But Our Violence Goes to Eleven!
St. Paul had it right when he said he was the worst of sinners. Not because he was the worst, mind you, but because he looked inward instead of just outward for an unflinching sight of raw, simmering villainy. He was mindful and critical of the moral failings of others, obviously, as his letters testify, but he didn’t consciously allow the faults of others to distract him from his own vices or assuage his guilt. He knew he was capable of the horrors of which he accused others.
His words exemplified the proper Christian disposition toward evil: the awareness and awe that, without grace, we are each and all capable of anything. There’s nothing inherently special about the souls of the damned: the wages of sin is death and we are all sinners. Salvation is an option only because of God’s gratuitous mercy. Grace and Heaven are gifts, not entitlements.
There are few things more antithetical to this Christian disposition than self-righteousness. Exceptional is about the last thing Christians should call themselves. For all the silly talk of America being a Christian nation, we people of these United States generally do not share Paul’s disposition toward evil. For us Americans, evil is mostly something exterior to ourselves, located mostly in others, especially in people with foreign sounding names belonging to institutions that start with “al.” We drop our jaws at the atrocious violence in the Muslim world, and yet fail to recognize our own predilection for violence for the barbarity it is. Instead we make excuses for it or champion it as civilized and righteous and just.
Am I saying that there’s no moral difference between al-Qaida and America? No. The former is a terrorist organization of Islamist fanatics; the latter is a country founded on a promise of justice and freedom that sometimes lives up to its stated principles and sometimes falls far short. Both institutions, however, use large-scale deadly violence to achieve their ends, and both take pains to legitimize their violence through master narratives about God’s will or Freedom’s March. The violence of both has resulted in dead children, lost mothers, murdered fathers, butchered brothers and mutilated sisters. Americans have no basis for self-righteous posturing.
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“Am I saying that there’s no moral difference between al-Qaida and America? No. The former is a terrorist organization of Islamist fanatics; the latter is a country founded on a promise of justice and freedom that sometimes lives up to its stated principles and sometimes falls far short. Both institutions, however, use large-scale deadly violence to achieve their ends, and both take pains to legitimize their violence through master narratives about God’s will or Freedom’s March.”
Your unspoken premise is that using violence to achieve one’s ends is always bad (therefore the U.S. and al-Qaeda are equally bad in that sense at least). But that is not in accord with Catholic teaching.
The position I’ve come to is that deadly violence may be justified, but it is never just, never morally good. And by justified, I do not mean that it is morally neutral. This position, though, requires some elucidation, as it opens me to charges of consequentialism. I’m working on a post now.
Agellius, also “not in accord with Catholic teaching” is the direct targetting of civilians:
“‘Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.’ A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons – to commit such crimes.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church – Paragraph # 2314.
I agree completely.
Your unspoken premise is that using violence to achieve one’s ends is always bad (therefore the U.S. and al-Qaeda are equally bad in that sense at least). But that is not in accord with Catholic teaching.<
Kyle can speak for himself, but I think you’re missing an important aspect of Catholic teaching there.
Using violence to achieve one’s ends is always bad – the body of Catholic teaching has, however, made allowance for the use of violence as a last resort, if all other means have failed, and the violence is proportional and so forth. That’s a different thing than saying violence is anything but bad.
War should always be understood as being, in some utterly essential sense, a failure – on the part of both belligerents.
Agellius presumes that all Catholic teaching is, ipso facto, Christian teaching. Ain’t necessarily so, you know.
Nor is your presumption necessarily so. : )
Matt:
When I said “bad” I meant “sinful”. Thus my point was that it’s not in accord with Catholic teaching to say that using violence to achieve one’s ends is always sinful. There are situations in which it can be not only justified but necessary to use violence, indeed sinful not to use violence in some conceivable circumstances.
Obviously we should avoid getting into such situations when it is avoidable. But often the necessity for violence is due to circumstances which are brought about by the actions of others.
