Love Your Enemy
Jesus said: love your enemies. Immanuel Kant added that only by following the commandment to love your enemies could you know for sure that you’d done something significantly moral. Why else would you have done it, he reasoned, except because it was your duty?
Even Nietzsche, the antithesis of Jesus and Kant, believed that it’s the strong who respect their enemies and the weak who are hostile towards them.
These days, in case you hadn’t noticed, enemies are the new black.
And Barack Obama is this season’s trendsetter.
In the first of three presidential debates, Obama defended his position on sitting down with the heads of enemy states without preconditions. McCain sneered at the idea. (see VodPod video, left column)
After the election, McCain took the walk of shame alongside Joe Lieberman and Hilary Clinton, as Obama’s opponents and rivals were one by one subjected to the humuliation of his, well, his magnanimity.
The talking heads were aspinning. Chris Matthews speculated that Obama was hedging for some elbow room to pursue his closeted Lefty agenda.
When questioned by Matthews about his take on all of this, Christopher Hitchens couldn’t get past his disdain for Hilary Clinton and saw Obama’s choice as soft and cynical.
Ask Obama and he’ll tell you it’s because he’s a pragmatist: ‘whatever works’.
So, which is it? Nietzschean uber-confidence? Softy cowtowing-to-the-establishmentism? Dutiful do-gooderism? Disenchanted instrumentalism?
I’d like to suggest another possibility. To better understand Obama’s coziness with his enemies we should begin by comparing him with someone from the other side: Pat Buchanan.
Buchanan has become the liberal leaning media’s pet conservative. He’s an articulate, ideologically consistent Republican who tends to smirk just a bit at the end of his rants and gets along awfully well with his liberal counterparts. Some wonder if he believes all that stuff.
He does. But he’s good at establishing a tiny bit of distance between his passions and his positions. He gets worked up and the spit flies but when the red light flashes on cue for the commercial he’ll have no trouble wrapping up and stepping back from himself and grinning about what he just did.
It’s an exercise the ancient Stoics thought very highly of, the ability to remove oneself from one’s own immediate situation just enough to see things from a slightly detached perspective.
The Stoics also believed that it was morally incumbent upon us to be able to do this with respect to patriotism and civic loyalties. One has to be able to step back from one’s own national interests to recognize committments to those who are not fellow countrymen, but men, nonetheless. The Stoics are an ancient source for cosmpolitanism, or world citizenship.
Such an ability, they thought, also allowed us to respect our enemies, because when cooler heads prevailed we could see that our enemies are, more often than not, mirror images of our own pursuit of excellence and achievement.
I wonder if Obama’s magnanimity has less to do with pragmatism and more to do with Stoicism?
Don’t just scratch the surface: Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time)
Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Religion and Postmodernism Series)
Stumble It!
Good stuff. I’m quite intrigued by the Stoic ideal and by its re-emergence in Obama’s politics. The Apostle Paul was no stranger to Stoic philosophy, and his remarks in Romans 14 have always fascinated me in this regard. There, he does an especially clever job of arguing in such a fashion so as to leave both parties thinking they’re the ones in the right. But that’s the rub: who knows, or how do we ourselves know, when we have successfully demonstrated “the ability to remove oneself from one’s own immediate situation just enough to see things from a slightly detached perspective,” versus having suffered a failure of nerve, set aside our convictions, lost faith in our ideology, acted inconsistently, etc.?
Well, Scribe, I pulled out my Good News Bible to blow the dust off of Romans 14, and found that to be pretty intriguing. I was wondering, since you seem to know a thing or two about theology and the Bible, what Paul’s relationship was to the Cynics, and what Jesus’ relationship was to the Cynics. and if or how any of that intersects with the Stoic influces on Christianity?
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