Y Safle

‘We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.’

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 3 (quoting St. Augustine)

Augustine’s Just War theory still is at the heart of ethical justification of many of our wars, but is the teory sufficient? Augustine argued that Christians should rather suffer loss than go to war, but did not make the same case for the head of a Christian state. Rather, the head of state may declare war in the interests of maintaining peace. If our peace is threatened, or if we have suffered grave loss, then our head of state may declare war.

I am not particularly happy with the just war theory, and part of my objection lies in this statement, made by a friend:

A pretty standard observation is that non-combatants get killed in wars of any “stripe”. That is often said as if it were a surprise. The important question, it seems to me, is whether fewer civilians get killed in a Just War than would be killed if there were no war.

There is an issue of responsibility here, and we should note that humans are not like beans that can be counted and weighed one against another. If there is a room full of unconcious people who are about to die in a fire, and I throw them from a window so that half of them survive, whereas half of them die from the fall, then I have indeed saved half of them, and my actions - it seems to me - are ethical (assuming there was no better means to save them available to me!).

But now consider this same room, and I decide I will save these people by releasing a flood from some water tanks that will quench the fire. I do so knowing I will drown several other people in another room. Is it now ethical for me to spend the lives of other people to save these?

If one volunteers for action then one says that their life is available to be laid down for the cause for which the action is prosecuted. But what of those who do not volunteer for this action and do not want it? What right have we to lay their lives down for the sake of others?

This is the kind of messy ethical situation one finds oneself in when attempts at a peaceful resolution to a festering problem are abandonded for the economic, logistical and political expediency for war.

I think it is a mistake to try and shoehorn our actions into Augustine’s Just War theory - we may manage to do so, or we may not, but the danger is that in uncritically accepting a theory from another age, whose underlying ethics we have not investigated, we may attempt to abdicate our responisbilities as Christians to consider the issues carefully for ourselves in the light of a fundamental biblically derived Christian ethic. In the case of the invasion of Iraq, such a Christian ethic would need to examine everything from our current lifestyle, our culture and its assumptions as well as the morality of both the Iraqi and western regimes.

Saddam Hussain wore his immorality on his sleave, and a reading of Amnesty International reports is terrifying, but let us not fall into the trap of imputing some overarching morality on our own nations - many of Saddam’s atrocities were perpetrated with western backing, and using western weaponry. The massacre he was executed for was perpetrated under the noses of the US army, and with their permission given to Saddam to breach the no fly zones to perpetrate the massacre.

Utilitarianism is the philosophy that says the moral worth of an action is determined by its utility only, and the utility is defined in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number.

For instance, if we see people in poverty, and they cannot afford to eat, then we are morally obliged to give them money or help them out of poverty, because it is in their best interests that we do so. So far so good.

But an objection to utilitarianism is that if a single man with no immediate family walks into a hospital where there is a man needing a heart transplant, another needing a liver transplant, another needing a kidney transplant, then we should kill the single man and harvest his organs. The greatest utility comes from the sacrifice of the one man to cure the three.

A utilitarian might reply that in the real world such could not happen, because a hospital that acted in such a way would quickly fall into disuse as no sensible person would darken its doors. But this, to me, is little more than a kind of special pleading. The problem with utilitarianism as a philosophy lies entirely within the assumption that our innate sense of morality must be ignored.

You see, a utilitarian will point to emotional and instinctive responses to moral questions and argue that these are evolutionary vestiges that may not be appropriate in the modern context. They will say we must ignore the emotional response that cries out that it is simply wrong to kill a man to harvest his organs. Moral choices are reduced to a simple economy of utility.

So should we invade a country to remove a despotic dictator? The utilitarian must say yes - if the end result will be in the interests of more people than the number of whom it is against their interests.

There is no place for the belief that we have some innate worth beyond being beans to be counted in the weighing up of utility.

But if we, each of us, matter to God. If we bear his image then we are more than carriers of organs (or self interests or whatever). As bearers of his image we have worth that cannot be measured in this simplistic manner.

It is common for defenders of the invasion of Iraq to say that Saddam Hussein was an evil man who was killing his people, and it was right to put a stop to this.

