Published in The Acorn: Journal of the Gandhi-King Society, XII, 1: Spring/Summer 2003
Presented St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery Lenten Dialogues : 3 April 2003
Presented St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery Lenten Dialogues : 3 April 2003
I. The Wellspring of Violence
II. East Meets West
III. Kant on “The Good Will”
IV. Gandhi on Violence
V. Postscript: On “Just War”
“I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction,” says Gandhi, “and, therefore, there must be a higher law than that of destruction” (Gandhi 383). “My opinion is becoming daily more and more confirmed that we shall achieve our real freedom only by effort from within, i.e., by self-purification and self-help, and therefore by the strictest adherence to truth and non-violence. Civil disobedience needs and asks for stout hearts with a faith that will not flinch from danger and will shine the brightest in the face of severest trial.” (68-9). He says also, “To bear all kinds of tortures without a murmur of resentment is impossible for a human being without the strength that comes from God. Only in His strength are we strong.” (364-5).
Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent non-cooperation, his method for replacing violence with love, he terms satyagraha-- literally “clinging to truth.” To practice it we must first recognize that the wellspring of violence is the heart, and that its nature consists in our separation from truth. By turning our hearts from their origin we separate ourselves from each other and from ourselves and fall victim to violence: as for Plato, the act of injustice injures the actor more than the victim (Gorgias). To overcome violence we must reconnect with ourselves, with our histories, traditions and communities, and with God: we must cling to truth. To root out violence from our hearts is the precondition for satyagraha, which seeks to overcome the separation of means and ends which, Gandhi insists, is the root of all violence: violent means invariably produce violent ends, a violent act instigates or perpetuates a destructive cycle that only love can break.
We shall begin by rooting ourselves in our own tradition by invoking the personal discovery of the wellspring of violence by a 4th Century African Bishop, Augustine of Hippo, which will lead us directly into the issue of separation. Next we shall begin to consider how to achieve connection with ourselves and with others by comparing Eastern and Western perspectives. We shall then turn to Immanuel Kant’s “good will” as a description of the personal condition for overcoming evil and violence. With this background we shall turn to Gandhi’s understanding of the rootedness of violence in the heart and how he would have us overcome personal separation to achieve the connection necessary to a peaceful community. Finally, having considered the evil of violence on an individual level, as a function of the heart, we shall conclude by considering the communal violence of war and the claim that a war can be “just.”
I. The Wellspring of Violence
“I was ashamed to be remiss in vice in the midst of my comrades,” recalls Augustine of his 16th year, “For I heard them boast of their disgraceful acts, and glory in them all the more, the more debased they were.” Who of us cannot relate to the tempting power of adolescent peer pressure-- smoking, shoplifting or petty vandalism-- “for the reason,” as Augustine says, “that it [is] forbidden?” He continues, “lest I be put to scorn, I made myself more depraved than I was. When there was no actual deed... I pretended that I had done what I had not done, lest I be considered more contemptible because I was actually more innocent....” So Augustine recounts, “I stole a thing of which I had plenty of my own and of much better quality,” and he asks, “would anyone commit a murder without reason and out of delight in murder itself? Who can believe such a thing?” We adults know better, but I venture to say that no one here tonight would murder but for the perception of overwhelming necessity. Augustine continues, “In a garden nearby to our vineyard there was a pear tree, loaded with fruit that was desirable neither in appearance nor in taste. Late one night a group of very bad youngsters set out to shake down and rob this tree. We took great loads of fruit from it, not for our own eating but rather to throw it to the pigs.... If I put any of that fruit into my mouth,” he says later, “my sin was its seasoning.”
