A Thinking Reed

Category: Just War Theory

  • MLK and non-violence

    Given how Martin Luther King Jr. has become a kind of American plaster saint that politicians of all stripes routinely genuflect toward, it’s easy to forget how radical his message was:

    As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?” They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent. Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they’ve applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can’t do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement–we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, Be non-violent toward Bull Connor;when I was saying, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark. There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There’s something wrong with that press! (emphasis added)

    More here (via Hit and Run).

    Of all the people currently running for president, who’s really willing to embrace this message?

  • The case for McCain

    CPA makes it. I’ve come around, somewhat to my own surprise, to the view that, of all the likely GOP nominees, McCain is the best option. Initially I thought Romney might be the least damaging of the crop since I reasoned that he would govern as a northeastern Rockefeller Republican (far from my favorite ideological grouping, but preferable to some of the alternatives). Instead he’s decided to pander to the Jack Bauer wing of the party.

    McCain has the soundest views on torture, has a realistic view of the threat of climate change, and is actually something of a principled fiscal conservative. The problem, of course, is that his views on foreign policy are roughly 180 degrees away from mine. He doesn’t seem to have ever seen a foreign conflict he didn’t think the U.S. should be involved in. But, as I mentioned in a comment to CPA’s post, he would be the best, I think, on jus in bello issues if not jus ad bellum. That’s no small thing.

    Which is not to say that I’d actually vote for him. I think the GOP needs to lose in 2008. I’m not crazy about any of the Dems, but eight years of Republican leadership hasn’t been good for us. The GOP needs a time out to think about what they’ve done. But it’s better for all of us if both parties put forward relatively decent candidates.

  • Political self ID – a Christian humanist?

    This is an exercise in bloggy narcissism (or is that a redundancy?) so feel free to skip this post.

    The other day a friend asked me to describe my political outlook and I couldn’t come up with a very satisfying answer. Having persued the blog he suggested religious conservative, but to me that sounds a bit too close to Jerry Falwell.

    I definitely thought of myself as a conservative at one point, though lately I’ve been toying with the idea of “Christian humanist” as the best descriptor of my overall outlook.

    Anyway, here are a handful of posts on my various statements of political principle and self-identification, if anyone’s interested.

    “Apologia pro vote sua” (On voting for the Green Party in 2004)

    “…on Sort of Going from Right to Left or How I Became a Quasi-Pacifist Conservative Vegetarian Pro-Lifer”

    “Am I a Conservative?”

    To me, what a “Christian humanist” position would emphasize is the dignity of the human person rooted in a transcendent moral order while at the same time recognizing human frailty and our limited apprehension of that order this side of the eschaton.

    This leads me to be in favor of strong limits on government power and to oppose, or at least be extremely wary of, the destruction of human life in the forms of abortion and euthanasia (traditional “conservative” views).

    On the other hand, economics was made for human beings not vice versa, so the idolatry of the free market has to go (see Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Roepke’s A Humane Economy). State killing in the form of war and capital punishment is at least equally as troubling and difficult to justify as other threats to life. And human beings can’t flourish while despoiling the environment.

    Throw in a general skepticism about bio-engineering (see Lewis’ Abolition of Man, Huxley’s Brave New World) and trepidation about unchecked technology more generally (Borgmann, Jardine, Ellul) and you’ve got an electric conservative-liberal-green-libertarian stew.

  • Pacifism and just war in The Mission

    Last night I re-watched The Mission, one of my all-time favorite movies (with screenplay written by Robert Bolt, who also wrote the screenplay of one of my other all-time faves, A Man For All Seasons). Like A Man for All Seasons, The Mission is about conscience and the way we respond to injustice.

