Morality, equivalence, and pacifism

Jonathan Dresner is single-handedly responsible for at least a dozen of my posts.  Today, he sent me this link to a Michael Neumann article in  Counterpunch. Entitled "How We Became Barbarians", it is a provocative op-ed on terrorism, civilian casualties, and collateral damage. It got me thinking about many things, especially pacifism (something I haven't blogged about in a while).

Some excerpts:

People can get astonishingly sensitive when they discuss moral issues.

Someone who can scarf popcorn all through *both* Kill Bills will go hoarse about the killing of innocents in Israel or Iraq or anywhere suitably distant. Someone who'd cheer a B-52 strike on Baghdad will murmur feelingly about the perfect little hands of a second trimester fetus. And everyone hates terrorism with a passion because it victimizes innocent people: that's so outrageous!

Really the claptrap about terrorism has gone far enough. Brutes should at least recognize their own brutality. None of us, left, right, or center, are all that bothered about the deliberate killing of innocents. Virtually none of us think it's that big a deal to tear the flesh off a child.

Okay, now you've got my attention. What Neumann means, of course, is that since the advent of air power, we in the industrialized West have become increasingly accepting of the "collateral damage" (loss of civilian life) that comes with bombing.

The brutalization of attitudes towards attacks on civilians was and is quite universal. We may deplore some such attacks, but not all of them. We disagree, not about whether they are ever legitimate, but rather about whether they should be blatant. Some think it's ok to kill civilians as long as they're not really your target. Others think that they can be all or part of your target. It's the difference between dropping bombs you know will kill civilians and dropping bombs to kill civilians.

Amen. It's refreshing to see this argument made by a secular leftist rather than by an Anabaptist; Neumann sounds here as if he is  indeed close to the position of most Mennonites around the world.  It's the refusal to see as morally legitimate the sophistry that he describes so well that led me to embrace pacifism in the first place.  Christian morality ought to be about total and radical congruence between "ends" and "means" -- peacemaking can only be done peacefully, modelled on the life of Christ Himself.

But Neumann is not an Anabaptist pacifist. (He's a Canadian philosopher.)   The central point of his article revolves around the distinction between "expected" and "unexpected" collateral damage.  You'll need to read that bit carefully. 

But it's Neumann's conclusion that is so remarkable:

What, then, is left to us, if we have become so cruel? We cannot say that two wrongs don't make a right, or that our hypocrisy doesn't justify others' savagery, because it is the very rules of morality that we have come to view differently. We really do believe that murdering innocents is, in the relevant cases, no sort of wrong at all. We cannot reproach others for terrorism, not because this would be hypocritical, but because it would be inconsistent. Our own standards allow what we might like to forbid.

Terror, by our own standards, isn't always wrong. Neither is the murder of innocent civilians, including children. Excoriating these practices is nothing more or less than a cynical or pointlessly moralistic diversion from any serious attempt to prevent them.

Such an attempt can't attack the practices themselves for the excellent reason that we have no moral basis for attacking them. To the extent that they can be prevented, it is only through appeals to self-interest, not to compassion or a level of decency we quite obviously lack.

There's much more.  Like much of what appears on Counterpunch, the rhetoric is harsh.  And I can in no way agree with Neumann's rather remarkable conviction that this is why Israeli and American atrocities are so much worse than Iraqi or Palestinian atrocities.

Uh, sorry Mike, you lost me there.  Neumann does a far better job of stripping American military tactics of moral legitimacy than he does of imbuing the intifadas with that same legitimacy.  Consistent-life pacifism is never as concerned with intent as other philosophies are; it is concerned with method.  The Mennonite vision of pacifism (to which I still cling) is one of radical faith that God holds us responsible for our actions, but He remains sovereign over the outcomes of those actions. 

Our limited humanity often sees no way other than violence to accomplish a good end; we are like Peter in the garden on that last night, flailing away with a sword at the guards who had come to take Jesus off to die.  We justify violence because we are, for all of our external piety, mostly "Good Friday" Christians.  We see the world as violent and chaotic, and feel compelled to use the sword to defend the vulnerable and to bring in justice.  Christian pacifism is an Easter theology -- it is only when one is convinced and convicted of the absurd and marvelous Good News  of the resurrection that one can contemplate letting go of even the noblest justifications for the use of violence.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

I'm in the middle of reading Marilynne Robinson's new book "Gilead" and this post made me think you'd enjoy it. The narrator's father was a pacifist; his grandfather a militant abolitionist; all three characters are ministers. It's a lovely piece about many things, including faith.