Soon we shall hear Kant insist that evil and good are strictly functions of the will: Kant accords no moral significance to outward appearance; so here Augustine speaks of the inner depravity to which we as free beings might descend in our primordial quest for nothingness, a yearning for death, a perverse imitation of immortality. “Behold,” he says, “now let me tell you what my heart looked for there, that I should be evil without purpose and that there should be no cause for my evil but evil itself. Foul was the evil, and I loved it. I loved to go down to death.” To Augustine, this adolescent indiscretion is an archetypal exercise of pride, a presumption of the self-sufficiency of one’s free powers. It is a rebellion against God, which consists essentially in mistaking oneself for Him—the deadly mistake of moral absolutism, which constitutes the ultimate separation from God. “Did it please me,” asks Augustine, “that... I should imitate a deformed liberty, by doing with impunity things illicit bearing a shadowy likeness of your omnipotence?... I fell away from you, my God, and I went astray... from you, the support of my youth, and I became to myself a land of want.”
It is in this secret sin that Augustine asserts his manly independence-- indeed! Its very triviality, for the perverse power it infuses, argues for the limitless freedom of the human will-- that this pitiful act should so have inflated the young man! For Augustine, free will constitutes the theological explanation for evil, and Kant, for whose philosophy freedom is the bedrock, makes the argument philosophically: we know, in doing wrong, what we ought to do, and this necessarily implies that we must be capable of doing right-- this is the very meaning of “ought”; and to be capable is precisely to be free (Religion fn 45). Again, if I were necessarily determined and thus not free to violate my neighbor, then it would never occur to me that I ought not do it; thus I must be free. Consider what human beings are capable of: “people speak sometimes about the animal cruelty of man,” says Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, “but this is terribly unjust and offensive to animals, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel” (Dostoevsky 238). “For what evil is there that I,” says Augustine, “who even loved the crime for its own sake, might not have done?”
This talk of evil and sin is admittedly very pre-enlightenment; insofar as we retain the concept of evil, we reserve its invocation for attribution to others. And consider how prevalent is “the belief,” in the words of Kant, “that the world steadily… forges... from bad to better.” However, he observes, “If this belief... is meant to apply to moral goodness and badness…, it has certainly not been deduced from experience; the history of all times cries too loudly against it” (Religion 15). Of human civilization Kant remarks:
we must listen to a long melancholy litany of indictments against humanity: of secret falsity even in the closest friendship, so that a limit upon trust in mutual confidences of even the best friends is reckoned a universal maxim of prudence in intercourse; of a propensity to hate him to whom one is indebted, for which a benefactor must always be prepared; of a hearty well-wishing which yet allows of the remark that “in the misfortunes of our best friends there is something which is not altogether displeasing to us” [La Rochefoucauld];... we shall have enough of the vices of culture and civilization… to make us rather turn away our eyes from the conduct of men lest we ourselves contract another vice, misanthropy.
Had Kant been speaking of us, he would have recognized that we Americans love ourselves, thus for misanthropy he would doubtless have substituted misogyny, homophobia, racism and particularly xenophobia. Continues Kant, “we need but contemplate... where civilized nations stand towards each other in the relation obtaining in the barbarous state of... continuous readiness for war..., from which they have taken fixedly into their heads never to depart” (Religion 28-9). Here we might recall the new Bush doctrine that the United States
We have seen that for Augustine, evil constitutes a separation from God, a violation of nature; but it is also a separation from oneself, from one’s own nature—from the “ought” that I am capable of being. And we shall see later, as we consider the concept of “just war,” that the separation from God and from oneself constitutes also separation from other people and from all community; thus to kill separates one irreversibly from one’s victim and from civilized society. So we shall begin to consider how we might seek connection in the meeting of East and West.
