Talking About War – Secular Theology and Nobel Sacrifice in Walzer’s Just War Discourse Abstract
|
|  Yüklə 113.5 Kb.
|
Secular Theology Walzer’s theory presents us with a silent minimal language that can only be recognised as a feature of the real world if we have faith that the language is authentically revealed to us, through maximal expression and interpretation, on special occasions. In addition Walzer argues that mankind possess a collective moral conscience that has the ability to recognise minimalism and be shocked into action if minimal values are attacked.38 Therefore, to understand Walzer’s secular theology we must investigate his conception of the individual consciences that comprise the collective through his analysis of being. Walzer describes being as an ordered self and states his intention to challenge religious conceptions of self, which suggest God has placed a singular conscience in all of humanity.39 Walzer conceives this ordered self to be, what he calls, a complex maximalist whole, internally divided in interests but not utterly fragmented40. Self is described as a thickly populated circle with a core “I” surrounded by a circle of self-critics. This “I” is defined as a newly elected president, capable of summoning advisors, forming a cabinet and manoeuvring between its constituent parts.41 Although Walzer is keen to stress the maximalist character of self, Pin-Fat is quick to remind us that the structure of Walzer’s self is universal; all human beings are like this.42 Walzer’s self may be maximally constituted but it is minimally distributed. The “core self,” Walzer’s sovereign “I,” is, as Pin-Fat argues, socio-historically pre-existent, it “is not dependent on time and place though its shape may be.”43 Walzer’s self is a manifestation of Solaris’, it is maximally shaped by the interpreter, here a metaphor for divided interests and specific socio-cultural contexts, however, its organising principle and spark of origin is the same in all cases; all the manifestations are born of Solaris. Importantly, it is this “core self” that is responsible for temporal revelation, it draws its cabinet together, interprets the maximal language and reactivates the minimal origin. The sovereign “I” is the common element inherent in mankind that signifies Walzer’s collective conscience; it is the “human” of human rights to which rights are attached and through which rights can be recognised. Not only is this a theological conception of self, it is an explicitly Christian conception of self. Patočka describes the Christian depiction of the soul as a mystical interiority; “in the final analysis, the soul is not a relation to an object, however noble (like the Platonic Good) but rather to a person who sees into me without being itself accessible to view.”44 In Kelvin’s story, Solaris represents this relation to the soul, a being that can see into Kelvin and manifest his most intimate emotional desires without being seen itself. Derrida expands on this theme by linking divine interiority to the structure of subjectivity: God … is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than my self … God is in me, he is the absolute “me” or “self,” he is the structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard’s sense, subjectivity.45 This structure is of seminal importance to Walzer’s conception of self, we never see the internal mechanics of being, the presidential “I,” how it calls its cabinet together and how it extracts minimalism from maximal language. This “core self” that can enforce the minimal external standard of morality, “the standard of God,” from within the human, can only do so in secret. Walzer’s theory is predicated upon faith in a mystical authority and its ability to recognise the unavowable minimal language, internally and in secret. Faith, Derrida argues, “signifies here acquiescing to the testimony of the other – of the utterly other who is inaccessible its absolute source,” and, as such, acts of faith exceed all proof of knowledge.46 Like Kelvin’s desire for Hari, Walzer’s desire for a universal, minimal, moral code, means more to his theory than any ontological proof. However, for Walzer’s ontological argument, which posits a definitive code of real world morality, to remain consistent, he must necessarily conceal this mystical structure through the construction of a mythical foundation. As Nancy argues, the ideal of the foundational myth signifies western metaphysic’s desire to appropriate its own origin and pronounce its own by birth, by subtracting the mystical secret from this origin.47 Walzer travels to Solaris to build his home and then conceals this fact by claiming to live in the real world. He weaves an onto-theological narrative that installs the language of just war as a universalised dogmatic moral code and grounds this code on a discourse of rights. And yet, this discourse cannot appear in the minimal dialect that Walzer’s theory requires, and is, as such, a groundless foundation. Walzer recounts the myth that minimal language and the language of rights are interchangeable, nonetheless, we never see or hear the minimal language, which, in truth, exists nowhere. Minimal morality can only be articulated through maximalist languages of rights. Therefore, for Walzer’s theory to make sense, it requires theological, albeit secularised, faith in the existence, and