    The Mission is the true story of Jesuit missionaries in 18th century South America trying to protect the Indians to whom they’re ministering from the unscrupulous machinations of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, with the papacy stuck in the middle

    Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) is an idealistic young priest who founds a mission in the high country above an enormous waterfall in a remote part of the jungle. He’s joined by his brother priests including Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert DeNiro), a reformed mercenary and slave-trader who accompanied the Jesuits to the mission as a kind of self-imposed penance for killing his brother (Aidan Quinn) in a fit of jealous rage. Mendoza ultimately has a dramatic conversion experience and becomes a Jesuit, finding a new kind of happiness among the Guaraní Indians.

    The Indians are running self-sufficient communal plantations where the profits are shared and reinvested in the community, but have a somewhat precarious existence under the protection of the church. The Portuguese would like nothing better than to expropriate the Guarani’s lands and enslave them. As it happens, the missions exist in a dusputed territory recently ceded to the Portuguese by the Spanish, but this means the Guararni are at risk of being subject to Portuguese slavers unless the papal emissary,Altamirano, rules in their favor.

    Unfortunately, the precarious position of the church in Europe, which would only be exacerbated by the Jesuits interfering with the secular powers, leads Altamirano to reluctantly conclude that the missions should be closed down and that all the Jesuits should leave. This, of course, means dispossession and enslavement for the Guarani unless the manage to disappear back into the jungle whence they came.

    Fathers Gabriel and Mendoza both vow to stay with the Guarani, but diverge sharply over their responses to the imminent invasion of the mission by a combined Spanish-Portuguese force. While Gabriel insists that fidelty to their vocations requires Christ-like non-resistance, Mendoza reverts to his military ways, organizing the Guarani for an armed response against the invaders.

    When Mendoza comes to Gabriel to renounce his vows as a priest, Gabriel counters with the theological rationale for not fighting:

    Gabriel: What do you want, captain, an honorable death?

    Mendoza: They want to live, Father. They say that God has left them,
    he’s deserted them. Has he?

    Gabriel: You shouldn’t have become a priest.

    Mendoza: But I am, and they need me.

    Gabriel: Then help them as a priest! If you die with blood on your hands, you betray everything we’ve done. You promised your life to God. And God is love!

    Later, when Mendoza comes to Gabriel asking him to bless his fight, Gabriel responds:

    If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that, Rodrigo.

    Ultimately (SPOILER) both Mendoza and Gabriel meet their deaths at the hands of the invaders, the former felled in battle, the latter killed while leading his flock in a Eucharistic Procession. Those Guarani who aren’t killed or captured disappear back into the jungle.

    It takes no great leap of insight to recognize that Gabriel and Rodrigo represent two divergent and contrasting Christian approaches to the problem of violence. Gabriel represents Christian pacifism: because God is love, as shown in the example of Christ, Christians can’t shed blood even in what may be a just cause. Rodrigo represents the “just war” ethos: force can be used to defend the innocent when their rights are being aggressed against. There’s no question that the Guarani are innocent and well within their rights, as far as natural justice is concerned, in defending themselves against the European invaders.

    Of course, neither one of these approaches prevails in any concrete historical sense. The armed uprising is crushed and the pacifist priest is slaughtered. Force doesn’t stop the invaders and love doesn’t change their hearts (though there is one scene where even the hardened conquistadors hesitate momentarily before setting fire to a church full of men, women, and children).

    You could say that Rodrigo ignores a cardinal tenet of just war theory: that war should only be waged when there is a reasonable likelihood of success. Unlike the pagan ideal of a noble death, the Christian just war tradition finds no virtue in fighting for a lost cause (Being martyred, of course, is another matter). The ragtag band of Indians, accompanied by three renegade priests, hardly seems likely to fend off a combined invasion by two of the world’s superpowers.

    And yet, at least as the movie portrays it, Rodrigo’s response is understandable, if not justifiable. He sees massive injustice about to be inflicted on the people he loves and wants to fight back and to defend them. And this ideal is hardly unknown in Christendom. Rodrigo could be seen as a kind of knight-errant who, after repenting of his evil ways as a mercenary, uses his skills to champion the cause of the poor and oppressed.

