DEALING WITH THE NUCLEAR THREAT:REPLIES

...The more relevant point is that in the United States the greatest impetus to state-activism has come from an unacceptably swollen notion of personal rights...

...I do not deny that some who take seriously the possibility of massive ruin or the qualitatively distinct possibility of human and natural extinction may come to believe that unilateral nuclear disarmament is necessary...

...It must be reexamined by its humane adherents, not because it has any chance of great success in the United States, but because adherence to it withdraws humane passion and talent from the most urgent mission: thinking about everything as if for the first time...

...Yet Hyde may err in thinking that that is the end of the matter...

...A partial detachment from one's world is preliminary to a new attachment to existence...

...II COHEN SAYS, "INDEED, THE PATERNALISM, instru mentalism and therapeutic welfarism he criticizes have been fostered precisely on the basis of the individualist principles that he defends...

...The ultimate reason is to prevent the desperate fear and then the paranoid panic that must ensue when another state feels that time is working against it— the sort of fear that Thucydides said Sparta felt when faced with Athenian aggrandizement...

...There are numerous American sources as well...

...As W. W. Rostow said: "Credible deterrence in the nuclear age lies in being prepared to face the consequence if deterrence fails—up to and including all-out nuclear war...

...Is there something within the individualism of personal and political rights that supplies some of the energies of state-activism...

...It may even be the case that such a conclusion is the only right one to draw...

...The main one is that the nuclear deterrent exists only to deter, and what it exists to deter is only a first use of nuclear weapons...

...In both examples, individuals try to use coercive administrative methods in place of the proper cultural methods of persuasion...

...I believe that these latter policies and speculative policies are invalid...

...Now, my concern in the piece published in Dissent (which was the first of three lectures on the relevance of several doctrines of individualism to the nuclear situation) is with the individualism of individual personal and political rights...

...though dependence on a boss is scarcely ideal...

...Such a life need not promote state-activism, though it is certainly compatible with it...

...But I do not think that it is the only right conclusion...

...I propose that the great democratic individualist thinkers (Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman) and the great antidemocratic individualist thinkers (Nietzsche and Heidegger) point to an attachment to human and natural existence that may surpass in intensity any other kind of attachment...

...it rebels...

...That is, they would forfeit office if they used nuclear weapons first against nuclear states in a case where the existence of these weapons had failed to deter some kind of unwanted behavior...

...Unfortunately, the nuclear doctrine of the United States includes these enlarged meanings of deterrence...

...The power belongs to bureaucracies...

...The plea for a nuclear weapons freeze is in line with the precept, 364 and so are at least some of the plans for arms control...

...That means thinking from the perspectives of avoiding massive ruin and possible human and natural extinction...

...It becomes mixed up with and provides a cover for the project of pervasive social discipline...

...Their guiding precept is that every effort to achieve a stunning breakthrough in nuclear weapons technology be abandoned...

...This project is historically perhaps the most important source of state-activism...

...We should remember, however, that the practice of voluntary association is suffused with the very spirit that suffuses the individualist understanding of the proper origin of legitimate government...

...And when individualism goes on to inspire "an original relation to the universe," dependence on the state is scorned...

...The common core that I find is a wish to go beyond the social: a wish for individuals to define themselves as aspiring to go beyond the social in order to try to have moments of aloneness when the shock of wonder at existence permeates the individual's spirit...

...even as it is compatible with the minimal state...

...III MICHAEL SANDEL'S RESPONSE IS CERTAINLY NOT polemical...

...In the nuclear situation, the shock of wonder at the inessential and unencompassable indefiniteness of human and natural existence on earth receives a fresh inspiration: the possibility that human action can end it all, and for no purpose at all commensurable to unmeasurable indefiniteness...

...The indefiniteness can't be sanely loved...

...One grows attached to the indefiniteness of human and natural life, generation after generation...

...It does not exist to deter all sorts of unwanted political behavior...

