Spit Spot

As many of you probably know, in the most recent issue of First Things, N.T. Wright wrote a pretty styptic response to Richard John Neuhaus’ review of his book Surprised By Hope. And then Neuhaus responded to that, more or less along the same lines.

There are a number of things in that exchange that would be worthy of comment, but I want to limit myself here to one. The other issues can wait for another time. In his response, Wright said this:

“Yes, of course there are other global problems besides simply debt. I acknowledge that in the book. (It won’t do, for fairly obvious reasons, to cite Zimbabwe as a counter-example, a country where debt is not the most pressing problem. There are always particular and special local cases.) Yes, of course there is corruption and tribalism in some parts of Africa — and elsewhere. But these problems have been exacerbated precisely by the relentless profiteering of Western banks and other financial institutions” (First Things, No. 184, p. 4).

Even here there are a number of cobblestoned avenues to run down, but I want to spend my time on just one, and I want to buy a trinket from every shop. In his earlier response to my criticisms, Wright had appealed to the simple and straightforward ethics found in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It simply won’t do, he said, to have economic rationalizations for “passing by on the other side.” No appeals to complexities when a guy is dying by the side of the road. Now undergirding this statement is Wright’s conviction that personal ethics of the kind commended in the parable are transferable, straight across, to the ethics of international relations. If people have an obligation to help someone who is beat up by the side of the road, then mutatis mutandis (and there isn’t much mutandating to be done) nations have an obligation to do the same thing for nations in distress. If a nation is staggering under a load of debt, the ethics of the Good Samaritan apply. Period. A little less back chat, a lot fewer appeals to Hayek from the easy chair, and a little bustling around with the ointment and the help. That was his argument.

Okay, then. Since international affairs are simply big versions of our personal affairs, and in the realm of personal ethics we do not need expertise in a higher level calculus in order to know what to do, what should we do with Zimbabwe? I grant Wright’s point that the debt load is not their worst problem. Their worst problem is that they are run by a thug installed with the approval of Jimmy Carter at his starry-eyed worst. We have an ethical responsibility to do something now, and the parable of the Good Samaritan requires us to believe that it must be pretty straightforward. No long division allowed.

So what is it? If their chief problem is the commie goon running the country, and we have a Good Samaritan’s responsibility to fix all such problems, spit spot, as Mary Poppins would say, then Wright has to be demanding (in principle) that we take out the goon. He might want us to forgive the debts at the same time, and do some other nice things also, but his ethical approach requires us to fix the problems now, and to have little patience with anyone who wants to over-engineer it.

No offense to the good bishop, but it was exactly this kind of impatience with those who would “over-engineer” things that got us the first several mismanaged years of the Iraq War. But it turns out that taking out the goon is easy. We have cruise missiles that could do that right this minute. Putting together a new, less disreputable goon out of the shattered pieces is not as easy as it seems to a certain kind of mind.

Now I know that Wright does not really want us to send in the military. But why not? If we had come across the guy by the road while the beating was still in progress, do we get to cross over to the other side of the road then? Why? Why not? I thought these things were supposed to be simple.

Wright cannot claim that the debt problems of the Third World are easy peasy when conservatives are raising our concerns, and dismiss our concerns about complexity as just so much special pleading, and then, when confronted with an actual African country with actual problems (that are enormous, tangled, centuries old, and complex beyond belief), retreat to the complexity redoubt.

So is there a set of international problems which would permit us to cross over to the other side of the road, and walk on by? And can we do this without doing violence to the ethics that Jesus left for us in that parable? Or is it more complicated than that — leftists get to walk by any problem that is complex, but conservative observers are hard-hearted if they ever try it? Nice work, if you can get it.

Now I want to make the alternatives clear. Either Bishop Wright’s simplistic application of the Good Samaritan is just that, simplistic, or it is not simplistic, and N.T. Wright, by not proposing a simple course of action for us that will deal with the Mugabe problem for good and done, and by not answering this particular line of argument that I am presenting, is choosing to cross over and walk by on the other side of the road. If there is no simple solution straight out of a parable, then stop demanding that we accept simple solutions straight out of parables. If there is a simple solution, then what is it?