DEALING WITH THE NUCLEAR THREAT
Cohen, Jean & Sandel, Michael & Kohák, Erazim & Kateb, George
George Kateb's "Nuclear Weapons and Individual Responsibility," (Dissent, Spring 1986) achieves an instant credibility by his open acknowledgment of what we prefer to ignore—the possibility of...
...Locke does not conceive of an anarchically individualistic state of nature and an intrinsically totalitarian civil state...
...And therein lies the rub...
...where the state is regarded...
...Given his definition of state activism—which includes everything beyond the most minimal police function allowed to the community by classical liberalism—this would mean that if we encourage, say, the Social Security system or even if we just fail to resist it, we are contributing to a future nuclear holocaust...
...In great part, the debate about nuclear weaponry has been so fruitless because authors who raise the issue invariably attempt to use the clear moral imperative of preventing extinction to advance some less clearly imperative agenda of their own, whether it is the struggle against capitalist imperialism, godless Communism or, in this case, state activism...
...Individual humans in reality are and can be individuals only within the context of a community...
...All the notorious instances of statism, whether dramatic like the Soviet or tedious like the French, came into being as a response to the breakdown of a functioning community...
...It is, however, not so clear that this well-deserved credibility should extend beyond the initial recognition to Kateb's proposals for dealing with the nuclear threat...
...The only policy that would escape the charge of "state activism," it seems, would be laissez-faire carried to extremes undreamt of even by our Victorian ancestors...
...It demands the difficult and determined work of building a community of morally mature, free, and responsible individuals who would make statism superfluous—just as anarchic individuals make it necessary...
...In one particularly farfetched Lacanian excursus, Kateb suggests that even attempts to protect the environment are an expression of a totalitarian passion for regimentation and perhaps of a death wish, not of a genuine concern about the danger of ecological extinction...
...As he presents it, humans in the natural condition are already humans in a community...
...And they did this by winning 40 percent of the vote among voters from 18 to 24 years of age, and 41 percent among voters from 25 to 34...
...Kateb is actually more honest about it than most...
...It is precisely when the infrastructure of civilization breaks down that society becomes quite necessarily a disciplining society...
...It is simply not true that the concern about the apocalyptic possibilities of nuclear weaponry made its appearance only with the coming of the "cultural revolution" and of the "me generation" that followed it...
...And here, finally, may lie Kateb's great and valid insight: a community that does not need the disciplining hand of authority requires morally mature citizens, prepared to accept responsibility for the common weal rather than leave it up to "the authorities...
...The atomic individual is a legal fiction...
...Even if nuclear weapons did not exist," he tells us, "and there were no possibility of extinction, the fight against state activism would have to be carried on...
...The opposition is not one between "individualism" and "statism...
...As Hobbes knew and experience amply confirms, it is atomic individuals, recognizing no bonds other than those justified by self-interest, who can only be governed by coercion...
...Perceiving social coexistence as a dialectic between individual demands, cast in the role of forces of freedom, and social needs, cast in the role of illicit repression, may appeal to the "me generation," since it endows its egocentric claims with the gloriole of "struggle against oppression," but it is fundamentally unproductive...
...In turn it would seem to follow that if we wish to prevent nuclear extinction, we should, for starters, dismantle the Social Security system, abolish Amtrak and put an end to farm subsidies, all in the name of saving the world from a holocaust...
...To be sure, such overextension of credibility is by no means unique to Kateb's argument...
...It is surely important that that unacknowledged reality be made overt and become a part of our decision-making...
...It is precisely what makes statism both possible and necessary...
...Such an exhaustive polarization is problematic already on theoretical grounds...
...In the 1950s, long before Jonathan Schell's very fine book and before Gunther Anders, no less a man than Karl Jaspers made it the focus of his thought...
...Then, since "state activist" regimes are most likely to make use of nuclear weapons...
...The imperative of preventing nuclear annihilation is a clearly acknowledged one, quite independent of the recent concern with "state activism...
...George Kateb's "Nuclear Weapons and Individual Responsibility," (Dissent, Spring 1986) achieves an instant credibility by his open acknowledgment of what we prefer to ignore—the possibility of nuclear annihilation and the anonymity of the powers that control that possibility, impervious to the considerations that sway individuals—such as the loss of all we love, of trees, dogs, and wheatfields, not to mention ourselves, in a nuclear holocaust...
