“Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die...”
Charge of the Light Brigade
Lord Alfred Tennyson
If you haven’t seen Clint Eastwood’s new movie about Chris Kyle, the most successful sniper in American history, go see it. It will get in your head. The very first scene is a moral dilemma that twists Kyle’s mind into a nervous knot. Through his rifle scope he sees a woman hand something to a child, spurring the boy to run towards a company of patrolling Marines. Is it a grenade? Looked like a grenade. Is it? Kyle’s partner warns him that if he’s wrong, they’ll fry him. He kills the child who did, in fact, have a grenade.
The left hates the movie. Why? It’s a movie about war that’s not morally ambiguous and self-flagellating. It presents the enemy as evil and American soldiers as flawed but heroic. It makes you grateful. And that’s all it takes: A movie with profound respect for America, the military, and the nuclear family just can’t go unchallenged.
Amanda Taub of Vox illustrates perfectly the moral confusion and dogmatic thinking of the left. She writes, “It's a movie about a black-and-white distinction between good and evil, but it is set almost entirely in the Iraq War, which can only be honestly portrayed in shades of gray”. Rejecting the “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” mantra, Kyle’s dogged moral clarity throughout was indeed striking. He tuned out the hand-wringing and simpering of the war’s critics to fixate on one thing: killing bad guys to protect his own. In justifying this, he remarked to his friends that they could not imagine the evil he had seen.
Taub called the movie historical revisionism noting that the butcher with the electric drill was fictional. Artistic license aside, the human depravity in Iraq was all too real. Bloomberg news praised respected war reporter Dexter Filkins’ book on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He wrote, “Electric drills were a Shiite obsession. When you found a guy with drill marks in his legs, he was almost certainly a Sunni, and he was almost certainly killed by a Shiite. The Sunnis preferred to behead, or to kill themselves while killing others.'' A New York Times article also noted the widespread cruelty among the Shiite majority, with whom we were largely aligned. When British soldiers stormed a special police unit known to have participated in death squads, they discovered, “more than 100 men were crowded into a single cell, 30 feet by 40 feet…A significant number showed signs of torture. Some had crushed hands and feet…while others had cigarette and electrical burns and a significant number had gunshot wounds to their legs and knees.” “They are like savage dogs that bite when they are hungry,” said one resident. “Their evaluation of guilt or innocence is how much money you can pay.” Kyle referred to men like these as “savages”. MSNBC pundits tut-tutted at the evident racism but Kyle didn’t just mean it in a pejorative way. He meant it quite literally.
More interesting than whether or not the war was good is how differently the left and right see morality itself. The left always claims the moral high ground and they sneer at the simplicity and lack of subtlety in conservative thought. Yet, a recent study showed that the right has distinctively more complicated and nuanced views. The study did not attempt to decide which side was morally superior, merely how they framed the very issue of morality. New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt found that people tend to arrange their values within six different domains. The first, Care versus Harm, concerns empathy and desire to not see others hurt. The second, Fairness versus Cheating, is concerned with justice and rights. Liberals tend to see fairness in terms of equality, while conservatives see it as an issue of proportionality, hence, liberals' desires to see a large social safety net versus the conservative attitude that people should get what they work for and no more. The third domain was Oppression vs. Liberty.
Liberals primarily focus on the first domain but also care much about the second and third. Conservatives care about these values, too, but they also care about three other moral domains that liberals tend to ignore: Loyalty and Betrayal, which concerns things like patriotism and group identity; Authority versus Subversion, which includes deference to authority and the rule of law; and Sanctity versus Degradation, which concerns beliefs about the sanctity and desecration of the body.
Liberals do one thing well: Find a group that is hurting and pass laws to overcome it, AKA “Do-something-itis”. Conservatism asks, “Yes, but will it work?” Always on to the next “solution”, liberals don’t seem to care. Thomas Sowell calls this “Stage one thinking”. The conservative moral vision, far from being simplistic, requires a complicated, utilitarian balancing act. It is through this lens of competing moralities that conservatives view war and everything else.
But even with morally muddy equations like war, it often comes down to a simple dichotomy: fight or don’t. When that moral balance tips to 51% good, the decision is black and white. During war, soldiers can’t shut off their moral filters; that’s how massacres happen. But they do need a black-and-white clarity of purpose, a justification that shields them from madness. The horrors of war require an astounding amount of denial and cognitive dissonance. In one scene, a funeral of one of Kyle’s friends, the grieving widow read a letter from the dead soldier questioning the war’s righteousness. Kyle said, “The Iraqis didn’t kill him. That letter did”. In “The Thin Red Line”, another great war movie, a young officer refuses to send his men up a machine gun-infested hill to their almost certain deaths. When his commander, played by Nick Nolte, explains the necessity of taking the hill, he states, “I think you’re right”. Nolte replied, “Next time, you don’t have to tell me when you think I’m right. We’ll just assume”. And so it must be.
Was Chris Kyle, the greatest sniper in history, simple-minded or single-minded? Was he morally obtuse or morally focused? Those are important distinctions but I would guess that the hundreds or even thousands of Americans and Iraqis he saved don’t really care.
I don’t either.
