Waltzer: Consensus is Not a Fact Based Exercise

It seems that every blog posted so far, Jesse, Bobby, Christine, Marguax, has touched upon Walzer's choice not to use argument. I think the blogs have well covered the positive aspects of his style, he is able to write in an accessible way, he sets a high bar for standards of war, he uses informal logic, he is able to appeal to a gut feeling ect...

For this reason, becouse the postive aspects are well covered, I would like to focus on the short comings of Walzer's choice not to use traditional logical argument. I think it is great to challenge, well, everything. However, as a long time activist, I know that simply abounding tradition doesn't always lead to optimal alternatives.

Instead of relying on argument, Walzer backs-up his assertions by painting pictures using popularly concensused upon American images.

I see two problems with this:

Culturally Specific.

1) Walzer uses images from the American liberal consciousness to back his assertions. By relying on images, Walzer limits his audience to those who assign the same understandings to those images. Walzer's argument is culturally specific to American liberals.

For example, it seems unlikely that Palestinians would accept Walzer's assertion that fighting forces can act with moral restraint backed by the image that Walzer paints of the restrained, morally careful Stern Gang and Israeli Defense Force.

Limited to this Paradigm

The scope of the American Liberal's understanding of the world is limited. It operates within a Paradigm. Although I would love to define all the limitations of this Paradigm, I don't have space to outline and back-up my arguments here. It would probably take a book to just define a few common assumptions shared by American Liberals and to justify this with argument. But, generally, to the American Liberal, war is justified sometimes, killing of civilians by state actors, including during war, is frowned upon, violence by non-state actors is almost always unjust, and Israel didn't do anything wrong until maybe 1987 and even that is stretching the paradigm.

Anyway, since Walzer is limited to the images that exist within, and reinforce, this paradigm, he can't make an assertion that is outside of the paradigm. Walzer can not argue that all war is unjust using images from a paradigm that defines WWII as the Just War. Nor can he argue that post-colonial violence plays a positive, cathartic role for the psyche of the colonized within a paradigm that is generally adverse to the killing of civilians. I'm not arguing that he should, or even that he may want to, I'm just pointing out the limitations of his method.

To put is another way, Walzer's vocabulary is constructed by images, and there are certain ideas that this vocabulary either does not have an image to express or can not be said because they contradict the assumptions that lie behind already established images.

I believe that it is for this reason that Walzer must simply dismiss those who have not already bought into the assumptions behind the pictures that he uses to build his argument.