Arthur Silber: The Destroyed Capacity for Thought

July 10th, 2005

In my post yesterday about Lesson One from the London bombings, I included in my imaginary conversation between “Bush Defender” and “Bush Questioner” the point that the most fevered hawks seem to need constant reminders of the fact that terrorists are evil people, who commit evil acts. There is a deeply bizarre aspect about this: it is as if many hawks are not at all confident that they can remember their own moral evaluations unless they and the other hawks remind themselves of them several times a day. Since they have undercut their own cognitive abilities in so many ways, and on so fundamental a level—as demonstrated by their nonsensical, self-contradictory, constantly shifting rationales and justifications for our foreign policy—this complete lack of confidence in their own mental functioning is not surprising.