HUMAN RIGHTS: CONFLICTS AMONG OUR IDEALS

...And today I am in a position of deep moral ambiguity because, on the one hand, I admire enormously the courage of the Soviet dissidents, whatever their personal ideologies, and share many of the values that inspire someone like the scientist Sakharov, but at the same time I have consistently refused to sign petitions or in any other way lend my name to the cruelties of the regime because it called itself In a bipolar nuclear world, I do not feel we can afford to hold to a simple, straightforward, universalistic moral standard such as one might hope for in a world free of the threat of mass annihilation...

...Furthermore, the focus on human rights, though now voiced by a generally liberal Democratic administration, inevitably plays into the never wholly defeated Cold War mentality of ethnocentric and patrioteering Americans even while President Carter is seeking to open up our relations with Cuba and Panama, with Vietnam and even with North Korea...

...What is important is to analyze the kinds of thinking involved in particular scenarios...

...To the extent that I have been able to familiarize myself with the technical issues here, this was a mistaken and even tendentious judgment: the best seismic experts believe that a distinction is easily made between an underground test and an earthquake...

...Any reflection on human rights and human prospects suggests the possibility of conflicts among our ideals...

...I need not tell you that this has not been a general American characteristic, nor even a Southern one...

...The Commonweal: 711 campaign appeals to our idealism: to our hope of living in a world without torture, without slavery, one where people are free to speak and to move about--although I must add that the current campaign against illegal immigrant s (mainly Spanish-speaking) and indeed against further immigration at all (now sponsored by the Zero Population Growth movement), fits in badly with a desire for more open frontiers...

...I can only strive to be aware of them...

...I am well aware that there are many students of the Soviet Union who would disagree with my analysis, who believe that the regime is fully effective, secure and unthreatened, that its leaders only pretend to be stung by criticisms--criticisms which I regard as justified in any circumstances other than our nuclear era at the very moment when we are trying to reach across that chasm for some understanding...

...Or just as a meeting was planned to discuss the end of nuclear testing, and the possibility of control of nuclear weapons, something quite accidental prevented it...

...Above all, any analysis of this sort must distinguish betweefi capabilities and intentions, and much of our thinking about the Soviet Union, like that of military men professionally, has been "worst case" thinking--a mode of thinking which can be self-confirming since it creates an alliance of the supposedly patriotic war party inside the United States with the patriotic war party within the Soviet Union, against the civilian populations of both countries...

...While one must take account of local conditions, and of the perils and priorities of other peoples, that does not mean that one condones ancient Aztec human sacrifice or today's tribal murders in Bangladesh...

...I have been one of those active in the defense of the Belgrade philosophers of whose now banned journal, Praxis, I have been an Advisory Editor...

...similarly, today's young people who have not had to deal with the detailed issues, for example of the current SALT agreements and all previous arms control negotiations, are the beneficiaries of an unearned beneficence which directs their idealism toward other, readier targets, for example, the Seabrook power plant...

...the idea, toyed with in Vietnam, that one could use tactical nuclear weapons, seemed to me a dangerous delusion...

...The very point of an ideal is that it is something not easily achieved...

...This resembles the belief that we can have more jobs and more environmental amenities...

...The history of our relations with the Soviet Union over the control of nuclear weapons is a history of might-have-beens...

...As mentioned earlier, when President Eisenhower in what was for him an uncharacteristic act of boyish openness, accepted responsibility for the U-2 overflight (an overflight whose timing may or may not have been accidental), one possible moment of rapprochment was lost...

...My generation is the product of a different history...

...The contemporary campaign vis-/t-vis the Soviet Union would seem to take its origin at the conclusion of the fighting in Vietnam, and, in some degree, to represent the unliquidated continuation of the American domestic conflict over that war by other means and with somewhat altered partisans...

...Commonweal: 715...

...Only in the Vietnam War did any large number of educated Americans begin to criticize the waging of total war against civilian populations even with the excuse of saving American lives when the cost was the destruction of civilian "enemy" life, including in Vietnam, plant life, in the country under attack...

...When I became an early supporter of Candidate Jimmy Carter, I found myself in Massachusetts opposed by many on the grounds of both regional and religious tribalism--by people with no understanding of or sympathy with the complexities of SoUthern theological traditions and suspicious of white Southerners in general...

