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A Moral Improvement on War

2/11/2007 01:32:13

Today I have been getting interested in some words that you have probably heard about, though they're new to me. In a book about current events I came across a reference to Jimmy Carter's rhetoric about "the moral equivalent of war" against energy dependence in the 70s. These words, in turn, refer to the title of a speech that William James gave almost a hundred years ago at Stanford. This little thread of triangulation - William James's pacifism, Carter's energy crisis, and today's geopolitics and ecopolitics - have been swimming around my head for most of the day, powerfully.

James begins by reflecting on the experience and memory of the Civil War and the more recent Spanish-American War. Despite the intolerable inhumanity that wars bring out in the behavior of societies, he concedes that war has a unique capacity to unite a nation around a pressing cause and, most importantly, forge the character of its people. At the same time, he describes himself as an avowed pacifist. Violent war, in his thinking and mine, is a consequence of decisions and circumstances that has been common in human history but not necessary to it. That is to say, there are social arrangements and distributions of resources possible that, very possibly, can make wars less desirous. But what then, in the case of such a utopia (and perhaps in preparation for it), can be done to still foster the virtues that the experience of war can teach us? What can unite us as strongly as war has, bringing people together "by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking"?

His answer, despite himself, is admirably suited to the situation today. He suggests (it sounds kind of strange, and then upon reflection, not so strange) a war against Nature. In actual fact, his vision is for young men to take some years for hard labor in the least desirable jobs "to get the childishness knocked out of them," thus preserving the lower classes from a whole lifetime of such work. But go back to the part about Nature. The transcendentalists and conventional wisdom since Freud have taught us that one doesn't go to war against natures, whether of the ecological or human kind. For Freud, war against human nature breeds psychosis. And we have learned well enough that ruthlessness against the natural environment can cause the beneficent earth to run out of the goods that sustain us. Nevertheless, there is a part of human nature, or at least the wasteful, selfish manifestations of it, that has failed and is failing to prevent environmental and political cataclysm. Similarly there is a part of the natural world, namely its capacity and tendency due to our efforts to destroy us, that can be justly warred against in a war that leads to a sustainable condition for the human kind of life.

The vocabulary of a war is an unusual one for dealing with something like Mother Earth, with whom the environmentalists ask us to be gentle and benign. But war, as James points out, might actually be more in our nature. Perhaps I should try another word instead: jihad. Arabic "jihad" has a more balanced and thorough set of connotations than English "war," and might be exactly what people in industrial societies need to take up. It implies both an inner and an outer struggle, one against the resistance to good in oneself and one out onto the world. This is exactly the sort of dual ethic that an environmental commitment might need to get beyond the fringe and into the mainstream consciousness. The communal, internal struggle is desperately necessary for us to change our habits as completely as a sustainable way of life will require. Applied and restored in this way, the English "war" could stand to learn from the fullness of meaning available in Arabic "jihad."

It is important of course that we not hate the enemy! We cannot afford to hate even our greed selves (because it is ourselves) or the air we breathe (because it is still what fills our lungs). Jesus taught that one should love even enemies, and that would be a necessary part of the jihadi-environmentalist approach. When Christian ethicists like Timothy Jackson (in The Priority of Love) argue that war must be fought out of love for the enemy, it normally sounds silly. How can I love someone and kill him at the same time? In the case of the environment, this makes a whole lot of sense!

Bringing the earth to this status of the loved enemy is probably much better represented in human history than the attitude of industrial societies. It is only in modern times that we tromp upon the earth with no concern about what it will do back to us, how its wrath will strike us when the time comes. People who do not live lives of total industrial affluence are aware of this double nature of nature: we depend on it for everything, yet we must struggle with all our might to survive in it. By revisiting this awareness, a jihadi-environmentalist ethic restores the knowledge of humanity's utter dependence on nature.

When Jimmy Carter first suggested that we adopt "the moral equivalent of war" as a posture against the energy crisis, many people did not take him seriously. Any war short of murderous explosions sounded to them like weakness. But between then and now we have seen the Iran hostage crisis, the first war in Iraq, the decade of Iraqi misery that followed, 9/11, Afghanistan, the endless second war in Iraq, and who knows what next. Not one of these conflicts was much of a victory for the United States, and our precarious dependence on the resources of unstable, oppressive regimes continues. Things are worse than ever, both on the geopolitical and ecological fronts. In contrast, Carter's administration made substantial legislative progress in increasing vehicle and industrial efficiency, though by the 21st century they are long out of date.