Even assuming that invasion was the only way to stop this (a case that is far from proven), we arrive at an interesting moral dilemma.

I expect it is possible to build a moral case that one may intervene militarily where the objective is to defend those who would be victims of the intended target, although this immediately suffers from this objection: as we know that non combatants (civilians) will die, then who are we to choose which civilians to die? In saving Jones do I kill Smith? If so, then will not the family of Smith be tempted to say that it would have been better that no intervention had occurred? And will not we have to say that Saddam (or whoever) would have been responsible for the death of Jones, but we are responsible for the death of Smith?

What if we save Lewis and Jones, but kill Smith? Are two lives worth more than one? Can we weigh up pros and cons of a military action in terms of the lives of others?

And here is an interesting point from human psychology: imagine that there is a run away train hurtling down a track. You can control the points and send the train down a branch where it will crash and kill one person or a branch where it will crash and kill 10. Which way will you send the train?

Most people reply that they will send it down the branch where one person dies. But recast the scenario: There is a runaway train with 10 people on board heading for a precipice and a very large man standing on an overlooking bridge. you can save the people by pushing the man off the bridge into the path of the train.

In this example, people hesitate - because they must specifically kill the one to save the many. They must act to push the man from the bridge. We recognise in the latter scenario that the life of the onlooker is not ours to give.

So too in Iraq and elsewhere. The lives of the people of other countries are not ours to spend on political aims - however noble.

There are some questions that arise again and again between Christians and non Christians, and one of these goes along the lines of “why does God demand our praise? Doesn’t that make him a self absorbed despot?”

The problem is not a trivial one. Christians would agree with non Christians that there is nothing praiseworthy in a person who demands our praise. That a leader of a country who demands he be praised by virtue of his position is little more than a selfish tyrant, or that an intelligent person who demands that their intelligence be recognised is little more than a bore.

In the history of protestantism there was a man named Emanuel Swedenborg, who was never an evangelical, but believed he had a message for the Church from God regarding the nature of the second coming of Christ, and of heaven and hell. However, Swedenborg was also never a modest man. On his return to Sweden on one occasion, he argued that all the professors of the universities there should have their salaries docked to pay for a chair for himself, and there are other examples of his self absorption that so consumed him that his own father seems to have despaired and oly mentioned his son two or three times in his voluminous autobiography!

And we would say that this was Swedenborg’s own doing. That there is nothing to be admired in a man so “full of himself” and so imodest.

So why should God be different? If we admire humility; if Christ himself taught us to admire humility, then why should we not agree with the atheist or non Christian who says that God is wrong to demand our praises, and wrong to be so absorbed with his own goodness?

There are many things that can be said here, but one of the clearest comments I have seen on the issue comes from John Piper, in his book “Desiring God”:

The second reason people stumble over the teaching that God exalts his own glory and seeks to be praised by his people is that the Bible teaches us not to be like that. For example, the Bible says that “Love seeks not its own” ( 1 Corinthians 13:5). How can God be loving and yet be utterly devoted to “seeking his own” glory and praise and joy? How can God be for us if he is so utterly for himself? The answer I propose is this: Because God is unique as an all-glorious, totally self-sufficient Being, he must be for himself if he is to be for us. The rules of humility that belong to a creature cannot apply in the same way to its Creator. If God should turn away from himself as the Source of infinite joy, he would cease to be God. He would deny the infinite worth of his own glory. He would imply that there is something more valuable outside himself. He would commit idolatry. This would be no gain for us. For where can we go when our God has become unrighteous? Where will we find a Rock of integrity in the universe when the heart of God has ceased to value supremely the supremely valuable? Where shall we turn with our adoration when God himself has forsaken the claims of infinite worth and beauty? No, we do not turn God’s self-exaltation into love by demanding that God cease to be God. Instead we must come to see that God is love precisely because he relentlessly pursues the praises of his name in the hearts of his people.

I don’t suppose it is a universal truth, but as a guiding principle I think there is something to be said for the thesis that crisis is required to bring about genuine and radical change.

Why should this be the case?

