Yesterday was Veterans’ Day here in America, and the Doctor and I observed this day in a fitting fashion by watching the final installment of The War, Ken Burns’ latest documentary about WWII. I like Ken Burns, and this series exemplifies all the things that he does so well. As much as I enjoyed his famous Civil War series, it lacked one advantage that this one has — actual living veterans who are able to tell their stories on film. But as with all of his documentaries, he excels less at filling the viewer’s head with facts and battle plans (though you do get some of those, of course) and more at causing one to reflect on what it would have been like to be alive in that historical period, and on the moral implications of events that actually took place in the not-so-distant past. This was, of course, an unapologetically American telling of the story. I reflected afterwards that it would be fascinating to see a similar production made by other participants in that war. A German documentary would probably be tiresome — merely an exercise in self-flagellation — but what would the Japanese do with it? Or the Russians?

One of the really interesting things about the second world war is the seeming necessity of it (or at any rate, of the Allied involvement in it.) Individual tactics or strategies may be questioned, but most people are prepared to concede that World War II was a just war if indeed such a thing has ever existed. Among the many memorable details of Burns’ documentary are tales from soldiers who went to war with a somewhat blase attitude about the “fight for right” propaganda they were getting from the war films and from their superior officers. They were out for adventure and a good time, and probably also felt, being the sons of WWI veterans, that it was “their turn” to take up arms for the government. One soldier recalls scoffing at his commander’s claim that they were engaged in a “crusade” against evil — that didn’t mean much to kid who cared mostly about fun and food and women. But by the end of the war, when they had seen the devastated cities, the death camps piled with bodies and the “hospitals” used for human experimentation, they believed it. It was the opposite of the old cliche story; instead of descending from idealism to world-weary cynicism about armed conflict, these boys were elevated from relative indifference to the belief that they were in fact participating in a struggle against the forces of evil.

Anyway, in light of these reflections I’ve been thinking again about just war theory and all the terribly difficult questions surrounding it concerning the morality of war. This isn’t something we talk about very much on this blog, so I thought it might be interesting to open a thread for general comments, with the preface that I know that there is an enormous body of literature on this topic, and I’ve read a sampling of it, but I’m not going to get into any of it here. I’m just going to give you my sort of general bottom-line assessment of it, which is: though I can’t ever quite get away from it, just war theory seems to be getting rather threadbare at points. I can’t get away from it because I don’t want to be either a utilitarian or a pacifist, and the only middle road between those two positions seems to be something like a theory of just wars. Unfortunately, the more one tries to apply the existing theory to actual situations, the more arbitrary it begins to seem. The Vatican has been sounding increasingly pacifist of late, and this displeases me, because I do actually think that virtue can include a willingness to take up arms in defense of good, or in struggle against great evil. If we lack that willingness completely, I’m not sure it is possible for us to have properly ordered dispositions and loves. And yet, I can well understand the impulse to keep just war theory at arm’s length. Particularly when applied to modern warfare, it starts to look like one of those tiny suits of armor you sometimes see in museums (I was always amazed to think that there could have been knights that little) being fitted on the Gubernator. It just doesn’t quite do it.

One immediately striking thing about just war theory: if one didn’t know better, its principles might seem almost utilitarian from the beginning. I’m never quite sure what status these rules are supposed to have anyway; are they supposed to be principles of the natural law? In any case, they would make perfect sense if listed under the heading “Ways to Make War Less Horrible.” Don’t kill any more people than necessary. Weigh the costs and the benefits. Stop fighting if you realize that the cause is hopeless. And so forth. These were obviously generated by people in a very pragmatic frame of mind. Sometimes they seem almost too pragmatic for my satisfaction. (For example, I’ve always been dubious about the “reasonable chance of winning” rule. Aren’t some things important enough that it would be worth fighting, even if the chances of prevailing were fairly miniscule?)