II. East Meets West
A student active in our new NYU campus ministry recently expressed the complaint that, on campus, Buddhism, paganism, atheism and any variety of new age-isms are all cool but that Christianity decidedly is not. In dark times, any world-view foreign to our own is alluring, but we remain conditioned by our own culture, our own karma-- the antithesis of freedom. Rebellion against traditional forms is natural-- college students declare their separation from these as a mark of independence, though it is ironic that such assertion of personal autonomy is directly antithetical to the spirit of the East. Moreover, we fool ourselves if we mistake such separation for freedom, because we remain powerless to influence our karma as long as we pretend naively “to be above” it: to persist in such rebellion is evidently to separate oneself from the fruits and virtues of one’s own tradition and established communities and thus to separate oneself from oneself. So we must make ourselves personally aware of our own philosophical and religious traditions: just as one in psychotherapy is about the task of unearthing subconscious baggage in order to master it rather than be determined by it, so, before we can have any chance of entering into a meaningful relationship with a foreign culture, we must first master our own.
Recall that satyagraha traces its inspiration to the person of Jesus: faced with the demand of a ruthless landlord, Gandhi refers to Jesus’s demand that one give up not only one’s coat but also one’s cloak, on which Gandhi comments, “Jesus put in a picturesque and telling manner the great doctrine of non-violent non-cooperation” (375): to Gandhi, non-cooperation ironically demands that, rather than pay rent, the oppressed tenant abandon the property altogether (308). Thus satyagraha is uncompromising in its avoidance of the pretense that we are not responsible for our nation’s sins: “those who are not on the register of military service are equally participating in the crime if they support the state otherwise” (359), insists Gandhi, who refuses to permit us to separate ourselves from our own political reality.
We must also remember that Eastern traditions are boundless in scholastic and philosophical heritage; all share the quality that to understand them demands a significant degree of diligent and thoughtful study. The Buddha for one was a serious scholar who exhausted the wisdom of every sage he could find, ultimately to equal or surpass them, and Buddhist “emptiness”-- the Sanskrit sunyata—can have no meaning absent the mastery of what it is empty of. Last year I spoke of Christianity in precisely the sort of supra-rational terms usually associated with the East. Thus for Kierkegaard, the role of philosophy in “becoming a Christian” is to press reason to its limit precisely by the lucid mastery of reason itself, for only thereby may one surpass its prejudices and limitations, its otherwise debilitating karma. This is essentially analogous to the Zen Buddhist practice whereby one meditates by reasoning beyond reason: Christianity, no less than Eastern religions, seeks also nirvana.
For nirvana, we use the term faith, which is not something we have and everyone else does not-- such a view betrays childish naiveté; Sunday school is for kids, Christianity and satyagraha are strictly for grown-ups. Like love, the more of faith one uses the more there is to go around. It represents the struggle to understand ourselves, each other and the presence of violence and injustice in the world. Genuine faith is not a “warm and fuzzy” feeling, rather the person of faith is engaged at every conscious moment in a battle to the death with despair over suffering and injustice. Anyone with a passionate commitment to anything thereby asserts what Paul Tillich refers to as an “ultimate concern” and is thereby a person of faith. Faith names the existential struggle which consists in seeking the proper object of that commitment. For traditional objects of faith many of us today substitute Starbucks, gigabytes, SUV and Armani—money money! Stop shopping! To attach oneself to things is to separate oneself from oneself. Stop shopping! Put love to work!, and put faith in the boundless possibility of human being and the nurture, freedom and fulfillment of all human beings, not excluding an attendant respect for all life and indeed all creation: even a grain of sand deserves some moral respect, though we must maintain perspective. Once our ground of moral value is clear, we must, if it mean anything, refuse cooperation with what opposes it, precisely because it is our ultimate concern. It is in such action that we achieve connection with the world and with ourselves.