    But the movie’s heart seems to be with Gabriel and his Christ-like non-resistance. The image of him, dressed in white surplice, bearing the monstrance with the Host, leading his flock into the hail of gunfire has a special kind of power. It suggests, at least, that there is a power that love has when it refuses to hate, even if it is trampled underfoot by the world. Rodrigo gives in to the temptation to use violence, and fails anyway. Gabriel refuses to hate or strike back and that does seem to give him a kind of victory. It’s not some sentimental notion that you can love your enemy into loving you back, but that precisely by refusing to hate, love overcomes the powers of this world.

    Bonus trivia: The radical priest Daniel Berrigan has a cameo as Sebastian, one of the priests at the missoin.

  • Debating the bomb

    Apparently some people never get tired of arguing about whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Happily, though, there is a link there to G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Mr Truman’s Degree” in its entriety, which I don’t think I’ve been able to find on the web before now.

    I mean, look: in terms of traditional moral theology Anscombe is absolutely right. The bombings were murder plain and simple. The only way I can see to defeat this is by abandoning deontological considerations and making some kind of consequentialist argument that the bombings were justified, which is what defenders usually do. You also get the rare bird who actually denies that there were any “civilians” in the morally relevant sense at those targets, not seeming to realize that this repugnant doctrine would license virtually any act of terrorism since civilians can always plausibly be held to be “contributing to the war effort” if you define that broadly enough.

  • Just War theory and the “charism of discernment”

    This post from Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh revisits some of the arguments of pro-Iraq war Catholics, in particular papal biographer George Weigel (link via Eric).

    Weigel’s notion of a “charism of political responsibility/discernment” is muddled at best. Here’s the relevant passage from his “Moral Clarity in a Time of War”:

    If the just war tradition is indeed a tradition of statecraft, then the proper role of religious leaders and public intellectuals is to do everything possible to clarify the moral issues at stake in a time of war, while recognizing that what we might call the “charism of responsibility” lies elsewhere-with duly constituted public authorities, who are more fully informed about the relevant facts and who must bear the weight of responsible decision-making and governance. It is simply clericalism to suggest that religious leaders and public intellectuals “own” the just war tradition in a singular way.

    As I have argued above, many of today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals have suffered severe amnesia about core components of the tradition, and can hardly be said to own it in any serious intellectual sense of ownership. But even if today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals were fully in possession of the tradition, the burden of decision-making would still lie elsewhere. Religious leaders and public intellectuals are called to nurture and develop the moral-philosophical riches of the just war tradition. The tradition itself, however, exists to serve statesmen.

    There is a charism of political discernment that is unique to the vocation of public service. That charism is not shared by bishops, stated clerks, rabbis, imams, or ecumenical and interreligious agencies. Moral clarity in a time of war demands moral seriousness from public officials. It also demands a measure of political modesty from religious leaders and public intellectuals, in the give-and-take of democratic deliberation.

    Now, you could legitimately argue, I think, that public officials have the unique responsibility for making decisions to go to war, but that’s no reason to suppose that they are given a unique gift of discernment or judgment. It’s true that they will often have access to privileged information (though, fat lot of good it did ‘em in the case of Iraq) but that’s a separate issue.

    What Weigel seems to imply is that public officials are granted almost supernatural aid in deciding whether or not a given war is just. I can’t imagine what in the tradition would support this claim unless we’re reverting to the idea of the king as God’s anointed.

    Cavanaugh puts it well:

    Regardless of the facts of this particular case, moral judgments about war, like all moral judgments, are not primarily a matter of good information. Good information is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for sound moral judgments. Sound moral judgments depend on being formed in certain virtues. Why a Christian should assume that the president of a secular nation-state would be so formed – much less enjoy a certain “charism” of moral judgment – is a mystery to me. “Charism” is a theological term denoting a gift of the Holy Spirit. To apply such a term to whomever the electoral process of a secular nation-state happens to cough up does not strike me as theologically sound or practically wise.

