of it is entirely sensible and serves as an important reminder that political reason is something different from interpersonal morality. A government that followed my priest's suggestion to avoid fighting back against the perpetrators of September 11 would encourage future attacks and the loss of more innocent lives. The statesman's chief responsibility is to protect the citizenry.

But Kaplan's paganism isn't without problems. Consider his celebration of Machiavellianism. Why should a political leader "savor" getting his hands dirty? Did Lincoln relish the steps he took to win the Civil War? Shouldn't the proper attitude toward killing civilians or using deceit during wartime be one of haunted necessity? Two of the great Machiavellians of the 20th century, after all, were Stalin and Hitler; surely Kaplan doesn't want to elevate such monsters into moral exemplars. He does admit that an unchecked dirty-hands approach would lead politicians to "drown in cynicism and deceit," but he provides no criteria, other than the "character" of political leaders, to say when it's okay to use Machiavellian tactics and when it's not.

Kaplan's desire to elevate a warrior ethos also leads him to call views pagan that aren't pagan. Kaplan describes America's Founders as pagans, for example, because they designed a republic that takes into account the human propensity for evil. But as Michael Novak shows with overwhelming documentation in his important new book, On Two Wings, what drove most of the Founding Fathers was a Biblical understanding of human sinfulness.

Indeed, from Augustine to Aquinas to Reinhold Niebuhr to contemporary writers like Novak and George Weigel, Christian thinkers, acutely aware of man's fallen nature, have made all the good arguments about the need for force and the permanence of this-worldly conflict that Kaplan attributes to paganism. Yet they have retained a crucial place for a transcendent ought that limits the evil governments can do. Kaplan pays only lip service to Christian just-war theory, and regularly disparages the Judeo-Christian tradition of moral and political reflection. Also, are Machiavelli and Hobbes really part of a pagan tradition? It makes much more sense to describe them, as the political philosopher Leo Strauss did, as proto-moderns.