The archetype of Christian faith, which looks very much like the Buddha’s nirvana , is the crucified Christ suffering, immovably, the ultimate pain and humiliation still to be able to say, “Forgive them God for they know not what they do.” It is our duty as Christians to walk in his footsteps, to assume the imago Christi, just as for Gandhi the perfection of the person consists in absolute self-sacrifice for justice. Nirvana is not a condition of blissful union of self with the absolute-- atman with Brahman-- for this would imply a Cartesian conception of reality, at once absolutist and egotistical. Nirvana is also naively misunderstood as a nihilistic “state of cessation” whereby one is utterly cut off from the world. The understanding of nirvana which seems closest to the Buddha’s own is a state wherein one is fully present to the world, but where one has achieved such possession of heart, such control of mind and will, as to remain unmoved by pleasure or by pain, a state wherein one has defeated all obsession over craving, hate and confusion (Kalupahana 76). This conception seems to accord precisely with Gandhi’s description of satyagraha. “Control over the mind is alone necessary” (52), says Gandhi, and further, “unless there is a hearty cooperation of the mind, the mere outward appearance will be simply a mask, harmful both to the man himself and to others” (384-5).
Gandhi’s emphasis on inner self-control brings us to Kant’s moral philosophy. Known popularly for his rationalism, on no issue is Kant more insistent than on human freedom, which constitutes the practical purpose of reason. The theft of pears had the outward appearance of triviality, but it masked the evil which lurks within; so for Kant, in Buddhist fashion, the material world is empty of moral significance, and freedom and goodness are functions of inner moral purpose or intent.
III. Kant on “The Good Will”
Kant, like Augustine, asserts that human beings are by nature plagued by a “perversity of heart” which is inextricable from human freedom, a radical and even arbitrary capacity of unbridled possibility and power, a “propensity to evil” which is “inextirpable by human powers” but which we can yet “overcome... since it is found in man, a being who is free” (Religion 32). The antithesis of the perverse heart Kant refers to as “the good will,” and he opens his Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals with the famous adage, “There is no possibility of thinking of anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be regarded as good without qualification except a good will” (Groundwork 7). Kant’s definition of the good will is as uncompromising as Gandhi’s of satyagraha: one cannot even conceive of an unqualified good apart from the good will, not in any possible world. Note that this does not touch an all-powerful and all-loving God, who is by nature unthinkable and whose “kingdom is not of this world,” for a world must come from somewhere whereas God is uncreated, which is of course unthinkable. Though the good will is clearly incapable of practical realization-- one cannot ever fully know even one’s own innermost intentions-- this makes it all the more worthy of aspiration.
Kant’s uncompromising emphasis on the will as the wellspring of morality puts him directly at odds with a utilitarian ethics, which would judge goodness by looking to physical results. Kant restricts himself to whether one’s heart is “in the right place”: the outward appearance of virtuous qualities is irrelevant to virtue itself: “Intelligence, wit, judgment, and whatever talents of the mind one might want to name,” he says, “are doubtless in many respects good and desirable…. But they can also become extremely bad and harmful if the will... is not good....; the coolness of a villain makes him not only much more dangerous but also more abominable in our eyes than he would have been regarded by us without it” (7). The good will alone can be thought of as good because it alone is under control of itself and thus responsible for itself-- this is the essence of freedom. As for Gandhi, with the immovability of faith one can control one’s will absolutely, but where Gandhi’s emphasis is on justice, Kant’s focus on freedom leads Kant to restrict his attention to the will in itself: in Eastern fashion, the material world is empty of moral content—for Hindus the physical world is maya, illusion-- so regardless of apparent “usefulness” or “fruitlessness,” the good will must, “like a jewel, still shine by its own light as something which has its full value in itself” (8). If, like plants and animals, we were properly suited to follow our inclination to physical pleasure, says Kant, we would be ruled strictly by instinct and would have no choice but to live in simple harmony with nature; but we rule ourselves by reason, for which there must be some purpose (9).
So Kant poses this question: if human beings could be “happy as clams” if only we were deprived of reason, why has nature graced us with a faculty that seems, as contemporary events attest, to have found its primary employment in the infliction of cruelty and destruction? With or without reason, we would still be threatened, like the dinosaurs, with extinction by meteorite, yet they survived countless millions of years; but in the short, one-million year history of rational humanity we have hastened to achieve the capacity willfully to destroy all life on earth, and we hear today our own leaders extolling the virtues of nuclear bunker-busting just 25 years after universal acquiescence to policies of “no-first-use” and “nuclear non-proliferation”-- dark days indeed. So this question “why reason” is a serious one.
