"Conservatism is a more or less articulate sense of normality, whereas liberalism has been described (by G.K. Chesterton) as ‘the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.'"
Is War Abnormal?
So wrote a graceful, if controversial, Catholic columnist recently, and so far, so good. But then the columnist added his own touch: "And, after all, few things are more abnormal than war."
Really? History – or Chesterton, for goodness' sake, or the Bible for that matter – would tell us otherwise, and undeniably so. If the Iraq War and the so-called "war on terror" have not "destabilized" the Middle East they have surely destabilized the minds of even some articulate, well-read opponents of these wars into making some preposterous statements.
It is certainly true that war is brutal and unpleasant. As Byron wrote, "War's a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art." And as the Duke of Burgundy has it in Shakespeare's Henry V, war can lead people to
grow like savages, – as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood, –
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire
And every thing that seems unnatural.
But as the soldier-king – and Shakespeare's hero – Henry, responds:
If, Duke of Burgundy, you would the peace
Whose want gives growth to the imperfections
Which you have cited, you must buy that peace
With full accord to all our just demands;
Whose tenors and particular effects
You have enscheduled briefly in your hands.
Chesterton said much the same thing: "War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you."
As with Chesterton and Shakespeare, the Catholic Church is far too realistic – and has been involved in far too many wars – to believe that war is "abnormal" or "unnatural." There is, after all, Just War Theory. But there is no Just Sodomy Theory.
In the Bible, too, we find that God Himself recognizes that there is a time for peace and a time for war, as have popes down the centuries.
What Even Our Enemies Know
Catholics are perfectly within their rights to make their own prudential judgments about particular wars. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote, after the Iraq War (which he opposed):
While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms against an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.
In the past, popes have ordered Crusades, they have formed military alliances and launched armadas, and they have shown sympathy for embattled countries like the Southern Confederacy. These judgments have no binding demands on us today, even if we agree with them (as I usually do). While on the Iraq War, I respectfully differ with a pope that I revere.
There is, however, a non-papal strain of Catholic anti-war sentiment that is much harder to understand; it's a sort of neo-Jansenist parochialism. These neo-Jansenists are so seethingly fixated on the beam in their neighbor's eye, they can't recognize the mad mullah in the Mohammedan's eye. They feel contempt for their not-very-religiously-observant, materialist-minded suburban neighbors, but think that polygamous Mussulmen with burqa-wrapped wives and Madrassa-educated kids who think Jews are swine represent such piety and virtue as we should be lucky to have.
These neo-Jansenists are so full of disgust at an America that allows abortion and pornography on demand that they think America has no civilizing mission in the world. At least our enemies give us more credit than that. When radical Islamists, from al-Qaeda to Hezbollah, pinpoint our alleged weakness and their alleged strength they condense it to the chant of "We love death, while you love life."
And one has to say, even with legalized euthanasia and abortion, that's true. No Christian (and I include the mere "culturally Christian") American or European raises children so they can become walking explosives. Similarly no such American or European male dreams of jihad and a homicidal "martyrdom" that will merit him 72 virgins in a sort of Hugh Hefner Paradise for the dead but horny.
Somehow the neo-Jansenists miss this. They also betray a lack of faith in the Faith, and in how deeply it has penetrated Western man, even Western man with his three-car garage, satellite TV, and messed-up family life.
Our neighbors might be weary of the faith, or indifferent to it, or cavalier about it, or have but a callow understanding of what it is. But all of them, even the Marxists, the Freudians, and the agnostics, take many of its cultural assumptions unthinkingly for granted – and that is the Christian flame that we can nurture.
Imperfect, but Still Worth Defending
Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines often have that flame roaring within them. The old saw about there being no atheists in foxholes is usually true. They have faith in God and believe that America – and the West – whatever its flaws, is still worth defending. They know that our values are better than those of our enemies – and worth spreading. They know how faith acts in the world: through imperfect human beings who live within imperfect cultures – as they always have done.
We all know – we have been forcibly reminded – that even within the priesthood, God works through flawed and sinful men. So too in the world, God works through flawed and sinful nations. No nation has a lock on virtue or God's favor, but equally there is no reason to presume that a nation fighting for Western ideals of justice in the face of terrorism and oppression is not advancing the cause of a Christian civilization.
Early in the war, I saw a picture of an American tank, its gun barrel draped with a rosary – a striking image that represents a fact. The American soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine who takes on the imperial – no need to shy away from the word – responsibility of fighting terrorists, training foreign soldiers to do the same, and rebuilding and protecting the schools and economic infrastructure of a newly and shakily democratic Iraq or Afghanistan, represents Christian civilization in action, something most Christians a hundred or two hundred or three hundred or more years ago would have understood perfectly well.
Then as now, Western Civilization, Christendom, was imperfect. But we had confidence then – we were neither multiculturalists, nor relativists, nor neo-Jansenists – and we knew that the West was best, that Western justice was real justice; that our values, rooted in natural law, were universal truths; that we had a moral duty to bring good government, commerce, education, and our own beneficent culture (not forgetting our religion) where we had the power, exercised prudently, to do so. If our culture today is marred by violence and obscenity and greed, so, to varying degrees, has it always been.
Nevertheless the qualitative difference between the West and the West's enemies remains. And if our civilization is to be renewed, it needs first to be defended and to exert itself with confidence in the world. Its renewal, then, will come, in part, through our centurions, through men who know that there will always be wars and rumors of war, and who are prepared and willing to fight for our civilization, however flawed, because they believe in it, and its potential, far more deeply than do the cynics, the critics, or the neo-Jansenists.
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