Over at Icthus, Nate Ljilje wrote a lengthy post about America’s “ethic of violence.” I think that he’s half right. I agree, as my pastor pointed out, that Americans have been sold on the idea that liberty demands a price in blood. I think this is because of our own history and our fairly solipsistic view of the world; we all learn about the wars to end colonialism and slavery and to launch democracy, but usually not in the context of the fact that other countries achieved these results with less bloodshed.

But I think Nate goes overboard in treating violence as a peculiarly American vice. “We Americans love hero/villain stories, all of which end with the villain facing a harsh justice,” he writes, as if the rest of the world didn’t love those stories too. Moreover, focusing on the violence of our times as if it were an aberration disregards the fact that there’s been a general decline in the incidence of warfare over the last century. I’ve heard it said, in fact, that the years between World War II and the outbreak of the Balkan war represented Europe’s longest stretch of peace in recorded history.

I bring this up because, in my continuing critique of left-wing utopianism, I think that treating violence as a deviation from the norm is considerably underestimating the opponent. Way back when I was blogging Exodus I described how the Old Testament laws had to be harsh because they were displacing a culture of personal vengeance. Although the article I linked in that post is no longer up, another treatment of the same presentation says:

When a nation goes to war against another nation, it may be merely re-enacting an event as old as humanity itself, according to scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting.

But, judging from comparisons of rates of combat deaths, modern nation states have not been as war-like as traditional tribal societies, according to Lawrence Keeley, professor of anthropology, University of Illinois, Chicago….

Some researchers argue that war is about 10,000 years old while others contend that it is much older, maybe even millions of years old. Nearly every primitive society ever studied fought wars.

Stephen Beckerman, an associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, noted that war is more frequent among tribal societies than is commonly believed, and most studies find that revenge is probably the single most common motive. The universal impulse to avenge an injury, harkening back to ‘an eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth,’ is a driving force in human violence.

This is why, as Jared Diamond bluntly put it, one of the first orders of business for any state is to monopolize violence for itself. There is thus a basic division of labor, where the government carries out punishments and the subjects are socialized to be relatively peaceful. I think that the general impression that humans are basically peaceful comes from the fact that we have been so socialized. But would we be able to be, if we weren’t under the umbrella of the state’s protective violence?

The division of labor has led to a kind of uneasy double standard, where the government and the subjects operate by different moral codes. It demands, in a way, that rulers be fundamentally different from the rest of us, and yet they are not. That uneasiness runs through the Bible, I think. Way back in Exodus, we see in Pharaoh the ultimate expression of the ruler as different: he is a god, so above the law that he even breaks the univeral incest taboo. Yahweh puts him in his place, and intends to rule the newly created Israel himself, but the people demand a king anyway. He gives them Samuel as a punishment. Whether the latter story is true or not, it says something profound about how Israel viewed its kings. The kings, of course, are all too human, and God keeps anointing prophets to tell them so, winding up with Jesus himself.

Jesus’ repeated warnings against revenge make sense in this context. But there has been an ongoing dispute in Christendom about whether rulers are still subject to a different law. I’ve been hearing only one side of the argument for the most part, so out of fairness I recently read a First Things article that not only defends just-war theory but defends a harsh medieval version of it that the author feels has been too diluted by modern liberalism.

This distinction between ruler and subject appears to be the crux of the matter. Augustine apparently read Romans 13 as delineating that distinction, and so concluded that a duly constituted authority has the right, and indeed positive duty, to employ force to punish evil and protect the common good.

Yoder felt differently, of course. But it also occurred to me, as I was reading this, that underlying the ruler/subject distinction is the idea that groups have different moral standards than individuals. A ruler acts on behalf of the group, and, it seems, the group is entitled to look after its self-interest, and fight for its survival, in exactly the manner that Jesus tells individuals not to.

But there’s a less-than-clean divide between the individual and the group. Nowadays we all vote, and therefore participate in government, so the ruler/subject division is not so clean. Even before the advent of democracy, one wonders why an officially titled ruler is different from, say the head of a family. Does a father have the right to fight for his children? Does he have an unlimited right to fight for himself, on the grounds that if he dies his family will suffer?

