Anti-Militarism, Tree Wisdom, and the Wellness Schism

This week—another look at Syria with Jeff Sachs, Samuel Moyn, & Daniel McCarthy. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.

Zach Goldhammer: On our last Syria episode, we tried to understand the ongoing crisis from the perspective of the Syrian people—inside and outside the country—who continue to resist the Assad regime. This week, however, we tried to grapple with the spiraling proxy war in the wake of the latest U.S.-led strike.

Despite the supposedly unprecedented abnormalities of the Trump presidency, the story seems remarkably familiar. The same old pundits—including Judith Miller—are still on TV praising the bombing.

Fareed Zakaria suggests that Trump has “now morphed into Obama” on the question of military intervention in Syria as if this were a positive turn. But as Jeff Sachs reminded us, this would simply mean “more war, aimlessness, running around in circles, and an ongoing bloodbath” in the region.

Open Source has always tended towards anti-militarist perspectives on questions of foreign policy. Going back to the very beginning of the podcast in 2003, OS promoted voices which challenged the pro-war Washington consensus on Iraq. With so many of the same pundits who egged on the invasion in 2003 still doubling down on similar positions today—and with The Atlantic now hailing Emmanuel Macron as “Trump’s Tony Blair”—the need for counter-programming seems even more urgent.

This week’s program tried to outline the the broad spectrum of anti-militarist positions on the Syrian crisis today—from Samuel Moyn’s left-liberal critique of humanitarian intervention (or what Moyn calls “humanism at the point of a gun”) to The American Conservative’s roster of paleocon isolationists. Both camps might be able to rally around the slogan proposed by TAC editor Daniel McCarthy— “do no harm”—as an alternative to Obama’s flimsy, redundant resistance to “dumb wars”.

Still, while it might be encouraging to think that some kind of left-right coalition against American warmongering is viable, Moyn raises the right reasons to be skeptical. The right-wing isolationist position too often “borders on nativism that just disclaims interest in the rest of the world.” This kind of disregard for lives that aren’t recognized as American has been strongly challenged by leftist organizers domestically. The Movement for Black Lives activists today — channeling the internationalist orientation of the late MLK and building solidarity with activists in Palestine— have argued that these foreign and domestic forms of militarism are never so neatly separated. Still, for most politicians in Washington—including Bernie Sanders—this kind of perspective remains MIA.

“We have to identify with humans everywhere” Moyn says on our program, “not just with the national interest, and believe that there is transnational solidarity that matters, especially when foreign governments are killing their own people.”

Aziz Rana—one of the smart critics of nativism we know—has written sharply about the need for left politicians to develop new foreign policy positions and provide an alternative to the modern militarist toolkit. In order to cure what Rana calls the “amnesia of the complicit” in Washington, the left should push for demilitarization and a commitment to global social democracy as serious alternatives to sledgehammer-style solutions.

You’ll be able to hear our own extended bonus interview with Rana next week. In the meantime, if you have your own proposals for what a new, progressive foreign policy platform should look like, send us your thoughts: info@radioopensource.org

Coming Up: Into the Woods w/ Richard Powers

Mary McGrath, Conor Gillies, Richard Powers, and Chris Lydon scoping out some stunning trees at the Arnold Arboretum

We spent an afternoon at the Arnold Arboretum last week talking about trees with the polymath novelist Richard Powers. Powers’ new book The Overstory explores the secret life of trees as an alternative to traditional, anthrocpoentric storytelling. If you’re aren’t totally sold on reading a doorstopper-sized novel with woody vegetation as the primary protagonists, read Barbara Kingsolver’s review:

[Richard Powers’] monumental novel “The Overstory” accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size … In the end, “The Overstory” defies its own prediction about fiction’s limits, making the contest for the world feel every bit as important as the struggles between people. Even if you’ve never given a thought to the pulp and timber industries, by this book’s last page you will probably wish you weren’t reading it on the macerated, acid-bleached flesh of its protagonists. That’s what a story can do.

We’ll likely air our interview with Powers and other tree friends next week—stay tuned!

Mary McGrath: Conor has been posting interviews every Monday for our Patreon faithful (as promised). They’re extras that don’t make it onto the show or longer versions of interviews that do. We opened up Chris’ interview with Barbara Ehrenreich to showcase what folks are missing. Patreon is our main fundraising platform, and helps keep our podcast ad free (this is an ongoing debate at OS). Every little bit helps, and new patrons at the $5 month level will get a wonderful collection of 5 postcards from artist Susan Coyne. $10 gets you a Thoreau t-shirt. A $25 pledge and you’ll have an original print from Susan.

Misc links:

Louisa Thomas in the New Yorker: “How Far Can Becky Hammon go in the N.B.A.?” Two newish writers to me: Alexander Chee: “On Becoming an American Writer” and Patricia Lockwood: “How Do We Write Now?” Hate-watching with A.O. Scott: “If You Love Goddard, You’ll Hate-Watch, “Godard Mon Amour.’ Yanis Varoufakis on how Marx predicted our current crisis. Prince’s studio recording of “Nothing Compares 2 U” finally released and it’s incredible. A massive trove of BBC sound effects released for public use.

Til next week,

The Open Source Tree-Huggers