History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

In a comment to my post below, a reader suggests that the corollary to doubting war is also doubting peace. If anything I said gave the impression that I never doubt peace, let me dispel that idea immediately. I doubt peace all the time, and especially in the wake of violence like last week's bombings in London. The murder of innocents always leaves me riddled with doubts about any commitment to nonviolence of any kind. I find myself clutching at convictions that suddenly seem slippery, and I intended to convey the experience of spiraling from doubt to resolution and back to doubt in my post. Immediately after I had posted, in fact, I wished I had not, and the only thing that kept me from taking the post down was the knowledge that it had already been released into the wide world of RSS.

Timothy Burke has written an eloquent and powerful response to my post, and Ralph Luker has added some more powerful thoughts and links to the conversation. I'm still pondering all that has been said, including the things that I said, and because this discussion is so wide-ranging I won't pretend that this post is a satisfactory or sufficient response. But I'm thankful for the conversation.

The more I read Burke's post and some of the comments to my post below, the more I see how imprecise and misleading certain parts of my post were. For instance, a large part of Burke's response is devoted to establishing that violence is always an expression of human agency, and that no explanation of the "root causes" behind terrorist acts diminishes the personal responsibility of terrorists for their murders. I could not agree more. I agree that acts of violence are never forced or totally determined by a perpetrator's social environment. I do think, of course, that agency is constrained in significant ways by complex social and political structures, structures created in part by the acts of other agents. But I don't hold that terrorists are driven ineluctably toward violence in such a way that absolves them of guilt.

I think I caused unnecessary confusion by referring back to my post on the tsunami. My intention in that post was not to compare terrorism to the tsunami, or to imply that a terrorist is forced to commit violence in the same way that tidal waves are forced to move by the shifting of tectonic plates. I think such comparisons between natural processes and social relationships are almost always misleading, precisely because they do tend to efface human agency. Rather, in that post my intention was to compare the international responses to the tsunami with responses to terrorism, and to argue that the choice to respond violently to innocent deaths is also always a choice, an expression of human agency.

So, far from wishing to deny that murder is a deliberate act, for which the murderer alone is ultimately responsible, I agree that violence is always a deliberate act, no matter which party commits it. That is the limited sense in which I mean that there is no difference between our acts of violence and those of terrorists: both are choices, neither are necessary. We are responsible for our acts of violence as surely as terrorists are responsible for theirs.

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A brief detour is in order here: Burke suggests that my particular doubts about war lead down the garden path to concluding that our antagonists have no agency, no capacity to make choices other than the ones they actually make. But I often find the reverse to be the case. Those who are most confident that we must make war with terrorists usually imply that we have no choice. We have no choice, the argument usually goes, because if we do not liquidate our enemies, they will liquidate us. We presume, in other words, that terrorists are sui generis as purveyors of violence. We could choose to spare them, but they are automatons who will continue to kill even if we refuse to kill in return. (Often lurking behind this view is the idea that religious belief represents the surrender of personal agency to some suprahuman force; religion is what makes them robotic and places them beyond the pale of instrumental reason, so that even if we modified our actions to the extent that absolutely any grievance they had would be totally irrational, they would continue to kill in the name of their god.)

The reasoning behind critiques of nonviolence or pacifism is often counterfactual: if we were to lay down our arms, they would not. A pacifist response to violence would thus lead to nothing but dead pacifists. In some cases, no doubt, that is, has been, and would be the case. There is a horrifying scene in the deuterocanonical Book of First Maccabees, in which a group of Jews fleeing Greek armies stationed in Jerusalem is massacred because they refuse to fight on the Sabbath.

The enemy quickly attacked them. But they did not answer them or hurl a stone at them or block up their hiding-places, for they said, ‘Let us all die in our innocence; heaven and earth testify for us that you are killing us unjustly.’ So they attacked them on the sabbath, and they died, with their wives and children and livestock, to the number of a thousand people.

There was a reason why that story was included by the authors of the Maccabees, who were essentially writing a glowing chronicle of those Maccabean revolutionaries who resolved instead to fight back, even on the sabbath. See, say the defenders of violence. You don't fight back, and your enemies massacre you.