...Not anarchic individuals but free and responsible individuals in a community provide an alternative to paternalism and statism...
...Though it might be made consistent with the views of Thomas Hobbes, who formulated his political views at the exiled Stuart court, it is in clear conflict with the views of John Locke, who learned his politics in the Netherlands and under the Commonwealth—and whom Kateb also invokes...
...And not only that: it is this well-functioning social matrix that makes a noncoercive community of mutual respect possible...
...I BELIEVE THAT THE FATAL FLAW that leads to this paradoxical conclusion is Kateb's binary vision of Silver Lining The elections in France this spring, which gave a parliamentary majority to a coalition of conservatives, nevertheless held some unexpected bright spots for the Socialists...
...That, it seems, is his real concern—not nuclear weaponry but the struggle against "state activism" and the advancement of "individualism...
...The struggle against the threat of nuclear annihilation demands more than a gesture of protest...
...q an abstract anarchic individualism on the one hand and of "statism" on the other...
...Quite the contrary...
...Not a "contempt for authority," well-bred or not, but a willingness to assume personal responsibility for the common weal, a readiness for in358 volvement in authority that transforms its anonymous "they" into a "we," is what is needed...
...Individualism, not in the sense of heedless gratification of personal whims but in the Enlightenment sense of Bildung, of fostering the growth of each individual to moral maturity, is the cornerstone on which free and responsible societies are built...
...Despite predictions of a huge defeat, the Socialists gained 32 percent of the popular vote and remained the largest single party in parliament...
...These are somewhat surprising...
...Invoking the 17th century social contract theories, he sets up what purports to be an exhaustive dichotomy between a totalitarian state (he uses the French 357 terms, ètatisme and dirigisme, since he draws largely on French thought and experience in the decade following the upheavals of 1968) and a rather abstract "individualism," marked by a "well-bred contempt for authority," which denies the legitimacy of all social constraints not justified by individual self-interest...
...There were others as well...
...The social contract is simply a formal recognition of a naturally existing community, not an arbitrary imposition on atomic individuals...
...That possibility is as horrifyingly real as Kateb would have it, though the recognition of it is of an older date than he supposes...
...The real opposition is between the polarization represented by the dialectic of statism and individualism on the one side and the committed building of a democratic community of participants in the common weal on the other...
...as the source of contented and adjusted and regularized life [through its welfarist policies and other interventions], it is subtly empowered to take the next step and become the source of mass death"— the struggle against state activism acquires the moral sanction of the struggle against nuclear extinction...
...Largely, I believe, by playing fast and loose with both theory and experience...
...In terms of this polarity, any attempt to take seriously the need to create an infrastructure of civilization, whether by protecting the environment, succoring the aged and the infirm, or assuring adequate transportation and communication, becomes automatically "totalitarian," or, in Kateb's words, a manifestation of the "passion of statism...
...I do not wish to question the reality of the nuclear threat or the urgency of all efforts to prevent nuclear extinction...
...It is the ties of family, language, and custom, the bond of common hope and shared vision, that make individual moral growth possible...
...Precious little, since contempt for authority is not likely to inhibit that authority from pursuing its desired course...
...Lived experience here bears out Locke, not Hobbes...
...The claim that the survival of humankind requires dismantling the Social Security system cannot be made credible simply by invoking the real and undeniable horror of a nuclear holocaust...
...Then what does all this have to do with nuclear weaponry...
...The state of nature, he insists, has a law of nature to govern it...
...Or, metaphorically, the fundamental opposition is not that between the master and the serf, but between the master and the serf on the one side and the New England town meeting on the other...
...And there we have it: although Reagan's defense policy is the quintessence of statism, his social policies strike a valiant blow against it...
...The abstract "individualism" that Kateb advances as "the most adequate idealism [sic]" for a nuclear age is not an alternative to statism...
...Those belong together, as two sides of a coin...
...The nuclear threat has become a rather novel argument for Ronald Reagan's social policies...
...359...
...The master and the serf, so beloved by all Hegelians, have become one...
...The nuclear threat only adds urgency to this basic struggle...
...JUST HOW DOES KATEB ARRIVE at his surprising conclusion...
...Remote as the connection may seem," he tells us, "the encouragement of state activism, or the failure to resist it, contributes to nuclear statism and thus to the disposition to accept and inflict massive ruin and, with that, the unwanted and denied possibility of extinction...
Vol. 33 • July 1986 • No. 3