...Another is the way in which the sense of being slighted has been turned into a litigious demand for the processing of grievances...

...Nothing I said disparages such practice...

...The effect of wonder is pictured as a poetical or philosophical attachment to existence...

...Following Tocqueville, I think that it is likely that individualism from within itself promotes state-activism when it is the individualism of personal rights unconnected to political rights, or connected belatedly or artificially...

...Circumstances will decide whether the "good" private life becomes dependent on stateactivism...

...I am also sympathetic to the theory of "existential" deterrence brilliantly suggested by McGeorge Bundy...

...But anyone who takes individual human dignity seriously must oppose state-activism...

...Its reaction would be unpredictable...

...The individualism lies in the refusal to be only social, so that one may see and know, in one's withdrawn moments, something other than one's self or one's extended self...

...Wonder makes it impossible to live with the thought of extinction...

...The version that may be acceptable to me is minimal, very restricted...

...The heart of a minimalist theory of deterrence has a number of components...

...The result is an inexorable growth of state bureaucratic power, and with it, the spreading sense that we are all either wards of the state or culprits mischievously defending injustice...

...The parental state and the warmaking state are the same thing, and this kind of state dominated European mentality long before individualist resistance to it arose...

...I say that the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke, Tocqueville, and Mill provide inspiration to further thinking...

...God would be well dead...

...Nor is it love of one's common world, of one's particular world, whether one's family or type or society...

...The inessentiality, the uncreatedness, of human and natural existence foster the wonder...

...There is only the repeated shock of wonder that there is existence, that there is so much existence, rather than nothing...

...The mere fact that the United States sincerely says that it would not retaliate does not mean that, faced with an attack, it would be able to live up to what it had sincerely been saying all along...

...He says, ". . the question remains how Kateb can cast extinction as a special kind of peril, while at the same time denying any notion of a common world worth preserving...

...Of course, democratic political rights are essential to the avoidance of this condition...

...The only really emancipatory cause is anti-state...

...To say that because it is inhuman it is not credible is false...

...Yet I know that there are humane sources of stateactivism...

...It is not a project of any version of genuine individualism...

...One example is the way in which 365 the effort to end legal discrimination has turned into a continuously invasive effort to achieve affirmative action...

...But because I was working, in the first lecture, with an individualism of personal and political rights, I believe that I worked with a cluster of concepts that stand in perpetual antagonism to the exalted or energetic idea of the state and hence to any mystification of it...

...Democratic politics can facilitate bureaucratic ruling...

...But let us notice that dirigisme (state-activism), the servant and support of êtatisme, is always an exercise of executive or administrative power...

...I do not exclusively associate this individualism with any one thinker, nor do I say that any idea found in any earlier thinker is right as it is and needs no revision...

...I am not sure, but I think that I could accept some version of the doctrine of deterrence...

...This is not love of the world—there is so much in the world that is not lovable...

...The second and third lectures attempt to answer this question...

...I have sympathy for the position of the Catholic bishops of the United States, which allows provisional acceptance of a minimal theory of deterrence on condition that nuclear states work for the elimination of nuclear weapons...

...I doubt it...

...If individualism teaches us to outgrow all solidarities, what reason does it leave to love the world...

...If, therefore, an individualist idea here or there has actually lent or would seem now to lend encouragement to the growth of state power, one would have to take that possibility into account...

...Though a democratic legislature acting as a result of democratic participatory pressure enacts dirigiste legislation, the entrusted work is done by bureaucracies...

...I COHEN SAYS, "IT MAY NOT BE OBVIOUS, but it is an inevitable and only thinly disguised trend of Kateb's argument that he is advocating unilateral disarmament...

...As Mill says in chapter eight of his book on representative government: "Every one is degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate his destiny...

...But even these tendencies that derive from a swollen notion of personal rights may be minor in comparison with the effects of the overall project of furthering socioeconomic equality (as distinguished from the struggle against poverty and misery...

