Month: February 2005

I don’t want to turn this into the “all just war theory all the time” blog, but what’s the point of having a blog if not to indulge my own personal idiosyncratic interests?

To that end, I thought I’d post some excerpts from Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe’s (1919-2001) essay “War and Murder.”* Anscombe was, in addition to being Ludwig Wittgenstein’s literary executor, a noted philosopher in her own right. She debated C. S. Lewis on whether naturalism was self-refuting, leading Lewis to modify the argument in his book Miracles.

She also had an activist side – she protested Oxford’s granting of an honorary degree to President Truman on the grounds that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted war crimes and later in life became active in the pro-life movement in the UK, once having to be dragged bodily away by police from a sit-in at an abortion clinic.

On the justification of the use of coercive force:

To think that society’s coercive authority is evil is akin to thinking the flesh evil and family life evil. These things belong to the present constitution of mankind; and if the exercise of coercive power is a manifestation of evil, and not the just means of restraining it, then human nature is totally depraved in a manner never taught by Christianity. For society is essential to human good; and society without coercive power is generally impossible.

On the duty of rulers to wage war when necessary:

The same authority which puts down internal dissension [i.e. crime], which promulgates laws and restrains those who break them if it can, must equally oppose external enemies. These do not merely comprise those who attack the borders of the people ruled by the authority; but also, for example, pirates and desert bandits, and, generally those beyond the confines of the country ruled whose activities are viciously harmful to it.

On the injustice of most wars:

Here, however, human pride, malice and cruelty are so usual that it is true to say that wars have mostly been mere wickedness on both sides. Just as an individual will constantly think himself in the right, whatever he does, and yet there is still such a thing as being in the right, so nations will constantly wrongly think themselves to be in the right–and yet there is still such a thing as their being in the right. […]

The probability is that warfare is injustice, that a life of military service is a bad life “militia or rather malitia,” as St. Anselm called it. This probability is greater than the probability (which also exists) that membership of a police force will involve malice, because of the character of warfare: the extraordinary occasions it offers for viciously unjust proceedings on the part of military commanders and warring governments, which at the time attract praise and not blame from their people.

On not attacking the innocent:

What is required, for the people attacked to be non-innocent in the relevant sense, is that they should themselves be engaged in an objectively unjust proceeding which the attacker has the right to make his concern; or–the commonest case–should be unjustly attacking him. Then he can attack with a view to stopping them; and also their supply lines and armament factories. But people whose mere existence and activity supporting existence by growing crops, making clothes, etc. constitute an impediment to him–such people are innocent and it is murderous to attack them, or make them a target for an attack wich he judges will help him towards victory. For murder is the deliberate killing of the innocent, whether for its own sake or as a means to some further end.

On Christianity and pacifism:

To extract a pacifist doctrine–i.e., a condemnation of the use of force by the ruling authorities, and of soldiering as a profession–from the evangelical counsels and the rebuke to Peter, is to disregard what else is in the New Testament. It is to forget St. John’s direction to soldiers: “do not blackmail people; be content with your pay”; and Christ’s commendation of the centurion, who compared his authority over his men to Christ’s. On a pacifist view, this must be much as if a madam in a brothel had said: “I know what authority is, I tell this girl to do this and she does it…” and Christ had commender her faith. A centurion was the first Gentile to be baptized; there is no suggestion in the New Testament that soldiering was regarded as incompatible with Christianity. The martyrology contains many names of soldiers whose occasion of martyrdom was not any objection to soldiering, but a refusal to perform idolatrous acts.

On saturation bombing and “unconditional surrender”:

The policy of obliterating cities was adopted by the Allies in the last war [i.e. WWII]; they need not have taken that step, and it was taken largely out of a villainous hatred, and as a corollary to the policy, now universally denigrated, of seeking “unconditional surrender.” (That policy itself was visibly wicked, and could be and was judged so at the time; it is not surprising that it led to disastrous consequences, even if no one was clever and detached enough to foresee this at the time.)

Anscombe shows how the adherent of just war theory is forever waging a two-front battle against pacifism on one hand and advocates of an “anything goes” approach to warfare on the other.
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*The essay can be found in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, vol. III: Ethics, Religion and Politics (Blackwell). It has also been widely anthologized.

Here’s an article by Theodore Dalrymple about the question of German “victimhood” and the bombing of Dresden that is germane to some of the recent discussion here.

