Daily Archives: February 3, 2009

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Stray thoughts on war and pacifism

I wanted to gather a few comments from thinkers I respect, and see what comparisons emerge.

First, Wendell Berry. Here’s a brief excerpt from “The Failure of War“:

What could be more absurd, to begin with, than our attitude of high moral outrage against other nations for manufacturing the selfsame weapons that we manufacture? The difference, as our leaders say, is that we will use these weapons virtuously, whereas our enemies will use them maliciously—a proposition that too readily conforms to a proposition of much less dignity: we will use them in our interest, whereas our enemies will use them in theirs.

This seems to suggest that there’s no moral difference between “our interest,” and the interest of a dictator like the president of Iran, who has publicly announced his intent to wipe Israel off the map, calling it by turns a “tumor” and a “little Satan” (America, of course, being the “great Satan”). Is there really no difference? Is it really hypocritical to oppose the acquisition of nuclear arms in such hands?

I think of C.S. Lewis’s dry commentary in “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” (in The Weight of Glory):

Only liberal societies tolerate Pacifists. In the liberal society, the number of Pacifists will either be large enough to cripple the state as a belligerent, or not. If not, you have done nothing. If it is large enough, then you have handed over the state which does tolerate Pacifists to its totalitarian neighbor who does not. Pacifism of this kind is taking the straight road to a world in which there will be no Pacifists.

There is another central contention Berry makes, one that’s obvious from his title. War always does more harm than good:

That many have considered the increasing unacceptability of modern warfare is shown by the language of the propaganda surrounding it. Modern wars have characteristically been fought to end war; they have been fought in the name of peace. Our most terrible weapons have been made, ostensibly, to preserve and assure the peace of the world. “All we want is peace,” we say as we increase relentlessly our capacity to make war.

Lewis contends,

How is one to find out whether this is true? It belongs to a class of historical generalisations which involve a comparison between the actual consequences of some actual event and a consequence which might have followed if that event had not occurred… That wars do no good is then so far far from being a fact that it hardly ranks as a historical opinion. Nor is the matter mended by saying “modern wars”; how are we to decide whether the total effect would have been better or worse if Europe had submitted to Germany in 1914? It is, of course, true that wars never do half the good which the leaders of the belligerents say they are going to do. Nothing ever does half the good — perhaps nothing ever does half the evil — which is expected of it. And that may be a sound argument for not pitching one’s propaganda too high. But it is no argument against war. If a Germanised Europe in 1914 would have been evil, then the war which prevented that evil is, so far, justified. To call it useless because it did not also cure slums and unemployment is like coming up to a man who has just succeeded in defending himself from a man-eating tiger and saying, “It’s no good, old chap. This hasn’t really cured your rheumatism!”

Last, and perhaps most weighty, comes the argument that life is the supreme value. Berry writes,

In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.

There is no satisfactory answer to the way war brutalizes not just “combatants,” but “noncombatants.” There’s no arguing with the truth that war damages the world.

Are there evils greater than that?

Here’s Lewis:

It is arguable that a criminal can always be satisfactorily dealt with without the death penalty. It is certain that a whole nation cannot be prevented from taking what it wants except by war. It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a great evil. The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil.

Cicero, writing before the time of Christ, agrees: “The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself is beneficial, but there is a great difference between peace and servitude. Peace is freedom in tranquillity, servitude is the worst of all evils, to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.”

Who’s right?

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The Man who was Thursday

I get cranky with books that are heavily allegorical. Something in me says irritably, “If you have a message this specific, just say it. Why try to hide it in a story?” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” I’m not quite that committed. I like the Narnia books, after all, and even Pilgrim’s Progress. Maybe it’s not when it’s allegory, but when it goes over my head, that I get cranky…

But I digress. The point is that I’ve tried several times in the past to read Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday, most recently last summer, and gave up (so I thought) for the last time. But then I read reviews at Semicolon, and more recently at Hope Is the Word, and against my will felt the desire to try again.

This time, I finished it. I took a deep breath, dove in where I left off a few months ago, and churned across the finish line like an olympic swimmer.

And I’m glad I did.

It seemed to get better and better. I won’t pretend to understand it perfectly, but the shimmers and thrills of meaning that did flicker through were deeply satisfying.

Some have called this an allegorical rendition of the book of Job. Chesterton himself called it, insistently, “A Nightmare” in his subtitle and in subsequent comments about it. My version of the book included an excerpt of an article he wrote for the Illustrated London News in which he mentions this book:

It was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was, even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion.

It is very dreamlike, and once I accepted that and could laugh at the absurdity and wit, to me it conveyed glitters and scents of truth. I loved the continual overturning of expectations. It works better if I don’t get carried away trying to analyze too much. However, here were a few things I noticed and appreciated:

  • Many pursuits: the professor pursues Syme, the secretary pursues the anarchists, everyone pursues Sunday in that wild culminating chase, and in a sense maybe Sunday pursues everyone else;
  • Complaints and accusations are given voice at the end in a hearing with plenty of symbolic and textual linking to Job; there were links to Job throughout, actually.
  • Philosophy as an inadequate attempt to “know” God. Just this morning I read a passage in Wendell Berry’s essay “Going to Work” pointing out that H2O “is a fact about water; it is not water. A person who had never seen water could not recognize it, much less recognize ice or steam, from knowing the formula… Water is water because it is the absolute sum of all the facts about itself, and it would be itself whether or not humans knew all the facts.” The same with Sunday, who calls himself “the Peace of God.” None of them can explain him, but he’s the sum of all the facts they notice about him.

It’s the kind of book that I could quote endlessly and muse over in writing, but I’d rather just “ponder it in my heart” and recommend it. In the broadest sense, to me it was about how the peace of God is not found in rational explanation, but in joyous embrace of the goodness and mystery of Creation — its more ferocious aspects included, and suffering included. As Sunday himself points out, our complaints about suffering are nothing to what God suffered in the atonement.