Alone with our rights
Garvey, John
adversary seemed greater. A narrowly conceived margin of "rationality" was the foundation of an irrational arms competition. The treaties were the precise but precarious effort made to...
...Other kinds of nuclear danger may be more probable, but they are not more important...
...Americans who still think that way (and there are lots of them) are at least made to feel ashamed by an official creed, by a prevailing hypocrisy which says you should, at least,feel ashamed while doing everything you can to limit the participation of nonblonds in the whole of society...
...I mean this as a kind of damning with faint praise, but the faint praise is something Europe has not yet earned...
...Catholic bishops in the 1980s, the effort to encompass nuclear strategy in the moral universe was a taxing task...
...Germany worries about its racial purity in the face of migrant Turks, and a neo-Nazi movement is on the rise...
...The recent conflicts in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn between Hasidic Jews and blacks show the continuing legacy of this bad beginning...
...In moral terms the tension was that much worse...
...The teen-agers have a right to sexual behavior unregulated in any way by their parents, according to the ever-sillier American Civil Liberties Union...
...An attempt at a compromise that would allow parents to "opt out" of the plan was defeated, and court battles are predicted...
...The assumption is that we exist primarily and most importantly as individuals--that is to say, alone--and each of us has a domain within which he or she is sovereign...
...The old terms, EastWest/North-South simply don't capture the complexity of the issues...
...The only limitations allowed have to do with the most obvious outer reaches of civic order: you may not falsely yell "fire" in a crowded theater, or spray a crowd at a shopping mall with machine gun fire...
...Great Britain has begun to experience a racial crisis (chickens coming home to roost, I say) not unlike that experienced by Americans during the early years of the civil rights movement...
...Skin color has always been important to people like Enoch Powell and his younger brothers, the skinheads, and in France to neo-Fascists...
...From Paul Ramsey in the 1960s to the U.S...
...We should take a moment prayerfully to be grateful and then move on to the issues of the 1990s...
...This set of debates, the diversity of black American literary voices, the controversial attention given to how we teach American history, are all positive legacies--whichever side you wind up taking----of a society which has at least confronted racism as a serious reality, however badly it may have handled it...
...The field of players expands dramatically and the issues about which many of the players are concerned go beyond controlling weapons...
...America, in arriving, or blundering its way, into a position slightly less racist than the one Europe has recently tended to show, has used the language of individual rights to describe the need for racial justice...
...The South's interest in planetary bargains has always been understandably more focused on economic issues than strategic questions...
...In an odd way, the problems of Europe's racism and the growth of neo-Fascist movements there are the opposite of our problems...
...The kinds of debates over affirmative action that have accompanied the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings are debates Europe is not yet capable of having...
...It is true that the U.S...
...it is another to claim that religious nationalism or nationalistic religion is in any way holy...
...The Senate ought to consent without too much advice on START and CFE...
...I've written before that our only common culture is made up of law and television, and I'm afraid I still think that's true--but there are other things that we can see about America by comparison with other places...
...r i OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey ALONE WITH OUR RIGHTS AMERICA IS GETI'ING HARDER TO FIND merica is stranger than we think, more varied and wonderful and potentially dangerous...
...On purely strategic grounds this "margin of rationality" stretched the notion of what was reasonable...
...The second stage of setting the agenda for the 1990s involves developing a view of the world capable of ordering the issues after the cold war...
...That doesn't mean we have any right to think that we have arrived at anything like a decent society...
...Indeed, the demise of the U.S.-Soviet danger and the remaining nuclear weapons simply point to the more central problems of the 1990s...
...There, a false hierarchy of values-racial and cultural purity and homogeneity, seen as superior to a mix of races and cultures--leads to social strife and disorder...
...First, the nuclear question will shift from its superpower fixation to the systemic problem of proliferation...
...the second is blasphemy...
...It is one kind of evil to be constantly distracted, in a culture based on distraction...
...A right comes before any other consideration...
...we really don't have one that we haven't had to make up as we go along...
...Bush should take up Mr...
...I am not talking so much about our national politics (if that means Bush, or who the Democrats might run for president, or the administration's foreign or domestic policy) but a culture that is in so many ways unlike any other...
...The prochoice movement has made a woman's right to choose more important than the choice itself, which is seen as morally neutral...
...Engaging the South in the proliferation question will and should open other necessary planetary bargains about debt, development, and the environment...
...In New York City a plan to distribute condoms to public school teen-agers, to help prevent teen pregnancies and fight the spread of AIDS, has been vigorously opposed by those who believe that the schools have no business encouraging students to ignore what their parents might want them to do, where premarital sex is concerned...