The force of such evidence and such arguments is certainly hard to deny, and it is the primary reason why I also doubt peace. But I wonder at the fact that the same kinds of evidence never seem to tell as strongly against war. A thousand deaths, suffered by those who refuse to retaliate, is usually accepted by everyone as prima facie evidence against the rationality or virtue of nonviolence. But tens of thousands of deaths suffered in wars do not similarly discredit the logic of retaliation--or at least, do not discredit it enough to sway the burden of proof to the critic of nonviolence.

At this point, the defender of war might say that once violence is committed, more violence will occur either way, so we might as well fight back to reduce the number of deaths. In the Maccabeean story, the refugees who abstained from violence on the sabbath might have died to the number of a thousand, but if they had fought back, maybe they would have only suffered half that many deaths. That's the basic logic, it seems to me, behind many defenses of the decision to wage war: fewer deaths will occur if we fight an implacable foe than if we lay down our arms. But in order for that logic to hold absolutely, we really do have to assume that the foe is absolutely implacable--so implacable that no overtures we make toward peace, no decision we make to refuse to fight, not even a utopian campaign to shock and awe our enemies by completely destroying our weapons instead of deploying them, would alter their decision to fight. In the end, it seems to me that the logic of war requires a more fundamental denial of the enemy's agency than the logic of nonviolence. It even ultimately results in the denial of our own agency and responsibility. We cannot choose other than to fight, because they will not choose other than to fight. War therefore is not chosen: it just is.

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But to get back to Burke's post: I certainly do not want to deny the agency of terrorists, because neither do I want to deny our agency. They choose to attack us; we choose our response. They alone are responsible for their acts; we alone are responsible for our acts. How, then, should we act in response to their acts?

That's the question, and one possible answer is the one that President Bush gave from the G8 conference: when terrorism continues, the "war on terrorism" continues. My post was an expression of doubt that a war--systematic violence that by definition includes a willingness to kill--is the proper response to terrorism.

Burke's post attempts to assuage my doubts in two ways:

First, he argues that at some point violence--a departure from the rules of civility--is required because, to borrow his metaphor, someone refuses to play by the rules of the game of civil society, or even refuses to acknowledge that the game exists. When terrorists throw the game board across the room, to borrow Burke's metaphor again, the game of civility is suspended. The pieces are scattered on the floor, the rules are not in force, and we are left in a position where the only way to right the board and get back into the game is to subdue the malcontent by force. If I understand the game metaphor, it is a version of the metaphor of a social contract. Both imagine civilized society as something to which different parties mutually consent. One of the rules of the game--or stipulations of the contract--is that parties will not do sociopathic things like detonate bombs in a London subway tunnel. When someone does do that, Burke suggests, they have in some sense alienated themselves from civilized society, "seceded" from "modernity," and thus forfeited whatever right they have to appeal to the rules when we detonate a bomb in their Afghan cave.

This metaphor of civilization as a consensual social agreement obviously has a great deal to recommend it, and because it does, it is worth being very precise about when the game has been thrown across the room, when we've gone off the map, when the contract is null and void, when the rules are no longer in force. But it's not clear to me from Burke's post where that bright line is--the line where we have crossed from a civilized state of society into a state of war.

For instance, is it simply the murder of innocents that means the rules of the game are waived? Does any act of murder constitute a forfeiture of a person's right not to be killed? If you believe in capital punishment, you believe that it does, but even in that case, you don't believe all the rules are suspended. You probably believe, for instance, that even a murderer deserves due process before being executed.

But a rationale for war has to accept that even those rules are temporarily waived. Burke, for instance, says that while military action is not the only or even the primary way to prosecute the war on terrorism, a successful missile strike on Osama bin Laden's hideout would be an acceptable--indeed, desirable--outcome of such a war. Burke therefore seems to imply that there must be something about terrorism that is fundamentally different about "ordinary" acts of violence or murder: those ordinary acts of murder break the rules of civilization's game, whereas terrorism constitutes a failure to even acknowledge the game, making it acceptable--indeed, desirable if necessary--to kill a terrorist even without due process.