Well very often when we are involved in an endeavor, we are involved with others and we develop a process that is comfortable. This builds up an internal pressure that sustains the process unless the external pressure to change is so great that it causes the process to collapse.

I think we can broadly apply this principle. In our churches we do things a certain way. I knew one church which had a youth group meeting. The oldest member of the youth group was in his forties, and the youngest was 23. The group had grown older together, and they had just gone on and on with their comfortable process - year in and year out, without thinking that maybe that group had outlived its purpose.

We can see the same in higher education, where lectures are still a major means of delivery, despite the fact that they are the type of delivery students claim to least enjoy, and from which students may gain the least benefit (unless delivered in some manner that broadens the educational offering beyond a simple discourse by someone in front of a very large class).

We can see the same in politics, where we are caged in the same tired old systems, choosing between two sides of a Janus faced political elite. (For some reason I always think of lizards when I write political elite… Douglas Adams has a lot to answer for!)

We can see it in our personal lives perhaps. Certainly in my own, the times when I have made the most radical changes in my ideas, beliefs, attitudes and such like have been in the response to crisis. Something that caused me to set aside beliefs held because they were comfortable, and made me come face to face with issues I had previously ignored.

In particular, many years ago I held to some beliefs - and most notably the belief that I knew better than the vast majority of Christians on certain things - because I was encouraged to think that way by someone. The crisis that caused me to realise that this person’s own faith was defective caused me to take a long hard look at my own.

It is only when the external pressure is great enough to overcome the internal pressure we have generated to remain the same that we are forced to change.

So what do we do? Manufacture crisis? Probably not the wisest of moves, but we can embrace it when it comes.

On a personal level, perhaps we should also attempt change daily, so as to avoid the need for crisis. If we could ensure our internal pressure to settle down, sit back and not change never built up, it would not take a crisis to change us.

And then there are those things over which we may feel we have little control. There is the Church service that hasn’t changed format since 1924, or the bible study which no one wants to go to, because two people always take it over to discuss single versus double predestination - and have done for the last 20 years.

There is the political system that will not change. The party that will not die, or the coalition that has run local politics for a quarter of the century. We cannot change these things, but a crisis - when it comes - will change them. And it will change them quickly.

The question is, what will we do when the crisis comes? Can we plausibly foresee a crisis, and know what we must do if we want to bring change for the better?

Robin Hobb wrote an excellent series of books about the “Farseers” based around a character known as “the catalyst”. This character either precipitated crisis, or else it followed him around in the magical manner of such stories. But in these stories it is the White Prophet who (with the benefit of knowledge of the future) uses the catalyst to jump the world from the rut it is in into a new rut, which brings about improvements for all.

We don’t have the benefit of knowledge of the future, but we can know now how we would see the world to be a better place (whether on the global scale or the very local scale). We can also predict some crises, simply because they are inevitable (eventually). If we put these together, we too could seize the opportunity of crisis when it comes, to see genuine change.

Diarmid Logan must count as one of the most irrational of people I have come across on the Internet. He argues for a removal of loyalists in Northern Ireland from their home - sending them to who knows where - as long as it is not in Ireland (where they and their parents and their grandparents were born and raised).

Diarmid is an American. He calls himself an Irish American, but that distinction is irrelevant. I wrote to him and asked him if he supported the forcible removal of European Americans from the USA, so that the land can be handed back to Native American people. His reply was that he is a friend of the Native Americans, and that the Irish immigrants to the USA were not and are not part of a problem as regards the loss of land for these peoples.

Diarmid said:

The indigenous Irish rarely came into contact with the Native American population since the indigenous populations of Boston and New York had been ethnically cleansed by Germanic scum such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Dutch centuries before.

Now I am curious. Leaving aside the rather poor grasp of history that this assertion reveals, could Diarmid or anyone explain to me how we arrive at a concept of just guilt. To what extent is an Anglo-Saxon guilty for a murder carried out by his ancestors? Do we argue that guilt is hereditary, passed from father to son? Why so?

Was Solomon guilty for David’s sin with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah? If so, does that not make Jesus guilty too? And yet no good Irish Catholic (or any other Catholic) would say that Jesus was guilty of any sin - his own or the sin of his forefathers.