Previously I asserted that the ground of all morality must ultimately be the value and dignity of human being and freedom, and this is precisely where for Kant rests the ultimate purpose of reason. He refers to it as “the principle of humanity” and he says, “This principle of humanity... as an end in itself is the supreme limiting condition of every man’s freedom of action” (37). With this principle, Kant can set forth his moral law, by which reason dictates to the free will of every rational being and which he calls The Categorical Imperative, as follows: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means” (36), an analytical version of The Golden Rule. This demands that we treat others as valuable in themselves, as worthy of individual respect and dignity: we must treat each other as persons and not as things. We innately feel racism to be wrong, and today, even those who suffer intense bigotry in their hearts are typically careful not to voice it; but it is not enough, Kant would insist, merely to feel that something is wrong, for bigots feel themselves justified in their bigotry. Kant brings the mind to bear on what we might otherwise leave exclusively to the heart by showing us why racism is wrong: to judge a person on the basis of skin color, which bears no essential relationship to his or her rationality, is to classify the person according to an accidental characteristic and not according to the person’s nature as a person, as rational. Racism uses a person’s race in order to bolster one’s pitiful sense of superiority where one should rather inquire directly of other people as ends in themselves. Analogously, sexual harassment is the treatment of a person as a sexual object.
This reminds us of the reason why thoughtfulness and clarity are so important: we properly exalt individuality and cultural diversity, which make life worth living, but in order for us all to get along, we must be able to resort to the one thing that overcomes our natural, selfish inclinations, which is reason, without which no act can be free and no communication possible. Reason connects us; its absence leaves us to the oblivious brutality of instinctual inclination and thus separates us from our own nature and from each other.
Kant understands perfectly that it is in the natural, material world where human reason must act, or where the determinations of the will by reason manifest themselves to other reasoning wills-- it is here alone where justice might happen; but he focuses on the good will in itself because one can never be certain how any action, however pure one’s intentions, will turn out and how others will react to it: Kant’s focus is on the infinite possibilities of the free will, which can respond to reason’s demand of respect for the “principle of humanity,” rather than over its physical effects, over which reason cannot rule.
IV. Gandhi on Violence
Where Kant ignores the external results of moral action, Gandhi is upliftingly sanguine about satyagraha’s practical power:
Its use is... I think, indispensable, and it is a force which, if it became universal, would revolutionize social ideals and do away with despotisms and the ever growing militarism under which the nations of the West are groaning and are being almost crushed to death, and which fairly promises to overwhelm even the nations of the East. (36)
Notwithstanding this confidence, Gandhi, like Kant, insists that the noble, self-sacrificing act of the Satyagrahi may well result not in physical contentment but in death, and this he or she is powerless to control. Thus Gandhi invokes the Gospel of the lilies and the birds to say, “A seeker after Truth… cannot hold anything against tomorrow. God never stores for the morrow; He never creates more than what is strictly needed for the moment. If therefore we repose faith in His providence, we should rest assured that He will give us every day our daily bread, meaning everything that we require” (45). So for Gandhi, as for Kant, one’s contentment must reside in the moral conviction of the justice of one’s own action, as determined by the will in accordance with reason, whatever physical suffering it might bring on. It is thus that Gandhi can say, “the exercise of the purest soul-force brings about instantaneous relief” (35), instantaneous because what results, useful or fruitless, is irrelevant to its moral rectitude, and one must seek one’s “relief” in the immovability of nirvana without expectation of immediate, manifest justice.
