Tweet

Email

Print

The European reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden prompts a question: Why do so many of us refuse to take our own side in a fight? Why was it that, as Douglas Murray acidly observed, “when the worst enemy of the West was dead, Europeans failed to display any emotion above a truculent annoyance at the manner of his passing”?

One reason for our (historically unprecedented) failure to stand shoulder to shoulder with ourselves is that we do not believe we are engaged in a war (the 9/10 syndrome). Another is that we do not believe the action we take to defend ourselves is just. For the academic-media complex in the West, the very idea of a just war against terror is a logical contradiction.

Take Giles Fraser, a canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, and a columnist at the UK’s leading liberal newspaper, the Guardian. He was appalled at the manner of the killing of OBL:

The idea that it can be just for an unarmed man to be gunned down in his bedclothes conflates justice and revenge in a way that flies in the face of the clear teachings of Jesus, who urged his followers not to respond to the violence of the other in the same manner. … In the manner of his own death, Jesus made it abundantly clear that it is better to die than to kill. … just war ought to make as much sense to Christians as just adultery.

For a Christian to treat “just war” as senseless is a symptom of a deep intellectual malady. Fraser is in thrall to the adversary culture and skilled at throwing its voice in a pseudo-religious register, but he seems actually not to know that the prime intellectual author of Just War theory was … St. Augustine (354–430). Of his dynamic and evolving concept of tranquillitas ordinis (the peace of public order), Fraser appears ignorant. He makes no reference to theologians such as Paul Ramsey, whose books War and the Christian Conscience (1961) and The Just War (1968) labored to analyse the conditions of jus in bello, or James Turner Johnson, who argued in Just War and the Gulf War (1991) that “Christian just war theory is based on the moral duty of love of neighbor. The obligation to protect the neighbor who is being unjustly attacked provides justification for Christians to resort to force, at the same time love also imposes limits on such force.”

“Just War” is a venerable and precious tradition of thought—Christian in origin, but now central also to secular thinking—about the normative framework that should guide our resort to war and our war-fighting. Typically, the late-modern Christian gets things completely upside down. Just War thinking is defined by a refusal to separate politics from ethics. Over the centuries it has helped to establish norms about initiating war (Jus ad bellum), which define a war as just only under specific conditions: a rightful authority openly declares it, just cause motivates it (self-defence against aggression, saving the innocent), there is right intention, it is undertaken as a last resort, and there is a reasonable hope of success. The tradition has also agonized over the norms concerning the actual conduct of war (Jus in bello)—the use of discriminate means (non-combatant immunity, discrimination between combatants and non-combatants) and proportionate means (force used must be commensurate with the threat faced).

According to James Turner Johnson, the killing of bin Laden was “an execution of justice, plain and simple, carried out under the authority of the one who can properly use bellum (war) in the service of good.” And the same author, note, has always insisted that an attitude of “‘anything goes’ in dealing with [bin Laden] and other terrorists would … violate our society’s own normative traditions.”

Fraser is embarrassed by such talk. He repudiates the entire Just War tradition as a nonsense, akin to talk of “just adultery.”

Fortunately, many Europeans have not lost touch with this supple, prudential, and ethical way of thinking about conflict. In my experience, there is a dividing line marked by class and culture when it comes to war-talk. While liberal middle-class professionals such as Canon Fraser talk breezily about it being “better to die than to kill,” some of my working-class students—often the sisters or girlfriends of the soldiers who actually do the dying—speak quietly, stoically, and with genuine expertise as sturdy Augustinian realists about the morality of the rigorous rules of engagement under which their loved ones fight (and die) in an anti-fascist war in Afghanistan.

Ignorance increases as one moves up the educational ladder. The heights of stupidity are found at the apex of the intellectual culture in the universities. As the writer Melanie Phillips puts it, we live in a world turned upside down.

While the ordinary people appear to be connected to reality and able to tell fact from fantasy and right from wrong, it is the intelligentsia—supposedly the custodians of reason—who seem to be taking the most irrational, prejudiced and intolerant positions, clothed nevertheless in the most high-minded concerns of “progressive” politics.

This matters profoundly. First, we have enemies and our refusal to take our own side in any fight erodes our ability to wage any war against them, just or otherwise. Second, we risk losing the ability to deliberate with each other as citizens about war, and the capacity to conceive circumstances in which our might may, sometimes, on balance, serve right.

And why must we continue to be able to talk to each other using the Just War tradition? The contemporary Christian Just War thinker George Weigel warns that if we allow “soft-minded and ill-informed religious leaders and intellectuals [to] succeed in gutting the Just War tradition and loosening our public culture’s grasp on it,” then we will find ourselves not at Canon Fraser’s other-worldly pacifist utopia—St. Augustine’s whole point was that the end time is not our time!—but instead in an altogether darker place, where “raw pragmatism … justifies any end and any means.”