5
“DO YOU STILL believe in the peace process?” the teenage boy asked cynically. He posed the question to a former Muslim militant in the southern Philippine province of Mindanao, who described this incident to me when I was visiting Cotabato City, the main town of the region.1 The former militant was now a lawyer and had renounced violence, but he continued to be a member of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front. So he still considered himself an activist. But to the teenage son of a friend, he was not activist enough.
“What peace process is there?” the young man hissed. “Look at Marawi.” He was referring to a nearby city that was described in the introductory chapter to this book, the one destroyed by the Philippine army in an attempt to rout a group of ISIS-affiliated militants who had taken the city and were holding it for ransom. Many Muslims in the region, including this teenager, blamed the army rather than ISIS for the destruction.
Days after their conversation, the lawyer told me, the boy disappeared. His family feared that he had joined the ISIS-affiliated rebels. The lawyer blamed himself for not doing more to persuade the young man that the peace process between the Muslim separatists and the Philippine government was still worthwhile. In fact in July 2018 President Rodrigo Duterte finally signed an agreement that had been negotiated four years before, but it was too late to save the teenager from joining the armed rebels.
“But would you have listened to this when you were his age?” I asked the lawyer, knowing about his past. He had joined the most militant branch of the separatist movement when he was in college and for years had fought against the forces of the Philippine government. He was engaged in a cosmic war between absolute enemies that resulted in violent encounters, guerrilla war, and a fifteen-year trail of bloodshed.
The lawyer smiled at my question, then started to tell me the story of how he had changed his point of view. In time he had begun to see the negotiations with the government as trustworthy.
“How did that happen?” I asked, wondering how he could turn from thinking in terms of cosmic war to civil engagement that could lead to a peace agreement.
It was as a student at Mindanao State University that he first became politically active. He was attracted to a Moro separatist movement that appeared tough and uncompromising, one that was militant and explicitly religious in its ideology. When he joined it, he felt that he was fighting for his faith, his community, his family, and himself.
It was a life-and-death struggle, he said. In his early days in the movement, he was willing to kill and die on behalf of its cause. He saw himself as a soldier in a righteous war, in a cosmic conflict of absolute right versus absolute wrong, against an enemy that did not deserve to live.
I asked him what changed, how he began to see the situation differently. His attitude about the need for self-government for Muslim Mindanao did not change, he said, but two things changed his attitude toward violence. One was simply the demands of domestic life. Later in his twenties he married and began to raise a family. He became busy with law school and an emerging career. Though he was no longer a combatant at this time, his basic outlook had not changed. He was still emotionally at war with the Philippine state and he supported armed resistance.
This view changed after he met a remarkable leader, Victor Corpus, a Philippine army official who had defected from the army, joined the Communist militants, and later returned to the army. He eventually became a general. When the lawyer met with him, the general had the credibility of someone who had been a rebel and reformed.
He understood us, the lawyer said. He could see how we would mistrust the government and want to embrace a new way of looking at politics. Yet he also was realistic. He could explain the futility of guerrilla warfare, and he told us how many of our goals could be met by negotiating a settlement.
When he and other Muslim separatist leaders accepted General Corpus’s offer to arrange a meeting with government officials, the lawyer was surprised at how sensitive they were to the Muslim separatists’ concerns. “They treated us with respect,” he said.
This attitude of respect threw him off guard. It made it difficult to continue to see the other side as the evil enemy that deserved to be killed, and the image of intractable absolute war began to dissolve.
His story confirmed what I have heard from other former militants, from Christian militias in America to Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka: the state of war is not necessarily a permanent condition. Just as people fall out of love or lose their faith in religion, they can also fall out of war. Or at least they can abandon the worldview of absolute war as a template for action in the world of everyday reality. In the case of the Mindanao lawyer, there was no suggestion that he had fundamentally changed his mind about the cosmic battle between good and evil. But he was no longer convinced that it was being played out in real time with real people. The general had treated him with respect. From that moment on it was hard to see him as a satanic foe. The idea of cosmic war had retreated to the realm of myth and symbol.