    It’s also worth pointing out that the Constitution envisioned war being declared by Congress, not the President (Article I, Section 8). While again it’s true that public officials have a unique responsibility for making these decisions, they aren’t guaranteed a special wisdom. It seems to me that only an inflated, quasi-monarchical concept of the presidency would even be tempted to impute this kind of “charism” to the occupant of the Oval Office. If the decision to go to war was kept with Congress (or, heck, with a plebiscite), there would probably be much less temptation toward this kind of obscurantism.

  • Christians and war revisited

    Doug Bandow has an article worth reading on Christians and the Iraq war.

    I think we see here one of the problems with Just War theory, a problem that many pacifists have pointed out, namely that it can be so flexible as to (rhetorically at least) justify virtually any war.

    However, Just War adherents obviously think that pacifism is too high a price to pay for a bright, clear line about when to go to war. But Bandow articulates what some JW thinkers have called the presumption against the use of force:

    Christians should be particularly humble before advocating war. War means killing, of innocent and criminal alike. It means destroying the social stability and security that creates an environment conducive for people to worship God, raise families, create communities, work productively, and achieve success – in short, to enjoy safe and satisfying lives. Wars rarely turn out as expected, and the unintended consequences, as in Iraq, often are catastrophic.

    Indeed, in Iraq the U.S. has essentially killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of humanitarianism. Christians, even more than their unbelieving neighbors, should be pained by the horror of sectarian conflict unleashed by the actions of their government with their support. Believers especially should eschew nationalistic triumphalism in pursuit of war. And when they err, like predicting health, wealth, liberty, and happiness in occupied Iraq, they should acknowledge fault – and seek forgiveness. At the very least they should exhibit humility before saddling their white horses to begin another crusade.

    I tried to make a similar point here, specifically with respect to proposed humanitarian interventions. A lot depends on whether we see war as an extraordinary last resort, or as a routine tool of statecraft. Andrew Bacevich and others have argued that Americans have come to see war as the latter, with disastrous results. And Bandow is surely right the Christians, even if they’re not pacifists, should be wary of war and set the bar high for supporting it.

  • The triumph of anti-Constantinianism

    Over at Faith and Theology there’s a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) poll on the “worst theological invention.” What’s interesting is not just that only one of the “inventions” is an actual heresy, but that “Christendom” and “just war theory” got enough nominations to make the poll. (Though, in fairness, biblical inerrancy and “the Rapture” are the current leading contenders for worst.)

    I say this is interesting not so much to disagree but to wonder at the fact that, at least in certain theological circles, the radical reformation/free church revisionist account of Christian history has triumphed almost completely and with little opposition. The story is that the early church was radically countercultural and pacifist until the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (who didn’t make Christianity the state religion as is sometimes asserted, but did institute religious toleration and opened the door for eventual establishment). From there the story is one of steep decline wherein the church becomes complicit in war, imperialism, crusades, slavery, genocide, you name it, roughly until, well, now. Just war theory is one manifestation of the Christendom’s attitude of compromise toward worldly powers. Granted there are always dissenters upheld as heirs of the true anti-Constantinian gospel such as anabaptists, but the overall picutre is a pretty bleak one. The prescription that usually follows this re-telling of the history is for the church to return to its countercultural roots in order to provide a radical witness against war, capitalism, consumerism, “radical individualism” and other ills of the modern age.