Are the hawks ready to recognize that the tactic of veiled conquest has failed? In the modern world, where it is the height of purposeful ignorance not to recognize the co-humanity of other people, even the most valiant victor has unaccountable blood on his hands. So what if President Bush called off the war on terror and declared one against the global injustice that breeds it? What if he made no more oil-securing invasions and instead declared a jihad against petroleum addiction? If he did, I hope that he would look very serious and hold massive rallies in Washington, complete with whooping dances, demonstrations of the amazing technology that will help, fantastic uniforms, and war paint. The only justifiable war nowadays is one against common problems. By the same token, William James recognized (and the failure of today's environmental movement has proven) that the only way to make us human enough to face the truest dangers is war, of sorts. Not merely its equivalent, I submit, but its improvement.

re:A Moral Improvement on War - 2/11/2007 20:35:03
Posted by nathan

On this subject, Common Dreams has a nice little article from The Nation about the views of Drew Faust, the first woman president-to-be of Harvard, on Americans' prediliction for war.

re:A Moral Improvement on War - 2/13/2007 15:29:22
Posted by Barbara Kay Croissant

I enjoyed this essay very much. Reminds me of how the Bhagavan Gita is the expression of internal war, set in a context of external war. The true war is against the ego. When taken to its conclusion, i.e., when the ego is totally destroyed, with it goes the world as seen through the ego. When consciousness is pure, the world is seen as God and all struggle is just theatre.

re:A Moral Improvement on War - 2/16/2007 13:12:43
Posted by Em

It seems a bit risky to define Nature itself as the enemy (is that what you meant to do?) As popularly understood, the goal of war is to either destroy the enemy completely or to beat the essence out of it so that it submits. The goal with nature is, I think, to exploit it in an intelligent way just enough so that we can survive, while leaving its life and essence intact as much as possible.

Perhaps my understanding of war just isn't deep enough (-: I'm no expert nohow :-). Perhaps there are theories of war in which the object of war is to extract just what you want from your enemy, as gently as possible, keeping your sword carefully away from its heart. But most wars in human history have not been fought that way. Desperation always seems to kick in, changing the mentality to "if we ever get the upper hand for a second, we'd better throw all our energy into killing the people in front of us so they don't think of killing us later." I'm not sure that the idea of respecting or loving your enemy is widely understood. So I guess I'd suggest that we might have to redefine war in the general imagination before undertaking a campaign against Nature.

Perhaps we could declare war on our own wasteful consumption, but I don't quite trust the wisdom and discipline of our collective military mind enough to risk declaring Nature itself as the enemy.

Still, I like the idea as a way to give the environmental movement some teeth -- to help people understand its importance for our well-being and to get us to engage with it using all our resources.

re:A Moral Improvement on War - 2/16/2007 13:24:12
Posted by Em

Hmmm... so rereading your last paragraph, maybe you've already addressed my concerns about the way wars tend in practice to be fought. But how would one change the public understanding of war away from "veiled conquest" to something more just? Not that it wouldn't be a good idea (changing this understanding would be a good thing in many ways), but it would require a bit of a struggle in itself...

re:A Moral Improvement on War - 2/18/2007 10:50:14
Posted by nathan

Thank you so much for your comments. Seeing how words like these echo to your ear really helps. It is true, war on "nature" doesn't sound very appealing. Particularly, as I mentioned, in the wake of Freud (who ended the mostly-religious discourse against human nature) and romanticist-transcendentalist-environmentalist movements, who rightly introduce into our way of talking that nature is a thing to nourish and protect. So maybe out loud things should be stated in a different way. As you say, against "wasteful consumption" or something like that. We'd need a clever phrase probably.

The key anthropological question here is whether war is possible that is not against people, not against a nation. We are coming close to that with the literal meaning of "The War on Terror," which is a futile war against a human emotion. And this war, incidentally, seems to depend, not on rallying the population against an enemy, but precisely the opposite, calling on ourselves to notice the war as little as possible while we keep on shopping, consuming, and borrowing money to keep the economy afloat.

The critical anthropological question I mean to ask is this: can people rally around the call to war when the enemy does not consist in other people whom they can hate? I'm not sure this is possible. Even in a war against overconsumption, we would all probably be so evil to the oil bosses that, unbelievably, they would gain the moral high ground.

Though we might not call it this, fighting our own consumption will be a war against parts of our own natures and against the wrath of nature. Actually, I still stand behind my use of jihad - the struggle to discipline the self and remake the world outside. I think it actually best describes the kind of concept-of-warfare that we need.

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