reactivation, of the inarticulate minimal language via the language of just war. And what of Walzer’s absolute values, life and liberty? How does he expound such fundamental tenets of the just war creed? Walzer states that these values should be treated as negative prohibitions, for example, the prohibition on murder.48 However, these are the very prohibitions that are placed at risk during wartime; lives are placed on the line and freedom comes into question. Indeed, Walzer argues that the fundamental crime of war is that it forces men and women to risk their lives in defence of their rights.49 Absolute values must be sacrificed in the name of their own defence. Therefore, it is important that we now turn our attention to meaning of sacrifice in Walzer’s theory. The type of sacrifice legitimised in the language of just war and the implications of this for Walzer’s conception of morality. Fear and Trembling Revisited The biblical tale of The Binding of Isaac has become a quintessential parable of faith and sacrifice, itself binding Christian, Jewish and Islamic theology, under the mantel of Abrahamic Religions or religions of the Book. The narrative tells the story of Abraham and his divinely ordained task to sacrifice his only son Isaac. After many years of infertility, Abraham’s wife Sarah finally gave birth to a son Isaac. Isaac was considered a double gift from God, as not only did his birth circumvent Sarah’s infertility, God also told Abraham that Isaac held within him the future promise of his people. The Binding tells how God spoke to Abraham and ordered him to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah, without offering any reason for this sacrifice. Abraham and Isaac travelled together to the Mountain, and Abraham bound his son to an altar. However, at the exact moment when Abraham, blade raised, was about to sacrifice Isaac, an angel stayed his hand. The message is that Abraham’s faith in God had been rewarded by the return of what he was willing to sacrifice, his son and the future promise of his people.50 Kierkegaard’s reading of the parable transforms it into a play of faith and ethical responsibility. For Kierkegaard, the interpretation of Abraham’s sacrifice is conditioned by faith; “the ethical expression … is that he intended to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he intended to sacrifice Isaac.”51 Kierkegaard describes faith as a prodigious paradox, “capable of making murder into a holy act well pleasing to God.”52 More monstrous still, this sacrifice can be imitated by anyone who does not possess faith. The argument turns on the conception of a relationship to the absolute, which Kierkegaard argues, can only be entered into by sacrificing the ethical. Abraham can only hold his duty to God by sacrificing, his familial duty, the future of his people, and his son whom he loved so dearly. The true horror of the act is that the ethical is sacrificed in the name of a secret alliance with the absolute; God’s reason is silent till the moment when Abraham has committed himself to the sacrifice. This image is mirrored in Walzer’s theory by the concept of faith in minimalism. Walzer’s belief that minimal values must be upheld makes war a necessary sacrifice, however, because minimalism is silent and secret, war justified in the name of minimalism can always be geared toward ulterior purposes.53 Derrida expands upon Kierkegaard’s reading with recourse to Levinas’ ethics of the Other, and his contention that my responsibility to the other is absolute because he is a mortal, singular and irreplaceable being.54 Derrida argues that what binds me to the absolute singularity of the other propels me to the space or risk of absolute sacrifice: As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know I can only respond by sacrificing ethics, that is to say by sacrificing whatever obliges me to respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others. I put to death, I betray and I lie, I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that.55 Derrida’s overarching argument is that Abraham’s tale teaches us that we cannot act responsibly without also sacrificing ethics; “there is no longer any ethical generality that doesn’t fall prey to the paradox of Abraham.”56 The moral, so to speak, of the story is that morality itself is complicit in immorality, and that the two work simultaneously in the same movement; even as I apply the ethical principal to a single person in a single instance I have already sacrificed my duty to apply this principle to every other person in the same instant. Importantly, for Derrida, this sacrifice can never be justified; “I will never be able to justify the fact that I prefer to sacrifice any one (any other) to the other.”57 Conversely, as we recall from the previous section, Walzer believes that just war offers a moral doctrine that abolishes this notion of the sacrifice of ethics; the rights of life and liberty justify war, and guarantee justice within war. Although there are numerous moments, within Walzer’s theory, that call this claim into question, for the purpose of this paper I will focus on one critical instant, the combatant/noncombatant distinction and Walzer’s justification for the killing of soldiers in warfare. Life and Liberty During Wartime Walzer presents us with the war convention, his codification of the