...The recent American presidential election was fought along both lines of fission...

...What I sought for in that body were eventually attainable ideals, bearing in mind Margaret Mead's parable about the star and the wagon, in which if the star is too remote from the wagon, it no longer gives direction for the wagon that remains mired in mud, and the start becomes an illusion...

...I supported the candidacy of President Carter on a number of grounds, chief among them the fact that he is the first president with a technical understanding of those weapons and with a serious and systematic interest in controlling and eventually banishing themwan effort that must begin between the Soviet Union and ourselves before we can 'hope to restrain proliferation among those other nations who now possess such weapons in actuality or potential...

...In fact, the judgment of many experts as well as my own is that we are more than amply protected by the mobile and dispersed weapons we already possess...

...I recognize that the imagination of future scenarios is an important enterprise both in intellectual terms and in the light of problems of policy...

...I am not contending that Soviet citizens are ready to break out in open revolt, but rather that Soviet authorities see themselves as beleaguered by China on the West, West Germany and the especially threatening dangers of French and Italian Communism in Western Europe (threatening because they are not under Soviet hegemony), and then of course by the United States...

...that is, the possibility that the proclaimed goal of human rights may inadvertently risk the human prospects of survival itself...

...Nevertheless, I hope that, by raising some issues for discussion, I can invite questioning...

...The fear of secrecy rests also on a fear of conspiracies which goes back to the founding of the American Republic, and the recurrent belief that evil consequences are the effect of malign conspiracies, which in fact sometimes is true (though my own inclination is more to see muddle or even good intentions gone astray than to see conspiracies, though to be sure we have our share of these...

...Similarly, when the Allende regime was overthrown in Chile, I was in touch with friends such as Professors Albert Hirschman and Gino Germani who are Latin American specialists, to see what could be done to rescue and save from imprisonment and torture liberal Catholics and socialists and others whom the new regime regarded as its enemies, but we sought to do so without publicly humiliating the new Chilean government and thus leading it to further cruel measures against dissenters who could be accused of links with the "imperialist" North Americans...

...A fifty-dollar registration fee includes room and meals...

...In one sense, it goes back to the very beginning of the Soviet regime, while long before that the insistence of many Americans on the proper moral conduct of other countries was a factor in launching us both into the Spanish-American War and the First World War...

...Eugene Carson Blake and Bishop Joseph Francis, S.V.D...

...Still, terrible as these mass bombings were, carried on with so-called conventional weapons, for me the use of nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked a profound dividing line...

...But I now must enter an area where I can claim no expertise, namely, that of the internal politics of the Soviet Union--yet an area where I am guided by a certain skepticism bred in me by experience with American Sovietologists going back to the 1930s...

...To take an example, the U-2 spy flight may not have been quite accidental, but undertaken by those who wanted to risk and perhaps torpedo the forthcoming summit meeting between Khrushchev and Eisenhower...

...and was not necessary for Allied survival, since for those who would listen there was evidence that the Japanese were succumbing to a Naval blockade and that the Emperor and his circle were eager for peace,~ Vis&-vis the Nazis, if we had not demanded unconditional surrender, we might not have had to wage total war with such destructive weapons...

...The Soviet Union has never been able to achieve the the kind of disciplined workforce and the internalized as well as superficial obedience that the Chinese Communists appear to have been able to instill, drawing in part on long Confucian and other traditions...

...There have been many agonizing moments over the last thirty years in which hopes for rapprochement were shattered by internal politics of the Soviet Union or of the United States...

...This outlook has meant for me a necessary restraint in criticism of the Soviet Union, even while prior to this era, there remained in this country quite a few influential intellectuals and writers who, as currently in many European countries, blinded themselves to the cruelties of the regime because it called itself socialist and because of their awareness of the evils of their own nation-states...

...Hence, I see the fact that the Soviets have a long tradition of superiority in artillery, and that they can make and no doubt deliver huge bombs, to be as much a sign of defensiveness as aggression--indeed, their foreign policy in recent years has been a series of defeats--even though their defensiveness, in dialectic with ours, may, in the form of nuclear war, end their prospects and ours...

...Worst case" thinking is of course not confined to this particular dialectic...

...9-11 ) and at the University of Notre Dame (Feb...

