70. The Sixties? That's Murk You're Looking Into.

 

All right, the man who gives me the most penetrating insight into the student riots of the sixties, T. E. Hulme, is associated with the fascists of the Action Francaise. Obviously he can't be trusted. Fascists are bad and he's bad. Do I have moral clarity?

No, you have moral facility. You have a litmus test that makes good-bad judgment easy. Thousands before you have applied it. It's the Nazis' gift to moral debate in the twentieth century.

And delivered, I see, by the logic of association (see Post #66), not real logic. A passing cloud. But still, enough to make me go back and check the essay. I see that Hulme's insight stands on its own merits. I'll use it.

Yes, you're the boss, as a man seeking moral clarity has to be.

Thank you. Now I can present you with a real problem. I'd been doing all this marching, real and symbolic, behind the out-of-Viet-Nam banners. The march had changed somewhat, the students were crazier and the banners weren't quite the same ("national crime" had been changed to "national stupidity," but I'd kept marching. Then I thought about what I was saying, what the words on the banner meant. "Get out of Viet Nam." Was that what I really wanted us to do? No. I really wanted us never to have gotten in. That stupidity. But, just as a military analyst, I had to admit that there was a world of difference between getting out and not getting in. Once you're in you face a host of new choices, and you'd better not make them without doing your staff work. Retreat in the face of hostile fire has always been difficult for generals, justification of retreat to the public has always been difficult for politicians, (admit failure? cut and run?) and reconciliation with the conscience difficult for individual citizens (our promises to our allies? our responsibility for countries we've messed up?). It's all extremely complicated. And there I was, saying simply, "Get out, get out." I was one with all the knee-jerk sloganeers who got us in. So what do I do? Go home?

The problem is clear, but I don't know the solution. It's the problem of complexity, made worse here by the fact that, as I remember, there weren't any other marches in town. Here we may be facing one of those problems that are just beyond our powers.

But I've named the problem, "complexity," I don't know the half of it. Consider this, suggested by a friend: what I was seeing on campuses wasn't close to what I was calling it, a political revolution. It was a social revolution. Of course it didn't live up to my expectations. The social and political were all mixed up. It was about as complex a situation as a moralist can imagine.

I can believe that, but I don't think "complexity" is the right name for what my friend described.  Putting a social revolution on top of a political revolution obscures the picture but it doesn't keep a determined moralist from clearing it up. In a political revolution, for example, the agents have aims. In a social revolution the agents just do things in a way that satisfies them more and sociologists call the result a revolution. Seeing differences like that — and there are a lot of them — is difficult but it can be done. The problem is obscurity.

And obviously I can't give up on it. But I think I've now gone as far as I can go so I think I'll let it alone for a while.