But what is it about terrorism that makes it so extraordinary as an act of murder? "The consequence of [terrorists'] actions," Burke says, "is a non-consensual, non-democratic constraint on the freedom of individuals to do what they like, a deprivation of their rights." But isn't any act of murder that? Burke says that the terrorists who committed the recent subway bombings have probably "been living in London for some time, breathing its air, seeing its people. Whatever the first steps they took on the path to setting those bombs, the path ends at war with freedom itself, in consciousness of innocence of their victims." Is that true of every murderer in London? Is every murder an act of war with freedom itself, that therefore frees us from the ordinary rules of civility that require us not to kill? (Perhaps Burke would place stress on the idea that terrorists kill "in consciousness of innocence of their victims," but for all we know about terrorists, I doubt we can speculate with any confidence about their internal states of consciousness regarding the innocence of their victims.)

I guess what I'm coming around to is this crucial paragraph in Burke's post:

To play a game, both parties consent to play by the rules. Yes, sometimes one party cheats, but there is a big difference between the kind of cheating that preserves the game’s essential terms and the kind of systematic contempt for the game that ultimately destroys it--or the spoiler who throws the board across the room when they’re going to lose. If one party sits down at the table to play, and obeys the rules, and the other person won’t even acknowledge the game at all, then there are no constraints on either player. There is no game.

I'm just not clear what the difference is between the cheater and the spoiler, or how we could define this with precision.

What I'm about to say may open up a bigger can of worms than saying that I have doubts about war. But I might as well say that I also have doubts about a utilitarian vision of society as a contract or consensual game. The problem with such metaphors is that they don't give us a good answer for how to preserve civility if the fictive "consent" they imagine is withdrawn. At the very moment when we are in danger of running off the map--the moment when we most need a map to avoid getting lost--the map fails us. We walk around with what we think are stable ideas of where the edge of the map is and where it is not--school shooting: punishable by life imprisonment, serial killer: punishable by death with due process, terrorist attack: war--but on closer inspection, any definition of what makes terrorism a total withdrawal of consent seems to make anyone who commits a "non-consensual, non-democratic constraint on the freedom of individuals" seem like a spoiler too.

There are virtues, therefore, to a vision of civility as a kind of assent to certain rules, rather than a kind of consent, because on such a view the rules continue to guide us even when not everyone consents to them. Suppose one rule of civilization to which a civilized person must assent is that it is always wrong to kill another human being. In that case we would have no problem figuring out where to draw the line, no problem finding the edge of the map where we no longer have rules to guide us. The rule is simply and finally that we do not kill, no matter what is done to us. On this view of society, there would be no distinction between an "us" and a "them" that is relevant to the rule.

Burke says he sees no reason why forswearing violence should be a categorical imperative. He wants a world where there is no more Al-Qaeda (so do I), and he argues that one way to get to that world would be (among other things) to kill Osama bin Laden and some of his lieutenants. This is the second point at which Burke tries to assuage my doubts about war: it is an expedient to advance the Al-Qaeda-less future.

This comes close, in my mind, to saying that the end justifies the means: if we can get back to the game more quickly by exterminating spoilers, then we should. Burke doesn't say that, of course, and he offers a much more subtle account of the limited role of violence in our conflict with terrorists. But I worry that any argument in favor of violence--however limited--ultimately reduces to the argument that the end justifies the means. Moreover (and this is why it's dangerous to say that the end justifies the means) we don't even know that the means of violence will secure the end of a world without violence. A utilitarian rationale for war requires making a bet that war will produce peace, but thus far in the world's history, the house has won that bet every single time. So why do we keep going back to the same dealer's table?

Ralph Luker's post points to Randolph Bourne's "War is the Health of the State.". That essay was published posthumously after it was found wadded up in Bourne's trash bin, and frankly, I've been tempted to treat this post the same way. But if war is the health of the state, posting is the health of the blog. So I'll post despite my better judgment and ask for your further thoughts. I really am listening.