There’s an interesting thread at Facebook commenting on a recent New Yorker piece by Teju Cole entitled “A Reader’s War.” Much of the thread is ideological hip-shooting, but not all. Perhaps the reason for both sorts of commentary is that Cole’s essay muses poetically about the apparent moral disjunction between President Obama’s undoubted high-mindedness (perhaps partly developed or at least influenced by a wide literary experience) and his prosecution of the war on terror, particularly his increasing reliance upon use of drone aircraft to perform targeted assassinations.

I like the Cole essay very much. It’s ironies are my own. Last weekend a dear friend and I talked late into the night about this very matter and found no end. Neither of us is losing sleep over the drone strikes, but perhaps we should be. Cole frames his meditation by reference to an age-old humanist dilemma. President Obama’s own use of language and the books to which he seems devoted “add up to a picture of a man for whom an imaginative engagement with literature is inseparable from life.” Yet in spite of this apparent moral conditioning, and in spite of his many ringing endorsements of the highest ideals of humanity and justice, this president has led us into focused expansions of the war on terror, even as he professes to be winding it down, so that we have arrived at policies that give our leaders license to kill at will. “How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief?” Cole asks rhetorically.

What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? . . . I wonder if the Presidency is . . . a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever [sic.] walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

I’m as interested in the humanist dilemma here as I am in the broader issues of war and peace, for the facts are that wars corrupt those who prosecute them at a far deeper level than the mere power to which Lord Acton referred. Though there may be necessary wars (I believe there are such) there are no good ones, and sometimes particular leaders are manifestly damaged by the corruption entailed by war, no less than if they had been wounded by bullets or bombs. As I view the photographic record of Franklin Roosevelt’s life as he aged into his fourth term at the end of World War II, our last supposedly good war, I think I see signs of psychic damage as well as the physical wasting that was a partial consequence of his polio.

Here is the humanist dilemma. How is it that persons who have received the education that tradition and faith both affirm should incline them to nobility of spirit and benevolence sometimes embark upon lives of crime and cruelty as private persons and as public persons sometimes pursue courses of action that would be judged criminal were they pursued by private persons? The humanist faith in right learning is deeply embedded in Western culture; though it was not in ancient times associated with an abhorrence of war. Alexander the Great was Aristotle’s most famous pupil. He carried a copy of the Iliad with him wherever he went. It was his bible as he conquered the known world for no higher reason than naked ambition. The elite class whose education is outlined in Plato’s Republic is a class of warriors.

The humanist faith in goodness transmitted over time through textual tradition is typified by a literary example from Philip Sidney, who muses over Virgil’s picture of Aeneas fleeing the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, carrying his father on his back and leading his litle son by he hand, an image that was often struck upon medals worn by sixteenth-century courtiers like Sidney: “Who readeth Aeneas carrying olde Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perfourme so excellent an acte?” Of course, Aeneas’ wife, Creussa, walks behind and is killed, but that’s another story. In a preceding sentence Sidney has drawn out the moral he intends in language that will amuse readers of Cervantes, of whom Sidney who died in 1586 was not one:

Truely I haue knowen men, that euen with reading Amadis de Gaule, (which God knoweth wanteth much of a perfect Poesie) haue found their harts mooued to the exercise of courtesie, liberalitie, and especially courage.

In much classical poetry warlike atrocities are carried out by the enemies of goodness (though we could spend a long time arguing about the last books of the Odyssey); and the Iliad can be read as the story of how the good warrior, Achilles, is from time to time corrupted into atrocity, which the gods force him to abandon. Here is part of Apollo’s condemnation of his actions in desecrating Hector’s body:

So Achilleus has destroyed pity, and there is not in him
any shame: which does much harm to men but profits them also.
For a man must some day lose one who was even closer
than this; a brother from the same womb, or a son. And yet
he weeps for him, and sorrows for him, and then it is over,
for the Destinies put in mortal men the heart of endurance,
But this man, now he has torn the heart of life from great Hektor,
ties him to his horses and drags him around his beloved companion’s
tomb, and nothing is gained thereby for his good, or his honor (Lattimore translation).