[DJW]

As a non-theist, I am reluctant to criticize or even comment on theistic-inspired pacifism. My view on pacifism as an ideology isn't a particularly charitable one (even though I think they're correct in their conclusions about American foreign policy at least 80% of the time).

But here's my question. It seems to me that pacifism requires a strong, non-porous wall to be erected between doing and allowing. This strong distinction is hard to maintain if you have a relational--or almost any kind of nuanced and non-mechanical--understanding of human agency. Right? What am I missing?

The response I usually get to this query is that when you apparently face a choice between doing and allowing violence, you should vigorously look for a third alternative, one that the limited imagination of non-pacifists can't see. Which I agree with in general (even, in part, the limited imagination point). But it's still a dodge, because it's certainly possible those situations won't always exist.

There are certainly good reasons to see Neumann's distinction between the badness of IRaqi and American atrocities, and attempts to distinguish between violent acts can often lead to troubling and unsustainable positions like this one.

But it goes both ways--refusing to even try to think about the relative and differing moral quality of violence in different contexts leads to equally (more!) absurd conclusions. Hitting someone over the head with a frying pan because they're a rapist in mid-attack and because you like causing pain--we really do need to distinguish between these two things, don't we?

[Hugo]

Of course we do, DJW. Pacifism is not a unified system of thought! The issue of self-defense is an enormously troubled one for pacifists, and there are a variety of answers (some pacifists say they wouldn't use the frying pan, some say they would, and so forth). I do a disservice to pacifist theology when I attempt to summarize it so rapidly, but that's blogdom.

I don't know how to hold a non-theistic pacifist position. Pacifism is very much against my nature, and only my faith has proven able to overcome that nature. I salute those who come to pacifism in other ways!

[Xrlq]

I agree with DJW's basic point about erecting a wall between doing and allowing. It's one thing to advocate that war be avoided most of the time, but to conclude that it is always the wrong approach requires you to assume it is better to allow someone else to kill millions than it is to stop him by killing a few thousand yourself. That's not a "consistent life" ethic, just a consistent I-didn't-do-it ethic.

[zuzu]

It sounds as though his concern is how remote killing has become. It's easy to indulge the barbarian in ourselves when we are in a plane or thinking about Iraqis as "the enemy" or being armchair warriors talking about exterminating all the "ragheads." But if we actually had to stare down the person we're trying to kill, to put ourselves in harm's way, it might be very different.

I mean, did you notice that the military was reluctant to go into Iraq because they knew what was involved, while the chickenhawks who'd never seen a day of combat were out for blood? Well, as long as someone else did the actual fighting.

There was a fascinating piece in the New Yorker a few months ago about the effect of killing on soldiers. It's absolutely, by far, the most damaging thing to a soldier's psyche, far above being shot at. Many won't do it. And the military, for somewhat obvious reasons, hasn't really addressed the issue other than to encourage soldiers to see their enemy as targets or something other than human.

[Xrlq]

No, I hadn't noticed that all the anti-war protestors were military men, probably because it isn't true. "Chickenhawk" is childish name-calling, nothing more. Thank you for playing.

[zuzu]

No, I hadn't noticed that all the anti-war protestors were military men, probably because it isn't true.

Tiresome as it is to even have to respond to yet another case of your deliberate misinterpretation of my words, did I say "all" anywhere? Go look. I didn't, did I?

"Chickenhawk" is childish name-calling, nothing more.

Well, if the shoe fits...

[Xrlq]

Speaking of tiresome, you are the one who made a foolish, unsupportable claim that the military generally was reluctant to go to war, while so-called chickenhawks were not. You have absolutely no basis for that claim, nor for the use of your childish slur. If the shoe doesn't fit...

[Hugo]

If you Cinderella's stepsisters can't get your foot into the shoe... oh well.

Where I come from, "chickenhawk" is a term used to describe older gay men who like teenage boys.

[zuzu]

When I use the term "chickenhawk," I refer specifically to the Project for a New American Century neocons such as Perle and Wolfowitz, our Dear Leaders Cheney and Bush, and media cheerleaders like Bill O'Reilly. All of them have beat the drums for the Iraq war, all of them managed to avoid combat service in Vietnam, if they didn't avoid service entirely. Rumsfeld also never saw combat.

Compare, if you will, to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. He expressed misgivings about the Iraq adventure and was pushed out. Marine Gen. Pace of the Joint Chiefs of Staff lobbied for a UN solution. Gens. Zinni and Clark have also publicly criticized the Iraq war as misconceived and misbegotten. Colin Powell has even leaked his misgivings, though he's too good a political operator to do it publicly and directly (nor could he, after his performance at the UN).