...But I should make clear that I am not free of biases myself...

...During the Second World War, I served on an international committee that had been set up to prepare for what would become the United Nations, a draft of an International Bill of Rights...

...It is not a sufficient argument against our human rights campaign that we ourselves often violate our own ideals in practice, not only vis-a-vis immigration of people but also vis-a-vis importation of goods which others can make more efficiently than we and which we attempt to limit or keep out through ever-increasing efforts at protectionism...

...will lead the discussion...

...The campaign for human rights vis-a-vis the Soviet Union of course :did:not begin with President Carter...

...moreover our spy satellites and our intelligence can tell us what is going on in the Soviet Union, even though we do not always want to reveal how much we know because that will tip off the Soviet Union as to how we know it...

...Thus, I want to emphasize that my position on human rights does not spring from cultural or moral relativism...

...SEMINARS ON WORLD HUNGER--At Princeton Theological Seminary, 12 Library Place, Princeton, N.J., a seminar on the theological and moral dimensions of hunger November 21-23...

...In that con11 November 1977:712 text, President Carter's raising of the human rights issue at the same time that he hoped to assure success of the SALT talks, gave me a feeling of d~j~ vu...

...The above article is excerpted from a Commencement Address given at Williams College in Massachusetts...

...Now my fear is that Brezshnev may be forced out of office by his illness, giving still further power to other factions in the Soviet military-industrial complex, before a new SALT agreement has been reached...

...we are inclined to believe that all good things are compatible: that we can have both human survival and human rights without any risks to the former or compromise or delay with respect to the latter...

...But I should add that, in what I regard as the finest act of his presidency, John Kennedy got the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other crucial "hardline" groups not to oppose the partial test ban treaty of 1963 even though he was unable, as I have indicated, to achieve a ban on all tests, in the atmosphere and underground...

...Yet as C. Vann Woodward pointed out a number of years ago, white Southerners are the only major American group to have suffered military defeat, and at least in some instances are therefore likely to have a sense of limits and of tragedy...

...To repeat: it is because I see the nuclear question as always foremost that I cannot be sanguine about the human prospect in the long run unless the human rights issue of this moment in this country is made less salient...

...Yet, despite my fear lest Hitler emerge victorious, I believed at the time and still do that the British and American dropping of ordinary bombs and fire bombs on Dresden and Hamburg, as well as on Tokyo and other large Japanese cities, transcended the limits which need to be placed on warfare...

...The fact that the Soviet Union lacks adversary journalism (except in Samizdat or the privately circulated writings of dissidents) and is not an open society has been a stumbling block in the effort to secure a test ban treaty which would cover underground testing since our negotiators insisted at the time of the negotiations of the partial test ban treaty of 1963 that it would be impossible without such inspection to distinguish between an underground test and an earthquake...

...But what seems in a sense accidental was Eisenhower's rather uncharacteristic insistence on being candid, open, and the all-American boy in accepting responsibility for the U-2 incident, which destroyed the summit meeting at which an arms limitation treaty might have been reached...

...I can illustrate my point by several counter-examples...

...In the decades since then, 1 had fought those supposed realists like Edward Teller and many strategists, who, pointing out that the largest conventional weapons were more deadly than the smallest nuclear ones, sought to erase the formal line between nuclear war and all other kinds of war...

...Indeed, I find it difficult to predict the possible impact of the human rights campaign, not so much on the vocal dissidents who have already suffered jeopardy, but on the generally silent but nonetheless in the long run influential public opinion of non-elites in the ,Soviet Union and its uneasy satellites...

...He has an all-American faith that problems are soluble and that they can be resolved not only within but among nations especially when talked about candidly and openly...

...It is in this situation that the launching of the human rights campaign against the Soviet Union seems to me so perilous...

...And the human rights issue itself vis-h-vis the Soviet Union can be taken up readily by the Congress to use against the President, who is himself now inclined to be more cautious on the issuemin other words to use against a SALT agreement, restricting the development of new nuclear weapons systems...

...I had the odd experience, during the height of the Cold War in the middle and late 1950s, of being told I was "soft on Communism" by people whom I had known when they were Communists, Trotskyites, Schachtmanites, etc., and when I was, as I have remained, convinced of the brutality, the corruption, and in many areas, the sheer incompetence of Soviet society...

