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Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

John McGowan has an extremely thoughtful post on this morning's terrorist attacks in London. It raises a question I asked in the wake of January's tragic tsunami: Why can't we respond to manmade disasters in the same way we respond to natural ones? And the post is consonant, I think, with the aspiration of the Wendell Berry quote in my sidebar. Pacifists cannot always state with confidence that an absolute disavowal of violent force is the only realistic or pragmatic way to live in the world, but, like Berry and McGowan, I at least "wish to be a spokesman of the doubt that the great difficulties of our time can be solved by violence."

There are two ways to look at the death and destruction caused by a terrorist attack. The first is to see the attack as another tragic proof that violence destroys lives, answers no questions, opens holes in buses and hearts, dismembers. The first possible response, in other words, is to stare at the nauseating results of murder and mayhem, and to come away resolved not to resort to such murder and mayhem ourselves. The second way to look at a terrorist attack is to look quickly away from the attack itself and focus on the faceless terrorist behind it, to train our gaze on a shadowy enemy, instead of on the tangible presence or absence of suffering fellow human beings. This staring at the enemy naturally stokes our desire to do as we have been done by, to deal the death that we have been dealt. The first way of looking at a terrorist attack encourages a resolve to make peace, the second strengthens a resolve to make war.

Let us resolve to make peace. Let us resolve this in spite of how pretentious and quaint such a statement sounds, because peace is worth the appearance of pretense and the accusation of naivete. Let us resolve to make peace, and let us reject the insinuation that such resolve is somehow less sympathetic to the victims of violence than a resolution to kill and kill again. To disavow violence for the sake of revenge does not detract from the sorrow we feel for innocent deaths, because we could not feel more sorrow than we already do, no matter what response we determine to make. Whatever charges may be leveled at those who set their jaw in the direction of peace, stone-facedness is not among them. On the contrary, it is the empathetic capacity of the violent that must always be called into question, because those who are resolved to take an eye for an eye reveal that their empathy is limited to only certain examples of innocent dead. What needs to be called into question is not the motive of those who express doubts that violence can solve the problems of our time; rather, what needs to be called into question are the motives of those who can describe one violent death as a "barbaric" act and describe another violent death as "collateral damage."

If violence is barbaric, it is because the act itself is a departure from civility, not because a particular purveyor of violence is a barbarian while another is civilized. The civility of deeds are not judged separate and apart from the prior civility of the doer. Our civility, on the contrary, is judged in every present moment by our present deeds. We have no prior claim to civilization that cannot be called into question whenever we resort to a state--however temporary--in which some lives are judged worthy of being nasty, brutish, and short. No one deserves to be treated like a brute; no one deserves a life shorter than the already short lives that we are allotted; no nastiness excuses nastiness in return.

Because I feel this way (rightly or wrongly, pretentious or not), I must also be a spokesperson for the doubt that a war on terrorism is more civilized than terrorism itself. With all the feeling I can muster, I join with those who say that terrorist attacks are uncivil, destructive, evil. But I cannot join with those who go on to say that terrorists are themselves embodiments of evil, that the war on terror is a clash of civilizations instead of a mutual departure from the promise of peaceable civilization. I cannot go on to say that our "way of life" has been challenged; that "we" are not "them." What should distinguish us from them, if anything, is our rejection of a rhetoric that pits "us" against "them."

"We" are human beings, and any other antecedent for that pronoun is small and artificial in comparison. We should not respond to these attacks or any attacks by peering into the hearts of "them" and concluding that there is an irreducible kernel of evil there, against which our own hearts are impregnable. How ridiculous it is, for instance, to say that we are morally superior because we attempt to help people live in peace and banish poverty from the face of the earth, if that claim of moral superiority then justifies us in going to war, to wreak poverty and pain in another portion of the earth. Do we believe that, by our benevolent acts to some peoples of the earth, we accumulate licenses to visit shock and awe on other peoples of the earth? In comparison to that kind of pretense, the pretentiousness of pacifism will always be more sincere.

Let us resolve to make peace, even though that resolution will be mistaken by many as passivity. If the alternative is the activity of killing, of bombing a house for a bus, then let us be prepared to be called passive. But let us also be prepared to point out, as McGowan does, that peace can make claims on pragmatists at least as compelling as war. Have three years of war solved the difficulties of our time? Manifestly, no. Have three millennia of war brought us closer to peace? Will committing acts of violence that will be displayed on television screens in our enemies' homes help prevent these horrible scenes from being displayed on our television screens? Not if our enemies are anything like us, and they are.

Doubt war. If we cannot disavow it yet, if we cannot yet resolve to make peace, let us turn from sorrow to deepened skepticism about whether death-dealing is ever a civilized answer to the difficulties of our time. Let us doubt war.