I’ve been a participant in various discussions on and off blogs, about the laws of war, just war theory and so on, as it applies to recent events. Though I think it is necessary to get clear about those things, there’s a horrible disconnection and abstractness about the debates, which doesn’t seem respond appropriately to the human miseries, to the people who are most human to us just as they are stripped of their humanity. Two texts came to mind when I thought about this, and felt feeling of disgust at myself for treating such matters as theoretical exercises. The first was Yeats’s “On a Political Prisoner”:http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/on_a_political_prisoner.html , and the second was Rousseau’s _The State of War_ from which I reproduce the opening lines below:
I open the books of law and morality, I listen to the sages and the philosophers of law, and, imbued by their insidious speeches, I am led to deplore the miseries of nature, and to admire the peace and justice established by the the civil order. I bless the wisdom of public institutions and console myself about my humanity through seeing myself as a citizen. Well instructed concerning my duties and my happiness, I shut the book, leave the classroom and look around. I see wretched peoples moaning beneath a yoke of iron, the human race crushed by the fist of oppressors, a starving and enfeebled crowd whose blood and tears are drunk in peace by the rich, and everywhere I see the strong armed against the weak with the terrifying power of the laws.
All this takes place peacefully and without resistance; it is the tranquility of the companions of Ulysses shut into the Cyclops cave and waiting their turn to be devoured. One must tremble and keep silent. Let us draw a permanent veil over these horrible phenomena. I lift my eyes and I look into the distance. I notice fires and flames, deserted countryside, pillaged towns. Ferocious men, where are you dragging those wretches? I hear a terrible sound. What a confusion! What cries! I draw closer and I see a theatre of murders, ten thousand men with their throats cut, the dead trampled by the hooves of horses, and everywhere a scene of death and agony. Such is the fruit of these peaceful institutions. Pity and indignation rise up from the the depths of my heart. Barbarous philosopher: try reading us your book on the field of battle.
{ 21 comments }
kharris 07.31.06 at 11:20 am
Not to make the Bush and Blair administrations’ job easier, but isn’t there a reason for pursuing a dry, unfeeling debate on these issues? The people who don’t suffer and die because war was fought to protect them are invisible. The innocents who die because of the war are visible. If we rely on our emotions for guidance, those with empathy will never fight. The invisible, potential sufferers cannot weigh enough to matter. That leaves decisions about war and peace to those with no empathy.
We need to think about these things in a bloodless manner for a while, just to make sure that we can think at all about war. There is, of course, another camp that prefers to be guided by their emotions rather than their minds regarding war, and who are not guided by empathy. We don’t want the debate to devolve to emotionally responses, because we don’t want the emotional responses of an awful lot of people in this debate.
Mike Otsuka 07.31.06 at 11:23 am
“I listen to the sages and the philosophers of law, and … I am led … to admire the peace and justice established by the civil order. I bless the wisdom of public institutions … [But then] I see a theatre of murders, ten thousand men with their throats cut, the dead trampled by the hooves of horses, and everywhere a scene of death and agony. Such is the fruit of these peaceful institutions.â€
Sounds more like a condemnation of philosophical apologies for a brutal status quo than a rejection of theoretical abstraction more generally. It’s one thing to make use such abstractions to provide an apology for the blowing up of innocent children and another to make use of them to condemn this.
Chris Bertram 07.31.06 at 12:01 pm
Mike, I’m not rejecting theoretical abstraction. Indeed I said it was necessary to get straight on these things. But I’m afraid that it is far too easy to get sucked into discussion with those for whom it is all a great armchair game of grand strategy and who get excited about whether this or that move in the game was legal or not. “Israel was _perfectly entitled_ to do X” and “Hezbollah was within its rights to do Y” they tell us, reading the Geneva conventions as if they were decoding some rather obscure passage in the rules to Monopoly or Scrabble. Engaging with such people is, I think, corrosive if one begins to partake of their alienation.
kharris. I don’t accept your way of thinking about the connection between reason and emotion. But on the whole, I don’t think we’ve been well served by those who _think of themselves_ as prepared to put aside their emotions and think about war purely as a matter of bloodless calculation.
Shelby 07.31.06 at 12:03 pm
It’s one thing to make use such abstractions to provide an apology for the blowing up of innocent children and another to make use of them to condemn this.
