Robert McNamara, quoted by Errol Morris in his phenomenal NYT obituary on him: “McNamara in Context.” Morris’ profound moral gift is his insistence that we view all humans in context, from those some consider war criminals to holocaust-deniers to murderers; reading the comments on his piece, one can see how rare this gift is.
In the clarity of their own purported rationality, of their own pristine, crystalline worldview -their own systems, all failures of integrity- the harshest judges fail to learn the most important lesson McNamara, and Kennedy and Johnson and all the others, can teach: rationality isn’t enough, systems of analysis aren’t enough, belief isn’t enough to safeguard against the real essence of human existence: error.
How morally culpable is someone who is in error? How do we judge the mistaken? Does the intent to do good mitigate the accomplishment of evil? If it doesn’t, how do we make it less likely that we err? More democracy? More technocracy? More intellectualism? More emphasis on morality? Every answer has attendant historical disasters.
McNamara wanted desperately that we should learn from failed history, and in his memoir noted that because we are not omniscient we should never act violently when allies who share our morality tell us we are wrong to do so: error is too easy, and only a kind of democratic deference to others can restrain our stupidity. I would add, although he wouldn’t, that without omniscience we ought try -harder than we think reasonable- to not make irrevocable decisions involving human life. We should not kill; we should not put to death; we should not make war. We don’t know enough, cannot predict enough, and are wrong too often.
But -and I don’t mean this flippantly- it is easy enough to problematize that assertion, easy enough to see that it too could be wrong: what about the necessary war? And if there is a necessary war, is there a necessary murder, to use Auden’s regretted phrase? All human judgments are subjective assertions that strive towards objectivity; we all aspire to rationality, and sometimes must act on it whether it is sufficient or not.
(See this note, too, from Gospel of Moll: that McNamara attempted to answer these questions honestly did not protect him from grave error; if sincerity won’t, if intelligence won’t, if morality won’t, what will?)