rules of conduct within war and asserts that “the war convention is written in absolutist terms: one violates its provisions at one’s moral, as at one’s physical peril.”58 The Convention is explicitly linked to the defence of rights, which Walzer assures us is a defining feature of legitimate acts of war: A legitimate act of war is one that does not violate the rights of people against whom it is directed. It is once again, life and liberty that are at issue … I can sum up their substance in terms I have used before: no one can be forced to fight or to risk his life, no one can be threatened with war or warred against, unless through some act of his own he has surrendered or lost his rights.59 The combatant/noncombatant distinction is subsequently introduced as the foundational principle of the Convention: “Soldiers are made to be killed,” as Napoleon once said; that is why war is hell. But even if we take our standpoint in hell, we can still say that no one else is made to be killed. This distinction is the basis of all the rules of war.60 As we can see, the sacrifice of soldiers’ lives is pivotal to Walzer’s conception of the rules of war, however, this sacrifice is deemed to occur outside the boundaries of rights. As such, we must investigate how this sacrifice is justified, and what combatants have done to lose their rights; in Walzer’s terms, we must “clarify the meaning of its forfeiture.”61 Walzer offers two primary justifications for combatants’ loss of rights: They gain war rights as combatants and potentially prisoners, but they can be attacked and killed at will by their enemies. Simply by fighting, whatever their private hopes, and intentions, they have lost their title to life and liberty, and they have lost it even though, unlike aggressor states, they have committed no crime.62 He can be personally attacked only because he is already a fighter. He has been made into a dangerous man, and though his options may have been few, it is nevertheless accurate to say that he has allowed himself to be made into a dangerous man. For this reason he finds himself endangered.63 Let us look at these two justifications in turn, paying particular attention to what combatants have done to forfeit their rights. The first justification, that soldiers lose their rights by fighting is instantly contradicted by Walzer’s contention that soldiers’ do not regain their rights by not fighting.64 Although Walzer is keen to stipulate that soldiers are immune from attack if they surrender, the act of surrender transforms the soldier into a prisoner of war, thereby, considerably limiting their right to liberty. As such, Walzer’s underlying argument that a soldier must act in a certain way to lose their rights is fundamentally compromised because combatants can be attacked even if they choose not to fight, and, further to this, if a combatant surrenders, hence relinquishing their status as active combatants, they still lose their absolute title to liberty. The second justification, that the combatant has allowed himself to made into a dangerous man65, proves even more problematic. Ignoring the question of allowed, which will subsequently be addressed in greater detail, we must first look at Walzer’s conception of danger. Walzer’s argument hinges on the threat posed by the soldier, the soldier is a fighter and is, therefore, to be treated as a menacing instrument of war; a legitimate target of attack. However, Walzer fails to elaborate on what dangerous or to be threatening means in regard to combatants. To understand the meaning of danger, we must turn to Walzer theory of prevention and pre-emption, and his “non-arbitrary standards” of “what it means to be threatened.”66 Walzer introduces what he describes as an objective standard of “just fear,” and expounds a clear definition of threat: “Threaten” means what the dictionary says it means: “to hold out or offer (some injury) by way of threat, to declare one’s intention of inflicting injury.”67 This definition of threat is expanded upon by the argument that threat must be offered in some “material sense,” and is concluded by the declaration that threat must focus on the present; “the idea of being under threat focuses what we had best call simply the present.”68 To recap, threat is when a material offering of injury is declared and intended in the present. Although this conception of threat is described with reference to states, Walzer contention that the rights of a state ultimately derive from the rights of the individuals that inhabit it, allows us to posit that the protections afforded to state’s rights must also be afforded to the source of these rights. Making this proposition we would assume that a soldier can only be attacked if he is presently offering a clear and intentional declaration to injure his adversary. However, not only would such a principle rule out all but direct face-to-face combat, it is a principle that Walzer adamantly rejects. Walzer describes, what he dubs, a “naked soldier;” a naked man bathing in the river, no arms by his side, locked in enemy sights.69 Although Walzer stresses the moral dilemmas involved in killing these men, he concludes by definitively asserting that the killing of the naked soldier is justified. As such, the definition of threat applicable to combatants is detached from their present action. It is based upon their