Means as Ends

 

Means as Ends

Peter Schultz

 

            In their book, The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, Colodny and Shachtman highlight how Dr. Fritz Kraemer provided the neocons with rationales for their decidedly militaristic foreign policies. For example, when Reagan sent the Marines into Lebanon, Kraemer “cheered loudly” because “Rapid military responses to provocations” was one of his tenets. Moreover, Kraemer saw “the battle with the Soviet Union as involving will as well as strength.”

 

            Note: Kraemer was focused on means as if they were ends. Responding rapidly, provocatively, willfully was essential, as important as anything, because such responses demonstrated and validated that the US was capable of a morally virtuous politics.

 

            Similarly, anti-communism is more about means than ends because anti-communism proves, validates the virtues of the United States and its elites, even in the face of defeat or war, that is, regardless of the consequences. At one point, Colodny and Shachtman point out that some neocons like Wolfowitz and Perle engaged in “official and unofficial alliances with right-leaning regimes…” that led “to the policy disaster known as Iran-Contra.” [304] But to its leaders, such as Ollie North, Iran-Contra was not a policy disaster. Why not? Because their actions were considered noble and therefore served, ironically, as ends. Because North had acted nobly, he had nothing to be sorry for. In fact, he could and did proclaim his pride in his actions, achieving significant notoriety and popularity as a result. He had proved himself to be a morally virtuous American, which then redeemed his extremism.

 

            It is useful to think about moral virtue more generally, as both means and ends. As means, moral virtue is taken to promote happiness and well-being. But moral virtue tends to become an end, that is, as being good in itself. Being morally virtuous is all that matters. But this is a kind of extremism.

 

            For example, as noted with regard to Kraemer et. al., anti-communism is a kind of moral virtue as an end: “better dead than red.” Anti-communism is then a kind of extremism, to be pursued despite the costs. Or, more importantly, the extremism that is intrinsic to moral virtue produces anti-communism. Anti-communists illustrate the extremism intrinsic to the morally virtuous. Barry Goldwater once famously asserted that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” which is clearly a defense of extremism as well as liberty. So, to deal with anti-communism, to tame it, it is necessary to be clear about and deal with moral virtue and its extremism. At the roots of anti-communism lies moral virtue as the deeper phenomenon.

 

            Reagan himself experienced this phenomenon after he had declared the Soviet Union to be the “evil empire.” Ironically, “Reagan soon found … that the ‘evil empire’ phrase constrained him in formulating foreign policy.” Of course it did, because when confronting evil, formulating policies, i.e., seeking accommodations, is insipid. The only honorable course of action against evil is violence, war, and seeking to “kill the beast,” ala’ Jack in The Lord of the Flies. Arm yourself to the teeth and provocatively go after the evil ones, defeating or killing them as necessary, thereby proving and demonstrating your moral virtue.

 

            Being morally virtuous, confronting evil is intrinsically extremist. Did Machiavelli, e.g., know this? Does this help explain his anti-Christianity, while he allegedly appealed to pagan virtue? But insofar as he was aware of extremism intrinsic to moral virtue, perhaps he was opposed to both Christian and pagan virtue, creating new modes and orders based on a new understanding of “virtu.” Could the same thing be said of Plato, Aristotle, and others, such as Montesquieu and Nietzsche, as well? Hmmm…..