A Thinking Reed

Month: May 2011

  • Justice, just war, and the killing of Osama bin Laden

    This story asks whether it’s wrong to celebrate bin Laden’s death. It quotes, among others, moral philosopher Christine Korsgaard who says:

    “Most people believe that the killing we do in war is justified as the only way to disable an enemy whose cause we believe to be unjust…. And although it is more controversial, many people believe, or at least feel, that those who kill deserve to die as retribution for their crimes.

    “But if we confuse the desire to defeat an enemy with the desire for retribution against a criminal, we risk forming attitudes that are unjustified and ugly — the attitude that our enemy’s death is not merely a means to disabling him, but is in itself a kind of a victory for us, or perhaps even the attitude that our enemy deserves death because he is our enemy.”

    This is an important point. Just war theory–at least in its modern incarnations–holds that the use of force is justified only up to the point of stopping an aggressor. It’s not about meting out justice in the sense of giving someone what they deserve. If it’s possible to stop an act of aggression without killing the aggressor, then just war theory requires we use only the minimum amount of force required to do that. Strictly speaking, any killing is supposed to be an unintended (albeit often forseeable) side-effect of using only the force necessary to disable the enemy.

    Of course, in practice it’s often very difficult to determine just where this line is between necessary and excessive force. But observing the distinction would certainly, I think, call into question many of the tactics of modern war. And whether the killing of bin Laden in particular was justified depends on whether it was possible to apprehend or otherwise disable him without killing him. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever know the truth of that for sure. Therefore, from this perspective, we’re not really in a position to say with 100 percent certainty that “justice was done” in the killing of bin Laden.

    UPDATE: Just to clarify, I’m not saying that bin Laden didn’t “deserve to die” in some moral sense. What I’m saying is that just war theory, as Christine Korsgaard points out, isn’t about punishment of the guilty so much as setting out the proper conditions for using force to protect the innocent and repel aggression. The question of justice in war is distinct from the question of justice as it relates to bin Laden’s personal guilt and what punishment might be appropriate.

  • The prayer of suffering

    Another insightful passage from Ellen Davis on the Psalms:

    The preponderance of laments in the Book of Praises is a fruitful contradiction from which we can learn much. But we live with a second discrepancy that should trouble us more than it does; namely, the contrast between the biblical models of prayer and our own contemporary practices in the church. It seems that ancient Israel believed that the kind of prayer in which we most need fluency is the loud groan, and they have bequeathed us a lot of material on which to practice. Therefore it is troubling that most Christians are almost completely unfamiliar with the lament psalms. Except on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, these psalms almost never appear in worship services. Evidently modern Christian liturgists define the business of worship more narrowly than did ancient Israel, and as a result our lives as individual believers and as a church are impoverished. The shape of the Psalter–the fact that the laments are brought to the fore–suggests that our own worship is deformed by our failure to bring the language of suffering into the sanctuary as an integral part of our weekly liturgy. (“With My Tears I Melt My Mattress,” Getting Involved with God, pp. 15-16)

    There’s a tendency among Christians to see the expressions of raw emotion in the Psalms–including despair, anger, and longing for vengeance–as sub-Christian and to conclude that they have no place in public worship or private prayer. But as Davis points out, most of the psalms of lament have an internal movement that finishes in praise. “[T]he lament psalms regularly trace a movement from complaint to confidence in God, from desperate petition to anticipatory praise” (pp. 20-21). Bringing the experience of suffering into God’s presence is necessary for that suffering to begin to be healed.

  • The First Amendment of faith

    The problem with [many common] notions of prayer is that we cannot have an intimate relationship with someone to whom we cannot speak honestly–that is, someone to whom we cannot show our ugly side, or those large clay feet of ours. We in this culture are all psychologically astute enough to know that honest, unguarded speaking is essential to the health of family life or close friendship. But do we realize that the same thing applies to our relationship with God? That is what the Psalms are about: speaking our mind honestly and fully before God. The Psalms are a kind of First Amendment for the faithful. They guarantee us complete freedom of speech before God, and then (something no secular constitution would ever do) they give us a detailed model of how to exercise that freedom, even up to its dangerous limits, to the very brink of rebellion.