...The relatively conciliatory Khrushchev, who had been the first openly to admit to the crimes of the Stalin Era, was forced out of office by his internal enemies, I believe in part as a result of this...

...We wrote personal letters and carefully drafted petitions which were without publicity given to the Marshal and to the Yugoslav Embassy, in a way which we believed would neither threaten the dissidents themselves (including some brave ones who might have wanted martyrdom) nor run risks of inflaming American public opinion against another Communist, though not Soviet-dominated country...

...See my article, "The U-2 Affair and After," The Commonweal, June 8, 1962...

...the problem is to adjudicate among competing ideals...

...To illustrate, the American Cold War hawks, who have repeatedly imagined a Soviet first strike, have had also to assume the existence of a berserk Soviet leadership, which believed it had the capacity to knock out all our hardened missiles, our underseas submarines, our Strategic Air Command, and now our mobile land weapons--and I say "berserk" because such a policy would rest on the assumption, I think quite obviously false, that in human affairs everything will go right, rather than the more sensible assumption that much, if not everything, will go wrong...

...six theologians from varying backgrounds will present papers for discussion...

...it goes on between Israeli and Palestinian and Arab groups--the latter may indeed fear that, if the Soviet Union should suddenly and astonishingly accede to American pressure and reCommonweal: 713 lease several million Jews, few of whom want in fact to emigrate to Israel, expansionist claims by Israelihardliners would become even more provocative of Arab fears...

...more social and human services, and less strenuous and exhausting conditions in the work to be done...

...It has been carried on by Senator Jackson and others in the Senate---and I should "add that Senator Jackson is a man who, contrary to widespread cynicism, is not only the "Senator from Boeing Aircraft," but also a true believer in human rights, as are many other idealistic Americans...

...Later seminars of the Bread for the World Educational Fund will be held at the University of Dayton (Dec...

...A group of us working quietly to protect these philosophers, while at the same time seeking to give them support, worked with great caution and sought not to humiliate Marshal Tito publicly, let alone to put our countries on an adversary course...

...Meantime, the Senate has already indicated where it stands by its vote of considerably less than two-thirds in favor of the confirmation of Paul Warnke as our disarmament negotiator...

...Viet Nam was not seen as an issue of nuclear peril, as it was for me, but as a moral outrage and, for many, a personal threat and a personal moral dilemma...

...By giving the movement for human rights full legitimacy at an earlier point, it may have transcended President Carter's ability to control and focus it...

...I did not share a number of attitudes that prevailed in this country during the Second World War...

...Thus candor can be both right conduct and successful strategy...

...Last June's graduating class belongs to a generation which Qudging from my questions to students on this issue over a period of many years) has not grown up with nightmares of the possibility of nuclear devastation...

...Tribalism within nation-states and among nationstates remains the most powerful force at work in the world today, more powerful even than class conflicts although especially powerful when (as in Belgium and in some measure in Northern Ireland and in Israel between the European and the Mediterranean Jews) tribal and class divisions coincide...

...But President Carter is an American as he is Southern...

...And just as Senator Jackson had been mistaken in insisting that the Soviet Union would on materialistic grounds accept our trade terms while accepting 'also our vocal criticism concerning the emigration of Jewish dissidents (we raised no question about other captive nationalities), so President Carter began his administration by insisting that the Soviet Union would come to terms on the SALT agreements (and also on other outstanding issues) because there would be gaing for them, and at the same time insisting on their accepting our standards of human rights as well...

...Indeed, the Russian experience in wars, from the Russo-Japanese War through the First and Second World Wars, has in fact been that most things have gone wrong...

...At the same time, in lending his prestige and immense moral capital to the campaign for human rights vis-aDAVID RIESMAN i$ a pro/essor in the Department o] Sociology at Harvard University and the author o] The Lonely Crowd...

...vis the Soviet Union, I think it is possible that President Carter has jeopardized his hopes on the allimportant nuclear front, and I think so not only because prominent officialdom in the Soviet Union says so, but because of my understanding of the long-run impact of the Carter campaign on American public opinion...

...24-26...

