Philosophy and Violence

0:00When I'm discussing violence, I want to talk specifically about a particular kind of violence, war, which Cicero calls war a contention by force. The interesting recent philosopher Alexander Mosley calls war a collective, open-ended violence. So we're not talking about individual acts of violence, say someone doesn't like my lecture and knocks me down. I want to distinguish three different views that we find in the philosophical tradition of war. One is that war is desirable or has a lot of beneficial aspects to it.

0:47I'm going to talk probably the most about this view because it's one I think most people are unfamiliar with. And the second is that war is something that should be subject to legal or moral regulation. This has a suggestion that war is in some respects undesirable, although it doesn't logically require that somebody could hold war as a very good thing, but we should just have a lot of moral or at least some moral or legal regulations. And the last view is that war is undesirable and to be avoided. The first of these views is one we find that the war is desirable, has a lot of good aspects. It is one we find in Greek philosophy very much.

1:36If we look, for example, at Plato, I want to concentrate not so much on his most famous work of political philosophy, of the Republic. If we look at his last dialogue, The Laws, which he calls the second best regime, the The government is something very distinct from our private lives.

2:30Each of us has his or her own private life, and we have various religious or philosophical opinions. But the government is really something that's either performing, at least supposed to perform The Theory of Money and Credit

3:10Plato held exactly this view. He said that everyone really has to hold the same beliefs. In fact, it was a common belief in Greek society that the gods that people believed in were the gods of a specific city they lived in. You could have cities with the same gods. You would have, say, Zeus would be the god of a whole lot of different cities, but they would have special names for the god that was specific to that specific city. so that each what your belief your religious belief was very closely connected with where you lived you couldn't say well I'm a resident of Athens but I hold different religious views from the rest of the Athenians it would be very difficult for you if you did say that everyone would have to really believe the same thing in the 19th century French historian Foustel de Coulange and famous book the ancient The City stressed very much how the Greeks had this view that the city is really what

4:24people really believed in. The gods were so closely connected with the city, they really had a belief in the city as some kind of collective entity that they were all parts of. Now, Plato said also there should be what he called a nocturnal council, which was kind of an inquisition that would find out if people had deviant beliefs and then subject them The way this is related to war is that Plato and those who think in this way thought that there are specific virtues that are found in warfare.

5:10For example, soldiers have to display courage in war. They're risking their own lives in battle. You don't have, in peacetime, the opportunity to display this kind of courage very often. Sometimes you do, say, rescuing people from danger, but in war you're able to display your courage Average is a way not very easy to find in the peacetime, and also you can display other virtues. For example, you can sacrifice yourself for other people who are in battle with you, or you can sacrifice yourself for the city. This was one of the supreme virtues in this Greek conception.

5:56Remember, for example, when Socrates is condemned to death and he's given a chance to escape, He says he doesn't want to escape because he owes everything to the city. He can't leave Athens because this is where he owes everything to the city. So you see, you have this idea that by sacrificing yourself for the city, you're displaying a supreme form of virtue and this is something that you're not able to attain in peacetime. A model that Plato used for this, he was very sympathetic to the type of government found in the city-state of Sparta, which is one where, as you no doubt know, military virtue was stressed the most.

6:44It doesn't by any means follow from this that a city-state organized on platonic lines of The following Plato's principles would always be very aggressive or always be engaged in war, but it would just be that war has certain virtues in it that we would not find in peacetime. This is a very desirable thing according to Plato, that we would have these virtues. He had a very low view of economic activities. We had to have certain kinds of trading and economic activities, but this was something The very much a bad part of life, a distasteful necessity, not to be compared with the real virtues that are found in the military activities. This is where you could really at least prove.

7:38There were a few people who were capable of something even higher, which is philosophical contemplation, but for most people the highest type of virtue they could find is in military Activity. I think one very good source here, although I think there's severe problems for the interpretation of Plato that's generally given by the Saudis in Karl Popper's book, Open Siding Against Enemies, first volume of that has a good account of the influence of Sparta on Plato's thought, although I wouldn't recommend the whole book for its whole interpretation of Plato, but I think on this This Point, he's right. So we have this again, this notion that war is sometimes desirable. Now, from my point of view, unfortunately, this notion didn't die out with Plato and the Greek philosophers. You find it. It's a constant theme in later writers. For example, Machiavelli criticizes Christianity and he says, well, the Christians have the notion of salvation as something apart from the state, that your salvation is a relationship between

8:56the individual and God, and this is a very, according to him, what happens if you have this idea that your salvation is something that depends on a personal relationship between

9:37The 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau criticizes Christianity on grounds that are very similar to Machiavelli, which is not surprising because he read Machiavelli and was very influenced by him. Christianity is really at fault because it separates the individual from the state. We have to have a new civil religion that will require everybody to have certain common beliefs where they're all subordinating themselves to the state. Everyone is to be subordinating to the state. You don't have the right to be an individual apart from the state, but you really gain The Theory of Money and Credit

11:26How close he studied with Strauss and then William Kristol, who was a leading defender of the invasion of Iraq, was very influenced by Strauss. There are various claims as to how influential Strauss has been on American foreign policy. Some people said, well, no, no, he wasn't very influential at all. He was a historian of political thought. I didn't really have very strong political views of his own, but I do think that there are certainly students of his who profess themselves to be Straussians, like Caron's Lord, who was an official of the Reagan administration, or Harvey Mansfield, who was a professor of government at Harvard, who call themselves Straussians, who take views that are very I want to take, for example, a book that came out a couple years ago, I think, just before the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.