The lawyer’s story of how war came to an end for him, or rather how the real-life enactment of an imagined reality of war ceased to be meaningful, may differ from the accounts of others who have abandoned the vision of war as it applied to real-life conflicts. But they often do abandon it. It is an alternative reality that is difficult to sustain over time.
The interesting thing is that ceasing to apply images of war to the real world does not necessarily mean abandoning the idea of war. War can continue in the mind long after it has left the battlefield. Though the idea of war might continue, this might be a satisfactory solution, for war in the mind doesn’t kill people. If former militants are now playing war games on their computers or singing hymns about war in church, this doesn’t bother most of us as long as they are not trying to do us in.
And in fact it may not be easy to rid the mind of war, even if we try. It seems to reside deep in the human psyche, a way of imagining an alternative reality that encompasses chaos. Even without being blessed by God, war is such a persistent element in the human imagination that it is hard to think of the world without it. Whenever people are under stress—as frequently people are—they are tempted to seek a different way of understanding the dilemma and its causes and to embrace the idea of an evil enemy against them. When whole societies are under stress, they may collectively see the world as engaged in war even if, as in the Cold War, the hostility seldom breaks out in actual military engagements. Often, of course, enemies are easy to imagine because they are indeed menacing. Like the Nazis in World War II, for example, they are opponents who want to change, punish, or destroy a society’s public order. It is hardly a stretch of the imagination to see these foes in absolute terms, not merely as political rivals but as demonic creatures set on the annihilation of a people and their culture. By embracing an imagined view of the world at war, individuals find a resolution of these social tensions and clarification of the indecisive areas of their own lives. Hence the idea of war will always have a strong appeal on both social and personal levels. It will endure.
Is it possible to find a way to live with war? Is there a role for that other great alternative reality, religion, to play in ameliorating its effects?
Containing War
One way of dealing with war is to accept that military action is sometimes necessary to maintain justice in an unruly world. The idea here is to contain or redirect war and perhaps allow just a little bit of it in order to bring about a greater good. The ethical foundations of most religions have some version of what is known as the “just war theory” of conflict.2 In Islam, the concept of jihad, frequently associated with the idea of holy war, also carries implications for the limitation of its use. According to the religious studies scholar John Kelsay, in undertaking jihad in a military sense (as opposed to simply striving for a more righteous life, which is what the word literally implies), a Muslim is limited by moral considerations regarding the purpose and the legitimacy of the undertaking.3 This concept of jihad contains within it the main elements of the idea of a just war.
The principles of just war as it has evolved in the Western philosophic tradition are several. The reasons for war must be moral; it should be undertaken for a just cause. It should be approved by a legitimate governmental authority. It should be undertaken with a right intention and a reasonable chance of success. And it should be only a last resort, after all other means to resolve a conflict have been exhausted. Often the principle of proportionality is included among these requirements. This is the notion that the violence involved in resolving a conflict militarily should not be greater than the harm caused by the conflict itself. These principles are collectively known by the Latin phrase jus ad bellum, “rules before war.” They are joined by another set of conditions governing the moral limitations of the conduct of warfare itself; these are known as jus in bello, “rules in war.”
The idea of just war came to Christianity somewhat as an afterthought. Members of the early church tended to be pacifists. This was partly to resist being made to revere Caesar in a way that would imply that he had divinity or authority greater than religious authority. And it was partly in keeping with Christ’s admonition to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:38–40). It is hard to live by the teachings of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and support war (Matthew 5:1–12).
But when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312, Christian thinkers tried to reconcile the pacifist mandate of the New Testament with the need to morally justify the military actions of the state. They tried to accommodate the idea of defensive war within the nonviolent idealism of the Gospels in a way that would not glorify bloodshed.
