I've been thinking about justifications for war. And the larger philosophical question of justification in general. No doubt it is a feature of my personality that the problem of justification seems more central to me that the various (& very real) political issues surrounding the recent war. I don't think poetry is any one thing, but one thing that poetry is, is an investigation of motive. If there is a universal quality of poetry, it is that poetry makes its rhetorical motives available to the reader; by doing so, poetry can also sometimes illuminate the public use of language. Poetry in this view is exemplary, not in the high-cultural sense of approved usage, but in the critical sense of language as self-interrogation. (Self? The personal self, yes; but also the "self" of language.) Aside: One of the failures of much recent poetics & criticism is lack of attention to the public qualities of poetic language. I want to advance the argument that part of the value of poetic language is its power to refract public discourse in such a way that its motives are revealed. There are other things poetry can do, but a poet's interest in the problem of justification is going to hone in on this particular use of poetic language.

On Sunday I posted a note in response to a Paul Berman review in the NY Times of a book by conservative academic Jean Bethke Elshtain. It was just a quick reaction. Today I heard Elshtain on NPR's Talk of the Nation, though, & my first reaction was to wonder what it must feel like to be an apologist for the likes of that bloated & diseased amphibian Richard Perle. The man sweats poisons. Elshtain appeared to be arguing that the recent war against Iraq was justified by a long tradition of just war theory, but she spoke as if recent revelations about the Bush Administration's public proclamations during the lead-up to the war had not yet reached the precincts of her ivory tower. Had I been able to address her, I would have wanted to ask the professor whether a war could be considered just that had been justified to the American public on the basis of a calculated series of lies. One of the most interesting exchanges occurred when a caller asked specifically about the requirements for just wars launched by a democratic nation. Professor Elshtain blithely followed her ideological script, replying that dictatorships could not launch just wars. Even the moderator could not let this statement go without question, remarking that any nation has a right of self-defense. Elshtain replied that dictatorships usually don't mind their own business & thus can rarely be passive victims of aggression & so entitled to the cover of just war doctrine.

Listening to the radio program, I immediately thought of two counter examples, though I'm sure there are more. Legitimate arguments proceed through the presentations of facts & arguments that tie the facts together; responses present counterfactuals & attempt to reshape understanding by reinterpreting the situation in terms of the new constellation of facts. I'm trying to get at the basic relationship between language & the world here & what I object to in the current political discourse as exemplified by Professor Elshtain's treatment of just war doctrine is the obscuring of that relationship. Poetry, I am arguing, keeps the relationship tight & thus honest. Counter examples from recent Vietnamese history: In 1979 China launched a war against Vietnam in retaliation for Vietnam's actions against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The Vietnamese beat back the Chinese attack in what anyone would have to mark as a justified war. The second example is the preemptive Vietnamese attack on Cambodia in order to protect Vietnamese territory, but also--& this is crucial--to stop the genocide going on in Cambodia. Elshtain appears to be staking a claim for American intervention based on our unique virtue, but we are not as a nation uniquely virtuous: I take it as fundamental that no nation is uniquely virtuous & that even repressive regiems can act for humane ends. We would have intervened in Rwanda . . . One of Professor Elshtain's fundamental assumptions is given the lie by these actual historical counterfactuals. Poetry, I would like to think, is like journalism in that it has to pay attention to the world itself. Perhaps poetry is more interested in the language & journalism in the facts, but this is a matter of tendency & focus, not a fundamental difference. I'd argue, with Stevens, that poetry is a reflection of reality that allows us to re-perceive the world to our critical advantage.

Poetry should stand up to the pieties of the dominate discourse in politics, but poetry must also be self-policing, catching itself in its own comfortable lies. Style doesn't matter, school doesn't matter--each poem can be judged on this essentially philosophical basis: does it investigate the world's particulars while investigating itself as part of the world? Poetry is mostly powerless, but the clarity it can sometimes provide can perhaps deflect & transform the murderous powers of ideologically driven political programs such as those endorsed by Professor Elshtain. Poetry, at its best, can help us to avoid the complete disintegration of imagination represented by current American militarism.

To justify any act on the basis of a known lie would seem to undercut the very idea of justification. It's not that poetry can't lie, only that poetry is the one use of language that can sometimes expose lies, even its own lies.