In most situations, people tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain, whichgenerally makes sense.
I want to suggest that at this moment in history, U.S. citizens need to invertthat. If we want to become human beings in the fullest sense of the term, if wewant to be something more than comfortable citizens of the empire, if we want tobe something more than just Americans -- then we have to start seeking pain andreducing pleasure.
By that I don’t mean we must become masochists who live in denial of the joyof being alive. Rather, I mean that to be fully alive we must stop turning awayfrom a certain kind of pain and begin questioning a certain kind of pleasure. Imean this quite literally, and with a sense of urgency; I think the survival ofthe species and the planet depends on Americans becoming pain-seeking andpleasure-reducing folks.
Let me begin to explain what I mean by describing two conversations I had withstudents recently. One young woman came to my office the day after we hadwatched a video documentary in class about the Gulf War and its devastatinglybrutal effects -- immediate and lingering -- on the people of Iraq. The studentalso is active in the movement to support the Palestinian freedom struggle, andthe day she came to see me came during a period in which Israeli attacks onPalestinians were intensifying.
We talked for some time about a number of political topics, but the conversationkept coming back to one main point: She hurt. As she was learning more about thesuffering of others around the world, she felt that pain. What does one do aboutsuch a feeling, knowing that one’s own government is either responsible for,or complicit in, so much of it? How does one stop feeling that pain, she asked.
I asked her to think about whether she really wanted to wipe that feeling out ofher life. Surely you know people, perhaps fellow students, who don’t seem tofeel that pain, who ignore all that suffering, I told her. Do you want to becomelike them? No matter how much it hurts, I said, would you rather not feel atall? Would you rather be willfully ignorant about what is happening?
I could see the tears welling in her eyes. She cried. We talked some more. Icried. She left my office, not feeling better in any simplistic sense. But Ihope she left at least with a sense that she was not alone and did not have tofeel like a freak for feeling so much, so deeply.
A couple of hours later another student who had been in a class of mine theprevious semester came by. After dealing with the classroom issue she wanted toaddress, we were talking more generally about her interests in scientificresearch and the politics of funding research. I made the obvious point thatprofit-potential had a lot to do with what kind of research gets done. Certainlythe comparative levels of research-and-development money that went, for example,to Viagra compared with money for drugs to combat new strains of TB tells ussomething about the values of our society, I suggested.
The student agreed, but raised another issue. Given the overpopulation problem,she said, would it really be a good thing to spend lots of resources ondeveloping those drugs?
About halfway through her sentence I knew where she was heading, though Ididn’t want to believe it. This very bright student wanted to discuss whetheror not it made sense to put resources into life-saving drugs for poor people inthe Third World, given that there are arguably too many people on the planetalready.
I contained my anger, somewhat, and told the student that when she was ready tosacrifice members of her own family to help solve the global population problem,then I would listen to her argument. In fact, given the outrageous levels ofconsumption of the middle and uppers classes in the United States, I said, onecould argue that large-scale death in the American suburbs would be far morebeneficial in solving the population problem; a single U.S. family is more of aburden ecologically on the planet than a hundred Indian peasants. "If youwould be willing to let an epidemic sweep through your hometown and kill largenumbers of people without trying to stop it, for the good of the planet, thenI’ll listen to you," I said.
The student left shortly after that. Based on her reaction, I suspect I made herfeel bad. I am glad for that. I wanted to make her feel bad. I wanted her to seethat the assumption behind her comment -- that the lives of people who look likeher are more valuable than the lives of the poor and vulnerable in other partsof the world -- is ethnocentric, racist, and barbaric. That assumption is theproduct of an arrogant and inhumane society. I wanted her to think about why shelived in a world in which the pain of others is so routinely ignored. I wantedher to feel what, for most of her life, she has been able to turn away from.
I do not want to overestimate the power of empathy to change the world. Butwithout empathy, without the ability to move outside our own experience, thereis no hope of changing the world. Andrea Dworkin, one of the great feministthinkers of our time, has written, "The victims of any systematized brutalityare discounted because others cannot bear to see, identify, or articulate thepain." [Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a FeministMilitant (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 193.] It is long past the time forall of us to start to see, to identify, to articulate the pain of systematizedbrutality. It is time to recognize that much of that pain is the result of asystem designed to ensure our pleasures.
The pain of cluster bombs
It is my experience that people can feel empathy for the pain of others incertain situations, such as the pain of a loved one or friend, or in certaincases the suffering of people far away who are hit by a natural disaster orcruel twist of fate. But the key in Dworkin’s insight is "systematizedbrutality." Empathy seems less forthcoming for those victims, especially whenit is one’s own government or society or culture that is systematizing thebrutality.
