Wise Words
I will try and get the graduation stuff up soon. I’m wrestling with whether or not it is ok to put video of my kids online. There have been some problems with blogs in Ehime in the past year, but it mostly had to do with Western-style outrageously sarcastic commentary or closeup photos of kids. Apparently, pervs in Japan find these photos and photoshop these innocent faces onto…older…more….um…explicit…forms, shall we say? Ok, enough of that. I think it’d probably be fine to post a video, though. Allow me to try and get a read off of some folks, first, though. Right. Now, onto my entry.
I reread a really good essay by good old C.S. Lewis entitled Why I am Not a Pacifist today. I just wanted to pass along these gems. Let me make it clear that I am not trying to start a dialogue about America’s various activities in the Middle East, but solely about a cultural place that many Americans occupy today. A place that is becoming increasingly highly politicized. When I read Lewis’ words, they really resonate. I think they are lucid, well-formed thoughts that contain some serious wisdom. (Then again, I suppose you’d have to be convinced that you were a wise old dude to head to a Pacifist Association to deliver a speech entitled Why I am Not a Pacifist, huh?) Anyway, it’s a really good read, and I highly recommend it.
If a Germanised Europe in 1914 would have been an evil, then the war which prevented that evil was, so far, justified. To call it useless because it did not also cure slums and unemployment is like coming up to a man who has just succeeded in defending himself from a man-eating tiger and saying, “It’s no good, old chap. This hasn’t really cured your rheumatism!”
The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower a much greater evil.
Only liberal societies tolerate Pacifists. In the liberal society, the number of Pacifists will either be large enough to cripple the state as a belligerent, or not. If not, then you have done nothing. If it is large enough, then you have handed over the state which does tolerate Pacifists to its totalitarian neighbour who does not. Pacifism of this kind is taking the straight road to a world in which there will be no Pacifists.
(Slightly related here, but only tangentially, is the Churchillism – “An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”)
From the dawn of history down to the sinking of the Terris Bay, the world echoes with the praise of righteous war. To be a Pacifist, I must part company with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Zarathustra and the Bhagavad-Gita, with Cicero and Montaigne, with Iceland and with Egypt. From this point of view I am almost tempted to reply to the Pacifist as Johnson replied to Goldsmith, “Nay, Sir, if you will not take the universal opinion of mankind, I have no more to say.”
(On the “turn the other cheek” doctrine of nonresistance.)
Or to put the same thing in a more logical language, I think the duty of nonresistance is here stateted as regards injuries simpliciter, but without prejudice to anything we may have to allow later about injuries secundum quid.
All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love. Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. It threatens every temporal evil — every evil except dishonour and final perdition, and those who bear it like it no better than you would like it. On the other side, though it may not be your fault, it is certainly a fact that Pacifism threatens you with almost nothing.
I’m not sure if you find his words interesting, inspiring, disturbed, or anything else. I quite like them. And I assure you that reading them in full context is far superior an experience. I worry sometimes that despite the good intentions of those who hate war (myself included), we are climbing that cultural wall whereby we put ourselves in a very grave place. War may be horrible, but it is not the most evil thing in existence. In that regard, if in no other, I agree with Lewis. And as Forrest said, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