But as I say, the larger problem is that some of them, pragmatically speaking, don’t seem to fit anymore. Take, for example, the rule about sparing civilians as much as possible. You can see the thinking here, and it seems fairly sound. Enemy civilians aren’t a direct threat to you. Killing them (deliberately) might annoy or dishearten the enemy but to do that is to “use” people who aren’t really part of the struggle for your own ends, which makes it more or less tantamount to murder. By contrast, when a man joins a military, gets a serial number and puts on a uniform, he is making a sort of implicit agreement with the world. He “gets” to do things that aren’t normally morally permissible (kill enemy soldiers, destroy property and infrastructure, seize land that isn’t his, etc.), and he can’t be blamed for these actions in the way that a person normally would be outside of wartime. However, he forfeits his own right not to be summarily killed by the enemy. That’s the trade. Civilians don’t make the trade, and thus they can’t participate in action, and can’t be summarily killed.

This was never an easy rule to apply, since it was always the case that civilians provided needed support for soldiers in the way of food, lodging or weapons. And even in the days of knights in shining armor, it would have made pragmatic sense to go through the villages of one’s enemies, killing every male child who might grow up to be a soldier. So the rule always required some restraint, but in many modern conflicts, it starts to seem practically useless. In the first place, we now have methods of killing that, while highly effective, don’t easily discriminate between people. Airstrikes are the obvious example, and as with all such rules, the difficulty is that if you decide not to use them, your enemy might be less scrupulous. But beyond this, there is an even larger problem: many of our enemies themselves no longer draw sharp lines between combatants and non-combatants. This became a familiar problem in Vietnam, when the Viet Cong would dissolve into just so many local villagers at convenient times. Today, we have the same difficulty: terrorist cells don’t have uniforms or serial numbers. They will gladly blend in among the local population in order to avoid detection. Moreover, they are willing to enlist people who would never ordinarily have been considered fit for military service. Our troops in the Middle East have found that women, children and the elderly can all potentially be agents of the enemy. Even on the Japanese mainland during WWII, there was something of a similar movement. Women and children were being trained to use sharpened bamboo spears in preparation for the expected American invasion. The whole country was being readied to resist American occupation with all available strength. In these sorts of situations, how do you decide who really counts as a “civilian” or a “non-combatant”? The distinction makes sense theoretically, but in reality it just seems inapt.

Just to offer one more example: just war theory tells us that a war can only be fought to redress an injury, and that the means used must be proportionate to the injury suffered, and must seek only to right that wrong. Well, again, I’m not sure how one goes about quantifying the “injury suffered” in some of these cases, and I doubt whether St. Augustine or St. Thomas were really envisioning scenarios of massive entangling alliances across the globe, of weapons that could take thousands of lives in a second, or of wars that would kill in half a decade what would in Augustine’s time have been about a third of the population of the entire world. What counts as “righting the wrong” in these cases? How does one go about identifying the “injury” that needs to be redressed? Again, one gets the frustrating feeling that these rules are basically arbitrary, and have nothing to do with the issues at hand.

So, what are the options at this point? There is pacifism, the alternative seemingly favored by the Vatican at the present time. I’ve already said that I don’t care for that one; it seems to me to breed cowardice in good souls and complacency in evil ones. There is utilitarianism, or, in other words, the idea that anything is permitted provided it works for the greater good. In times of war we often feel real pressure to resort to that sort of view, but for the Catholic this would be a defeat of the highest order. Consequentialism is deeply inimical to Catholic thought for a whole variety of reasons, and when the dire options loom before the eyes, one finds oneself thinking with desperation even pacifism might really be the better choice. But it is at this point that an interesting thought occurred to me: isn’t it strange that we should be worrying about a slide into utilitarianism when, from the standpoint of the soldier, war is surely a profoundly un-utilitarian sort of activity?

I don’t merely mean by this, of course, that war is no fun for soldiers. That is unquestionably true, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for the utilitarian, who evaluates actions in terms of their effects on everyone and not just their effects on the agent himself. To illustrate what I do mean, I thought I might pull some quotes from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, in his chapter on “The War of the Gods and Demons.” If you’ve never read this, you owe it to yourself to do so; it is quite stirring. I have a feeling that Chesterton would like Ken Burns, because the question that arrests his attention in this chapter is: why do soldiers fight? Governments fight wars for any number of reasons, but these are not necessarily the sorts of things that would motivate a man to suffer, to sacrifice, and even to die.

“There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an appropriate language, as realpolitik. As a matter of fact, it is an almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who fight. In any case no man will die for practical politics, just as no man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be eaten by lions at a shilling an hour, for men will not be martyred for money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics, is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm water port in the Gulf of Finland!’ Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen!’ Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances. Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about d