What is boils down to is, you can’t judge people as better or worse than (or the same as) other people by the amount of violent force they use. It’s not that easy. You have to judge the violent force they use by analyzing the context of each of the circumstances in which it is used.
By the quote from the Catechism the method we used in ending WWII (the dropping of the atomic bomb) is “a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” No war we have fought since has even come close to meeting the requirements of a just war as laid out by the Church’s teachings as none have been declared, or a proportional response. The Pope even spoke personally with President Bush to tell him the Iraqi war was unjust and ask him not to invade, (I know the text of the discussion was not released, but little doubt was left that this was the message.) The Vietnam and Afghanistan wars included bombing and the indiscriminate killing of civilians. In Afghanistan and Iraqi we initially neglected our responsibilities to maintain peace in a conquered territory.
My point is not to show we are as evil as al-Qaida, but to point out that the actions of our country under almost every president can be defined as sinful under catholic teaching. Judging the violence used in every war we have fought under the context of each circumstance indeed exposes war crimes and crimes against God and Man. The point is that war is inevitably evil by its nature; to think it is possible to wage war in a way that does not lead to evil is to ignore the history of every war ever fought.
Paul – I agree with everything you’ve said there. I would just add that even before the atomic bombings, the firebombing raids on Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg, and other cities, also qualifies as unjust, and gravely so.
Paul:
I agree about the atomic bomb. The rest is debatable, however it was not my intention to enter into a debate about the merits of each and every American military intervention, only to point out what I perceived to be a flaw in Kyle’s logic.
Agellius, I believe that one purpose of our Faith is to free ourselves from the temptation to use violence as a problem-solving strategy. The discussion might focus on our innate propensity for violence and how each violent feeling, thought and belief may contribute to the violence that occurs every moment of everyday around the world thus creating and becoming partners in the culture of death.
Ronald writes, “I believe that one purpose of our Faith is to free ourselves from the temptation to use violence as a problem-solving strategy.”
I agree that our faith teaches us not to be violent aggressors. I don’t agree that it teaches us never to use violence.
Agellius, I believe that Christ teaches us from the Cross that we are not to use violence since it attaches us to the world of violence that can never be a part of the Kingdom of God.
We drop our jaws at the atrocious violence in the Muslim world, and yet fail to recognize our own predilection for violence for the barbarity it is. Instead we make excuses for it or champion it as civilized and righteous and just.
This sentence really resonated with me when I read Kyle’s post. I was awake in the middle of the night and for some reason found myself thinking about my occasional cooperation with the Women&Gender Resource center on campus. The director and I don’t agree on almost anything, but every time I teach a first year seminar I invite her in to speak to my students about sexual assault, date rape and abusive relationships. I was horrified, years ago, to discover the degree to which my students accepted violence as part of their relationships. Having her speak is one (very small) step towards addressing it.
And this, I think, points to the deeper issue here. American culture is wedded to the illusion that violence is a normal part of life, either something to put up with (as in domestic violence), or the solution to our problems: abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, harsh and degrading treatment of prisoners, military intervention. Rather than question this or that military act (though I agree that most of those named are horrors that we must repent for), we need to examine our underlying predilection for violence.
Agellius is correct that the Church is not categorically opposed to using violence in certain circumstances. But the very existence of these exceptions should put us on guard against rationalization and self-justification. I have seen it far too often in my work on the death penalty. The Church has left a tiny, almost hypothetical justification for the death penalty, one which Pope Benedict (while still Cardinal Ratzinger) said would almost never hold in the modern world. Yet Catholic supporters of the death penalty seize on this opening and stretch it to cover support for almost any execution.
Ronald writes, “Agellius, I believe that Christ teaches us from the Cross that we are not to use violence since it attaches us to the world of violence that can never be a part of the Kingdom of God.”
So then, if a man is attacking my child, I may not lift a finger to stop him?