AC Grayling commands our respect. He founded the New College of the Humanities in London, in which all students must study critical reasoning, science literacy, and applied ethics. He is a philosopher who believes that philosophy should be applied to daily life, and so appears frequently in British media discussing philosophy and public affairs. He is an atheist, a humanist, and a secularist, and this is all important, as we shall see.
He starts his Enquiry with a broad sweep of the history of war in Part 1 delineating war in which the combatants are constrained in what they do from war in which they are not. In Part 2 he further discusses the causes of war, the kinds of reasons, explanations and justifications, between those that look at human nature and those that focus on how humans have organised their societies. He also covers the effects of constrained and unconstrained wars. Part 3 brings the first two parts together in discussing how war can be constrained: if we can understand it, we can reduce its frequency and its consequences, Grayling argues.
He starts his Enquiry with a broad sweep of the history of war in Part 1 delineating war in which the combatants are constrained in what they do from war in which they are not. In Part 2 he further discusses the causes of war, the kinds of reasons, explanations and justifications, between those that look at human nature and those that focus on how humans have organised their societies. He also covers the effects of constrained and unconstrained wars. Part 3 brings the first two parts together in discussing how war can be constrained: if we can understand it, we can reduce its frequency and its consequences, Grayling argues.
What Grayling has written will be well received in the UK. But Britain is not the world; British liberal, atheist, humanist, and secularist values are not shared around the world. In fact, most countries and peoples disavow British values and would do the same to Grayling's. Although the British Government has been guilty of acts of aggression, today the British people are pacific. British society is experiencing all-time low levels of civil violence, and only the oldest generation has experienced war and even then not as combatants but as their children. The poor performance of British armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan was epitomised by how easily the Iranian Revolutionary Guards took and terrified the 15 sailors of HMS Cornwall in March 2007. So it won't surprise anyone to see in the 2018 FIFA World Cup news stories of over-weight Englishmen being beset by Khuliganskaya Armiya led by Vasily the Killer and the Orel Butchers with the tacit support of the Federal Politsia (motto, sic: "By serving Russia, I serve the law!"). Grayling is simply deluded by the Liberal Fallacy: the world doesn't want to be British, or American, even if given the chance.
Accepting an election result doesn't mean accepting that the ethics of the losing side are defeated, is what losers and some winners of them often say. That those people do accept the result of elections illuminates the nature of politics, that it is only tendentially, and sometimes not at all, about applied ethics, about The Good. Here's a quote from Grayling which portrays the essence of politics and betrays the frustration that British liberals have with the rest of the non-liberal world (being most of the other 7 billion people on the planet):
"There is something very crude indeed about war as a solution to serious differences between two or more parties, for it hands the argument over to killing and destruction as a form of settlement, leaving to killing and destruction the decision as to who will have the final say. It goes without saying that there is no guarantee such outcomes will represent the better moral case in the dispute. ... War does not determine who is right, only who is left". Replace the words "killing and destruction" and "war" for "elections", and you get what I mean about Grayling's certainty in The Right and The Wrong, The Good, The Bad, the better and the worse.
His argument to de-institutionalise war seems nice, but when you realise that modern weapons systems take many years to bring into service (for example the Eurofighter was started in 1983, first went into service with the Luftwaffe in 2003, and may well keep flying until 2033 and beyond) then you realise that the institutionalisation of war, from the defence equipment perspective at least, has never been stronger. When you realise that to have this weapons-making capacity requires, as Grayling himself points out, the money, the manufacturing and technological infrastructure, and not only that but especially the encouragement of positive social attitudes to those whose business is war, not summoned up and pulled out of a cupboard for a sudden, single threat, but to be maintained over generations, then the abolition of war under such circumstances is impossible. So the choice between pacifism and permitting weapons even just for self-defence (which can easily be misunderstood for offence and aggression) has never been starker.
He writes of the romanticisation and cosmeticisation of war. Again, this is an argument which will appeal to British people even if they will be uneasy about acting upon it. But war is commonplace in many parts of the world, and many hundreds of millions alive today have experienced it directly and will testify that it is an evil as Grayling judges it to be. But few of these hundreds of millions resile from it. Where are the massive pacifist movements overwhelming the world's gun-toting polities? Do you see them, because I don't. Where have you seen widespread civil disobedience or the revolutionary rise of the anti-war party in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, Somalia, Nigeria, Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Congo, Yemen, Ethiopia, or Ukraine, to name just a few current conflicts? In the country where Gandhi devised the pacifist Satyagraha much beloved of British liberals, there is a standing army of 1.4 million soldiers, a navy of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, and an arsenal of nuclear weapons enough to destroy the whole world. In a country where a guerilla army rose to fight social injustice but which metastasised into violently-criminal drug traffickers and murderous terrorists committing human rights atrocities on a daily basis that would bring even the most determined and courageous to their knees, the impoverished and blood-spattered Colombian people initially voted against being bullied and murdered into making peace. People around the world might agree with Grayling that war is an evil, but they all point to greater evils than the wars they willingly fight.
It is for this reason that I disagree with Grayling's assertion that war represents the failure of diplomacy, trade and cultural ties. It is a continuation of all that, and more. Politics is about conflict and disagreement, and the point of politics (and war) is forcing the opponent (the enemy) to the point where they cannot or do not wish to continue fighting. A final decision will have been made, whether using violence or its threat, or not. Appeals to ethics will be made as one of many ways to force the opponent to the point where they cannot or do not wish to continue fighting, but there is no guarantee the final decision will represent the better moral case in the dispute.
I've left this "war is a continuation of politics" argument till last because Grayling did. He initially left out of his definition of war the notion of the political, that the aim is to maintain or gain state/political power, but instead made it one of his Concluding Remarks, as if he had advanced the learning of humankind with this conclusion. Sorry, AC, but we have known this for centuries.
No comments:
Post a Comment