When that pain is caused by our government, we are channeled away from thatempathy. The way we are educated and entertained keeps us from knowing about orunderstanding the pain of others in other parts of the world, and fromunderstanding how our pleasure is connected to that pain of others. It is acombined intellectual, emotional, and moral failure -- a failure to know and tofeel and to act.
Let’s take a simple example, the CBU-87, also known as the cluster bomb, whichis a part of the U.S. arsenal. It is a bomb that U.S. pilots drop from U.S.planes paid for by U.S. tax dollars.
Each cluster bomb contains 202 individual submunitions, called bomblets(BLU-97/B). The CBU-87s are formally known as Combined Effects Munitions (CEM)because each bomblet has an antitank and antipersonnel effect, as well as anincendiary capability. The bomblets from each CBU-87 are typically distributedover an area roughly 100 x 50 meters, though the exact landing area of thebomblets is difficult to control.
As the soda can-sized bomblets fall, a spring pushes out a nylon "parachute"(called the decelerator), which inflates and then stabilizes and arms thebomblet. The BLU-97 is packed in a steel case with an incendiary zirconium ring.The case is made of scored steel designed to break into approximately 300preformed thirty-grain fragments upon detonation of the internal explosive. Thefragments then travel at extremely high speeds in all directions. This is theprimary antipersonnel effect of the weapon. Antipersonnel means that the steelshards will shred anyone in the vicinity.
The primary anti-armor effect comes from a molten copper slug. If the bomblethas been properly oriented, the downward-firing charge travels at 2,570 feet persecond and is able to penetrate most armored vehicles. The zirconium ringspreads small incendiary fragments. The charge has the ability to penetrate 5inches of armor on contact. The tiny steel case fragments are also powerfulenough to damage light armor and trucks at 50 feet, and to cause human injury at500 feet. The incendiary ring can start fires in any combustible environment.
Human Rights Watch, the source for this description of a cluster bomb, hascalled for a global moratorium on use of cluster bombs because they causeunacceptable civilian casualties. Those casualties come partly in combat,because the munitions have a wide dispersal pattern and cannot be targetedprecisely, making them especially dangerous when used near civilian areas.
Even more deadly is the way in which cluster bombs don’t work. The officialinitial failure-to-explode rate for the bomblets is 5 to 7 percent, though somede-mining workers estimate up to 20 percent do not explode. That means in eachcluster bomb from 10 to 40 of the bomblets fail to explode on contact asintended, becoming landmines that can be set off by a simple touch. Human RightsWatch estimates that more than 1,600 Kuwaiti and Iraqi civilians have beenkilled, and another 2,500 injured, by the estimated 1.2million cluster bomb dudsleft following the 1991 Persian Gulf War. For decades after the Vietnam War,reports came in of children and farmers setting off bomblets. The weapons werealso used in the NATO attack on Serbia.
What does that mean in real terms? It means that Abdul Naim’s father is dead.The family’s fields in the village of Rabat, a half hour from Herat in westernAfghanistan, were sown with cluster bombs, some of the 1,150 reportedly used inAfghanistan. Some of the farmers tried to clear their fields; some of them diedtrying. Out of desperation, Naim said his father finally decided to take thechance. Using a shovel, the farmer cast three bomblets aside successfully. Thefourth exploded. The shrapnel caught him in the throat. [Suzanne Goldenberg,"Long after the air raids, bomblets bring more death," Guardian (UK),January 28, 2002, p. 12.]
Or consider this testimony from a 13-year-old boy in Kosovo: "I went with mycousins to see the place where NATO bombed. As we walked I saw something yellow-- someone told us it was a cluster bomb. One of us took it and put it into awell. Nothing happened... We began talking about taking the bomb to play withand then I just put it somewhere and it exploded. The boy near me died and I wasthrown a meter into the air. The boy who died was 14 -- he had his head cutoff." The 13-year-old lived, but with both his legs amputated. [RichardNorton-Taylor, "Cluster Bombs: The Hidden Toll," Manchester Guardian (UK),August 2, 2000.]
When one brings up these unpleasant facts, a common response is that war ishell, that in war "people die and things get broken." In this case,14-year-olds die and 13-year-olds get broken. We are supposed to brush thataside. We are not supposed to feel. Dead and broken. Such is war. Such is lifeduring wartime.
While it is true that, as Gulf War era Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams putit, "There's no nice way to kill somebody in a war," it is also true thatthere are ways to fight a war without cluster bombs.