The fourth-century theologian Augustine of Hippo hit upon a solution. Augustine expanded on the concept of “just war” developed by Cicero in Roman jurisprudence and set it into context. The perfect ethic of peace that Jesus talked about, he reasoned, was appropriate to the “city of God,” to which we should all aspire.4 We live, however, in a more mundane realm—the “city of man”—where life is less pleasant and force is sometimes necessary to keep evil at bay. Augustine specified the conditions in which a Christian could morally sanction war. He condemned “the lust for power” as an inappropriate reason for warfare. These conditions were later refined by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and have become the bedrock of the church’s teaching on the morality of war ever since.
Contemporary Christian thinking continues to be guided by just war criteria. One of the twentieth century’s most influential Protestant thinkers, Reinhold Niebuhr, began his career as a pacifist and then grudgingly accepted the role of the military in preserving order and justice. The actions of Hitler and Stalin persuaded Niebuhr that there were moments when evil had to be countered by military force for justice to prevail. As I have mentioned earlier in this book, in his influential essay, Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist, Niebuhr cited the Christian tradition that the defense of justice is more important than pacifism when it comes to great encounters between evil powers and social order.
The idea of just war allows religion to approve of certain forms of military action. This is a reasonable moral calculation regarding the necessity of police and soldiers in maintaining order and achieving justice. But it focuses solely on the application of military force. It does not deal with the idea of war. One can entertain the notion of a cosmic encounter and at the same time accept the limitations of just war, I suppose, though the two are not really compatible. It is hard to imagine a jihadi warrior inspired by the apocalyptic ideology of the Islamic State charging into battle and then suddenly stopping to check whether he and his colleagues have been morally approved by a legitimate authority and were motivated by a right intention. Similarly it is unlikely that the Christian militia soldier who believes in the end-times apocalypse will check to make sure his battles are in line with proportionality and undertaken for a just cause.
Though, come to think of it, an abortion clinic bomber has done just that. Rev. Michael Bray, a Christian militant convicted of attacking abortion centers, once told me that his actions were in accord with the principle of just war since he was applying only a small amount of violence to counter the thousands of lives that, in his calculation, were immorally cut short by abortion.5 Still, I think he may have just been trying to impress me, showing that he could play my game by coming up with rational reasons for his actions within traditional ethical frameworks. I suspect that his real motivation may have been rooted in a vision of cosmic war and an absolute battle with the forces of secularism. Just war is not easily reconciled with this kind of militant absolutism, I’m afraid.
War without Blood
The concept of just war may be the best way to limit warfare once a party is determined to undertake it, but it is worth pondering whether it is possible to avert war from ever becoming a reality in the first place. Or, to put it another way, since the idea of war is just that, an idea, is it possible to have war without bloodshed? What I have in mind are ways to conceive of war, even cosmic war, without actually having to fight it. The idea is to keep war on a symbolic level, and this is an arena in which literature, video games, and religion might be helpful allies.
According to Freud, violent religious symbols and sacrificial rituals evoke, and in the process vent, violent impulses. Freud was concerned with individual tendencies toward violence rather than large-scale socially promoted ones, like warfare, but the mechanism of symbolically displacing violence could work on both the personal and the social scale. Freud found inspiration for his theories in the persistence of the ancient Greek myth in which the king of Thebes, Oedipus, accidentally fulfills a prophecy that he would kill his father and sleep with his mother. What interested Freud about this tale of accidental patricide and maternal incest was its endurance over the years. The reason for its popularity, he speculated, is that it vicariously allows those men who tell it to project onto it their own desire to kill their father and have sex with their mother, and thus symbolically displace the need to do either. This theory, first discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams, was later developed in Totem and Taboo, where Freud argued that the Christian ritual of the Eucharist is a kind of acting out of the Oedipus myth, allowing the faithful to participate symbolically in the death of Jesus, the father figure of Christianity.