[Rhesa]

When I use the term "chickenhawk," I refer specifically to the Project for a New American Century neocons such as Perle and Wolfowitz, our Dear Leaders Cheney and Bush, and media cheerleaders like Bill O'Reilly. All of them have beat the drums for the Iraq war, all of them managed to avoid combat service in Vietnam, if they didn't avoid service entirely. Rumsfeld also never saw combat.

Um, what about us who supported the war but aren't in the military? You would apply the same term to them and me, wouldn't you?

[Rhesa]

I'm not a pacifist, but neither do I advocate violence to solve ALL problems. I certainly didn't lust for blood when it came to invading Iraq; getting rid of Saddam and freeing the Iraqis was what was foremost in my mind.

My two cents.

[George Turner]

Do you mean chickenhawks like Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, and Reagan?

Or do you mean non-chickenhawks like Colin Powell and Tommy Franks?

[NancyP]

Re: chickenhawks, in the non-gay sense. These are aggressively pro-war individuals who are or were eligible to serve in the military and either didn't volunteer (post-Vietnam) or got out of serving with a high number or with a bogus class-based deferment. They all had other priorities when their own lives could be put on the line, but they are happy to sacrifice other men's sons in a world where their own children belong to the upper classes that don't need to serve or feel a duty to serve.

xrlq, in case you don't know, military officers see themselves as in the business of winning wars , not in the business of losing their men's lives on the whim of a politician who wants to prove theories and win elections. That's why some generals considered the Rumsfeld plan with low troop numbers to be worth protesting. The Rumsfeld plan was felt to violate the doctrine of overwhelming force both in war and in occupation. I believe that the general staff is far more concerned about casualties than the civilian administration. Officers have to look their men in the eye.

[George Turner]

Nancy,

If routing an army of 400,000 men in three weeks with less than a company's worth of casualties isn't overwhelming force, what is? And it was General Franks and the other generals at CENTCOM who came up with the innovative plan to go in with lower troop numbers than in the Gulf War, not Rumsfeld, Powell, Perle, Wolfowitz, or any of the other neocons (read evil Joooos...), who had to be convinced that our newer technologies and modern maneuver warfare made the new type of attack possible.

Generals like Clark don't look their troops in the eye, they expect them to bow, which is why Clark was known to his soldiers in Bosnia as "the Perfumed Prince".

[zuzu]

George, why are the troops still putting hillbilly armor on their humvees? I thought mission was accomplished.

Um, what about us who supported the war but aren't in the military? You would apply the same term to them and me, wouldn't you?

If you'd read carefully, you would have seen that each of the individuals I named avoided combat when it was near-compulsory for men their age and are now in a position to directly influence either war policy or public opinion.

However, if you're subject to a draft, find that you have "other priorities," thereby forcing others with higher draft numbers but fewer connections to go in your place, and in 30 years or so find yourself in a position to actually take the country to an ill-advised war and do, then I might apply the same label.

Believe it or not, as reprehensible as I find Rush Limbaugh, I don't apply the chickenhawk label to him. His pilondial cyst, though it makes me have to think about his ass, was a legitimate out at the time, due to hygiene concerns.

[zuzu]

Do you mean chickenhawks like Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, and Reagan?

Tell me, which of them were subject to a draft who refused to go? Which Roosevelt, Teddy or Franklin? I'm sure you're aware of Teddy's military service, and Franklin's being in a wheelchair much of his life. Truman served in the military.

And then there's Reagan. He only thought he'd been in the war, since he'd acted in WWII movies.

[Rhesa]

The reason I asked is because the anti-war folks have a tendency to dismiss the pro-war side's arguments by asking them why they don't enlist and join the military in most of the debates I've read.

I'm glad you don't use the "chickenhawk" label in the same manner, but maybe you might consider this: the Gallup polls prior to our invasion in 2003 showed that over half of the public supported first approaching the UN for a resolution, and when that didn't work out, about the same amount of the public supported unilateral action to force the Saddam regime out.

[George Turner]

Well Zuzu,

Bush wasn't subject to a draft, since he was already a military fighter pilot, one of the few jobs in the Air Force where he could expect to get shot at. When last I checked, fighter pilots weren't given much say as to when a big war with the Soviet Union would start, even though even reserve pilots were rotated through front line European positions. Just his own logged flight hours put him at the same risk of death as serving a year in Vietnam, and volunteering to fly an F-102 deathtrap rates considerably higher in my book than faking a back injury to go skiing in Colorado, as did the DNC's sunshine candidate, Howard Dean. You remember, the guy who was a shoe-in before John Kerry shouted everyone else down by ringing out "I served in Vietnam". It seems the voters were a bit particular about which side he served on, not just that he was over there.