Let us remind ourselves at this point that one of the central concepts ininternational law, in the law of warfare, is that civilians shall not betargeted. That means not only a prohibition against the intentional killing ofcivilians, but as the Geneva Conventions state, against attacks that areindiscriminate. Article 51’s description of indiscriminate attacks is:"those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot belimited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, areof a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objectswithout distinction." That’s a cluster bomb.
It is true that the U.S. military used fewer cluster bombs in Afghanistan thanin the Gulf War or Serbia. One U.S. reporter explained that Pentagon was "morecareful" than in past conflicts. But careful doesn’t seem to includefollowing international law. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, has said, "We only use cluster munitions when they are the mosteffective weapon for the intended target." In other words, we will use themwhen we want to. In other words, the Geneva Conventions don’t matter.
Cluster bombs are made by Alliant Techsystems of Minnesota. I’m from that partof the country. There’s a term widely used there about the friendliness ofMinnesotans, who are legendary for avoiding conflict (at least open conflict) --"Minnesota nice." Alliant employs 11,200people, most of whom are no doubtnice. Many of the military personnel who drop cluster bombs and defend the useof cluster bombs are no doubt nice. Many of the U.S. citizens who don’t seemto mind that we drop cluster bombs are no doubt nice. Minnesota nice. UnitedStates nice.
I wonder what the 13-year-old boy in Kosovo with no legs thinks about how nicewe are?
I want everyone to think about the 13-year-old boy with no legs and his friendwhose head was ripped off. Some of you may already know about cluster bombs andabout such effects. Some of you may already carry images like this in your head.
If you don’t, I want you to. I want to plant that image, and I don’t wantyou to ever forget it. I want you to know that the U.S. government’s quest forglobal power, and the U.S. military’s barbaric efforts to achieve that, leave13-year-olds with no legs and memories of dead friends. The next time you hearofficials and generals say we are fighting for freedom, think of that. Ask whosefreedom we are fighting for. Remember they are fighting with weapons that youhelped pay for.
If the capacity for empathy is part of what makes us human, what are we to dowith that image, that boy’s pain, the pain of the family members? If we had toface them, what would we say? If we had to face them, would we cry with them?Should we have to travel to Kosovo to feel that? Should we feel that simplybased on what we know?
We know. We feel. The question remains, will we act? More on that later.
The costs of our pleasures
Most people in the United States take for granted a standard of living that thevast majority of the world can barely imagine and can never expect to enjoy.Most of us can recite the figure that the United States is about 5 percent ofthe world’s population yet we consume about 25 percent of the world’s oiland 30 percent of the gross world product. How is that related to foreign policyand military intervention?
The clearest statement of the connection came in February 1948 in a top-secretU.S. State Department document, known as Policy Planning Staff memorandum 23,which defined U.S. post-war policy in Asia, focusing in particular on Japan andthe Philippines. The policy paper had been drafted by George Kennan, the firstdirector of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. Kennan wrote:
"We [Americans] have 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percentof the population. This disparity is particularly great between ourselves andthe peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envyand resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern ofrelationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparitywithout positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have todispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming.... We should cease to talkabout vague, and for the Far East, unreal objectives, such as human rights, theraising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when weare going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are thenhampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
Kennan advocated ditching the idealistic slogans about freedom, but it turnedout those slogans were too effective for U.S. policymakers to give up. Still,Kennan’s statement embodies the philosophy of a small elite sector of theUnited States whose goal is subordinating the interests of other peoples to theprofit needs of American corporations. Most of us are not part of that sector.But while this nation’s foreign policy and wars are designed to benefit anextremely small sector of the country, the more general affluence of the cultureis an important part of how those elites win support for those policies andwars. That is, I think the people in working and middle class America who livecomfortably have come to believe that their continued comfort depends on U.S.dominance around the world. I also believe that those working- and middle-classAmericans are generally willing to support policies and wars of dominance toprotect that comfort.
Put differently: If you propose a relatively cost-free way (that is, fewAmerican casualties and limited expenditures) to continue that dominance andensure continued material comfort, it is my experience that most Americans willendorse it, especially when the deeply ingrained mythology about how the UnitedStates fights for freedom can be tapped.
If I’m right about that, then in addition to being able to face the pain ofthe world, we also need to reduce our own pleasures. The level of consumption inthis country can only be maintained if people in other places (and increasinglya growing number of people here at home as well) suffer deprivation. The degreeto which people believe that they must keep consuming at that level to be happywill tend to distort the ability to see how much pain our pleasures require.