And still another to dwell on the philosophical abstractions while ignoring reality. Or at least, that’s the meaning I draw from the Rousseau quotation.
Adam Kotsko 07.31.06 at 12:11 pm
The first comment in this thread appears to refer to a type of war that does not actually exist.
Ajax 07.31.06 at 12:40 pm
Rousseau, of course, is a fine one to talk about the suffering of specific human beings. His sentiments deserted him when it came to his political theory of democracy, which includes the most absurd abstract nonsense about the General Will. I know of no society, and I bet JJ knew of none also, where there is an agreed General Will about any matter. Arguably (and Oliver Wendell Holmes, among others, argued it), such a society would be undesirable.
bi 07.31.06 at 12:44 pm
I think it’s time we face up to the fact that the Geneva conventions are defunct for all practical purposes. :(
On a related note, I just saw this page.
me 07.31.06 at 1:17 pm
ajax, I think you got Rousseau wrong. The idea of a general will idea is NOT that of a perfect or even near-perfect consensus about any substantive policy issue. The idea is merely that when deliberating about which policies to adopt, citizens should be thinking not from the point of will of their individual (egoistic?) interests (in which case their combined preferences would constitute nothing but ‘the will of all’), but with the good of the entire body of citizens in mind. What the precise content of this ‘common good’ *is* — that, Rousseau thinks, is open to debate, and should be decided in a majoritarian fashion.
Sorry for getting off-topic. I just don’t like it when poor JJ gets bashed unjustifiably. Anyway, I’m sure Chris would be able to give a more authoritative take on this…
me 07.31.06 at 1:18 pm
oops, correction:
third sentence should read: “…not from the point of VIEW of their individual…”
me 07.31.06 at 1:27 pm
And just to get this back on-topic:
The danger I see in detached, academic, overly abstract political theorizing is that conclusions drawn from ‘hard-case’-type thought experiments (or from ‘let’s-see-how-our-intuitions-match-this-ridiculous-example’-type theorizing), which bear little resemblance to the actual issues facing policymakers, might shape one’s conclusions about the more commonplace cases. (While the latter might to some extent resemble the more extreme theoretical cases, they too often do not).
An example that comes to mind is the ‘able-bodied surfer’ in the context of debates over universal minimum income. This kind of extreme case *can* be used wisely, but often is not.
Sebastian Holsclaw 07.31.06 at 2:03 pm
I think quite a bit of the problem with abstract thinking on things like the Hague or Geneva Conventions is that it completely misses how pragmatic the documents really are. That is one of the reasons why discussions about what happens when a ‘just but weak’ force wants to fight look so silly. Both sets of conventions realize that both sides think that they are just. The rules don’t get particularly involved in that except to try to mark a very limited number of things as always unjust.
Steve 07.31.06 at 2:17 pm
bi-
Total war? During WWII, the Western powers (the good guys) killed around 80,000 civilians in one night (several times; at Dresden, at Hiroshima, at Nagasaki). Soviet losses are estimated at as much as 50 million (though realistically they were at least 20 million; 10 million soldiers, 10 million civilians). Similar numbers in China. Western powers routinely sent 1000 plane bombing runs over German cities to break the civilian will to fight (i.e. to kill civilians).
During the US Civil War, approximately 600,000 Americans died.
There are about 450 prisoners at Guantanamo. There have been about 600 civilians killed in Lebanon. I don’t know how many civilians have been killed in Iraq-probably in the thousands, but the vast majority were killed by the insurgents (i.e. the bad guys). Thus far in Iraq, approximately 2,500 American soldiers have died.
How do ‘total war’ and ‘end of geneva conventions’ relate to current times, given a modicum of understanding of the history of warfare?
