Virtue and U.S. Foreign Policy
By Louis Rene Beres
The overwhelming defects of U.S. foreign policy are the result of a society that does not care for itself as individuals. Before we can expect virtue in our relations with other nations, Americans will first need to nurture virtue within and among themselves. It will do little good to appoint congressional committees to root out the evil, or to place our hopes in the next presidential election. As George Washington recognized in his farewell address of Sept. 17, 1796, the wellsprings of a decent public policy are always in private morality.
What has become of this private morality? It has fallen victim to the herd, to a society that celebrates only “success” and that reserves such celebration for those who can produce conspicuous wealth. As revealed by recent scandals on Wall Street, even highly paid arbitrage professionals required infinitely expanding amounts of money to salve their desperate need for self-worth, stopping only when a vigilant U.S. attorney began sending them to jail.
In the end, of course, these pitiful figures display appropriate forms of open contrition, but only because there is nothing else to do. As for the public, the lesson it draws is not that the crimes were wrong, but that the perpetrators were greedy and foolish enough to get caught.
Why this desperate need to project meaning through money? Why is it that we Americans refuse to see ourselves as individuals, to reject endless cycles of useless consumption in favor of what was once called “inner direction?”
More than anything else, the answer lies in television, a primal force that preempts individuality as it sanctifies imitation. Tantalized by offers of bliss and glamour that stream forth from this heavenly box so many hours a week, the viewer is effectively immune to alternate cues of correct behavior. Faced with a contrary image of the world offered by frenzied parents and worried schools, younger viewers learn quickly that it’s what’s up front that counts. Elders and educators never had a chance.
In the past, Americans were defined by the values to which they were subscribed. Today, definition flows from those values which we have repudiated. A traitor to authentic ideals of the Founding Fathers [who were familiar with the Greeks and who understood with Plato and Pericles that virtue in foreign affairs requires virtue at home], today’s citizen looks upon personal integrity as an epithet, as an adolescent fad from which all successful persons are quickly disabused. Proceeding from one forfeiture to the next, this heir to a tradition once known as the Enlightenment inhabits his convictions like a worm in the fruit. Consuming voraciously, he hasn't the slightest idea of what is being eaten.
Interview a successful American and ask his or her secret. The answer is always the same: “I have the courage of faith in myself.” But this is invariably a lie, as such faith serves only as a pretext for new capitulations to the herd, for persistent degradations of self and society dressed up as achievement. Advancing against his past and his future at the same time, this dazzling entrepreneur or performer carries his indignity to any lengths, secretly convinced that his self is a terrible prison and that the warming glow of a society approaching extinction is liberation.
In America, the self- is on the verge of disappearance. Seeking meaning only in the desolate mass of other people who have refused to become persons, in the collectivity, the individual American has purposefully lost all control over his own life. Not surprisingly, such loss of control has brought unparalleled humiliation both nationally and internationally.
We have come a long way from the Greek belief that a person must be honored for individual worth, and treated with respect only because one is oneself. In the words of the Athenin statesman Pericles: “Each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility.”
Without virtue, America is a phantom that has worn out its shadow, a deteriorating presence that diminishes with each foreign policy failure. Terrified by the risks that could bring survival, only our shame remains vital. It is inexhaustible.
No nation that is obsessed with lies can speak truth to the world. Vague impulses of an atrophied interest in virtue, contemporary America’s expressed regard for “liberty,” “democracy” and “freedom” is an obscene gesture toward all those who would take words seriously. Before we can become a light unto other nations, we will first have to dispel darkness among ourselves. In the final analysis, this will require us to speak truth to power, rejecting a terrible bargain wherein things are exchanged for silence.
