Anyone need some violence?

If you are in accord with the general thrust of this blog up to now you agree that human violence is not justifiable. The notion of just war is fine in theory only. In reality it is an idealist pipe dream. War is never just, given the destruction it yields and given the wicked men who pursue it. War could be just only if it could be conducted by a morally pure person (or nation) who had the power of restoring everyone after that war. Unfortunately, no human (or nation) fits this description.

But viewing war as unjustifiable does not exclude a view of war as a necessary evil. Allow me to return to quote form a past post (March 2, 2007):

"Let us say, then, that national aggression is not justifiable. We may still decide that it is a necessary evil. For instance, how can one say that national aggression should not be pursued when such wickedly violent acts are being perpetrated upon vulnerable people? To make this question even more vivid we could consider the story of a Muslim woman in Bosnia. She says, "My student, Zoran, the only son of my neighbor, urinated into my mouth. As the bearded hooligans standing around laughed, he told me: 'You are good for nothing else, you stinking Muslim woman...' I do not know whether I first heard the cry or felt the blow. My former colleague, a teacher of physics, was yelling like mad, 'Ustasha, ustasha....' and kept hitting me. Wherever he could. I have become insensitive to pain. But my soul? It hurts." (The Killing of Sarajevo, Vukovic).

What are we to do with this woman? Sit around and pretend nothing is happening? Allow her tormentors to take advantage? Is it not right to flex a little muscle on behalf of the weak?"

Perhaps aggression is a necessary evil. Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed something along those lines. He wrote, "How should the Christian act in war? There is no plain commandment of God on this point. The church can never bless war or weapons. The Christian can never take part in an unjust war. If a Christian takes to the sword he will daily pray to God for forgiveness of the sin and pray for peace" (Bethge 188). Bonhoeffer would later say that there can be no justification for war, even a defensive war (Bethge 386). What is truly remarkable about him is that years after expressing these views he decided to aid in an assassination plan to kill Hitler. Additionally, he began an elaborate lie in which he attempted to deceive the Nazi authorities about his complicity in the assassination attempt. (He viewed it as a worse sin for a lover of lies to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to tell a lie.) Bonhoeffer never sought to justify his actions, but rather accepted Christ's words, 'They that take the sword shall parish with the sword.' In the mind of Bonhoeffer he drew no solace by pretending that God was justifying his plans for violence. Bonhoeffer pursued injustice (murder) with the hopes of obtaining some future justice (an end to Nazi oppression); he believed in doing this he was sinning and in need of God's forgiveness.

So is this the way for a Christian to act on behalf of the weak (e.g.: children, enslaved persons, conquered folk)? For the Christian pacifist the answer to this question is an unqualified no. If violence is not justifiable then it should not be pursued. For the pacifist the end does not justify the means (this is similar reasoning to the means/end argument against abortion for the sake of preventing the birth of a child with catastrophic defects). Life is sacred and cannot be crunched in some casualty computation in which this many lives lost is on one side and this many lives saved is on the other side.


How does the intellectual Christian pacifist answer the question of violence as necessary evil? Well, she might engage in an evolutionary argument against naturalistically derived morals. (I have never heard or read of this argument being employed by a pacifist. Here I have whimsically adapted this argument from arguments made by some atheists; it is also of note that I have taken considerable inspiration from the analytic theist Alvin Plantinga. I am obviously not a logician so my apologies for the crassness of this argument.) The argument goes something like this: The probability of pacifistic practices being preserved is low, given the rule of reciprocal altruism and the ubiquitous presence of violent conflict; yet pacifism exists. This is represented as such:

P(Pa/A & V) is low and yet Pa,

where 'Pa' is the proposition that pacifistic beliefs are preserved and practiced, 'A' the proposition that morals have evolved naturalistically based on current theories of reciprocal altruism, and 'V' the proposition that violence is ubiquitous within society.

All atheists claim that societal morals have their origin naturally without the strong arm of God delivering them to the world. Some atheists invoke Darwin's theory of natural selection to postulate the specific mechanics of how morals originate apart from God. They say that morals are rules accepted by a society for the purpose of self preservation. Moral rules which survive the test of time are the ones which give certain societies the upper hand among societies with radically different morals. For instance, the society which morally embraces strict homosexuality as a normative practice for all men will have a shrinking population; the society which morally embraces infant sacrifice will have ever decreasing descendants; the society which morally embraces recreation above industry will slip into economic depression. On the contrary, the society which embraces reciprocal altruism (something like, 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you') builds a sense of trust and cooperation. In this society people do not have to spend as much energy on discerning whether or not to trust their neighbors. Instead they can put time and energy into cooperating in building families, businesses and governments. Simply put morality is not from God, rather it is a mechanism for survival. All morals serve to increase survivability (see Michael Shermer in The Science of Good and Evil).

Of course this is true of almost all morals. We embrace the practice of reciprocal altruism as long as it protects us, our kin, or our nation. However, when survival is at stake we have a different set of morals governed by the principal of protection at the expense of the competition (aggression). Aggression is pursued for the sake of survival. Once the competition is either eliminated or co-opted into the victorious society a return to the practice of reciprocal altruism occurs.

Here the naturalistic philosophers have made headway in explaining the possible natural origins of morality. However, what is to be said of renegade morals such as unconditional altruism? When a sub-society embraces the moral of unconditional altruism how does it continue to survive? Such a question is relevant to any pacifist culture. Here the culture embraces a moral which commits altruism even when others do not reciprocate. Is such a society evolutionarily disadvantaged? Likewise, we should ask about the society which embraces conditional reciprocal altruism (e.g.: the aggressive nation). Is such a society merely serving the purpose of its own survival?

In my next post I will turn this question of aggression as a necessary evil toward the current Darfur crisis. I will begin by reviewing the history of the conflict and assessing some of the possible causes of the violence. Then, I will build on previous posts to assess the possibility of both violent and non-violent interventions in the crisis.