12:44Tax on the World Trade Center. It was called Making Patriots by Walter Burns. Burns was a professor for a long time at Cornell University, a very influential follower of Leo Strauss. And what Burns says, and we can see these views I was just talking about are not really old-fashioned views, but people are still holding them today. He says we need to have a common civic religion. In the Greek city-state, we had everybody believing the same thing according to what the gods of the city were. He said, we don't have that anymore because of Judaism and Christianity.

13:29We have the notion of belief as something that's private, that people have a part in the city. He said, well, we can't really change that. He seems to suggest it would be desirable. What we have to do is have a common civic religion, and this civic religion is to be based on the speeches and activities of Abraham Lincoln. The Gettysburg Address is the greatest speech ever written, and we should really have this and all teach this, get everyone to learn this, and we could all absorb Lincoln's wisdom.

14:20When we do this, we'll realize that the supreme goal, at least in political life, is that And we'll be able to sacrifice ourselves for the state in warfare. And we have exactly the same ideas as I mentioned. Plato is still very prominent today, that the notion we're sacrificing ourselves for the state is part of a civic religion. I want to mention that this Platonic view isn't the only view that holds that war is desirable. In his early writings, Hegel has very much the same view that in war people are able to attain certain kinds of unity that they're unable to have otherwise.

15:09This is a very good thing in that he mentions in his great early work, Phenomenology. Who criticizes Christianity says this has led to the notion of the unhappy consciousness where an individual is separate from society, but if we're engaged in the collective activities, one of which is war, then we can attain meaning in a way we can't in an individual life. Now there's a related view that holds that war is undesirable. In other philosophies, for example, we find, I'll mention specifically the early 20th century German philosopher and sociologist, Georg Zimmel, who, well, I think he wasn't that bad, but he did have unusual views.

16:00What he held was that our ordinary life is very, we find very complicated. We have, say, modern economic production, which he was very interested in. He wrote a book called Philosophy of Money, which some Austrians think has certain Austrian insights. It's very complicated. We have long chains of means and ends. To produce something requires long chains of production. We can have various counts of structured production. They're very hard for people to follow. Life gets very complicated for people. People get very cynical about things because they can't follow what's going on. We need to remedy this. We need We need to have kind of very heightened sensations. We need to really experience things directly.

16:53And what better way to do this than to have a war than we can really experience things in a very direct way. We'll have a whole lot of different sensations from the ones we usually do. And this will give us meaning in life by having all these new aesthetic sensations. We find similar ideas in the early 20th century French writer Georges Sorrel, who had a famous essay short book called Reflections on Violence. He said that in modern life people are dominated too much by rational thought.

17:41People are trying to reason things out, but we have to really, this is separating us from what's really important in life and by direct action, by violence, then we can attain real meaning. There's a very interesting discussion that came out in a book last year by the writer Chris Hedges, who had a book called War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. And he's not very sympathetic to this idea that war is a good thing because it provides us with these sensations or experiences we don't have in ordinary life. But he discusses this view at length and he says he himself has been a war correspondent.

18:27He's very attracted to this view. He sees the force of it and he thinks it's something very dangerous because of all the horrible things that happen in war, but he thinks this is something that we need to take This is why people actually engage in wars, because they're seeking this kind of special experiences. They think they'll get meaning in their lives from the extreme situations that they won't get in their ordinary life. This is the first of the three traditions I want to talk about, as I say. It's one that probably most people are not too familiar with. Now, the second one I want to mention is the notion that war should be subject to certain kinds of legal or moral regulation.

19:19This is one we find especially developing in the Middle Ages. We had various nations that sometimes came into conflict with each other. There's a notion in the Middle Ages that all the Christian countries were part of a single entity, which is called the Christian Republic, the Race Publica Christiana. So they were all, in a sense, part of a common realm. and I should mention the raised public Christian Republic entirely different notion from the holy Roman Empire in a book that came out a few years ago by Harry Jaffa who you may I know is not one of my favorite authors. He apparently confuses you because he says at one point he puts England in the Holy Roman Empire. I wondered in my review when exactly was England part of the Holy Roman Empire. I'd like to have the dates on that. It is It is true that England was at one time a papal fief when the Pope annulled the Magna Carta, but I don't think it was ever part of the Holy Roman Emperor.