So is there some principle by which one imputes the guilt of one generation onto another? If so, what is it?

Let me suggest a more reasonable principle - one firmly rooted in Christian ethics - a man is responsible for his own actions.

We are all guilty of many things, but we are guilty for our thoughts and actions, not the thoughts and actions of others. If this is so then the question is really not to do with who massacred the Native American populations, and evicted them from their homelands, but how do we treat these people now?

For instance, are we willing now to share with them the wealth that we generated from the land of their fathers? Are we willing to look at the world around us, seeking out injustice every bit as heinious as that which was visited upon the American peoples, and take a stand to stop that injustice?

Will we speak up for the innocent people of Iraq? Will we play our part in providing aid to the starving populations of a continent that we have and continue to systematically exploit? Will we take a stand to prevent our profligate lifestyles from destroying the world for generations to come?

These are the kind of questions that we must ask ourselves if we are to take seriously questions of guilt and responsibility, for surely raking over the many faults of people long dead and gone does nothing to effect peace and reconciliation, and if Irish Catholicism really exists, then it must take seriously the call to love our neighbours and be reconiled with our brothers.

If these commandments of Jesus are to be ignored then let us have no more silliness about this being done in the name of the catholic Church, because in such a case the Church is anything but catholic, and anything but Christian.

It seems that you can get any kind of emergency help these days, but this one - parked outside our office yesterday, was a new one on me. The caption reads “Grey Matters Ltd. 24 Hour Emergency Philosopher. Don’t even think about it, call us instead!”

And then underneath:

• Same day service within the M25
• All though considered - from inkling to eureka!
• 10% discount when you mention Tarski’s argument that the model-theoretic characterization of logical consequence is more basic than its characterization in terms of a deductive system

It is not clear who in our office had called out this service.

Last month I wrote a post criticising the “Truth Driven Thinking” podcast, and Tom Harpur’s view of a mythical Jesus. The nub of his argument seems to be that ancient literature is “widely understood” to be written in a mythical manner, and that no-one really believed what was written to be truth. Rather they all accepted an assumption that what was being written was spiritual myth.

On the other hand there are people who say that not only is Harpur talking rubbish, but that every part of the Bible must be taken as literal historical fact, including the six day creation six thousand years ago.

Both are wrong, because both misunderstand this issue of how literature was understood.

Let us be clear - all literature has certain conventions, and those conventions change over time. A verbatim narrative of an event is about the dullest thing one could possibly read, and so narrative histories modify conversation somewhat, leave out the dull bits, perhaps re-arrange a little. But in essence, they are narratives of actual events.

Now it may be instructive to look at Thucydides’ Magnus Opus, The History of The Peloponnesian War. (Actually, it is not all the work of Thucydides, but we can ignore that for now, as these comments apply to the part he did write).

In this work, Thucydides recounts the war between Athens and Sparta, with remarkable insight and clearly a first hand knowledge of the events he recounts. When Thucydides stops writing, the account loses some of this detail, and we must marvel at what a remarkable historian this man was.

However, he was not just a historian. Thucydides was also a philosopher, and he used his history to paint a picture of the degeneration of the Athenian empire. The theatre of history is the backdrop for his philosophical teaching (and in this, he is not unusual as a historian).

So consider Thucydides’ accounts of various speeches and motivational addresses in his history. These are often pages in length, and it is clear that Thucydides was not present to hear and record these. Thus we suppose that the speeches are gists of originals, modified by Thucydides to carry his message. It may be that everthing that Thucydides attributes to the speech maker was actually said by someone, but by placing the words in the mouths of the key actors in his history, the narrative is enriched, the point is carried, and the history is richer for it.

Now Tom Harpur would be wrong to suggest that anyone reading the History of the Peloponnesian War should understand that the account is mythical. No one would agree with Harpur, for instance, that the General Pericles was not a historical figure who lived and then died of plague (or perhaps typhoid) in the siege of Athens. Did Pericles actually speak certain words attributed to him? Perhaps not, although we can be near certain that the direction he gave Athens was as reported by Thucydides, because we know that Thucydides had access to the information that allowed him to report accurately on the war.

