Protecting the country's security is "a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people. And we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek." - Dick CheneyH.J. Massingham's The Tree of Life was originally published in England in 1943. Its central argument revolves around a profound dual loss: the loss of the love of the land for its own sake and the loss of the Christian religion. For Massingham, the two go hand in hand. There is a distinct paradox at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon experience, for they are they who have written the greatest poems in praise of nature and have done the most destruction to the face of the earth. Massingham reckons this was partially the result of a failure to appreciate the centrality of nature to Christianity, the fundamental unity of heaven and earth. The culmination of that failure is war, including the Second World War.
From the later Middle Ages to the present day the history of Western Europe has been that of the intensification of war, first religious and then economic wars, until the whold fabric has come to the point, unless some drastic rehabilitation takes place, of total collapse as the consequence of total war.Now, the total collapse of western civilization has been predicted many times. It may yet be upon us and may yet come from total war. One important question to ask ourselves repeatedly is where do we stand on war. I am the first to acknowledge the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence, but I long for a world where those distinctions are unnecessary.
It seems reasonable to me that the laws which govern individuals should govern nations. J. Reuben Clark, a prominent attorney and religious leader, thought along the same lines. In an interesting article on Clark's Isolationism in the journal Dialogue I discovered that Clark, like Cicero, considered treaties absolute. For Clark, the 19C efforts to "lessen the evils of war, and especially to relieve noncombatants . . . from the ravages of war" were one of the most significant developments of public policy. There is no justification for the wholesale bombing of cities, destruction of property, and the indiscriminate killing of women and children. The world, Clark wrote, had "gone back a half millennium in its conduct of international relations in time of war. . . . no nation has to bear a greater blame for this than our own." He called the use of atomic weapons on Japan "shameful," and declared that "we are now living under the law of the jungle where in cataclysms every beast fights to the death of his own life."
Clark opposed military establishments and standing armies, advocating instead moral force. "We must have a world organization for the purpose of deliberation, but not for the purpose of waging wars and imposing sanctions," he wrote. Given a world where power politics will fail, Clark recommended the U.S. role be two-fold:
1. To foster international communication, including trade and commerce, while shunning political involvement.The enemy of human freedom is war; the friend of human freedom is peace. In addition to this two-fold mission, America and the world's hope, for Clark, was in learning and practicing "the divine principles of the Sermon on the Mount. There is no other way." The only way to govern is by good will, not physical force. "We have lost, at least for the moment, the temper to live at peace with our brethren of the world, our fellow children of God."
2. To support the cause of peace by working for the settlement of international disputes by mediation and arbitration.
Perhaps nations and individuals, myself included, could try turning the other cheek. It isn't easy, but it is compelling.
2 comments:
You mention briefly a consideration I'd like to spend more time on: what is the difference you see between legitimate and illegitimate violence? Would a ground invasion of Japan to end the war have been any more justified than an A-bomb, for example?
I think Clark's different take on a globalized society is interesting, but it feels from your brief summary that it almost turns a blind eye to things like human rights abuses in other countries if we shun political involvement. Am I reading that right?
Well, just war theorists and others make a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Usually what it comes down to, as far as I understand it, is that legitimate violence is authorized by the state. So a person destroying property would be illegimate; a police officer stopping that person by constraint would be legitimate. The example you give of a ground invasion might be legitimate . . . and certainly respects the test better than the A-bomb because the latter creates such violent destruction.
I don't think Clark turns a blind eye to human rights abuses, but rather believers, perhaps naively, that the answer to such abuses is not violence, but communication, mediation, arbitration, &c. Certainly the question still needs to be raised about whether any violence is justified or justifiable. The piece on Clark does not address his ideas on that topic. It does, however, show Clark quoting Cicero's _De Officiis_.
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