    In much of the recent academic theology I’ve read (which is admittedly a limited sample) this story seems to be taken almost for granted. The only major theologian I can think of who has really contested this account is Oliver O’Donovan. But I can’t help but wonder why magisterial Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians (for whom the Emperor Constantine is in fact a saint) haven’t been more ready to look critically at this anti-Constantinian/anti-Christendom narrative. After all, doesn’t it imply that the church went deeply and radically wrong for pretty much most of its history? What does this imply for the doctrine of providence, for instance? And what does it say about the practice of infant baptism, which seems like it fits better with the quasi-state church model as opposed to the practice of believer’s baptism associate with the free churches? And what about the Christologica dogmas formulated in many cases under the watchful eye of the emperor? Can they still be deemed legitimate?

    Again, I’m not saying the revisionist story is out and out false. I’m just not convinced that mainline Christians haven’t been too quick to jump on the anti-Constantinian bandwagon rather than sifting the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the legacy of Christendom.

  • Augustine, just war, prevention, preemption, etc.

    Chris at Even the Devils Believe has a follow-up on the question of preemptive/preventive war & Just War Theory. He riffs on an article from the Journal of Religious Ethics that discusses Augustine’s view of these matters (not available online, alas).

  • Preemption, prevention, and the Pope

    Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus have both offered some critical comments on Pope Benedict’s Easter address where Benedict reiterated (by implication, at least) some of his criticisms of the Iraq war. Novak has consistently remained a steadfast supporter of President Bush, so his comments aren’t particularly novel or surprising; he offers the now-cliched rebuttal that the Pope, much like the “American Left” is ignoring all the “good news” coming out of Iraq.

    Neuhaus, by contrast, has expressed at least some misgivings about the war over the last several months, but here tries to get the Bush Administration off the hook for its embrace of “preventive war,” which, as numerous theologians, including the Pope himself, have pointed out, is incompatible with Catholic teaching on Just War:

    Talk about preemptive war was part of the Bush administration’s less than careful (others would say arrogant) strategic language, most assertively expressed in the statement on national security of September 2002. Language about preemptive war was provocative and entirely unnecessary. As George Weigel has explained (here and here) in the pages of First Things, traditional just-war doctrine adequately provides for the use of military force in the face of a clear and present threat of aggression. Such a use of force is more accurately described as defensive rather than preemptive, and it is worth keeping in mind that in 2003 all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war.

    There needs to be a distinction made between “preemptive” war and “preventive” war. Fr. Neuhaus is correct that preemption is allowed for in Just War thinking. If a country is facing an imminent threat it needn’t wait for the other side to attack before engaging in defensive action. The textbook (literally) example of this is Israel’s preemptive attack which began the Six Day War.

    But “preventive” war refers to initiating hostilities when the threat is only hypothetical. Daniel Larison dissects some of the problems with this concept here, but it is to say the least far harder to justify according to traditional Just War criteria.

    Fr. Neuhaus, unfortunately, seems to be engaging in a bit of sleight-of-hand here when he talks about the supposed threat from Iraq as “clear and present threat of aggression” and says that “all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war.” The “threat” posed by Hussein’s regime was always a very hypothetical one, relying on a chain of inferences involving its possession of WMDs, its alleged ties to al-Qaeda (always the weakest of the Administration’s arguments), and the claim that it couldn’t be deterred from launching what would appear to be a suicidal attack on the U.S. via these terrorist proxies. Even Administration spokesmen shied away from describing this “threat” as “imminent.” In fact, President Bush himself in his 2003 State of the Union address said:

    Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.

    In fact, after it became clear that the threat from Saddam’s Iraq was largely illusory, there was a concerted effort by Administration spokesmen to deny that they ever claimed that the threat was “imminent.”

    Now, it’s open to the defender of preventive war to argue that a threat needn’t be imminent for war to be justified, but that would represent a serious departure from the Just War tradition; to mention only one problem it’s very difficult to see how preventive war could be reconciled with the criterion of “last resort.” But, if so, it should at least be admitted that it is a departure. Either the Administration was claiming that that the threat from Saddam was imminent, in which case it was either wrong or dissembling, or it was not claiming the threat was imminent, in which case it went to war in contravention of accepted Just War principles.