past actions, that they became soldiers, and their assumed future actions, that they will injure their adversaries in the future. As the assumption of future injury belies Walzer’s depiction of a material offering of threat, and could easily be applied to any noncombantant that the enemy assumes will join the future war effort, we are left with a singular justification for a combatants’ loss of rights; because they have allowed themselves to become soldiers. The act of becoming a combatant takes us to the crux of the Abrahamic sacrifice within Walzer justification for the killing of combatants. It is the point at which Walzer’s desires to justify war, and to guarantee justice within war bump against each other; when two absolute imperatives prove absolutely incompatible. As previously stated Walzer’s justification for the loss of rights is dependent on an individual’s actions, in this case the soldier allowing himself to be made into a dangerous man. It is therefore surprising that he begins his discussion on war by arguing that soldiers are forced to fight; “we assume that his commitment is to the safety of his country, that he fights only when it is threatened, and that he has to fight (he has been “put to it”): it is his duty and not a free choice.”70 Walzer buttresses this point by asserting that fighting is not free when it is a legal obligation or a patriotic duty; “this is equally true whether the army is raised by conscription or voluntary enlistment.”71 Walzer sums up the tyranny in stark terms: Hence the peculiar horror of war: it is a social practise in which force is used by and against men as loyal or constrained members of states and not as individuals who chose their own enterprises and activities.72 Paying particular attention to Walzer’s choice of terms let us reflect upon the act of citizens becoming soldiers. In Walzer’s theory, a soldier loses their rights through the act of becoming a soldier, thereby becoming dangerous men. However, this act is in Walzer’s view not a free choice. It is not an activity of soldiers’ own choosing, therefore, its integrity as an act justifying the loss of a combatant’s rights is compromised. For if we recall Walzer’s two absolute rights, life and liberty, surely the forced enlistment of soldiers, whether by moral obligation or legal duty, constitutes a breach of the latter right. Walzer’s justification for the killing of combatants hinges upon a prior violation of their right to liberty, for which no justification is given. Prior to enlistment, combatants are noncombatants, innocent and immune from attack, it is only when they are forced to become dangerous men that they are transformed into legitimate targets. Their loss of rights is not a result of their actions, it is a result of the actions of their state and its adversary. Given these contradictions, why then does Walzer insist that soldiers are forced to fight? The answer lies in Walzer’s concept of the moral equality of soldiers. His argument that war is not the crime of individual soldiers, it is the crime of states, and, therefore, soldiers face each as equals on the battlefield, both sides justified in kill in self-defence.73 Walzer argues that if soldiers freely went to war, they would be morally responsible for that war. Without this concept Walzer’s theory would become very different, there would be no separation of the justice of war (jus ad bellum) and justice within war (jus in bello), and only those soldiers engaged in an unjust war could be considered legitimate targets. As Walzer does not expound, nor desire to expound, such a theory (which would no doubt raise its own problematic ethical questions), we are left with an insurmountable ethical paradox. War is necessary to defend life and liberty, but this defence can only be mounted through the sacrifice of combatants’ right to life and liberty. Walzer’s theory is unable to justify this sacrifice, on its own terms, and, as such, the sacrifice of soldiers’ rights also constitutes the sacrifice of just war theory’s own absolute ethical principles. Sacrifice as Se Donner la Mort Derrida describes Se Donner la Mort [The Gift of Death] as the marriage of faith and responsibility. Expanding upon Heideggerean themes of death and being, Derrida contends that because no one can die in my place, although they can die for me, death constitutes the locus of singularity; death must be assumed by every being for themselves.74 Se donner la mort then is the possibility of dying for the other, “it institutes responsibility as giving oneself death, putting oneself to death or offering one’s death, that is to say one’s life, in the ethical dimension of sacrifice.”75 The gift describes the economy of sacrifice initiated by Walzer’s language of rights and the war convention that it founds; soldiers are asked to offer their lives as a gift to noncombatants. However, Derrida is quick to remind us that se donner la mort is also to interpret death, to give oneself a representation of it, a figure, a signification or destination; to endow a meaning to death.76 Walzer’s desire is to construct the death of combatants as a noble sacrifice; their lives are given in the service of absolute rights to save the lives of innocent civilians. Yet, as elaborated in the previous section, the notion of this death as given or offered by combatants is fundamentally