Wired Mesh

The Kingdom of Heaven Suffereth Violence, and the Violent Bear It Away

The following is a response to Josiah's thread on Colby Cosh and Christian Peacemakers, which began as a comment and expanded alarmingly:

Attempting to distinguish between moral and immoral acts of violence is an admirable goal, but the analysis strikes me as overly fine. Violence in any form is going to destroy those it is used upon, and sully those who use it. Try telling a mauled Palestinian child, an Iraqi widow, or even a Dresden survivor that your cause was just, and somehow I doubt they will be moved by the clarity of your moral reasoning. (And these are all causes I agree with.) "Just War" is a charming phrase; so are most oxymorons. As Paul Fussell writes (I've posted this before, but it bears repeating):

"...to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else's expense or do and undergo things it's not pleasant to face: like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of the innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Europe and the final bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And not just the bombings. It's also the unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets, or knives, if not in Germany, Italy, or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam. You have connived at murder, and you thrive on it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely."

But – and here, I suspect, is where Paul is going to throw something – there may be times when we have to set aside our own righteousness for the sake of other people's lives and, less nobly perhaps but just as importantly, for the sake of our own life and the lives of those we love. If you deny this unpleasant fact in the abstract, you are rewarded with the admiration of your equally distanced peers. If you deny it in practice, you are too good for this world (as they say) and will meet the apposite fate. So will people you love.

Few of us are likely to face this decision in practice, and we should give thanks every day. But as we examine it in the abstract, we should avoid the conceit that we are being terribly brave, or moral.

That said, we are citizens of the nation whose war machine looms over the world, and we might want to decide what we think of that. Here it might be helpful to make a distinction that the Christian Peacemakers do not bother with: the distinction between peace as a means and peace as an end. Peace as a means may often be effective, and is almost certainly more ethical than the alternative. (Although, to steal from Fussell again, there are no ethicists in the foxholes.) But to value peace as the highest moral end is automatically to denigrate other virtues that we claim to value: liberty, for one, and often human life. To "choose peace" is, in this world, very often to choose tyranny in someone else's house.

I don't mean to suggest that there is some kind of moral calculator we should consult before entering into conflict. I'm merely saying that the closer you look at war the more muddled the picture gets, until the point where it's incredibly tempting to use a concept like pacifism like a pair of windshield wipers and wipe the glass clean. But doing so really only moves the dirt around.

Posted by mesh at April 19, 2006 02:44 PM | TrackBack