    -Ellen F. Davis, “Improving our Aim: Praying the Psalms,” Getting Involved with God, pp. 8-9

  • bin Laden

    Clearly no American is going to shed any tears for Osama bin Laden, me included. And based on the president’s statement last night, it sounds like the operation that got him was of the right kind–targeted, based on sound intelligence, avoiding both American and civilian casualties. If we’re going to fight terrorism, this is vastly preferable to “shock and awe.”

    That said, it’s hard to be too giddy about this when you consider the road we’ve traveled over the last decade. Nearly ten years after the inauguration of the “war on terror” we find ourselves with two protracted wars we’ve been unable to bring to a decisive or satisfying conclusion; trillions of dollars spent, further contributing to a ballooning national debt; untold thousands of dead–both American troops and foreign civilians; and an engorged national security apparatus that has pushed, and sometimes broken through, the boundaries of values we profess to hold dear. The Obama Administration has taken some important steps back from the brink (ending torture, winding down operations in Iraq, e.g.) but hasn’t gone nearly far enough. If this is what winning looks like, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

  • Putting down roots in a place of transience

    I mentioned in my last post that my wife and I are buying a house. This has been a big step for us, though after having a child nothing seems like quite as big a step as it did before. Longtime readers may recall that we’ve bounced around quite a bit during the course of our married life. Over the past 10 years we’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay area, Philadelphia, Boston, and now D.C. We’ve been here for about 4 years, and until very recently, we were ambivalent about sticking around.

    As anyone who’s lived here can tell you, it’s a strange place. The seat of the federal government with all the good and bad that entails, a meeting of sorts for North and South (I believe it was JFK who called Washington a “city of northern charm and southern efficiency”), and a place of transience–people coming and going as the political winds shift or opportunities for career advancement come and go.

    But it’s also a very stimulating place–intellectually, culturally, and historically. There are thousands of smart, interesting people doing smart, interesting things, and some of them are even trying to make the world a better place (honest!).

    And for a place made up in large part by transplants and transients, there’s a surprisingly widespread and genuine local pride and a commitment to improving the city among those who’ve decided to make the District their home. I don’t want to paper over the very real issues that have arisen from the incoming population of affluent professionals and ambitious climbers existing (often uneasily) beside a population of longtime residents who are largely African American and working- or middle-class. But it remains that D.C. has been experiencing something of a renaissance over the last decade or so, and it’s a pretty exciting place to be. The “other” D.C.–the city that doesn’t appear on the morning talk shows or as the symbol of everything that’s wrong with America–is a quirky, interesting city with it’s own unique local culture. (Though one inextricably bound up with the federal government.)

    In some ways though, all of that is less important to me than simply the decision to put down roots somewhere. I’m well aware that there’s a paradox involved in choosing to put down roots. Localists and traditionalists often bemoan American mobility and rootlessness. But for may of us, returning to the place (or places) of our birth and upbringing simply isn’t an option, for a variety of reasons. I love Western Pennsylvania, but a lot of it’s been devastated by Reganomics and Clintonomics and Bushonomics (and meth and heroin), and there’s just not much to go back to.

    The thing is that having a family makes me want to be embedded in something larger than myself. Religion is a big part of this–even when I have my doubts, I want my family to be part of a community that tries to live by the gospel, because it’s the best story I know. But it also makes me want to commit to a secular community too–a city, a neighborhood, schools, places of business, people I know and live with day in and day out. Surprisingly, D.C. enables a pretty “localist” style of life. Apart from work, I spend the vast majority of my time in our neighborhood, and almost every place I go is within walking distance (including church). I’m constantly running into people I know at the store, the farmer’s market, or just on the street. So, maybe I’m putting more meaning into it than it merits, but buying a house here feels like investing in all that–deciding to be part of it, for me and for my family.