For Gandhi, as for Kant and Augustine, violence has its root in the human heart, of which he says, “Let alone the world, I, the self-styled general, have repeatedly admitted that we have violence in our hearts, that we are often violent to each other in our mutual dealings” (304). We heard Gandhi say above that “life persists in the midst of destruction and, therefore, there must be a higher law,” to which he adds, “if that is the law of life, we have to work it out in daily life” (383). Violence, in its essence, does not manifest itself as physical force: physically to restrain a child where one’s intent is strictly the interest of the child is not “violent” (14). But flattery is violent because, to use Kantian terms, when I flatter someone I seek to manipulate a person for my own selfish purposes: I treat the person not as an end but as a means to my own end. Deceit is violent for the same reason-- Kant does not countenance it under any circumstances, and Gandhi says, “Under violence I include corruption, falsehood, hypocrisy, deceit and the like” (294). More evidently still is rudeness violent-- it’s a put-down that separates by closing off communication and empathy, and racism even if it never finds expression-- perhaps especially when one suppresses it, for then it is redoubled by the violence of deceit. Thinking ourselves superior to the bus driver or the sanitation worker or the waiter is violent because it separates us from them in our implicit judgment that they are unworthy of us-- moral absolutism, which identifies us as good and the other as evil, is the ultimate form of this; and for the opposite reason, envy is violent because it separates us from ourselves by our wishing to be someone we are not, and it separates us from the other by making us resent another’s gift.
So I am proposing, à la Kant, that we focus on inner intent as the moral criterion to distinguish violence from justice; this is crucial in the context of non-violent resistance, which shares with violence itself that it often incites the violent reprisal of the oppressor—recall Bull Conner’s dogs and fire hoses, which really made the point. But doesn’t Kant say that the good will, while thinkable, is practically unattainable, and that one can never perfectly fathom the motivations of one’s own will much less those of another? He does, but we ask juries to do precisely this every day, primarily in rendering criminal verdicts; thus the distinction among degrees of homicide is strictly a function of criminal intent, and jurors must essentially read the minds of defendants, drawing of course on outward behavior, to distinguish between murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide and their degrees. Thus to convict of first-degree murder, a jury must determine, as a matter of fact and beyond a reasonable doubt, that the accused specifically intended to cause the death of the victim with premeditation or, in the words of the common law, with “malice aforethought.” Second-degree murder typically depends on a finding that the accused exhibited a “wanton disregard for human life” or was possessed of a “depraved heart” In all cases, jurors must speculate on the willfulness of the defendant, and on such speculations are determined liberty, life and death. And this is proper because Gandhi, Augustine and Kant are right: violence is rooted in the heart.
So with Kant, specifically, we must look to the heart, to intent, for moral judgment. In the days ahead this will be more important than ever: we will see many argue that this war is justified because its appearance and results are good. This will be possible in part because American journalists are so craven as to have abandoned even the pretense of investigative reporting and questioning to marry themselves to the military; we’ve come a long way since Viet Nam
Violent means—dumping defective American products on third-world nations, exploiting foreign labor and suppressing labor organization at home, overthrowing democratic regimes in favor of repressive dictatorships friendly to business—produce violent ends as Gandhi asserts and history attests; the intentions of our foreign policy betray themselves in economic, political and military strong-arming and hegemony. Our hearts are emphatically not “in the right place”: this war is about raw, violent power; thus its result can only be the perpetuation and even praise of raw violence. We must be willing and prepared to understand ourselves and our history so that we might understand and live in mutual fulfillment with others. Our only hope is to cling to truth.
So the path of the Satyagrahi begins with the arduous examination of the self. We must cast off false piety, false humility and indeed falsity of every kind; we must reject the rudeness that puts down and separates the other to seek connection and common ground with all. “Fear and love are contradictory terms” (384), says Gandhi, so we must reject not only war but also its threat. We can understand these things only if we think them through together, particularly where other cultures are involved, for we can always recognize one another as rational beings and thus as free persons worthy of respect as ends in themselves. Anti-intellectualism is thus a most insidious form of violence, for it cuts from beneath us that one sure point of common ground. Recall that Socrates was the Western world’s first moralist and first civil disobedient: he was executed, in 399 BC, precisely because he exposed to his war-torn and strife-ridden fellow citizens the arrogance of their dogmatic claims to knowledge. Had he been willing to give up philosophy, they were agreed to spare him; he chose instead, unto death, to cling to the truth (Apology).
