We will be moved to action because of our emotional needs

From Fighting for the Future by Ralph Peters. A bleak assessment, the bleakness of which does not make it wrong.

In an age haunted by cataclysms real and imagined, in this era of disappointment and wracking international failure, men and women will prove increasingly vulnerable to anti-modern, anti-rational explanations for their misfortunes and their inextinguishable impulse to vanity. Even in the United States, many of those least able to keep material, intellectual, and spiritual pace with the demands of modernity turn to primitive or exotic religious forms, from revivalism to New Age God-candy. In the failing regions of the world, such trends can only acquire greater momentum. There are no irreversible physics in the fundamentalism-to-nationalism equation: unsatisfying nationalism can evolve "backward" into theocracy. To paraphrase the most thoughtful soldier who ever learned to write, "Nationalism is merely the continuation of fundamentalism by other means."

Our century has been one of fragmentation, of devolution that flirts with chaos. Mankind has not experienced so universal a breakdown in the established political order since the shattering of the Roman Empire. Brotherhood-of-man platitudes have been consigned to the "ashheap of history" with even greater certainty than has Marxism-Leninism, but we, convinced of the all-conquering virtue of liberal democracy, still cannot accept the essential realities of human political behavior. The world has cancer, and we are in the denial phase. If you want to see the future, look to Cambodia, to Somalia, to "Kurdistan," or to Yugoslavia, Angola, Tadjikistan, or Georgia.

We Americans must avoid fantastic schemes to rescue those for whom we bear no responsibility, and we must resist imagining a moral splendor for murderers who better understand media manipulation than the murderers with whom they are in conflict. We must learn not to trust our eyes and ears--and, especially, their electronic extensions: the media, forever focusing on the crisis of the moment, almost never understand what they witness. In dealing with nationalism and fundamentalism, we must be willing to let the flames burn themselves out whenever we are not in danger of catching fire ourselves. If we want to avoid needless, thankless deaths among our own countrymen, we must try to learn to watch others die with equanimity.

We won't learn this, of course. We will be moved to action because of our emotional needs, heightened by the nonsense of post-colonial guilt. We will send troops to places where they can do no long-term good. We will be forced to choose which human beasts to back. And we will always pay more than we expected to pay when we began our intervention.

Bleak as it might be, it does call attention to the issue we can tackle, the pious narcism of our media and pundits who misdirect and avert attention from serious matters towards displays of moral preening and ritualistic performances of self-serving morality at other people's expense.