Don’t worry: This is no paean to Henry Kissinger or his statecraft.
Rather, I was reading the NY Times Book Review, which reviews the new book by Barry Gewen, The Inevitability Of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World. The effort, according to the reviewer, is a “a timely and acute defense of the great realist’s actions, values and beliefs.” I’m not here to argue one way or the other, but it’s important to note that history increasingly sees the actions Kissinger had a hand in over the course of his career as war crimes (here, here, and here).
The above notwithstanding, I was struck by this graph in the review:
What Gewen focuses on, and excels at, is the story of how the rise of gangster dictators left an irradicable impression on the Jewish intellectuals who escaped Nazi Germany before World War II. These men and women — Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Hans Morgenthau and Kissinger — bent their brilliant minds toward the questions raised by the century’s savagery. They concluded that human beings are timorous and manipulable vessels who could not be relied on to recognize and resist evil — at least not before the Imperial Japanese Navy broke the still of a Sunday morning in Hawaii.
It made me think about how world-changing events shape people, profoundly influencing not only their worldview, but also how they move through their lives. More importantly, I expect that the post-Coronavirus world will be similarly shaped by people who will have seen first hand–and lived through–this moment we’re currently in.
After all, as I noted on Twitter, we’re being subjected to a kind of savagery by our own government as the death toll and infection rates continue to rise.
So here’s the question: What will our response be? We have to assume that, of those who make it to “the other side” of this, some of them will rise to positions of power. How do we ensure that conditions are set that don’t put us right back in the same place we were prior to the pandemic? Think about the issues of the day: Healthcare. Prison and criminal justice reform. Homelessness. Income inequality. Racial, gender and environmental justice.
California is certainly an example that those of us who support and promote progressive agendas should keep in mind. Especially as our idealism comes face-to-face with realities such as city, state and federal budgets.
The bottom line is that we need to identify, support and promote people who’s experience with this pandemic made them even more committed to shared values and, as writer and economist Umair Haque notes, public goods:
What does America not have that the rest of the rich world does? Public healthcare, transport, education, and so on. Every single rich nation in the world has sophisticated, broad, and expansive public goods, that improve by the year. Today, even many medium income and even poor nations are building public healthcare, transport, etc. America is the only one that never developed any. Public goods protect societies in deep, profound, invisible ways (we’ll get to that).
Ultimately, we need enough people committed to this worldview and in positions of influence in order to prevent us from making knee-jerk decisions based on fear and scarcity.
That’s the work ahead.