On the question of whether the bombing of Dresden constituted a kind of war crime he writes:

I don’t think any decent, civilized person can look at pictures of Dresden after the bombing without being overcome by a sense of shock. The jagged ruins of walls emerging from fields of rubble, as far as the eye can see or the camera record, are a testament, of a kind, to human ingenuity. Only the long development of science and knowledge could have achieved this. As for the funeral pyres of bodies, piled up with their legs and arms emerging from the mass, or the corpses of the people boiled alive in the fountains in which they had taken refuge . . . one averts not only one’s eyes, but one’s thoughts.

Yet the idea sometimes propounded by those who seek to condemn the bombing as an atrocity equal to, and counterbalancing, Nazi atrocities—that Dresden was some kind of city of the innocents, concerned only with the arts and having nothing to do with the war effort, cut off from and morally superior to the rest of Nazi Germany—is clearly absurd. It is in the nature of totalitarian regimes that no such innocence should persist anywhere; and it certainly didn’t in Dresden in 1945. For example, the Zeiss-Ikon optical group alone employed 10,000 workers (and some forced labor), all engaged—of course—in war work. Nor had Dresden’s record been very different from the rest of Germany’s. Its synagogue was burned down during the orchestrated Kristallnacht of November 1938; the Gauleiter of Saxony, who had his seat in Dresden, was the notoriously brutal and corrupt Martin Mutschmann. The bombing saved the life of at least one man, the famous diarist Victor Klemperer, one of the 197 Jews still alive in the city (out of a former population of several thousand). He and the handful of remaining Jews had been marked down for deportation and death two days after the bombing; in the chaos after the bombing, he was able to escape and tear the yellow star from his coat.

I gained a whole new respect for our church’s associate pastor when yesterday at lunch she complained that clergy are defrocked (or whatever the Lutheran equivalent of defrocking is) for sexual or financial misconduct but never for heresy! She is quite “liberal” on issues of sexuality and the like, so this was surprising to me.

But, really, this is just common sense. In any community there always has to be some degree of “policing” if the community is to maintain a coherent identity. Complete openness or “inclusivity” is not in itself an identity. An entity without borders or boundaries, something that differentiates itself from the surrounding environment, is nothing at all.

Which is why it can’t be a good sign when a church adopts as its motto something like “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” (This is not to pick on the UMC. I’m sure the ELCA would’ve loved to have that slogan if it wasn’t already taken. Instead we got stuck with “Living in God’s amazing grace” which actually mentions God! And Grace! How exclusionary! What about all those works-righteous atheists?? How will that make them feel?)

If the church is going to be “counter-cultural,” to offer an alternative to the world, then its life will have to have a definite, concrete shape. And this will, of necessity, exclude certain things. And this entails the necessity of things like, well, heresy trials. Doesn’t it?

In the article I linked to the other day, David B. Hart takes issue with the interpretation of just war theory I’ve been discussing that counsels Chrisitians to abjure self-defense:

[I]t is strange to see Cole attempting to reconcile the developed Thomistic language of charity as a virtue with the older, somewhat more implausible belief advanced by Ambrose and Augustine (and accepted by Cole) that Christians are forbidden to defend themselves in all circumstances from unjust violence visited upon their own persons lest, in so doing, they offend against charity. Quite apart from the exegetical difficulties such a view presents to the theologian (For what purpose were the disciples to use the swords for which Christ prophesied they would sell their cloaks? Was he commissioning them as knights errant?), it is clearly incompatible with the rule that all earthly loves must be made subordinate to the love of God.

It is one thing to turn the other cheek against insult and casual abuse, or even to accept martyrdom, but another thing altogether to permit oneself simply to be murdered to no good end. To love charitably—selflessly—requires that love of self be ordered towards the love of God; to do this, one must learn to love oneself under the rule of justice, and to fail to do so is no less a sin than refusing to defend one’s neighbor. Indeed, defending oneself against unjust violence is one of the few times that one can most assuredly subsume self-love under the law of charity, without egoism or spite intruding at all.

This is partly an exegetical question I am not at all qualified to answer. Does Jesus’ admonition to “turn the other cheek” apply only to cases of “insult and casual abuse” (this would seem to be suggested by the fact that if someone is slapping your cheek he is probably not violently attacking you – you don’t just slap someone you aim to seriously hurt or kill) or is it meant to apply more broadly? What about the command to love our enemies? Does loving someone entail allowing them to kill you if that’s what they’re bent on?

