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| What Could Be Wrong With a Little ‘Moral Clarity’? | |
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| If, in politics, words are weapons, they often prove themselves double-edged. So it was when, on the summer night that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez learned that she had won a Democratic congressional primary over a 10-term incumbent, she provided a resonant quote to a TV reporter. “I think what we’ve seen is that working-class Americans want a clear champion,” she said, “and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.” Dozens of news videos and articles would cite those words as journalists worked to interpret what Ocasio-Cortez’s triumph, repeated in November’s general election, might represent for the American left and its newest star. | If, in politics, words are weapons, they often prove themselves double-edged. So it was when, on the summer night that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez learned that she had won a Democratic congressional primary over a 10-term incumbent, she provided a resonant quote to a TV reporter. “I think what we’ve seen is that working-class Americans want a clear champion,” she said, “and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.” Dozens of news videos and articles would cite those words as journalists worked to interpret what Ocasio-Cortez’s triumph, repeated in November’s general election, might represent for the American left and its newest star. |
| Until recently, “moral clarity” was more likely to signal combativeness toward the left, not from it: It served for decades as a badge of membership among conservative hawks and cultural crusaders. But in the Trump era, militant certainty takes precedence across the political spectrum. On the left, “moral clarity” can mean taking an unyielding stand against economic inequality or social injustice, climate change or gun violence. Closer to the center, it can take on a sonorous, transpartisan tone, as when Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, and former Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, each called for “moral clarity” in the White House reaction to the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And it can fly beyond politics altogether, as when the surgeon and author Atul Gawande writes that better health care “does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity.” We hear about moral clarity any time there is impatience with equivocation, delay, conciliation and confusion — whenever people long for rapid action based on truths they hold to be self-evident. | Until recently, “moral clarity” was more likely to signal combativeness toward the left, not from it: It served for decades as a badge of membership among conservative hawks and cultural crusaders. But in the Trump era, militant certainty takes precedence across the political spectrum. On the left, “moral clarity” can mean taking an unyielding stand against economic inequality or social injustice, climate change or gun violence. Closer to the center, it can take on a sonorous, transpartisan tone, as when Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, and former Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, each called for “moral clarity” in the White House reaction to the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And it can fly beyond politics altogether, as when the surgeon and author Atul Gawande writes that better health care “does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity.” We hear about moral clarity any time there is impatience with equivocation, delay, conciliation and confusion — whenever people long for rapid action based on truths they hold to be self-evident. |
| Moral clarity is long defined by usage as a capacity to make firm, unflinching distinctions between evil and good, and to take action based on those distinctions. These are fighting words: They mean knowing the enemy, which is the first step to taking up arms against the enemy. But they’re potentially applicable to any side of a fight. What adrenaline does for the body, moral clarity does for semantics: It generates a surge of willpower, serving as a prelude to — and maybe a pretext for — combat. | Moral clarity is long defined by usage as a capacity to make firm, unflinching distinctions between evil and good, and to take action based on those distinctions. These are fighting words: They mean knowing the enemy, which is the first step to taking up arms against the enemy. But they’re potentially applicable to any side of a fight. What adrenaline does for the body, moral clarity does for semantics: It generates a surge of willpower, serving as a prelude to — and maybe a pretext for — combat. |
| This zeal can be abundant on all sides of the battle. As a slogan, though, “moral clarity” has much more particular origins. There was, originally, only one way to be right about it. | This zeal can be abundant on all sides of the battle. As a slogan, though, “moral clarity” has much more particular origins. There was, originally, only one way to be right about it. |
| “Moral clarity” was literally forged in war. The phrase first became popular in the early 1950s, soon after the onset of the Cold War, then subsided slightly during the 1960s and 1970s. It would revive during the 1980s — as Ronald Reagan preached unrelenting struggle against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union — and reach unprecedented heights in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. For decades, moral clarity functioned as a shibboleth, an efficient means of discovering, then assailing, anyone too weak-willed to wage war against America’s ideological foes or incipient spiritual collapse. And more than any other writer on the right, the Catholic neoconservative William Bennett — Reagan’s education secretary and the “czar” of George Bush’s war on drugs — would be the one who became synonymous with moral clarity. | “Moral clarity” was literally forged in war. The phrase first became popular in the early 1950s, soon after the onset of the Cold War, then subsided slightly during the 1960s and 1970s. It would revive during the 1980s — as Ronald Reagan preached unrelenting struggle against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union — and reach unprecedented heights in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. For decades, moral clarity functioned as a shibboleth, an efficient means of discovering, then assailing, anyone too weak-willed to wage war against America’s ideological foes or incipient spiritual collapse. And more than any other writer on the right, the Catholic neoconservative William Bennett — Reagan’s education secretary and the “czar” of George Bush’s war on drugs — would be the one who became synonymous with moral clarity. |
