Just War and the City of Man

Good article from Roberto Rivera on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (via Thunderstruck).

While relatively few Americans can bring themselves to say that the deliberate targeting of non-combatants during World War II, regardless of the physics involved, was immoral, our commitment to jus in bello has grown to make the avoidance of “collateral damage” official policy. At least until another hard, less asymmetrical, case comes along. Then it’s likely that the same utilitarian calculus used to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Tokyo, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka don’t seem to require any justification) will be difficult to resist.

This is neither critical nor cynical. It’s a reminder of what Scripture and Sacred Tradition teaches: while we may reside and even thrive in the Earthly City, our citizenship is elsewhere. The two cities aren’t identical, and their requirements won’t always coincide. As Augustine famously put it, “Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self.” For citizens of the City of God, suffering injustice rather than risk committing one is part of “contempt of self.” The other city can’t begin to imagine such a trade-off. Not because it’s contemptuous of God—although it is—but out of simple self-preservation. (If this sounds a bit theoretical, recall that just the other day, a congressman suggested bombing Mecca in response to a terrorist attack. If this idea made sense to you, welcome to the City of Man.) Love of self and its emphasis on self-preservation is why utilitarianism is the City of Man’s default position, in war as in peace.

So, while we are not exempt from the “obligations necessary for national defense,” those obligations aren’t open-ended. The “evaluation” of whether the criteria of the Just War doctrine have been met may belong “to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good,” but that doesn’t mean that they’re always right or that, once they’ve spoken, we must shut up. If that happens, then something a lot more important than workers will be absent from our society: its conscience.

It’s not always recognized how radical the implications of just war theory can be. You have to allow for the possibility that it may not be possible to win without acting unjustly. I think this is part of the reason that just war theory is never really going to sit well in a secular state; for a secular government survival is always the overriding concern. Not so for a Christian. Which is why it’s distressing to see Christians try to justify the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent men, women, and children in order to save our skins. How much of a testimony is that to our faith in the One who has conquered death?