Probably no one did more, at least in Protestant circles, to revive just war thinking in the 20th century than Methodist ethicist Paul Ramsey. Ramsey explicitly defends just warfare as an act of “social charity,” or what I’ve been calling a neighbor-love oriented approach.

In his essay “Justice In War” (first published in 1964) Ramsey says:

While Jesus taught that a disciple in his own case should turn the other cheek, he did not enjoin that his disciples should lift up the face of another oppressed man for him to be struck again on his other cheek. It is no part of the work of charity to allow this to continue to happen. Instead, it is the work of love and mercy to deliver as many as possible of God’s children from tyranny, and to protect from oppression, if one can, as many of those for whom Christ died as it may be possible to save. When choice must be made between the perpetrator of injustice and the many victims of it, the latter may and should be preferred–even if effectively to do so would require th use of armed force against some evil power. This is what I mean by saying that the justice of sometimes resorting to armed conflict originated in the interior of the ethics of Christian love. (Ramsey, “Justice In War,” in The Just War, p. 143)

But, says Ramsey, the very same reasoning that permits on occasion the use of force also demands that such force be limited:

The justification of participation in conflict at the same time severely limited war’s conduct. What justified also limited! Since it was for the sake of the innocent and helpless of the earth that the Christian first thought himself obligated to make war against an enemy whose objective deeds had to be stopped, since only for their sake does a Christian justify himself in resisting by any means even an enemy-neighbor, he could never proceed to kill equally innocent eople as a means of getting at the enemy’s forces. Thus was twin-born the justification of war and the limitation which surrounded non-combatants with moral immunity from direct attack. (pp. 143-44)

This would be Ramsey’s response to Orwell’s defense of saturation bombing. If the justification for war is the defense of the innocent, it cannot be used to justify directly attacking the innocent. And “innocent” here doesn’t mean “morally innocent,” as if soldiers were somehow more “deserving” of death than civilians. Rather, soldiers are legitimate targets only because it is their objective acts of aggression that are to be stopped. They are, in Ramsey’s words “the bearer of hostile force.”

It follows from this understanding of justice in war that one can’t draw a sharp line between one’s own people who are deserving of protection from aggression and outsiders who we can safely leave to take their chances. If, as Ramsey says, it is a work of love to “deliver as many as possible of God’s children from tyranny, and to protect from oppression,” then it seems to follow that we should do so when we are able.

At the same time, it would seem that each nation-state is charged first and foremost with the protection of its own citizens. There might be an analogy here with the idea of vocation. If each one of us is primarily tasked with caring for those near to us, we still should be open to the call of the neighbor even when it comes from outside our normal set of concerns and commitments. Likewise, a nation must tend first to protecting its own citizens, but be open to extending its protection to those unable to protect themselves when it is able.

Now, all this abstract theorizing is apt to look meaningless in the face of nation-state realpolitik as we know it. Nations don’t generally act on the precepts of Christian love (even Ramseyan muscular Christian love!); they act, more or less, as maximizers of their own power an interests. So, how exactly can we expect this kind of just war theorizing to gain a foothold in the corridors of power?

Frankly, I’m not sure we can. I’m tempted to share the pessimism of Orthodox theologian David B. Hart, who concludes his review of Darrel Cole and Alexander Webster’s just war defense of the war on terrorism with a great deal of skepticism about the relevance of just war theory for post-Christian secular statecraft:

I do not much blame Webster and Cole for failing to bring their excellent historical and theoretical survey of just war thinking into credible contact with contemporary reality. It seems to me to be a difficulty that is inescapable whenever one attempts to use a moral grammar suited to an age of Christian princes and Christian cultures as a guide to our relations with the post-Christian political order. Webster is almost strident in his assertion that we can credit ourselves with virtuous warmaking in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and pray God he is right. But I cannot imagine anyone not disposed to approve of the invasion of Iraq (in particular) being convinced by any argument this book advances. […]

I am not urging any particular view of the matter, as it happens; I am only calling attention to how complicated the issue becomes when the Christian just war theorist can no longer claim that we are fighting to defend or restore a Christian order. It may well be that the only Christian argument for the war in Iraq that will not inevitably become at best equivocal when subjected to a sufficiently unyielding moral skepticism is that the suffering of the Iraqis under Saddam’s regime was sufficiently monstrous that no Christian conscience could possibly be content to leave that regime in place.

