The Warrior's Honor
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
Solomon, Beloved, and now Paradise. Her books resonate with her passion and commitment to racial dignity and equality, but also with her immersion in a fictional world unlike any other. She...
...They don't just tell us that he traveled from New York to Cincinnati...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain's most recent book is Real Politics (Johns Hopkins...
...But Ignatieff, horrified by what he has seen, believes that we should call up and call upon whatever is in our cul~ral and political armamentaritwn to interdict killing, and in this he is surely right...
...To be sure, European imperialism embodied a particularistic definition of human obligations, dividing the world into "us" and "them," but the European heritage also contained the seeds of a powerful corCommonweal 2 5 October 9, 1998 rective to this moral partiality...
...But the danger here is watery sentimentalism: we feel good about feeling bad about the misfortunes of others...
...The first is the incredible research on display...
...What impulses led us to supervise elections in Cambodia, try to protect the Kurds from Saddam, send UN troops to Bosnia, restore democracy to Haiti, bring the warriors to the table in Angola...
...Tracking down every detail of Heschel's life, every postcard and letter that he wrote, is in itself an enormous Commonweal 2 6 October9, 1998...
...That is far too easy, he insists, as it doesn't reckon with the overwhelming fears created by the "disintegration of states," especially in light of the fact that there are no alternative institutions that help individuals to form and to hold secure civic identities...
...Why does the world we find seem so chaotic and terrible...
...Kaplan and Dresner have unearthed the very first hiddushei torah that the young Heschel wrote in his childhood and have interviewed people who were able to describe the home and the street of his youth...
...Here is the world according to Ignatieff...
...Universalism now trumps particularism...
...It reads as if every scrap of paper that Abraham Heschel ever wrote or that anyone else ever wrote referring to him has somehow been found by these two...
...He doesn't really get beyond the themes of Blood and Belonging, here repeating his argument about the ways in which, given a particular concatenation of circumstances, even minor differences get magnified into deadly incommensurabilities that blind human beings to the suffering of others and justify wounding those same others...
...So we get involved...
...Finally, he lifts up the honor of warriors and suggests that where humanrights language and just-war argument fall on hostile or uncomprehending ears, appeals to the honor of warriors might take us some distance in limiting the damage...
...These images of human suffering prick the conscience and animate a moral claim...
...human beings---qua human beings-have none...
...First, we citizens of the settled West are everywhere, as "aid workers, reporters, lawyers for war crimes tribunals, humanrights observers"--on and on...
...He arrived at Hebrew Union College the next afternoon and settled in a dormitory room, the lodgings Morgenstern had promised...
...Confronted with a "pure victim," we may fall into an unhealthy combination of pity and contempt as we prefer our victims to be blameless...
...This is not a work in systematic moral philosophy...
...This mix of "moral solidarity and hubris" intrigues Ignatieff, a frequent contributor to the New Republic and the New York Review of Books...
...Elizabeth Bartelme, a long-time Commonweal contributor, lives in New York City...
...That, in a nutshell, is Ignatieff's thesis and the text is devoted to its exploration...
...thin in prescription...
...Clearly, the problems of other people concern us...
...But it is none too clear how we are to go about enforcing codes of warrior honor in disintegrated situations and in light of the fact that, as Ignatieff makes painfully evident, many of those doing the killing are not warriors at all but irregulars who fight without training, without rules, and in the throes of a nigh-unlimited blood lust...
...In the past fifty years an ever more robust regime of human rights has grown up alongside the most horrific carnage...
...The Warrior's Honor is vivid in description...
...Ignatieff does well to warn us off a few of our pet evasions, the most common being that the tribal bloodshed in Rwanda, the upheavals in India, the disaster in Bosnia, can be summed up as "atavistic eruption of...incorrigible tribalism," an urgency we in the West long ago left off or never suffered in the first place...
...they do no such thing...
...The first discovery we make, then, is that "human rights have little or no purchase on this world of war...
...Returning to the theme of moral disgust, Ignatieff scores the West's cautious and incautious reactions...
...Honorable warriors do not slaughter civilians indiscriminately...
...She gives vivid expression to black bitterness, while at the same time subjecting certain middle-class aspirations based on white achievements to a subtle critique...
...The temptation of triumphalism may be great on our part: we respect human rights...
...I know that it goes against the rules of reviewing to make such an uncritical statement, but I can't help it...
...We were prepared for this response by Christianity and the radical equality of all persons in the eyes of God, an egalitarianism that fueled modern human-rights discourse and argument...
...Tougher by far to recognize that victims are likely to be victimizers as well--a narrative that doesn't play as well on television...
...What Edward Kaplan and Samuel Dresner have done in this biography is so remarkable that the regular rules of reviewing have to be suspended...
...Ignatieff suggests that we have no real idea of what it would be like to find ourselves in situations that resemble Chapter XIII of Hobbes's Leviathan, where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short...
...The sheer volume of the details of Heschel's life in Warsaw, in Vilna, in Berlin, and in Frankfort is astonishing...
...We are sufficiently loath to risk "our" lives for "theirs" that we stand by and watch helpless civilians being shelled to pieces in refugee cities...
...The book is remarkable on two counts...
...Moving to "the narcissism of minor difference," a term he owes to Freud, Ignatieff puzzles over identities and the sometimes deadly "fictions" of nationalism...
...ABRAHAM, OUR FATHER Jack Riemer his book is simply stunning...
...But we are all in Ignatieff's debt for his insistent plumbing of the heart of contemporary darkness...
...OUR NEIGHBOR'S KEEPER Jean Bethke Elshtain ritish journalist Michael Ignatieff continues his tour through the rubble and ruin of late twentieth-century violence in his latest book...
...they say: "shortly before midnight on 9 April 1940, Heschel boarded an all-night train to Cincinnati, Ohio...
...For example, there are photographs of Heschel at every age and that have never been published before...
...Perhaps, he suggests, we feel a kind of moral disgust toward victims, toward those who cannot help themselves...
...Morrison understands the suffering, the mythology and religion of the black community in a way that few writers do and allows her great gifts to illuminate them...
...Ignatieff devotes five essays, here collected, to the matter...
...Far better to appeal to these fighters as warriors than as human beings, for warriors have codes of honor...
...Still, he would have us enforce the various Geneva Conventions that seek to ensure "that warriors conform to certain basic principles of humanity...
...We are sufficiently disgusted that we send UN troops into Bosnia and declare "safe havens...
...Even her ghosts seem alive and lively...
...Why do we feel that we must "do something" for strangers well beyond our own families, friendships, and nations...
...Television is his preferred answer, a "new kind of electronic internationalism linking the consciences of the rich and the needs of the poor...
...There is a further question: how are our "zones of safety" and their "zones of danger" linked...
...I'm not sure that has any better chance of stanching the flow of blood than appeals to human rights...
...Yet we are drawn as moths to flames to the Bosnias and Rwandas...
...She is, without doubt, one of our finest writers...
...If, in Blood and Belonging (1993), he took us inside situations of internecine disintegration and war, here he aims to probe the mentality of Western nations that embark on intervention, aid, and assistance to those in trouble or those we think will likely be in trouble unless we assist in putting things right...
...rather, Ignatieff gathers intimations, impressions, and narratives in a way that adds up to a decent road map if not a comprehensive encyclopedia...
...His concluding call for a healing "forgetting" if nations are to move on from traumatic collective wounds is particularly provocative...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 17