| Whether in foreign policy or domestic culture wars over narcotics, faith and sexuality, Bennett proved that a discourse of righteousness could pay political dividends. It was Bennett who, interviewed by CNN on the first anniversary of Sept. 11, regretfully observed that recent discourse seemed to be “softening, trying to soften the memory” of the previous year’s atrocity. Focus had to be maintained, he argued: “We have to act. And to act, we have to have resolution. And for resolution, we have to have clarity.” A graduate of Harvard Law School, Bennett cited Bruce Willis’s character in “Die Hard” as an exemplar of clarity while pushing confidently for an invasion of Iraq. In a book he had recently published, titled “Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism,” he preached the necessity of subjecting Americans to an aggressive re-education in “our history, undistorted by the lens of political correctness and pseudosophisticated relativism.” The chief enemies at home, it seemed, were postmodernist professors, multicultural activists and intellectuals like Susan Sontag, whose skepticism about the impending quest for vengeance overseas rendered them, effectively, traitors. Bennett was not alone in prosecuting such a claim: At the time, the former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan suggested that the “decadent left” might constitute “what amounts to a fifth column.” | Whether in foreign policy or domestic culture wars over narcotics, faith and sexuality, Bennett proved that a discourse of righteousness could pay political dividends. It was Bennett who, interviewed by CNN on the first anniversary of Sept. 11, regretfully observed that recent discourse seemed to be “softening, trying to soften the memory” of the previous year’s atrocity. Focus had to be maintained, he argued: “We have to act. And to act, we have to have resolution. And for resolution, we have to have clarity.” A graduate of Harvard Law School, Bennett cited Bruce Willis’s character in “Die Hard” as an exemplar of clarity while pushing confidently for an invasion of Iraq. In a book he had recently published, titled “Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism,” he preached the necessity of subjecting Americans to an aggressive re-education in “our history, undistorted by the lens of political correctness and pseudosophisticated relativism.” The chief enemies at home, it seemed, were postmodernist professors, multicultural activists and intellectuals like Susan Sontag, whose skepticism about the impending quest for vengeance overseas rendered them, effectively, traitors. Bennett was not alone in prosecuting such a claim: At the time, the former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan suggested that the “decadent left” might constitute “what amounts to a fifth column.” |
| During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush would defend the prosecution of the war he started by reiterating Bennett’s themes — the vigilance and courage required for single-minded action, the flaccidity of dissent. “I will continue to lead with clarity,” Bush said during one news conference, “in a resolute way.” This clarity, of course, proved more perishable than first believed: American momentum in the Middle East soon petered out inside a self-made labyrinth, replete with traps and dead ends. An administration that had crowed about resolution and clarity soon found itself waffling, brutally and helplessly, between what Donald Rumsfeld parsed as “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” If suppressing Al Qaeda meant taking over Iraq, did maintaining a hold on Iraq imply bombing Iran? How should the American state engage with the various hostile factions emerging from the cinders of Iraq? What, precisely, would be the morally crystal-clear approach to Syria? | During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush would defend the prosecution of the war he started by reiterating Bennett’s themes — the vigilance and courage required for single-minded action, the flaccidity of dissent. “I will continue to lead with clarity,” Bush said during one news conference, “in a resolute way.” This clarity, of course, proved more perishable than first believed: American momentum in the Middle East soon petered out inside a self-made labyrinth, replete with traps and dead ends. An administration that had crowed about resolution and clarity soon found itself waffling, brutally and helplessly, between what Donald Rumsfeld parsed as “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” If suppressing Al Qaeda meant taking over Iraq, did maintaining a hold on Iraq imply bombing Iran? How should the American state engage with the various hostile factions emerging from the cinders of Iraq? What, precisely, would be the morally crystal-clear approach to Syria? |
| Over the past 15 years, the association of “moral clarity” with a bellicose approach to overseas affairs has faded only slightly. “Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity,” Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post in 2014 — defending what others perceived, no less clearly, as an Israeli war of collective punishment that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly civilians. (“Moral clarity” has been a euphemism in constant use through this conflict, as in Alan Dershowitz’s book “The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza.”) After the death of John McCain, a fierce advocate for any and all wars, the senator was praised for his “voice of moral clarity” by Jennifer Rubin, another conservative columnist at The Post. Rubin contrasted McCain’s enthusiasm for doing the right thing overseas with the Trump administration’s indifference to human rights, but President Trump himself was no stranger to the discourse of clarity regarding Muslims. “Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country,” he said during a 2016 campaign speech, adding that “anyone who cannot condemn the hatred, oppression and violence of radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our