Candles in the Wind

by Philip Weiss
March/April 2008 , Page 32

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The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s set off a great debate over the use of force for humanitarian ends, and it also sparked two remarkable careers. Chris Hedges and Samantha Power were journalists in the Balkans who found that journalism did not offer them a large enough platform; they needed to bear witness to man’s inhumanity. Over the last decade Power and Hedges have become leading moral voices on the left—albeit with different styles and arguments.

Samantha Power is an intellectual celebrity, a sort of liberal Condoleezza Rice. She is a tall redhead who has advised Barack Obama on foreign policy and was photographed in an evening gown for Men’s Vogue. Born in Ireland, a graduate of Harvard Law School, Power became a much-fêted success in 2002 with A Problem From Hell, a Domesday Book of Third World suffering showing that Americans and our politicians routinely turned blind eyes to genocide. Power has a tireless, earnest manner that has won rapt audiences for her lectures, but she is also at home in the establishment: She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Chris Hedges is just as worldly as Power, but more otherworldly, too. The blond-haired son of a minister, he went to Harvard Divinity School before realizing he needed action, and became a reporter for the New York Times in war zones everywhere. But he lacked the respectful quality that the Times expects of its foot soldiers, and a bold act changed his life. Soon after the invasion of Iraq in May 2003, Hedges, one of the few Arabic speakers at the Times, gave a commencement address at Illinois’ Rockford College in which he said that the American occupation was doomed. Students jeered him off the campus and he earned a reprimand from the Old Gray Lady, whom he soon abandoned to write books of a political and philosophical nature.

The latest, I Don’t Believe in Atheists, comes out of debates that Hedges had in the spring of 2007 with two writers he evidently doesn’t believe in, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Harris’ book, The End of Faith, was aimed chiefly at Muslims, saying that religion was encouraging them to blow themselves up. Hitchens’ God Is Not Great extended the critique, doubting the Christianity even of saints like Martin Luther King Jr.

Hedges had hoped that these books would go away, but they became best sellers, and now the Presbyterian minister’s kid is standing up for a new-age faith. He doesn’t talk about God but the “mystery.” Atheists, he says, are as bad as fundamentalists. They both believe in the perfectibility of man, one through science and globalism and humanist “progress,” the other through salvation. Both ideologies lead to “depravity and violence,” whether through eugenics or holy wars. “The belief that we can achieve human perfection, that we can advance morally, is itself an evil … It sanctifies war, murder, and torture for an unattainable absolute … It reduces other human beings to the status of a virus.”

Hedges’ religious training serves him well. The microchip may be perfect, but man’s soul is not. We will always have a dark side that is unquenchable. “Human evil is not a problem,” he writes. “It is a mystery. It cannot be solved. It is a bitter, constant paradox.” We must devise human systems that limit the lust for power and for utopian ideas, too.

As someone who admires Hedges’ politics, and his faith, I wish I could say that this manifesto works. It doesn’t. He threw it together in six months because two compatriots had written best sellers, and the haste shows. Big ideas are stuck to every paragraph like bumper stickers. Reinhold Niebuhr, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Marcel Proust suddenly take over a few pages and then leave. Gonglike pronouncements may work in a speech, but Hedges should have spent at least one quiet winter organizing his ideas and anchoring them in fact or incident. Has the U.S. succumbed to “the selfish lusts of the consumer society and the deadening provincialism of the petite bourgeois”? I guess. Has “privatized space” like the shopping mall replaced the town square, where people once learned to participate as citizens? Search me. It would take a chapter of calm observation to earn such a statement.

Fact, observation, analysis—these are Samantha Power’s strong suits, as Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World demonstrates. Back in the Balkans, Power was wined by the dashing United Nations official Sergio Vieira de Mello, an aristocratic Brazilian with outsized political gifts. For most of his U.N. career, only low-level staff from the great countries would meet with Vieira de Mello—Brazil not being a diplomatic force—but it was inevitable that he would attract attention, as he did when he met George W. Bush in 2003. The U.N. wanted someone of Vieira de Mello’s grace and stature to head its mission in Baghdad after the Iraq invasion, and he got the job. But as Iraq began to disintegrate in the summer of ’03, a massive truck bomb outside the U.N.’s headquarters killed a dozen Iraqis and U.N. workers, and pinned Vieira de Mello between his leather couch, a slab of concrete, and a human rights worker. Rescuers saved the rights worker by amputating his lower legs. But after four hours without being freed, Vieira de Mello passed away.

Power is a romantic, a person of unebbing passion, and in Chasing the Flame she has undertaken to save Vieira de Mello’s legacy through a relentless sorting of the rubble of his many postings during a 30-year U.N. career. It is not immediately clear why a reader should care. Power is such an honest assembler of evidence that we see the hero’s clay feet. Vain and immature, he was not always serious and he hated to be disliked. “His popularity stemmed in part from his amorality,” Power writes. “Even though he was unfailingly kind to Bosnian individuals, he had lost sight of the moral big picture.” And yet Power insists on infusing his long career with an air of nobility. I wondered how much Power was projecting onto her hero, for she too is a dashing immigrant who knows how to truck with the powerful and maintain her ideals.

The personality is less interesting than the international processes. This is Power’s deeper achievement, a biography of the U.N. told through a longtime servant. Few of his missions were unqualified successes. The places he tried to rescue still suffer. The U.N. is hamstrung by bureaucracy, its idealism corrupted. Yet Vieira de Mello got better and better at the job of winning hearts and minds, and Power argues that commitment, humility, patience, and elections, carried off by first-world countries in league with the U.N., are the best tools the civilized have on a brutal planet. Flickering candles, yes, but in the end Power and Hedges offer a faith in human action, the need to engage monsters rather than simply watching them.

For more, see 02138's web-only interviews with the authors:

The Crusader
Samantha Power on the writing process, the point of the United Nations, and the hotness of Barack Obama...

The Anti-Utopian
Author Chris Hedges talks about new atheists, his faith in the religious impulse, and how to reverse America's march towards plutocracy.

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