Hart suggests that if Christians are to participate in the secular state’s wars it will have to be on their own terms:

[W]e may have to draw a firm demarcation between the aims of Christians in this conflict and the aims of the secular state. Perhaps we should cease to imagine that we can simply translate the principles of just war from the age of Christendom to the age of “the rights of man.” If we make war justly as Christians, we do so “alongside” the state perhaps, but surely not under its moral or (God forbid) spiritual authority.

Our alliance with the state is more or less accidental, and even somewhat opportunistic, and the prudential decisions we make for or against war must be something separate and distinct from the decisions made by our governments.

If we go forth to fight for God’s justice, we do so as citizens of a Kingdom not of this world, one that can make use of the post-Christian state, but that cannot share its purposes. To the world, this may appear to mean that we go forth only as individuals, driven each merely by the passion of his faith. Perhaps so. And perhaps it is then also the case that, really, we must learn again how to speak not only of just war, but of chivalry.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take this last remark. Is Hart suggesting a kind of Christian corps of mercenaries who would fight alongside the state’s armies on some occasions? Knights Templar for the 21st century? Because an enlisted man is not going to be given the option to fight only when the cause and methods comport with his understanding of just war theory!

If a Christian soldier is not at liberty to participate in the wars of the secular state on his own tems, we may wonder if a Christian should participate in those wars at all. After all, if we take just war theory as an expression of Christian love, doesn’t it seem that many of the wars embarked on by secular governments are more likely to have ends incompatible with that love?

In talking about war and the question of what attitude Christians in particular should take regarding the use of force, it might be helpful to distinguish two traditions or strains of just war thinking. These two strains are distinguished, I think we could say, by what they judge to be the paradigm instance of a justified use of force.

The more modern tradition (enshrined, for instance, in common law and the UN charter) takes self-defense to be the paradigm case of a justifiable use of force. If I am attacked, or threatened with an attack, then it is permissible for me to use force (but only the necessary minimum amount of force) to repel or prevent the attack. The logic of this position is farily straightforward – if I have a right not to be unjustly harmed, then I have a right to prevent unjust harm to myself, even if that requires the use of force (since a right which can’t be defended is, practically speaking, no right at all). Since the aggressor is the one who breaks the peace, he can no longer claim immunity from physical retaliation.

Clearly, as we saw with the run-up to the Iraq war, there can be large areas of disagreement about how certain we have to be about a threat, as well as how imminent the threat is judged to be, before we are justified in responding with force. But virtually no one denies that there is some point at which a threat is so obviously imminent that not to respond would be foolish (e.g. the proverbial armies amassed at your border).

For Christians, the problem with this approach is that it seems, at least on the face of things, to conflict with the clear command of Jesus not to resist evil, to turn the other cheek, etc. The so-called historic peace churches have taken these injunctions, along with the command to love our enemies, as well as the example of Jesus’ life to mandate a position of total pacifism for Christians.

But there is another strain of just war thinking that tries to take the commands of Jesus and the apparent need to restrain aggression in a fallen world with full seriousness. For this tradition the paradigm case of justifiable force is not self-defense, but defense of the neighbor. A Christian, on this view, should not resist attacks on his own person, but this by no means entails that he should leave his neighbor to suffer the depredations of violent aggressors.

While strange to modern ears, this appears to have been the view of the earliest proponents of just war theory in the Western chuch such as Augustine and Ambrose. Gilbert Meilaender (who I quoted on vocation the other day) explains it as an expression of the dual commitments of entrusting our own life to God, while being willing to serve the needs of our neighbors:

[T]he life of love diverges from a philosophical principle of equal treatment of human beings. It diverges not because Christians love their life less than that of any other person, but becuase they have entrusted that life to God. It is in safekeeping. Of course, God may well care for us by moving others to use force on our behalf. And God may, in turn, care for them by moving us to use force in their behalf, even though we ought not use it for ourselves. … Some Christians hold that the use of force is always forbidden those who trust God, and theirs is certainly an authentic discipleship. Better, however, is an understanding that permits neighbor-love to flow from trust by distinguishing what we do for self and for others.