20:46That's just a digression. I like to always attack Jaffa when I can. So, we had the notion that because all the nations were part of the Christian Republic, The limitations on the power on war were developed by many of the great Christian thinkers like St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and they were developed later by some of the Spanish scholastics like de Vitoria and later by Hugo Grotius and others. They generally had very severe restrictions. These kinds of restrictions were both on when you could engage in war at all, what were the conditions in which you would be able to engage in a just war.

21:43And also, once you were in the war, there were certain limits on what you could do. Even if you passed the test you were in a just war, you couldn't do anything you wanted. You have to observe certain limits. For example, one of the restrictions that you find in Aquinas is that war has to be a last resort. You have to try peaceful means of settlement first. For example, we can see one case where this seems to have been violated. In the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, there were certain negotiations that seemed to be taking place between the U.S. and the Taliban forces in control in Afghanistan.

22:33The U.S. said, well, they're not really sincere in this, so they're going to invade anyway, they're going to disregard this, but according to the classical just war theory, you're not allowed to do this, you have to pursue these measures of negotiation till it's evident that they fail. You can't just say, well, I'm not going to bother with that because it's interfering with what I want to do. There's a recent writer, Jean Bethke Elshteyn, who's at the University of Chicago, who has a rather truncated view of natural law. She says, well, of course, last resort doesn't really apply if it's going to get in the way of your military tactics, but that's not really what the people had in mind by natural law restriction, and just an example of what's meant by restriction on what's done in war.

23:31One of the principle rules of the Just War tradition is that you can't directly intend the death of people who aren't fighting. You can't say, well, it would really make the enemy very upset if we just destroyed one of their large civilian centers of population and they'd really see reason and surrender. According to just war theory, you can't do that. Even if you're right that that would have just the effect you want, you can't say, well, this is the way I can bring the war to an end as soon away as possible, so I'm just going to attack the civilians. That'll just minimize total casualty, so it's a good thing to do. This would be a violation of standard just war principles.

24:24Now we can see this whole notion was later, it's been very influential later on, for example, Immanuel Kant had the notion of a universal system of republics, each of which would be peaceful. He thought by having, I'm not a world government, kind of a league of all the different republican governments, we would have a peaceful world. But I think we can see one danger in this type of thought, which was called attention to, I think, probably best by the great German constitutional theorist, an extremely controversial writer, Carl Schmitt, in many books he wrote in the 20th century, especially a book called The Nomos of the Earth, which is on what he called the public law of Europe.

25:21What he pointed out is, he said, well, there's a danger in this notion of legal, moral regulation, because then we can start to view international affairs as if they were to be equated with local police matters. We would say, just say, suppose we have somebody in, say, someone robs you, you would say, well, that's the criminal, then the police have to capture that person. Schmitt says, well, if you apply this notion of legal regulation to international affairs too far, then you'll say, well, there's certain aggressor nations who are just criminals and then the rest of the countries have to come in and suppress them, and this is going to lead to many more wars than before.

26:15We won't be able to limit wars by negotiation because, sorry I can't take any calls right now, so I guess the person is pretty persistent, keeps calling back, so we can't take, we have to limit, so he says well, we'll have a notion these aggressors are criminal, we can't have any neutrals and anyone who tries to be neutral is just someone who favors aggression, he The Theory of Money and Credit

27:14I've left very little time for it because I think this is a view I'm sure you're all familiar with, the view of war as undesirable, which we find especially in the classical liberal tradition. We find, for example, in Herbert Spencer, in the German sociologist, Franz Oppenheimer, said that they distinguished very sharply between two different methods of people who can attain their ends. One is peaceful production exchange, where people can attain their ends by cooperation, by having a system of social cooperation. We can each get much more than we could attain by individual actions.

28:13If each person were producing by himself, very few people would be able to be living. by being in an organized society where peacefully exchanging goods and services with each other, we can attain much more, almost infinitely more, than we could by individual action. In this type of action takes place only if it's to everyone's mutual benefit, because of course you wouldn't engage in an exchange if it's not to your benefit. So whenever you have an exchange, it's the mutual benefit of everyone engaged in it. Mises contrasted with the political means where one person is taking or a group of people is taking something from another, and of course this is what we find in warfare. So the notion here was that war is something that's very undesirable because it's interfering with the whole process of social cooperation.

29:10We can see, I think perhaps the best account of this whole system is in Mises' Human Action. We have the whole notion of what Mises called the law of association, the notion that we can have peaceful relations among people enabling each one to attain his ends is something that's really perhaps the basic theme of Mises' book, Human Action. I think we can see in this, especially by combining this notion, war is undesirable with certain aspects of the just war tradition we can get I think a really good account of the proper views on war so that we see that from this war is something that's to be engaged in almost never perhaps only in case of direct invasion because it interferes with the whole process of social cooperation.

30:08Well, I think I'm about out of time now. Thanks.