NEW YORK — Susan Sontag died the same week as a tsunami in
south Asia killed over a hundred thousand people. There’s no
logical connection between these two events. Even though Sontag
titled one of her books Regarding the Pain of Others,
nothing of substance is to be learned by their juxtaposition except
to remark that, when free association counts as intellectual work,
as it did in Sontag’s world, intimations of significance can always
be found.
After Sontag published as essay last year in the New York
Times about the Abu Ghraib scandal in which she compared
prisoner abuse by Americans to mass executions carried out at Nazi
concentration camps — arguing, in effect, that human brutality is
all of a piece — I wrote a column in which I referred to her as a
“pseudo-intellectual.” In retrospect, that was unfair. Sontag was a
heroine of the political left, a talented writer who tackled
ambitious subjects in respected journals. She was indeed an
intellectual. She was just a very bad intellectual.
What I mean is that, for all her rhetorical gifts, Sontag could
not think — or, rather, she could not reason. She didn’t do
if-then logic. She tossed around ideas as though they were
horseshoes and hoped that their proximity to a thesis formed an
argument. This method made her consistently provocative,
consistently readable, and consistently irrelevant.
In a 1967 essay for Partisan Review, she wrote: “It is
the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions —
which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads,
which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now
threatens the very existence of life itself.” This is the kind of
preening, self-loathing declaration intended first and foremost to
announce the writer’s sympathy with the romanticized Other. It’s
also a harbinger, given the essay’s date, of a mindset that would
soon embrace the ear-gagging phrase “people of color” — as though
concentrations of melanin conferred existential unity and
behavioral nobility to populations who happen to think of
themselves that way.
But setting aside Sontag’s motivations for writing it — she
would later make a sarcastic retraction, saying the line slanders
cancer patients — is there a way to rescue it logically from the
hundred objections that can be lodged against it? Doesn’t there
throb, beneath Sontag’s words, a hardened racial essentialism of
the sort that seeks to define the intellectual, moral and spiritual
potentials of individual human beings by the geographic origins of
their distant ancestors? And isn’t her condemnation of “the white
race” actually a function of her disappointment that Europeans and
their descendants, who developed the scientific and technological
means to dominate the planet, didn’t also develop a corresponding
ethical superiority that would have made them better stewards? Why
weren’t white people a kinder, gentler master race? The “autonomous
civilization” of India had a quaint little custom of burning widows
alive at the funerals of their husbands; why did the Brits have to
go mucking around the subcontintent and force the locals to scrap
it? Why didn’t Fulton, Edison and Ford realize the havoc their
inventions would wreak on the eco-system?
In recent years, Sontag caused a political firestorm with her
notorious New Yorker essay on the events of 9/11. Her
words seemed shocking just days after the attack, but in retrospect
the performance was pure Sontag: “Where is the acknowledgment that
this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or
‘humanity’ or ‘the free world,’” she wrote, “but an attack on the
world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of
specific American alliances and actions?… And if the word
‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those
who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky,
than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In
the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be
said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not
cowards.”
Analyses don’t come more wrongheaded than this; a reader could
negate every proposition Sontag puts forward and arrive closer to
the truth than she does. But since she makes such an issue of
cowardice versus courage, let’s focus on that. Because the
hijackers killed themselves in order to kill their victims, she
claims, they exhibited courage and shouldn’t be called cowards. She
insists that courage is a morally neutral virtue. (What is a
“morally neutral virtue” anyway? Is it like a “shapeless square”? A
“colorless shade”?) Moral neutrality, however, changes the meaning
of the word; courage has never been thought of that way. If courage
were morally neutral, in the sense she’s using it, then every
premeditated murderer would count as courageous since he’s risking
capture and punishment, perhaps capital punishment, for his crime.
But Sontag, I suspect, wouldn’t call Jack the Ripper or Richard
Speck or Ted Bundy courageous.
Likewise, her notion of cowardice. If America is taking the
“cowardly” route of dropping bombs from airplanes “beyond the range
of retaliation” — the courageous route, I suppose, would be to
send in the Marines to engage in knife fights — then why do
American pilots ever get shot down? Answer: Because they don’t fly
beyond the range of retaliation; they intentionally fly low to
avoid collateral damage. Unlike the 9/11 hijackers, American pilots
can inflict mass destruction with no danger to themselves. The fact
that they risk their lives to minimize civilians casualties
exemplifies a courage that is not morally neutral; rather, it’s a
courage that recognizes that even an unshakable perception of your
cause’s justice doesn’t justify wanton violence.
The quality in the hijackers Sontag has fixated on isn’t courage
but what Aristotle would call “rashness,” what Cheech Marin would
call it “cojones.” It derives from a failure to esteem life, an
obliviousness, ironically, to “the pain of others.” Taken down a
notch, it’s the character trait that stokes the heart of every
soccer hooligan, every barroom brawler, every drunk driver.
To be sure, Sontag was a person of integrity. As president of
the PEN American Center in 1989, she rallied support for Salman
Rushdie after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his
death — this, at a time when many in the publishing industry were
quaking in their boots. After decades of battling cancer, her own
courage — in the usual sense of the word — cannot be questioned.
On the evidence of the testimonials which have followed her death,
many of which go far beyond customary graciousness, it seems fair
to conclude she was a generous friend, colleague and mentor.
Sontag once said, “I like very much the idea of being serious.”
Whatever her personal merits, that accomplishment will forever
elude her.
