The Problem of War, Part 3
By George Templeton
Gazette Blog Columnist
Editor's note: This is the third in a 5-part series by Gazette Blog Columnist George Templeton entitled "The Problem of War."
In part 2, I discussed the science of information, knowledge, and communication. As Jonathan Haidt puts it, we are like the little man riding the big elephant who erroneously thinks he is in charge. The powerful elephant is our subconscious emotion. It goes where it wants to. We are the rider, trying to be rational, to no avail.
In part 3, I discuss the war to end all wars. One image of war emphasizes its courage, gallantry, and duty. Another sees it as the pointless suffering of the innocent. Life isn’t fair.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story The Rose of Paracelsus (1983). One of its many interpretations is that proof destroys faith. The Rose also brings classical math, the subjective and the objective, the intuitive and the formal, into computational intelligence. It has implications about the nature of human consciousness and the meaning of life. (Reference Gregory Chaitin’s 2005 book, “Meta Math! The Quest for Omega”)
Religious people are right that science is flawed. It sees that reality is discreet, a particle, measurable, having a trajectory in time and place. But that particle is also a wave which is everywhere. It works every time, but it is not common sense.
When we contemplate war our intelligent emotions present a quandary. They are common to all humans, and subject to conditioning by culture and experience. We make our judgments accordingly.
Biblical Ethics
God said: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed…" Genesis 9:6. "If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for an eye, and a tooth for tooth…" Exodus 21:24 “He who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” Romans 13:2.
The great deceiver, the anti-Christ is a world leader. Did God appoint him? Even the devil can quote scripture!
Eve seduced Adam into biting the apple creating original sin. What’s a guy going to do?
Consider Numbers 25 and 31. Moses gets angry because of the sexual misbehavior of his troops. He blames his women instead of the whores of the opposing tribe who seduced and cajoled his men into worshiping a false God. “Kill every male among our little ones, and kill every woman of our tribe who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” It is an example of how rewards destroy the truth.
Our Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Righteous Mind”, claims it is evolutionary. We are born with it.
In our parlance, it means "just, upright, or virtuous". If you are a lawyer, righteousness comes from justice and fair play. If you are religious, it means that you act in accordance with God's wishes. If you are God, it explains your harsh judgment and the reason people should fear you.
There is such a thing as righteous anger. What is more important, love or righteousness? Are we to be sentimental or ethical? Is war more evil than self-defense? Can we overcome evil with truth, goodness, and self-sacrificing love? It seems that self-defense is when you cannot tolerate people who think differently than you. It needs no attacking army. It can be pre-emptive.
In our “Dog Eat Dog" world sovereign states seek to maximize their security and power. They coddle the minds of their people. They won’t let outsiders influence their weaker neighbors. That would curdle minds. This justifies the use of war, considered inevitable in “Real War Theory”. But we fight because of tribalism, ideology, and belief. They can change.
Assisted Living
The news warned me. We should not accept the war-torn Ukraine (2022) as civilized because of their dismal care of their severely retarded. These were adults who could only moan and groan, cry and scream, and pound their heads on their bed rails. They could not walk, feed themselves, or wipe their behind. They were piles of emaciated skin and bones.
The year was 1962. I had just turned 18 years old. I drove to see my grandmother, the person who raised me, in the care facility selected by my aunt. It reeked of urine. There was no TV, plants, or window for sunshine that would cut the gloom. I struggled to move between the pushed-together beds. Adjacent to my grandmother resided a seemingly healthy 15-year-old girl. She wanted to play ABC blocks with me, but she never got it right. Her family warehoused her there. My grandmother would be bedridden for three years. It would be four years until I graduated from college and another year until my wife rescued me from my single life of loneliness.
The “news” would protect us from reality, but don’t we need to know? You can’t write uncertainty into a contract with the private equity owners of assisted living facilities. Bad things happen to good people.
Mere Christianity
What keeps it all going is being part of a shared project, and contributing to the team effort. It requires a belief system having deep emotional roots.
C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, wrote: It is in my opinion perfectly right for a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. Semi-pacifism gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face as if you were ashamed of it. Christian service is the natural accompaniment of courage – a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness. If I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death, I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.
C. S. Lewis conjectured about Christians in opposing armies who didn't mind that they killed each other. Lewis was experienced. He was wounded in WW I. What did history record?
The British attacked, in the Battle of the Somme, by walking, as though they were on a parade ground. They suffered sixty thousand casualties and twenty thousand killed in the first hour. In less than four months they gained only five miles at a cost of 420,000 British, 200,000 French, and 450,000 Germans.
The fighters in the fetid stench of the muddy diseased and dying in the trenches realized the futility of it all. Both sides temporarily put down their guns to celebrate Christmas in 1914 together. “We don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to kill us, so why shoot”? Christianity simultaneously embraces war and peace. The moral history of Homo sapiens proves that we need a better guide.
Are wars like this? Or is it more like the lyrics of The Green Fields of France?
Green Fields of France
“Oh, how do you do, young Willy McBride? Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside and rest for a while in the warm summer sun?
I've been walking all day, and I’m nearly done and I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen when you joined the great fallen in 1916.
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean, oh Willy McBride, was it slow and obscene? And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind? In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined? And though you died back in 1916, to that loyal heart you're forever nineteen.
Or are you a stranger without even a name, forever enshrined behind some old glass pane in an old photograph torn, tattered, and stained and faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?
The sun shines down on these green fields of France, the warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance. The trenches have vanished long under the plow. No gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing down, but here in this graveyard that's still no man’s land the countless white crosses in mute witness stand till' man's blind indifference to his fellow man and a whole generation were butchered and damned.
I can't help but wonder, oh Willy McBride do all those who lie here know why they died? Did you believe them when they told you the cause? Did you believe that this war would end wars? Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame, the killing and dying it was all done in vain. Oh, Willy McBride, it all happened again, and again, and again, and again, and again.”
Is morality irrational and just a servant of our emotions?
What if God commands?
In Deuteronomy 20, God said: “When you go forth to war against your enemies, and see horses and chariots and an army larger than your own, you shall not be afraid of them, for the Lord your God is with you …” When Israel behaved, God rewarded them with victory. But when they misbehaved, God taught them a severe lesson. Christians believe that self-sacrifice redeems and changes evil. The hardest thing to do is to empathize with the enemy. It may be that Jesus chose crucifixion so he could liberate us from sin through his example. Everyone instantly recognizes the symbol of the cross. If we choose to not defend America, the world will not look at it the same way. Jesus could turn the other cheek. He had no H bombs to contend with. Should a nation court martyrdom and disarm totally?
Hatred is the motivating force behind war and genocide. Jesus did not trust using force to right a wrong. By his standard, success is forgiveness by the wronged party. But the injured expect repentance from the wrongdoer. When you kill and destroy, there is nothing left to redeem. Our law expects payment for damages. Reparations to pay for the damage caused by war seemed unfair to starving Germans.
The problem with religion is that what “God said” can’t be wrong. A TV minister explained that it was moral to torture the enemy. But if torture is morally permissible, what isn’t? Does God use war to reveal his justice and righteousness? The problem with the lack of religion is that anything goes.
Bonhoeffer explained that God's command is something beyond the ethical. "It embraces the whole of life. It is not only unconditional; it is also total. It does not only forbid and command; it also permits. It does not only bind; it sets free, and it does this by binding… God's commandment leaves man no room for application or interpretation. It leaves room only for obedience or disobedience… If God's commandment is not clear, definite, and concrete to the last detail, then it is not God's commandment."
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