president.” | Over the past 15 years, the association of “moral clarity” with a bellicose approach to overseas affairs has faded only slightly. “Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity,” Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post in 2014 — defending what others perceived, no less clearly, as an Israeli war of collective punishment that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly civilians. (“Moral clarity” has been a euphemism in constant use through this conflict, as in Alan Dershowitz’s book “The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza.”) After the death of John McCain, a fierce advocate for any and all wars, the senator was praised for his “voice of moral clarity” by Jennifer Rubin, another conservative columnist at The Post. Rubin contrasted McCain’s enthusiasm for doing the right thing overseas with the Trump administration’s indifference to human rights, but President Trump himself was no stranger to the discourse of clarity regarding Muslims. “Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country,” he said during a 2016 campaign speech, adding that “anyone who cannot condemn the hatred, oppression and violence of radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our president.” |
| There seemed to be an opening, after Barack Obama’s election, for “moral clarity” to become a liberal watchword. Perhaps the philosopher Susan Neiman, whose 2008 book “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists” argued for a liberal re-embrace of such language, could have served as its Bennett. Yet by 2011, it had become clear that, regarding foreign policy and economics, the Obama White House would lean instead toward pragmatism and accommodation, not the stubborn force of moral commitment. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional bid was preceded by a decade in which many youthful nonreactionaries despaired of democratic institutions’ ability to deliver any kind of systemic change — and chafed at the obtuse contempt with which older, more established liberals frequently reacted to demands for bolder action. It’s only natural that, having been chosen to replace one such established Democrat, Ocasio-Cortez would argue that “moral clarity” was not the province of radicals or dreamy idealists, but exactly the kind of principled action her constituents had voted for. | There seemed to be an opening, after Barack Obama’s election, for “moral clarity” to become a liberal watchword. Perhaps the philosopher Susan Neiman, whose 2008 book “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists” argued for a liberal re-embrace of such language, could have served as its Bennett. Yet by 2011, it had become clear that, regarding foreign policy and economics, the Obama White House would lean instead toward pragmatism and accommodation, not the stubborn force of moral commitment. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional bid was preceded by a decade in which many youthful nonreactionaries despaired of democratic institutions’ ability to deliver any kind of systemic change — and chafed at the obtuse contempt with which older, more established liberals frequently reacted to demands for bolder action. It’s only natural that, having been chosen to replace one such established Democrat, Ocasio-Cortez would argue that “moral clarity” was not the province of radicals or dreamy idealists, but exactly the kind of principled action her constituents had voted for. |
| The weapon of clarity works differently depending on who’s wielding it: It tends to be a blessing for insurgent underdogs and a curse for domineering overlords. For those already in power, clarity can be as tragically easy to obtain as the vanity it often resembles — a combination of narcissism and hubris that’s liable to produce calamitous outcomes. In politics, as in all things, it should be possible to match decisive action with intelligent consideration. Clarity achieves only the first of those two; left to its own devices, taken as a virtue in itself, it tends to generate more problems than it solves. Strategic vision requires something more than narrow intensity. It develops by admitting its limits and working to understand the enemy at a high resolution — the kind that only humble relativity can access. | The weapon of clarity works differently depending on who’s wielding it: It tends to be a blessing for insurgent underdogs and a curse for domineering overlords. For those already in power, clarity can be as tragically easy to obtain as the vanity it often resembles — a combination of narcissism and hubris that’s liable to produce calamitous outcomes. In politics, as in all things, it should be possible to match decisive action with intelligent consideration. Clarity achieves only the first of those two; left to its own devices, taken as a virtue in itself, it tends to generate more problems than it solves. Strategic vision requires something more than narrow intensity. It develops by admitting its limits and working to understand the enemy at a high resolution — the kind that only humble relativity can access. |
| Near the end of “Moby-Dick,” Ahab furiously addresses the “clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship.” If any character in literature is an avatar of moral clarity, it’s Melville’s maniacal captain, who defies all omens of disaster and single-mindedly pursues revenge upon the being he has named his evil enemy. Such clarity gets him, and all but one of his crew members, killed. With such lessons in mind, it’s hard to read the recent Foreign Affairs essay by the latest secretary of state, Mike Pompeo — in which he presses for regime change in Iran and worshipfully references “the power of moral clarity” — without suppressing a certain shiver. | Near the end of “Moby-Dick,” Ahab furiously addresses the “clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship.” If any character in literature is an avatar of moral clarity, it’s Melville’s maniacal captain, who defies all omens of disaster and single-mindedly pursues revenge upon the being he has named his evil enemy. Such clarity gets him, and all but one of his crew members, killed. With such lessons in mind, it’s hard to read the recent Foreign Affairs essay by the latest secretary of state, Mike Pompeo — in which he presses for regime change in Iran and worshipfully references “the power of moral clarity” — without suppressing a certain shiver. |