To understand love in this way enables us to come to terms with the “hard sayings” of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount–and to do so in a way that neither loses their force nor turns them into a prescription governance of the world or withdrawal from the world. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also….” (Matt. 5:38-39). Luther captures in one sentence the meaning of such love: “Although you do not need to have your enemy punished, your afflicted neighbor does.” That is, God may use us as the means of protecting a neighbor’s well-being, making us thereby the means by which that neighbor’s trust in God is vindicated. But God would not have us defend our own well-being; instead we are to wait in trust for him to defend us–which he may, of course, do through a neighbor who protects our rights and meets our needs. (Gilbert Meilaender, Faith and Faithfulness: Basic Themes in Christian Ethics, pp. 85-86)

For this tradition going to war can be (strange as it may sound) an act of charity. A just war is motivated by the love of neighbor and concern for his well-being. Whether this attempt to square participation in war with certain commands of Jesus in the NT is successful is another matter.

Let me just say, for the record that I always liked Howard Dean. I mean, not that I voted for him (as an independent I am not eligible to vote in party primaries in Pennsylvania, and anyway, by the time we had our primary it was a done deal), but he always came across as a genuine human being in a sea of pre-programmed stuffed shirts (I mean, c’mon Gephardt? Kerry? Not to mention the terrifying war-bot Clark. And I never fell for John Edwards’ southern charm schtick – I actually prefer Dick Cheney’s crusty old man schtick and thought he mopped the floor with Edwards in the VP debate).

I liked it when Dean said he wanted the votes of “guys with confederate flags on their pickups.” The other candidates reacted with utter shock and horror, like they didn’t want those votes too and were too pure to even suggest such a thing. Gimme a break. Dean was the only one honest enough to say so (and, anyway, aren’t those guys entitled to cast a vote too??).

And Dean was the only candidate with a real shot (sorry, Dennis and Al) who was unapologetically against the Iraq war from the get-go. Iraq was not a threat to us and we shouldn’t be engaging in preventive war, he said. And that seems, well, right.

The Dems, we are encouraged to believe, are committing electoral suicide by electing the “left-wing” Dean as head of the DNC, but it’s clear that Dean is fairly centrist on a lot of issues. For one, he had a reputation as a budget hawk in Vermont and takes what seems to me to be a quite sensible federalist approach to gun control. Which is not to say that I don’t have my disagreements with him, I just don’t think he’s some kind of scary left-wing boogeyman.

In fact, here libertarian Justin Logan suggests that what the Dems need to do is reposition themselves as an “America First” party and that Dean might be the guy to do it:

[W]hat I think the Dem leadership needs is a blue collar, unapologetic, mildly nationalist, workin’ man’s pugilist. A non-Klan baggage Bob Byrd. Somebody who you’d feel AOK if tasked with responding to an attack, but who harbors only contempt for people like Bill Kristol. Somebody who can explain that it’s blue collar folks who’re payin’ for this high falutin’ war, with their blood, and with their paychecks, and that somebody’s gonna stand up for them when it counts.

That we’ll respond viciously if attacked, but that we care for our own first. This leader would point out that the current president seems almost to care as much about each Iraqi as he does each American. This fightin’ tough, blue collar pugilist would (of course) demagogue economic issues like social security and outsourcing, and take a stand for the little guy. He’d claim that the Republicans don’t know how to stand up for anything other than big business and Wilsonian adventurism, and that he’s not gonna stand idly by and watch the Bush administration fritter away this country’s essence.

Now, of course, there are elements of this platform that I think are dopey, but I think it’s as close to a winner as the Dems are likely to come up with. The party of Nancy Pelosi is never, never going to be the hawk party. It just isn’t. What I think Dean can bring to the table is a *perish the term!* America First mentality that should be bubbling up in some wavering Red Staters. […]

I think Dean could actually hold his own, and come off as a strong, gun-rights-believin’, health care socializin’, America Firstin’, fiscal discipline favorin’ leader. Now, of course, the Dems would have to tweak their positions on gun rights and fiscal sanity, but they ought to be willing to be flexible if there’s a Great Vermont Hope out there.

Inspired by Arthur Paul Boers I decided that a good Lenten discipline for me would be to try to improve my shockingly bad practice of prayer by praying a regular daily office. I’m using a version put out by the Society of Saint Francis (Anglican) called Celebrating Common Prayer.

The offices are keyed to the seasons of the church calendar; here is the OT canticle for morning prayer during Lent:

THE SONG OF MANASSEH

Lord almighty and God of our ancestors,

you who made heaven and earth in all their glory:

All things tremble with awe at your presence,

before your great and mighty power.