...600: Commonweal...
...The need for different ideas as well as different policies arises because the nuclear danger has dissipated...
...Refraining from hurting another is the highest ethical good here...
...The likely sources of proliferation tie neither in the East nor the West but in the South...
...The engagement of the South in a planetary bargain about proliferation will surely spill over into issues which have nothing to do with nuclear (or chemical or biological) weapons...
...A "right to die" movement has gone beyond such reasonable proposals as the right to refuse life-extending "extraordinary means," and "living wills" that would put this desire into force, to the encouragement of doctorassisted suicide as a right...
...Gorbachev's proposal for a test ban...
...If our culture has narrowed down to law and television, in Yugoslavia it has narrowed down to race and region and religion, and--because religion can be made part of it (Orthodox if you're Serb, Catholic if you're Croat)--there is the obvious danger of idolatry...
...The treaties were the precise but precarious effort made to mediate between "danger and survival...
...National identity is important in Europe in ways Americans have never seriously encountered, because 25 October 1991:599 "Agreed, then, Henderson--you don't impact me, and I won "t impact you...
...Arguing against them, on the grounds that they either missed the complexity of the nuclear danger, or they would in fact raise the likelihood of nuclear use by delegitimizing nuclear deterrence, has been, in my view, a valid and necessary but not terribly satisfying enterprise...
...In America the pluralist assumptions of our form of democracy have combined with individualism to produce a dangerous leveling: no value may be seen as higher than another (only different, morally equivalent), and the right of the individual outstrips any sense of an obligation that might limit rights...
...The notion of rights, taken to an extreme in many instances, is typical of a peculiarly American assumption, and presents its own new set of problems...
...At one level it almost doesn't exist, or exists in an attenuated and weird way, one that isn't a common understanding or sensibility so much as it is a passivity before our peculiarly empty brand of politics and our having placed commerce at the center of everything...
...Many educated, articulate Europeans still believe that the proper response to racial tension or immigration is to try to limit the numbers of, or exclude entirely, these oddly colored and oddly cultured people...
...This evil has skewed our whole common understanding of what America is and can be...
...That defines our obligation to others as beginning only at the point where the possibility of hurting them begins...
...Remember the line, common during the sixties, "You can do anything you like as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else...
...That danger--a world of many nuclear (or chemical and biological) states--is less cosmic in its scope than the one which has just passed, but it is more complex in its content...
...Short of that, almost everything is negotiable...
...The point of this review of both strategic and moral arguments is essentially to declare the terms of both debates dated in 1991...
...and both sides ought to pursue the simpler road of coordinated unilateral reductions to drastically reduce their arsenals, as the National Academy of Science recently recommended...
...Here, value hierarchies are forbidden, rights are everything, and the possibility of any common cultm'e, any common civil understanding, any real civility, is eroding fast...
...Europe, fight now, is going through a profound crisis with "foreign workers"-some of whom have been there for more than one generation and would not be called foreign in countries which did not still define themselves primarily in racial terms...
...In the 1990s, because other forms of nuclear danger will be far more probable, they are now more important...
...Senate has yet to ratify START or CFE, and the BushGorbachev initiatives need to be implemented, but it is hard to believe any of these issues could revive the old version of the nuclear question...
...They can be defined in two stages...
...Neither the authors nor their audiences were ever content with the conclusions...
...The political change in U.S.-Soviet relationships, the transformation of the map and politics of Europe, and the combined results of the START and the CFE treaties, along with the Bush-Gorbachev decisions are enough to render the previous arguments moot...
...In his preface to Danger and Survival, McGeorge Bundy explained his decision to focus upon the U.S.-Soviet relationship rather than other nuclear threats in this way: "This book by contrast is about danger and survival on a planetary scale...
...America has been guilty of racism, and began its economic life with a dependence on a form of slavery that made the slavery of the ancient world (which allowed for the education of slaves, and their eventual freedom, and did not deny their humanity) seem humane...
...The first is willful sleepwalking...
...A few things that have happened recently made me think about how odd we are in the world...
...The fact that even after these steps are taken, nuclear warheads will still exist highlights the character of the 1990s: The nuclear danger as we have known it is over, but nuclear weapons still exist...
...But something else needs to be said about America here...
...Lawrence pointed out in Studies in Classic American Literature that America was a place people came to in order to get away---but it is important to notice the fact that they wanted to get away from something old and stale: Europe...
...It isn't bad, but a necessary sense of obligation to something higher is missing completely from a rights-based understanding of common life...
...The clarity of calls for condemnation of the entire nuclear enterprise was tempting in its internal coherence...
Vol. 118 • October 1991 • No. 18