Cole introduces his New Yorker essay with references to remarks made by Mario Vargas Llosa and Toni Morrison in Nobel lectures, remarks that are clichés but nonetheless proclaim the humanist faith that “it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa.” “We persist in this belief,” Cole avers, “regardless of what we know to the contrary: that the Nazis’ affection for high culture did not prevent their crimes.” Perhaps it is more to the point that neither this faith nor its problems is new, nor is either particularly tied to novel reading except in the minds of postmodern philosophers and literary critics. Cole mentions some of these. I might add one he does not mention, Martha Nussbaum, whose little book, Poetic Justice, is a minor classic.

But if the humanist faith in the civilizing power of literacy is not new, as I’ve already suggested, in ancient times the arguments about it primarily concerned what the proper study might be: what books, what sorts of books, what types of poetry and music, and what other disciplines produced the good person speaking and acting well, to paraphraase Cicero. The most serious argument in the Christian West was about the legitimacy of the surviving books of ancient Greece and Rome, that is about the place of secular culture in the developing medieval theocracy, a conflict that began with the church fathers and continues today. Our own culture wars since the 1980s are a version of this argument. Our present conflicts over the purposes and content of education from kindergarten through graduate school continue it.

What is the proper study? This present generation’s answer may be that there isn’t one, that the concerns of old-fashioned liberal studies are no longer legitimate public concerns, if indeed they ever were legitimate. But the reason why Cole’s essay is worth talking about, it seems to me, is that it elevates consideration of the proper study above the naive and essentially petty economic considerations that are shaping our present day discourses about education. We speak of competitiveness, of training up little economic prodigies who can design the widgets and money products of the future in a world whose only imperatives are to maximize profits and to satisfy the market demands of the moment, whereas our forebears thought of souls, citizenship, and politics.

In today’s market driven ethical environment there need be no discussion of means and ends. Timothy Geithner was quoted in 2009 as saying that punishing those responsible for the 2008 economic catastrophe might have given us some moral satisfaction, but it would have come at the expense of further economic chaos. In resisting this and other like dismissals of justice I am aware that my thinking is archaic. Still, with respect to endless war as well as to the ghost of “too big to fail,” one might ask under what conditions it might be truly legitimate to use a bad means in the service of a supposed good end, given that bad means tend to corrupt the ends they serve. A traditional moral education suggests the question.

But in today’s ethical environment we tend not to consider such things. Supposed greater goods such as saving lives, promoting economic growth, and creating jobs, today’s ethical clichés, are not open to question. Reference to any or all of them stops conversation about means. Any and all means necessary to achieve these ends are taken to be self-evidently justified. But if I might offer our President some small archaic wisdom with respect to the present war effort, I hope that he has narrowed our objectives to the arena of necessary war. And since there are no good wars I hope, I pray, for him that he proceed as the Book of Common Prayer once advised with regard to marriage, “reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.” Cole concludes similarly:

I believe that when President Obama personally selects the next name to add to his “kill list,” he does it in the belief that he is protecting the country. I trust that he makes the selections with great seriousness, bringing his rich sense of history, literature, and the lives of others to bear on his decisions.

And knowing that even necessary war corrupts, and that that is a very good reason to insist that we begin any war only when we have envisioned its end, for to envision its end is to envision its purpose, I can only concur in Cole’s final gesture of frustration and bafflement that “we have been drawn into a war without end, and into cruelties that persist in the psychic atmosphere like ritual pollution.”

Early on I refused believe that 9/11 had changed the world in any fundamental way. Now I’m not so sure. Globally speaking we in the West seem to be embarked upon a struggle to preserve Euro-American imperial hegemony since 9/11. I am obliged to grant that this hegemony has made my own life possible: my education, my career, my intellectual and cultural pursuits, my identity—and that it now undergirds my relatively comfortable old age. But the history of empire, about which my traditional education informs me, makes me squirm in my comfortable chair as I think of my own cultural touchstones in ironic juxtaposition to the brute fact of robotic war that has rendered normative the constant explosion of small 9/11s in the world beyond, like the crucifixions with which the Romans liked to litter the landscape of conquered territories.

Cole arrives at a similar conclusion via a series of apothegms constructed by paraphrasing the opening lines of some famous novels to fit our changed world:

Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

I had thought I might do the same, but I think I’ll quote W. B. Yeats instead, thinking of Cole’s claim that “we are acquiring . . . the angriest young enemies money can buy”:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Though we may be able to name the dead, not all death in war is holy, and those who are blown apart by bombs may not be war’s only casualties. Words from another forever war only recently brought to uneasy stalemate. Perhaps no paraphrase is necessary.