Immeasurable and unsearchalbe is your promised mercy,

for you are God, Most High.

Your are full of compassion, long-suffering and very merciful,

and you relent at human suffering.

O God, according to your great goodness,

you have promised forgiveness for repentance

to those who have sinned against you.

The sins I have committed against you

are more in number than the sands of the sea.

I am not worthy to look up to the height of heaven,

because of the multitude of my iniquities.

And now I bend the knee of my heart before you,

imploring your kindness upon me.

I have sinned, O God, I have sinned,

and I acknowledge my transgressions.

Unworthy as I am, you will save me,

according to your great mercy.

For all the host of heaven sings your praise,

and your glory is for ever and ever.

Michael Bowen of the Gutless Pacifist has been posting some thoughts on Orwell on his blog A Minority of One. Here he quotes Orwell’s well-known argument that pacifism is “objectively pro-fascist”:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

Orwell has become a kind of secular saint, a sort of generalized moral authority, due largely to his brave stand against the horrors of Stalinism at a time when many of his comrades on the Left saw the USSR as the great hope of mankind and his general opposition to all forms of deception in politics. Michael wonders if Orwell “might have had a different view about some of the later wars in the 20th and 21st centuries, including the current war on terror.”

What is interesting to me about Orwell is that, not only was he an enemy of pacifism, but he also flatly rejected any kind of just war theory, at least as far as “jus in bello” considerations are concerned. In May of 1944 Orwell wrote an article in response to a critic of Allied bombing of German cities. He rejects concerns to impose moral restraints on the conduct of war as so much sentimentalism:

Now, no one in his senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but disgust. On the other hand, no decent person cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity. And there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features. Pacifism is a tenable position; provided that you are willing to take the consequences. But all talk of ‘limiting’ or ‘humanizing’ war is sheer humbug, based on the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords. […]

When you look a bit closer, the first question that strikes you is: Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage. A bomb kills a cross-section of the population; but not quite a representative selection, because the children and expectant mothers are usually the first to be evacuated, and some of the young men will be away in the army. Probably a disproportionately large number of bomb victims will be middle-aged. (Up to date, German bombs have killed between six and seven thousand children in this country. This is, I believe, less than the number killed in road accidents in the same period.) On the other hand, ‘normal’ or ‘legitimate’ warfare picks out and slaughters all the healthiest and bravest of the young male population. Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. Yet people who would hold up their hands at the very words ‘civilian bombing’ will repeat with satisfaction such phrases as ‘We are winning the Battle of the Atlantic’. Heaven knows how many people our blitz on Germany and the occupied countries has killed and will kill, but you can be quite certain it will never come anywhere near the slaughter that has happened on the Russian front.

Orwell is here taking the extreme “realist” position that “war is hell” and once you’ve started you should do whatever it takes to “get the job done.” This places war in a zone beyond the reach of morality. He makes the curious argument that admitting this may actually make war more unlikely:

War is not avoidable at this stage of history, and since it has to happen it does not seem to me a bad thing that others should be killed besides young men. I wrote in 1937: ‘Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet hole in him.’ We haven’t yet seen that (it is perhaps a contradiction in terms), but at any rate the suffering of this war has been shared out more evenly than the last one was. The immunity of the civilian, one of the things that have made war possible, has been shattered. Unlike Miss Brittain, I don’t regret that. I can’t feel that war is ‘humanized’ by being confined to the slaughter of the young and becomes ‘barbarous’ when the old get killed as well.

As to international agreements to ‘limit’ war, they are never kept when it pays to break them. … War is of its nature barbarous, it is better to admit that. If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable.

We have seen these very same arguments made by some of the more extreme advocates of a “maximalist” understanding of the “war on terror” – “Hey, war is hell, and, anyway, they started it, and we should do whatever it takes to finish it, even if that means torturing prisoners, killing civilians, nuking Mecca…”

Personally I’m skeptical that placing war in a category “beyond” moral evaluation has made it less frequent than it would otherwise have been. But more fundamentally, all human actions are subject to moral evaluation, even those done in service to a good cause. In fact, maybe that’s when we need to be most vigilant since it’s in service to a cause we deem to be good that we’re most tempted to ignore moral limits.

In comments to this post, “Joshie” (who is much better read theologically than I am) criticized (rightly, I think) any doctrine of vocation that would encourage us “to stay in our little corners of the world and ‘do our thing.’” Part of the problem is that I don’t think I adequately presented Forde’s position, which I then tried to clarify.

