Live, from the City of Man
While relatively few Americans can bring themselves to say that the deliberate targeting of non-combatants during World War II, regardless of the physics involved, was immoral, our commitment to jus in bello has grown to make the avoidance of “collateral damage” official policy. At least until another hard, less asymmetrical, case comes along. Then it’s likely that the same utilitarian calculus used to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Tokyo, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka don’t seem to require any justification) will be difficult to resist.
This is neither critical nor cynical. It’s a reminder of what Scripture and Sacred Tradition teaches: while we may reside and even thrive in the Earthly City, our citizenship is elsewhere. The two cities aren’t identical, and their requirements won’t always coincide. As Augustine famously put it, “Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self.” For citizens of the City of God, suffering injustice rather than risk committing one is part of “contempt of self.” The other city can’t begin to imagine such a trade-off. Not because it’s contemptuous of God—although it is—but out of simple self-preservation. (If this sounds a bit theoretical, recall that just the other day, a congressman suggested bombing Mecca in response to a terrorist attack. If this idea made sense to you, welcome to the City of Man.) Love of self and its emphasis on self-preservation is why utilitarianism is the City of Man’s default position, in war as in peace.
Roberto Rivera
Mr. Rivera presents his Christian readers with a dilemma: whether to suffer injustice, or to commit injustice. The dilemma is a false one.
Suppose a man comes to kill you. As a Christian, are you permitted to defend yourself? The traditional answer is that self-defense is legitimate. Suppose you are also a pacifist. Are you required to defend yourself? No, you are permitted to submit.
Let’s raise the stakes. Suppose the man is coming to kill a child entrusted to your care. Are you permitted to submit? No. To do so is not pacifism, it is cowardice. Moral fastidiousness has limits. Doing nothing while others are murdered does not keep your hands clean. Mass graves are a dirty business; they spread contagion.
As to bombing Mecca. Speaking as a citizen of the City of Man, it seems to me that Mecca is just another city, as expendable as Damascus or Tehran, and far more expendable than New York or London.
Posted on August 15th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: religion
Entries RSS
I think it’s a “MatchBox 20″ single — from last year or earlier — that contains the line, and I paraphrase “It’s 2 a.m. and I must be lonely.”
Lonely or not, before I head back to my guava paste, “Maria” cookies, and second Isabel Allende novel in a row, I must make one comment here:
PBS recently did a special attempting to put into perspective the multiple factors that lead, eventually, to defeat of Japan in the Pacific Theatre of WWII. I learned, for the first time, of the firebombing of Tokyo by American pilots with newly developed napalm bombs.
Tokyo was, at that time, a tinder box — a city built of wood. The carnage I learned about that night shook me to my core.
Using waves of napalm bombs dropped from American planes to soften up the resolve of the Japanese military leadership is one of the great human catastropes of the 20th century.
Those Japanese non-combatants should not have been firebombed to oblivion while still alive on this earth. Period.
Paco Malo