V. Postscript: On “Just War”
I opened this talk with Augustine’s theft of pears, in which the adolescent asserts his autonomy in the acknowledgment of the unfathomable power of the human will for depravity and violence; but I didn’t finish the story. Recall that peer pressure was at work under the pear tree: Augustine says that “alone, by myself, I would not have done it,” and he struggles to understand the incentive furnished by his comrades. “If I had merely liked the pears that I stole, and merely wished to eat them, I could have done so by myself, were doing that wrong deed enough to lead me to my pleasure. Nor would I have needed to arouse the itch of my desires by rubbing together guilty minds. But my pleasure lay not in the pears, it lay in the evil deed itself, which a group of us joined in sin to do.” Throughout his Confessions, Augustine urges the personal and spiritual importance of human community, but here its virtue is perversely inverted. “I also loved in it my association with the others with whom I did the deed. Then it was not only the theft that I loved?,” he asks himself, and answers “No, truly nothing else, because my association with the others was itself nothing.” This nothing constitutes a total separation from human being: community, otherwise so essential to human freedom and fulfillment, had fallen from God and turned to violence. “O friendship so unfriendly!” he laments, “Unfathomable seducer of the mind, greed to do harm for fun and sport, desire for another’s injury, arising not from desire for my own gain or for vengeance, but merely when someone says ‘Let’s go! Let’s do it!’ and it is shameful not to be shameless!”
Consider how soldiers, in the unfathomable nightmare of war’s terror, can incite each other to unthinkable atrocities; consider WorldCom and Enron and Arthur Anderson, where justification reduces to “everybody’s doing it”; and consider the solidarity in shamelessness of our current political leaders and their allies. Militant mob mentality displaces individual conscience and transforms the virtue of society into sin. This is why the crime of conspiracy is as serious as the completed crime itself: danger to the community increases exponentially as individuals combine in a common demonic purpose. The mere threat of war stops truth dead, sincerity is impossible and justice a dream. War separates all from all: individual and community are nothing. An army at war is not a human community; it is a killing machine.
“Just war” theory is often claimed to be essentially related to the law of self-defense, and the United Nations Charter casts it in essentially these terms: the only provision that would justify a state’s unilateral resort to military force is Article 51, which limits such resort to the repulsion of “armed attack.” But this analogy between an individual person and a war machine is dubious. Essential always to the justification of the use of deadly force in self defense is the imminence of an actual physical threat, and where the aggressor is an individual, one can plausibly argue that he or she implicitly waives the right to the respect of others, and to life itself, by seeking to kill an innocent victim. But in the context of war, particularly with its radical escalation in scale and destructiveness since the industrial revolution, innocent people will be killed, and one can offer no plausible reason why it is right to kill them. In the fog of war, all become anonymous and personal interaction reduces to killing or the conspiracy to kill: all is nothing. Today’s video games are shocking, the fireworks over Baghdad Texas
If we need practical confirmation of the inherent injustice of war, consider the question Quaker Anti-War activist Daniel Seeger posed to Fr. Brian Hehir, an expert and author on just war theory, at a forum on just war at Columbia
Just war, Reverend Father, just war Honorable Prime Minister, just war, you say, Mr. President? To politicians I suspect it’s just a game of real politick, to generals just a strategic exercise, to oil tycoons just an investment opportunity and to weapons engineers and profiteers just a testing ground for the latest generation of computer-guided missiles.
But it’s not just war.
WORKS CITED
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Gandhi, M. K., Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha) (Mineola , NY
Kalupahana, David J., Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1976).
Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, with “On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns,” tr. Ellington, James W. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1981).
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