...Since we have lived for over thirty years without the use of nuclear weapons in war, our good fortun'e in this respect reminds me of Joseph Schumpeter's verdict on capitalism: it would be destroyed by its beneficiaries who had no hand in its adventures and triumphs...

...The insistence on openness, that there be no secrets, is not only a legacy of Watergate and of often moralistic attacks on Henry Kissinger's style of secret covenants secretly arrived at, but also reflects earlier attitudes, many of them penetratingly discussed by Edward Shils in his book, The Torment o/ Secrecy, which dealt with the egalitarianism and populism of the Joseph McCarthy era, and the concomitant judgment that a secret is elitist or exclusive, keeping ordinary Americans out like a clique at school...

...I never for a moment had any sympathy for Stalinism and I regarded Soviet brutalities as quite as murderous as Hitler's (though probably as somewhat more defensive and less madly driven by a desire to conquer aU of Europe, Africa, and Asia, if not the planet...

...CONFLICTS AMONG OUR" IDEALS DAVID RIESMAN The focus inevitably plays into the Cold War mentedlty In the course of dealing with intricate moral questions which at the same time, like all moral questions of import, are intensely practical ones, I shall be making some criticism of the bias of ethnocentrism implicit in some of the current campaign for human rights...

...The notion that ideals may not be compatible with each other is often difficult for Americans to accept...

...Some of these Russian experts, among them a few of my colleagues at Harvard, were among the last to realize what Victor Zorza had long been pointing out, namely, the likelihood, of a I1 November 1977:714 Sino-Soviet split in what had been thought of as monolithic World Communism...

...to keep a secret is somehow unfair...

...Yet to believe that it will always work seems to me an often unconscious ethnocentric failure to appreciate that we cannot approach other countries in the same way that at times, in our cults of intimacy and of sharing, in our demolishing of the line between public and private, we approach each other both in adversary journalism and in many aspects of personal life...

...Liberal intellectuals, public officials, and interest groups ranging from influential American Zionists to longshoremen to the hard-liners who run the international division of the AFL-CIO have been in the forefront of the human rights issue, in some part as an attack on the effort to achieve dttente by former President Nixon and Henry Kissinger --an attack joined by the Republican Cold War Right, and the Democratic-Liberal Left with its call for an open moral diplomacy, superior to Realpolitik...

...More important, I have seen the Soviet Union as suffering even more from internal tribalism than we do, with many nationalities struggling to get out from under the control of the Great Russians, and in which the countries of the Eastern Zone produce superior consumer goods and have a higher standard of living, in spite of having constantly to pay tribute to the Soviet Union, than do the citizens of the latter...

...The risk I have in mind is of immediate destruction through what I have regarded, since Hiroshima, as the overarching danger to the species, that is, the existence of nuclear weapons and the possibility to which these give rise of an escalating nuclear conflict among the superpowers...

...It was not begun by Candidate or President Carter...

...Again to underline the fact that Jimmy Carter did not begin but is in fact trying to curb the American temptation to worst case thinking, we should recall the fact that candidate John Kennedy made the utterly factitious "missile gap" the main theme of his attack on candidate Richard Nixon and the previous Republican administration--indeed, later, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had done what no other American president has to my knowledge done, namely, endangered the planet in order to force Premier Khrushchev to back down...

...And I believe that no American policy, foreign or domestic, is viable which rests on a definition of the national interest--a concept which I am inclined to question--which fails to take account of our national idealism...

...things generally go wrong with such calculations, which resemble one-person chess, and escalation to mutual annihilation has seemed to me the likely result...

...Given these American attitudes which often verge on paranoia as to all the secret goings on which will do the ordinary person in at the hands of government or of large, invisible corporations, the President must take account of the need to explain, when negotiations are being conducted in secret, why this is necessary in terms of the internal cultural and political outlooks of the countries with which one is dealing and of the special subcultures of their leaders in and out of power, but also to prevent early forestalling, for example, of arms agreements, by leakage of classified documents which purport to show, for example, that the Soviet Union is building a massive civil defense apparatus with the presumptive aim of being able to engage in a nuclear first strike and not suffer devastating reprisals...

...He created a crisis situation out of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, an issue that could have been handled more safely over time, since in reality the United States was no more threatened by these missiles in Cuba (over which Soviet control was maintained) than by those ICBMs already in place or potentially located in offshore submarines...