But the whole discussion raises the issue of how we find a balance between caring for those who are closest to us (both physically and emotionally) and caring for the world at large. Virtually every system of ethics concocted by philosophers tells us that we should treat every person as counting for one and no more than one — that bonds of personal affection, blood relation, physical proximity, etc. are morally irrelevant to determining how we treat people. And yet, virtually every non-philosopher would say that they have greater obligations toward their family and friends, neighbors and countrymen than they do toward strangers.

For Christianity this tension becomes particularly acute, since the ethic propounded by Jesus so clearly requires us to reach out to those beyond our immediate circle of relations, including reaching out to those who wish us ill. So, any notion of vocation that leaves us content to care only for those near and dear to us cannot pass muster as a Christian doctrine.

On the other hand, even though we all (well, except for Christopher Hitchens) admire people like Mother Teresa for leaving their home and family to dedicate their lives to serving those most in need, we don’t usually think that we are all required to do the same. Luther’s idea of vocation grew out of his conviction that one served God best by loving one’s neighbor where we are placed – i.e. within the spheres of everyday activity such as work and family life.

This notion of vocation is uderwritten in part by a particular understanding of God’s providence. God cares for his creation by means of the institutions of human life – economy, family, government, etc. and it is precisely in and through those “places” that we find opportunities to serve our neighbor. This introduces an element of contingency into our obligations to others, whereas philosophical ethics has always tried to delineate the obligations we have to anyone and everyone, regardless of how we happen to be related to them (e.g. Rawls’ original position).

Here’s Augustine:

Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you. For, suppose that you had a great deal of some commodity, and felt bound to give it away to somebody who had none, and that it could not be given to more than one person; if two persons presented themselves, neither of whom had either from need or relationship a greater claim upon you than the other, you could do nothing fairer than choose by lot to which you would give what could not be given to both. Just so among men: since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you. (On Christian Doctrine, Bk. I, Ch. 29)

You could see the doctrine of vocation in part as an answer to how we decide who we are to help. Since we already find ourselves enmeshed in complex and overlapping webs of relationships (our families, our workplaces, our communities, etc.), that is where we can begin our service. And, more often than not, this will give us plenty to do! As Luther put it in comments on I Corinthians 7:20 (“Everyone should remain in the state in which he was called”):

How is it possible that you are not called? You have always been in some state or station; you have always been a husband or wife, or boy or girl, or servant. Picture before you the humblest estate. Are you a husband, and you think you have not enough to do in that sphere to govern your wife, children, domestics, and property so that all may be obedient to God and you do no one any harm? Yea, if you had five heads and ten hands, even then you would be too weak for your task, so that you would never dare to think of making a pilgrimage or doing any kind of saintly work. (quoted here.)

But truly learing to love those closest to us can impel us to move beyond the boundaries of our own little corner of the world. Gilbert Meilaender suggests that our particular stations in life serve as a kind of school of virtue, teaching us how to love others (and to mortify our own sinful selves). And this has the effect of forming us into the kind of people who will extend love more readily to those we are not related to in any special way:

Thus I marry my wife not because my love for her is a specification of some more universal regard for neighbors but because I am drawn to her in particular. But having committed myself to her, attempting to care for her well-being in particular, I may gradually become a person more ready to care for the good of any neighbor. (Gilbert Meilaender, Faith and Faithfulness, p. 53)

Someone who has been formed by the practice of genuinely loving others will be more sensitive to the call of need from outside their normal sphere. Thus love always points us beyond our present set of concerns. But it never escapes the concrete and the particular.

Meilaender again:

If the heart that trusts God does not seek unlimited responsibility for achieving what is best overall, neither can it be closed to the call for love and service in new ways. … Such decisions are always personal and particular. They cannot be made for anyone else. They cannot be willed universally for all similarly situated people. They cannot be made from an impersonal, objective standpoint that is nowhere in particular–for we never hear the call of God except at the place where we stand. (p. 103)

According to Meilaender, it’s not our job to take care of the entire world – that’s God’s job and to think otherwise would be a denial of our finitude and God’s providence. On the other hand, we need to be open to calls for greater commitment, calls which will arise from our particular situation in the world. This means neither an attempt to transcend our finitude (as with various psuedo-eschatologies for setting the world to rights) nor a complacent attitude of doing the bare minimum.