questioned. Derrida argues that the gift can only remain a gift when dying remains the property of individual. Conversely the war convention offers soldiers’ lives as a sacrifice to the state and the minimal rights it claims to protect, thereby aiming to usurp the combatant’s irreplaceable gift. Walzer thrusts the state into the role of Abraham, commanded by a secret absolute he offers his sons’ lives in the name of unnameable minimal rights. The combatant, as Isaac, represents the future of the state, as Walzer assures us that if nobody comes forward to defend the state, we must doubt the existence of the state, and the state loses its right to sovereignty and territorial integrity.77 Without the combatant Isaac, the Abrahamic state has no future, therefore, the sacrifice is even more monstrous; the state risks its own existence, in its own defence. In Walzer’s theory, our metaphorical Abraham takes Isaac to Mount Moriah, and binds him to the role of combatant, guided by the unpronounceable name and secret voice of minimal rights. The blade is held over Isaac’s head when the state declares war, and yet, no angel can come to stay the blade and no dive profession can justify the sacrifice. The absolute, as minimal rights, will unavoidably be sacrificed in their own defence. To conclude let us pause to look at the opposite side of the spectrum, at Walzer’s discussion on terrorism, the military method of contemporary holy war. Walzer clearly outlines what he believes to be the crucial distinction between just war and terrorism; it is “the moral difference … between aiming at particular people because of what they have done or are doing, and aiming at whole groups of people, indiscriminately, because of who they are.”78 Once again the argument hinges upon the distinction between innocent civilians and morally culpable combatants who are legitimate objects of attack. Indeed, for Walzer, the only way to oppose terrorism is “the refusal to make ordinary people into targets, whatever their nationality or even their politics.”79 However, in Walzer’s justification for the killing of combatants it is precisely who that combatant is that transforms him into a legitimate target; it is because he is young, patriotic, and fundamentally because he is a member of a particular state. Ultimately the combatant has been forced to fight because of who he is. It is because of this that he is, in Walzer’s terms, forced into a role that permits his morally justified death. Therefore, Walzer justifies the sacrifice of combatants because of who they are, not any freely taken action, and this constitutes nothing less than a terrorism against combatants. While just war’s terrorism against combatants is reified as noble sacrifice and an essential atom of minimal justice, the terrorism of contemporary holy war is vilified as an act viler than rape or murder.80 The sacrifice of the suicide bomber, whose divinely acquired interpretation of justice legitimises, in his eyes, the targeting of noncombatants, is admonished by Walzer as brutal and barbaric murder. This is not to say that either sacrifice is legitimate, or that we cannot make judgments about their relative moral abhorrence; it is simply to challenge the absolute moral justification of both. As Derrida argues: For in the discourses that dominated during such wars, it was rigorously impossible, on one side and the other, to discern the religious from the moral, the judicial from the political. The warring factions were all irreconcilable fellow worshipers of the religions of the Book. Does that not make things converge once again in the fight to the death previously referred to, which continues to rage on Mount Moriah over possession of the secret of the sacrifice by an Abraham who never said anything? Do they not fight in order to appropriate the secret as the sign of their covenant with God, and impose its order on the other, who becomes for his part nothing more than a murder?81 The contemporary just war and holy war both meet on Mount Moriah in a battle that seeks to take possession over meanings of justice and sacrifice. Both appear as Abrahams offering Isaacs in the name of a secret alliance with the absolute, divine Allah and minimal rights. These sacrifices are made under the absolute authority of what is absolutely incapable of appearing, of speaking, and of adjudicating over the justness of the sacrifice; they are made in absolute faith in an absolute language. This absolute faith can never be definitively confirmed, it can only be revoked, through scripture or convention, in a fallen mortal, in Walzer’s sense maximal, language. Is it possible to justify either sacrifice? I tremble at the very thought. 1 Barack Obama, ‘Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize Speech Transcript’, October 2009, http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/12/10/barack-obamas-nobel-prize-speech-transcript/ (accessed 07 September 2010) 2‘What We’re Fighting For: A Letter from America’, February 2002, http://www.americanvalues.org/html/what_we_re_fighting_for.html (accessed 06 September 2010). “What We’re Fighting For” is a letter addressed to European academics endorsing the use of force against Afghanistan on the basis of just war principles, the letter was signed by 60 American academics including many prominent just war theorists. 3 Michael Walzer, |