Steve
roger 07.31.06 at 2:29 pm
What an amazing piece of writing! Rousseau was, of course, onto the fact that war isn’t an accident that happens to the state, but the health of the state — in fact, you could make the argument that a state is just an excuse for more war. Hence, the idea that, say, 600 people being crushed by Israeli missiles is not too bad a thing — uttered by a person who would probably consider his own annihilation — which is almost zero, a mere one — a pretty crushing thing, and something to be avoided at all costs.
roger 07.31.06 at 2:37 pm
PS — My “hence” was a little obscure, sorry. The logical connection is between the state’s need for wars and, derived from that, the need to blind the population to thinking about the casualties of war as anything more than a mere matter of counting or of rules of engagement — which is unnatural when applied to one’s own self or one’s loved ones. Peace, in the war culture, becomes either a form of defeat or an off-time in which to brood about and breed new wars. The amazing thing about this decade so far is the large, mostly white and male constituency for war in the one superpower that objectively needs peace — the U.S.A.
kharris 07.31.06 at 2:56 pm
Adam Kotsko,
You don’t think US entry into the European theater in WWII was justified, even though Germany had not threatened the US mainland?
Shelby 07.31.06 at 3:21 pm
roger:
How does “the state’s need for wars” square with the substantial number of states not involved in military activity now, or anytime recently? For example, Japan, Switzerland, Iceland, New Zealand. Are they unhealthy?
roger 07.31.06 at 3:51 pm
Shelby, I would definitely hope that states evolve to flourish in peace, although your list is certainly a mixed bunch – I don’t view the history of Japan, for instance, in the last century, as being an example of pacifism. Interestingly, there is only one non-island in your list — Switzerland. Switzerland and Sweden operated as a negative image during the cold war — the American government didn’t want states to become ‘neutralist’ in the great struggle with the communist enemy, the term “neutral” and the term ‘neutered’ being pretty close to each other.
So I think the state does have a chance to shuck off the war culture. The U.S. had that chance in the 90s, for instance. And who knows, maybe the realization that we have a severe, life threatening global environmental threat on our hands might just push states away from the war culture. But at the moment, with the U.S. spending a trillion dollars every two years on the military, and having, frankly, no serious enemies — al qaeda, by all rights, should have disappeared if the Bush administration had wanted it to, in 2002, instead of putting it on tap as an exhibit threat in Pakistan, and paying Pakistan 3 billion dollars per annum to act as zookeeper — I wonder if the war mentality is going to simply bring down the whole system.
Pre-1945, war was considered an economic disaster. Hitler’s most enduring legacy, in my opinion, was to merge the welfare state and the war economy. It was an amazing success — as Tony Judt days in his recent history of Europe, the German population never really suffered from the war until around 1944. The idea of being able to segregate a war from the population for which it is ostensively fought was an amazingly diabolical idea. Hitler’s model has been used ever since — by the Soviet Union, by the U.S., and by European countries that formed a parasitic variant, creating vast industries to export military weaponry. It is my hope that Hitler will be defeated in the 21st century.
bi 08.01.06 at 12:06 am
Steve: indeed “total war” isn’t practised at the moment, but it does seem that none of the key players really care about the Geneva conventions any more.
Ajax 08.01.06 at 4:28 am
“me” wrote (#8): “I think you got Rousseau wrong. The idea of a general will idea is NOT that of a perfect or even near-perfect consensus about any substantive policy issue. The idea is merely that when deliberating about which policies to adopt, citizens should be thinking not from the point of will of their individual (egoistic?) interests (in which case their combined preferences would constitute nothing but ‘the will of all’), but with the good of the entire body of citizens in mind. What the precise content of this ‘common good’ is—that, Rousseau thinks, is open to debate, and should be decided in a majoritarian fashion.”
I can’t let this pass without response. If this is what Rousseau meant, then my criticism of his political theory in comment #6 is even stronger. Your statement, “the good of the entire body of citizens”, is abstract and meaningless. For a start, there is never a single, unique “good”, so use of the definite article is inappropriate. Possible decision options for any non-trivial political issue will each have diverse impacts, and usually both winners and losers, and the impact on society as a whole must be a complex combination of these diverse impacts. To talk of “the general good” of society is either naive or machiavellian, as Mrs Thatcher once tried to explain in a statement widely quoted out of context.
Chris Bertram 08.01.06 at 5:18 am
Ajax. (1) This thread is not about the Social Contract or the general will, please don’t hijack it to sound off about your prejudices. (2) If you are interested, I recently published “a short book”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415201993/junius-21 on Rousseau and the Social Contract.
Thom Brooks 08.01.06 at 5:41 am
Chris is on the money here. The general will is about real individuals and what they share, not “the state” which exists only in mind (and paper).
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