So based on documents such as this one, we see that we can dismiss Harpur’s suggestions at once. There was no assumption that when reading history one was reading a mythical account.

But the hstory of the Peloponnesian war tells us something else: That history is often arranged to make a spiritual point. In the Old Testament we might read the book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel and be taken with an understanding that Kings that followed God were blessed, and those who failed to do so did badly. 2 Chronicles in particular brings out this point, and it is notable how little attention a godless king might get. Perhaps the most significant example is Omri. Chronicles talks of his son, the king Ahab, and uses this to make its points well. Omri gets no mention at all (except as father or grandfather or son).

In the book of Kings, chapter 16 we read “But Omri did evil in the eyes of the LORD and sinned more than all those before him.”, so we know this much about him and very little more. The Chronicler does not rewrite history - he does not say Omri was a good king, or that he met a quick and unfortunate death because of his evil. The Chronicler just ignores him entirely.

Does this worry us? No - because the message God has placed in the Bible is the message he wants us to read. And the message here is that it does not matter how great your works are - without God they have no lasting significance. All crumbles and decays in its time, and all are forgotten. Without God we really are nothing.

So the omission itself is a part of the teaching of the Bible, and we can learn from it.

But there are also parts of the Bible that are not observed history. The six day creation is an example, because who could have observed God creating the world before Adam was created?

Thus we must treat this part of the Bible as direct revelation, and this being the case, it is not unwarranted to suppose that the six day creation was allegorical, as Origen thought and as Augustine also believed.

Augustine held that creation must have taken place in an instant. And in a sense that is exactly what science says, for in the instant of the big bang, the precise configuration of the Universe that would create me and you was created.

Whether you accept that interpretation or not is up to you, but to me that is the most elegant of all universes. It is beautiful in simplicity hiding its incredible complexity.

And the book of Genesis? If it is allegorical, then what is it teaching us? To me that is the most exciting part of this whole journey - that we can learn so much from Genesis too.

But that will have to wait for another message. This one is long enough already.

I confess I don’t understand American politics.

It seems that if you try and talk about some political issue or another in America, what it all boils down to is “are you pro choice, or pro life?”. Witness for instance this thread: http://pandagon.net/2006/07/05/you-just-dont-want-to-die-of-starvation-because-youre-jealous-i-have-a-hummer-and-you-dont/, ostensibly about global warming - but really a dig at the so called religious right in America.

It seems that if you are a right winger in America you are not allowed to believe global warming is a problem, and you must be pro life.

Why?

I guess that an ideology that believes in small government, low regulation and the dominance of the mythical free market could have a vested interest in arguing that global warming does not exist. If there is no problem, we do not have to regulate it - and whilst we are at it, we can have a war or two to transfer money from the public sector into our more deserving private business interests!

But why is abortion a polarised political issue?

Some points to note:

1. Abortion is often a religious issue. But historical Christianity believes in ascetism, and is opposed to greed and materialism. Thus we should find many Christians who oppose the consumerist policies of the “free” market with the inherent beliefe that the generation of wealth is the greatest good. Thus these Christians should not be economic right wingers.

2. The dichotomy between pro choice and pro life is a false one. How many people that believe abortion is at least sometimes acceptable (thus pro-choice) would accept that they are anti-life? Many reasonable people find the truth somewhere in the middle of this issue, so polarisation into two opposing camps seems unhelpful

3. As the ethic of the right wing is built on the economic premise that the generation of wealth is the greatest good, I continue to wonder how this argues for a pro life agenda?

Of course, I have stereotyped a few things in this message. I am sure that many right wingers are not “pro life” (or at least, already do lie elsewhere on the spectrum between the two poles). I am fairly convinced that the belief that generation of wealth is the greatest good is so endemic in society (be it American, British or any other) that most people don’t notice it and just accept it whether they think themselves right wing or left wing.

But I wonder whether anyone can actually disect this question and tell me exactly what is right wing about pro-life and left wing about pro-choice? Or is it just historical accident that these issues have become the key questions asked of U.S. politicians (who cannot seem to reverse the laws in any case!)