COVER -> DAY ONE
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The day after newspaper pictures appeared of a teenage boy in Sierra Leone carrying what appeared to be a British supplied rifle, the British Government reacted by confirming its support for the legitimate Government of Sierra Leone but said it would only supply arms on condition that they were not issued to children under the age of 18. The hard pressed Government accepted the preconditions with the quality of enthusiasm that only accompanies the absurdity of compliance.
My reaction to this was that arms suppliers specifying the age of soldiers wasn't very different from Pope Innocent III forbidding the use of the crossbow.
I took a side swipe at the self interest of American labour's opposition to child labour in developing countries and concluded that Western diplomacy should have become much more deeply involved in West Africa much sooner. In other words, the conclusion was that the teenage soldier issue was just an unfortunate piece of consequential damage and we ought to look at the underlying causes.
As is customary, I checked the vocabulary, the spelling, the logic and the syntax and punted the piece into the out box. But there was something wrong; my conclusions might be logical but they felt "clever" in the sense of the word that only the British use to signify a very particular kind of contempt for intellectual activity that lacks pragmatism.
I resumed my reading of Jonathan Glover's estimable if somewhat repetitive Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century which, in my view, successfully explains the causes of the moral breakdown which led to the excesses of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and, above all, Hitler.
Every time I came across a passage about children as torturers or victims I flinched:
- infantile Red Guards humiliating their teachers;
- Child Khmer informers condemning their parents to death;
- Soviet parents teaching their children to lie in the hope of saving them from KGB notice;
- mothers, almost mechanically, carrying their infants into the gas chambers.
I thought back to my article, to the somewhat ironic reference I had made to movies of great sea disasters with square jawed Victorian sea captains calling for "Women and children first!" Was my reaction pure sentiment?
On reflection, the answer wasn't very difficult to find; logic will only take you a certain way to solving a human dilemma and if you use this tool to excess you will fall into the totalitarian trap, for were not Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler woodenly, blindly logical?
To survive we surely need the logic of reciprocity in the observance of law but we also need compassion, an occasional act of pure altruism.
There may now be counter arguments to social Darwinism that emphasise the social benefits of compassion (see Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind) but we will not survive as a moral species unless we are kind without being actuarial.
I kept thinking of that remarkable meeting where Celan responded to Heidegger's anti-Semitism with a poem of hope. Which led me to Southern Lebanon. No one who has been immersed in the literature of the Shoah as long as I have could stifle an internal scream when I read eye witness accounts of instruments of torture abandoned by Israeli forces. Did those millions die in Dachau that their survivors might do to others what had been done to them?
Of course, the question is rhetorical.
We know that abuse begets abuse; from the slums of industrial cities to the bush of Sierra Leone, evil propagates itself from generation to generation. Why should the Jews be an exception? Why should we expect the victims of systematic, bureaucratic, long haul genocide to rise above their treatment any more than the victims of Versailles? If the damage is proportionate then there is more excuse for the Israelis than for most.
As in so many matters that apparently perplex us, Aristotle formulated our course of action more than 2000 years ago. In the Nicomachean Ethics he postulated that legislators instil habits into citizens and that, therefore, it matters whether those publicly affirmed habits are good or bad.
Turning back to Glover I read with fascination the case of the village of Le Chambon-Sur-Lignon which harboured thousands of Jews under the Vichy regime. He points to the initial refusal of the villagers to participate in acts of petty cruelty. Apart from the light this might shed on the notion of 'zero tolerance' it certainly puts a heavy obligation on our legislators to be more careful.
There is surely a case where moral resources have been degraded beyond self-generation for a remedy to be invoked more powerful than the preservation of the sovereign state. There are many arguments against this position but they are largely relativist, postmodern, rather flimsy objections, that we should not try to persuade others of our own moral case, that all moralities are equally valid, that we are so degraded that we have no resources to regenerate ourselves, let alone others, that there is no such thing as morality.
None of these arguments make sense to the benighted people of West Africa who might quibble over the details of external administration but would accept any reasonable package and they, after all, know much more about the realities of imperialism and colonialism than the scribblers with attitude that pass in most chic quarters for the intelligentsia.
Granted, the colonial record might be viewed as the golden age compared with what is happening now but that says more about now than about then. It is only when you have cowered, in candlelight, under a flimsy table in the customs shed at Lungi Airport, not frightened that the kid with the machine gun can shoot straight but that he can't, that you really get a snapshot of the precariousness of human life.
So let those with compassion and some passion try to structure a methodology for moral regeneration that does not become a dictatorship. It is a risk, but after the fearsome carnage of the 20th Century which was so poorly resisted by those who witnessed it, we have to try something new so that the demobilised licensed mass-murderers of political factions have some hope, if not for themselves then for their children. Unlike the trivial risks in the deconstructionist game theory which has replaced serious moral questioning in contemporary fiction, such an aspiration is worth the risk.
