Originally posted on January 5, 2011 at 12:03pm
Those who knew me growing up might be surprised to see me defending the act of war, as I was strongly anti-war as a child. Since war and the death penalty were two issues which survived such a major life-altering event as my rejection of my religious beliefs, to some degree I clung to them (irrationally) as reflections of who I truly am, since not even something as powerful as religion seemed to define "the real me."
As I see it, war results from a peacock's tail effect: just as a long, beautiful tail increases a peacock's chances at reproduction, although the resulting arm's race of tail length makes the species more prone to predation, I believe that human behavior which works well in individual cases (say, preferential trust for that which is more familiar when confronted with a world of so many unknowns, or parents struggling for basic resources for their children) become less and less advantageous as the social system in question becomes larger and larger. If we throw in some of the basic human motivations, say, revenge, and hatred or indifference toward "The Other" as perceived by us (to paraphrase from Western Front, we dehumanize the enemy to make killing easier), or even sheer frustration, we have the seeds of many atrocities of war: rape as a tool for demoralizing the enemy; the Bataan Death March/Trail of Tears; Abu Ghraib; the murder of Archimedes; the Diaspora.
Lately, whenever I pose the question of the necessity of war, I consider the following hypothetical: if I had a child who depended on me to live, what ideals would I be willing to sacrifice to ensure this child's life, and what ideals are important enough to let this child die? I then extrapolate to increasingly larger realms of responsibility, until I become a vote in Congress/POTUS/Grand Dictator of Le Republique de la Banane. If I believed there were credible threats among a group in my country, could I okay a document-checking program of potential American citizens, deporting those who don't have the right papers? The internment of Japanese Americans? The Rwandan genocide? The Holocaust? I like to think that I would stop before I get into "genocide" territory, but why? If I truly believe that they would stop at nothing to build powerful weapons to kill us, what choice do I have but to fight until the threat is eradicated from the face of the earth? If I am a soldier, and I am told that the strangers being put in my hands live and die solely for the purpose of destroying everyone and everything I hold dear, why on earth would I not treat them like dogs, reveling in their humiliation? As I've said before, the problems of war are the problems of the modern western human.
And yet I do have lines I dare not cross. If I cross them, I may not feel bad just then, but give me two days, or two months, or two years: I come to feel guilt, maybe anguish, and instead of finding the act easier (which does happen sometimes), it becomes harder once an idea becomes an action, and the emotional fallout becomes fact rather than prediction. Of course, this brings us back to the original question of divided loyalty: what conditions would make it possible to kill a stranger to save a child? On this note, I would like to point out that in the school board shooting of last year, the heroic security guard who killed the hostage taker, instead of rationalizing his behavior as "I killed a bad man who deserved it," struggled with his conscience over the act of taking another person's life, which I believe one identifier of a true hero as contrasted with a sociopath who happened to be in a place to save some people. (Or, to put a pessimistic slant to that last statement, "The truly good guys are the ones who suffer.") This is also why I think the argument that women shouldn't be on the front lines because they're mentally unable to handle it is complete nonsense: no human being is able to handle it, and those who are aren't the people we want out there.
And speaking of the people we don't want out there, what of the screening process? Be it the case of the Fort Hood shooting, the flight school that taught the 9/11 hijackers how to fly, or the cop who killed my aunt, surely there were signs that should have indicated something was seriously wrong, am I right? Except I've taken statistics; I know there are two types of errors one can make -- reject someone who should not be rejected, or do not reject someone who should be rejected -- and it takes increasingly larger access to resources to make these errors smaller and smaller. If we want enough cops on the street to keep the criminal element in check, if we want sufficient field psychologists to aid our troops in an environment that is mentally taxing to an extreme, or if we are a flight school that wants enough customers to meet our financial needs, we need to weigh the fact of limited resources against potentially unforeseen, perhaps unknowable risks. The saying is that hindsight is 20/20; I disagree. Hindsight causes tunnel vision: we only see what did happen, not what could have happened. This is not to dismiss incompetence which perhaps allowed tragedy; this is merely a reminder of the realities of living in a messy world. The very unpredictability which makes the world a wondrous place to live is also what makes it so scary at times.
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