Dick Cheney was described as "one of his most brilliant students" by Col. John Boyd, who wrote our first book on aerial combat tactics, first showed that a fighter plane could outmaneuver a missile, invented the concept of both the OODA loop and energy-maneuver theory in aerial combat, who headed "the fighter mafia" in the Pentagon and developed our modern Marine ground warfare tactics and modern ground maneuver warfare theories.

So I'd take Cheney over a candidate who thinks envelopment tactics apply to surrounding issues instead of enemies, and whose positions still remain a mystery, somehow involving an increase or decrease in troops levels, combined with making our allies, who he insulted as a coalition of the bribed and coerced, to contribute more troops to "the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place." It's hard to imagine a more staggering feat of total diplomatic ineptitude, but then again I'm also not holding my breath waiting for his "better plans" to get recorded into actual sentences and forwarded to anyone other than the crack research teams keeping tabs on the Lock Ness Monster.

However, nothing will be more amusing than watching how fast the whole chickenhawk idea gets dropped when the DNC realizes they're fresh out of candidates who ever set foot on a military base, much less served in uniform.

You also mentioned Donald Rumsfeld, naval aviator and retired Captain, United States Navy. Not sure why, though. Guess because he was in on planning sessions with all those evil Jooos….. (Note that Bush and Cheney aren't called neo-cons, because they're Christians. Why do Islamic and ultra-left websites think that's such a big issue?)

[zuzu]

The "neocon=Jew, and therefore criticism of neocons is anti-Semitic" thing is old and tired, George. Neocons are a specific ideological group who went from Democrat to Republican beginning in the 70s. Bush and Cheney do not belong to that group. That there happen to be Jews among the neocons, and that some of the most visible are Jews, does not make them some kind of stand-in for Jews in general. I could argue that the right's derision of liberal Upper West Siders is also anti-Semitic.

Bush jumped the line to get into the "champagne unit" of TANG and couldn't be bothered to show up for his service. Cheney used every last deferment he could and later said he had "other priorities."

Dean was against the Iraq war, you might remember. He was also against Vietnam, so his position has been consistent, if not entirely admirable.

You'll note that nowhere in any of my posts did I generally criticize those who avoided service; I saved my scorn for those who saved their hides then even though they were for the Vietnam war and are now in a position to directly take the country into the current catastrophic success, or are in influential policy or media positions cheering it on.

[mythago]

It seems the voters were a bit particular about which side he served on

You're not *really* accusing Senator Kerry of treason, are you?

[George Turner]

Zuzu,

Going from Democrat to Republican isn't odd, it's normal. Why do you think Democrats have counted on the youth vote for the past 40 years? Why don't our older voters vote like they did when they were young? It seems a large number of people switch parties, which might explain why most of the conservatives I know are former socialists and communists, even former "Young Pioneers" from the Soviet Union and high-level communist party members who were anti-war planners in Berkeley in the 1960's. Or maybe you should zip over to Islam-Online and catch the full video presentation on the evil neo-con Jews, laid out case by case, along with their perfidious links to Zionist war crimes. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are specifically NOT neo-con due to their religion. They're just Israeli sock-puppets.

The Bush campaign had to tell people to hold off showing the records documenting that Kerry had been taking direction directly from Hanoi, which was never in much dispute since he had secret meetings with them in Paris, which under Article 104 of the UCMJ could've had him executed by firing squad, except the government didn't want to give ammunition to the protestors by prosecuting such acts.

But on the bright side, 70 million people got to spend a generation under totalitarian communism, with the Buddhist monks still setting themselves on fire to protest religious freedom, but without foreign news cameras there to cover it.

[zuzu]

Kerry had been taking direction directly from Hanoi, which was never in much dispute since he had secret meetings with them in Paris, which under Article 104 of the UCMJ could've had him executed by firing squad, except the government didn't want to give ammunition to the protestors by prosecuting such acts.

Too bad for you Kerry had been discharged at the time and so wasn't subject to the UCMJ. You know, Vietnam Veterans Against the War?

[mythago]

George, your tinfoil is a little wrinkly there.

. Or maybe you should zip over to Islam-Online and catch the full video presentation on the evil neo-con Jews, laid out case by case, along with their perfidious links to Zionist war crimes.

You can find all kinds of conspiracy nuts on the Web. That's a far cry from trying to fob off all criticism of neocons by accusing all critics of anti-Semitism.

[zuzu]

Though fobbing off criticism of neocons by accusing all critics of anti-Semitism is a terrific way to avoid addressing the criticism!