I feel there’s a sleight-of-hand going on here, where Jesus’ commands to surrender oneself to God and neighbor are converged with the old pagan virtue of surrendering oneself to family and country. The Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus knew all about dying for a larger cause; the question is, what is that cause?

The article does mention in passing that there has always been one type of Catholic group that has taken pacifism seriously: monastics. And that, I think, is the other major distinction between Catholicism and the peace churches. Catholicism has always recognized that pacifism is holy (which is more than I can say for some denominations), but has traditionally cordoned it off into monastic communities.

Actually, the whole role of monasticism in the Catholic/Protestant debates is not a subject I’ve seen treated much. Luther the disaffected monk disliked the self-punishing asceticism and the fact that a lot of people got put into those communities against their will, and that seems to have been the continuing attitude among most Protestants. But Mennonites, Quakers and other radical groups actually went in the other direction: they claimed for all believers some of the disciplines that had previously applied only to monastics. Pacifism was one, of course, but so was a certain amount of asceticism (hence the obsession with plainness), the sharing of property, the apartness, and the voluntary nature of the community (hence adult baptism, or in the case of Quakers, no baptism).

Although the theological division between ruler and subject isn’t hard to follow, I don’t really know anything about how monastics became so divided from everyone else. In the Bible there are ascetic holy men, including Jesus himself, but there’s no sign that the young church actually recognizes separate communities of them, which operate on different ethical standards.

Of course, holding people to such high standards seems to destine movements to remain small. The multilayered Catholic version of church is more generous in its way than the Mennonite, which defines only one rigorous lifestyle as being truly Christian. But I suppose the answer to my question — can people live in peace without authorizing on a violent government? — is basically “Yes, but only by the grace of God.” How far that grace extends is a matter of greater dispute.

Sorry I’ve been absent from the blog — I don’t have any good excuse, just general distraction. But I have been thinking a bit more about the question of international law, especially after I commented at beppeblog on what went wrong with Star Trek. Especially the bit about how its creators couldn’t envision a peaceful future Earth without making it basically monocultural.

As I said when I was discussing abortion law a while back, I think that for a legal code to work it needs a critical mass of citizens who support it — or at least, a critical mass who either support it or who could go either way. Making something official certainly helps solidify this mass and perpetuate the principle to future generations, but I still think you need that basic starting point. Otherwise, the law either goes largely unenforced, or you have a civil war on your hands.

When it comes to the United Nations and the laws it promulgates, it seems like mostly the former is happening. And I think that’s because, while you can garner lip-service agreement for basic principles of human rights and so on, there is no deep cultural consensus on those issues. This is apparent just in the makeup of the U.N.: governments run the gamut from democracies to monarchies to dictatorships to one-party states. Hell, I’m not sure how many Americans would sign on to the Geneva Conventions, given some poll data.

So while I understand the Platonic ideal of international law as Neil laid it out, I don’t think the world is currently in a state to have it. I do, actually, agree that moral law is very broadly similar around the world (hey, I don’t always differ with C.S. Lewis). But the philosophy of government, the extent to which rulers have different moral laws unto themselves, and just how much moral law should be written into civic law to begin with, is a matter of much greater disagreement.

There’s also the fact, as I mentioned not long ago, that even if your morals are similar your epistemology may be different. When I look at myself now vs. pre-church, I don’t think my morals have changed, but my view of the universe has changed, and that has altered how those morals are applied. I don’t think total pacifism is really feasible without the assurance of eternal life, for instance, because not every threat can be met with an effective nonviolent solution. (This is another reason why the Star Trek premise failed, but that’s another subject.)

So does Pax Christi’s emphasis on the U.N. do anything for this? I tend to think it’s too legalistic and top-down an approach to really resonate with people. But of course, top-down vs. bottom-up was one of the original disputes between Anabaptists and Catholics, so I suppose I would think that, wouldn’t I?