...If the theoretical price for the reduction of state power is a great decrease in the number of opportunities for democratic politics, so be it...

...Even if one confined oneself to a concern for ruin and extinction, and did not take into account any other sort of more conventional principle, one could make a strong case for avoiding unilateral nuclear disarmament...

...I admire the reserved expression of its passion...

...There can be no society-wide democratic socialism or social democracy in the modern age...

...But elimination will be politically impossible for as long as one can imagine...

...Individualism (rightly understood) can help heal the blindness of self-love and group self-love, and thus induce that passage to a protective sense of wonder, that change of heart, which may be the best resource in the effort to make the nuclear peril recede...

...It is scarcely an accident that the practice of voluntary association grows only in societies committed to the idea of contracting individuals...

...There are other components to a minimalist theory of deterrence...

...But when, from the start, individualism is dedicated to political rights as well as to personal rights, dependence on the state must be felt as abhorrent...

...What is feared is a condition of psychological dependence and diminishment as much as unjust or inefficient policies...

...My judgment is that forfeiture of office would occur theoretically whenever officeholders acted in accordance with these elements of nuclear doctrine...

...The detailed interpretation and application belong to bureaucracies...

...Claims are made in the language of rights, but what is being claimed is not a right but a benefit or a cure...

...All first uses and all specific (as distinguished from existential) threats compel the judgment that officeholders have forfeited the right to stay in office...

...It is, however, the project of Dissent...

...On the other hand, to say all along that there will be nuclear retaliation is to adopt an inhuman position...

...It does not exist to deter, for example, nonnuclear policies or acts of war by a nuclear state, or to threaten nonnuclear states with nuclear reprisal...

...No particular emotion—not even love or Nietzschean affirmation—can possibly be adequate to indefiniteness...

...Naturally, one of the basic methods of opposition is voluntary association...

...When I claim that individualism must itself be the source of resistance to state-activism, even when (especially when) it supplies some of the energies of state-activism, I am referring, in part, to the inward affiliation between it and the practice of voluntary association...

...True individualism is the only unidolatrous self-loss: "all mean egotism vanishes," as Emerson puts it...

...The practice exists not only to work on government, or to work against it, but also to work instead of it...

...In that unpredictability lies the deterrent force...

...Cohen's response does, however, raise some serious questions, and I would like to comment briefly on two of them...

...It also becomes much easier to recognize and resist state pathologies of every sort—including the pathologies of informationgathering, surveillance, and thought-controlwhen the project of socioeconomic equality is abandoned for the reason that it is inevitably joined to state-activism...

...Though denouncing it as a bluff, Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois has nicely given the gist: You say that you would retaliate with nuclear weapons against a nuclear attack, while all along persuasively and unmistakably indicating that you wouldn't...

...I believe that the individualism of personal and political rights is not consistent with itself when it promotes state-activism...

...in fact, I incline to the view that it may be a wrong one...

...q 366...

...I can give only a brief indication of them here...

...This kind of individualism consists in defining the good life as living for oneself and for one's own, and hence living for domestic intimacy, religious piety, and material gratification...

...But because of this country's energy, wealth, and virtuosic drive, it may apply especially to the United States...

...Historically, the degradation Mill refers to comes before the individualism of personal and political rights...

...there can be only statist socialism or social democratic statism...

...Obviously, this guiding precept applies not only to the United States...

...or if they merely threatened to use nuclear weapons against a nonnuclear power...

...whether it be the consent of individuals in the immediate postrevolutionary period, or the consent given (if it is given) by each individual as she or he attains adulthood...

...I am sure, though, that it cannot be Cohen's version, which is an enlarged doctrine of deterrence...

...My hunch is that such a unilateral step might increase the chances of ruin or extinction by encouraging other countries to enter the nuclear field, their statist minds filled with fantasies of uninhibited power plays...

...Individual human dignity is inextricably tied to suspecting, restraining, and confining the state power, and resisting its extension beyond a certain point...