The literary theorist René Girard has updated Freud’s insight in a way that makes it relevant to how we think about war. In Girard’s view, ritualized violence—including the glorification of mythic wars—can help to symbolically defuse a potentially tragic encounter. He explains that societies have devised cultural dams to prevent the rivalry between competitors from overflowing into violence. One such cultural institution is religion, which shelters the expression of cathartic violence in the guise of ritualized sacrifice. Through religion, Girard claims, the death of a sacrificial victim becomes a saving death, and the scapegoat who is the symbolic butt of the violence is celebrated as a cultural hero. In Girard’s reckoning, by enhancing the role of religion in providing symbolic releases for violent passions the possibility of real violence can be reduced: “The function of ritual is to ‘purify’ violence; that is, to ‘trick’ violence into spending itself on victims whose death will provoke no reprisals.”6
According to Girard, this is the function of sacrifice, including symbolic sacrifice, in religious ritual; it displaces real aggression with a symbolic enactment of it. This becomes relevant in thinking about war when one considers that war can be thought of as a reciprocity between sacrifice and martyrdom: sacrificing members of the enemy’s side and raising up martyrs on one’s own. Behind the gruesome litany of sacrifice and martyrdom is something that encompasses both and much more: the idea of cosmic war played out in symbolic narration. The depiction of cosmic war in myth and ritual is a way of displacing the urge to participate in a real war. The gorier the imagined battle, the more heroic and victorious the fictional triumph, the more satisfying are these images of cosmic war. And thus, so the theory goes, there is less need to engage in the more limited forms of actual war.
Does this really work? Maybe. There are studies that attempt to measure empirically whether, for example, obsession with violent video games lessens the aggression that leads to real violence or whether instead it stokes aggression. The popular assumption is that such games lead to real acts of violence and should be banned or, at the very least, controlled. The theories of Freud and Girard, on the other hand, suggest that they might actually help to ameliorate violence. Which is the case? A longitudinal study reported in the Molecular Psychiatry section of the journal Nature in 2018 arrived at an interesting conclusion: there was no effect at all.7 Two groups of subjects played two kinds of video games, one violent (Grand Theft Auto) and one nonviolent (involving Sims-style role-playing). After giving players a battery of tests meant to discern changes in empathy, aggression, and interpersonal cooperation, the scientists found no difference between the two groups. This does not conclusively prove that the ideas of Freud and Girard are baseless, but it does raise questions as to whether displacing violence onto symbols really works.
There are other ways in which we can participate in a war-like situation without actually engaging in violent conflict or killing people. One is to use the idea of war metaphorically. The “war on poverty” and the “war on drugs” are two examples. But most people probably regard these as mere figures of speech and do not take them as seriously as one would an engagement in a real war.
Someone who advocated taking nonviolent war seriously was Mohandas Gandhi. In Gandhi’s reckoning the war against injustice requires all the discipline and commitment of soldiers engaged in battle. This was real war, in his calculation. He thought of social conflict as the struggle to move toward satyagraha, “truth force” or “grasping after truth.” To engage in it involved direct confrontation between clashing points of view and the people who defended them—battles that could be fierce and potentially violent. But the violence would not come from Gandhi’s troops, whom he called satyagrahis. They would be trained in as disciplined a manner as soldiers preparing for a military expedition. They would learn how to bear the brunt of violence rather than be the instruments of it. When Gandhi led his satyagrahis in skirmishes with the British army over the right of Indians to purify their own salt for domestic purposes, they had disciplined themselves to accept violence and not fight back. But they were engaged in a war-like struggle all the same.
Gandhi developed his ideas about nonviolent warfare in resisting racist policies in South Africa, where he led a movement of Indian immigrants. But his thinking about war began even earlier, in his reading of the classic Hindu epic the Mahabharata, especially the part we have discussed earlier, the Bhagavad Gita, in which Lord Krishna explains to Arjuna why he has no choice but to enter the field of battle in a fierce war between two sets of cousins. He cannot escape this turmoil, so the only question is how to deal with it. Lord Krishna suggests that one should seek to perfect the art of struggling without passion, dealing with life’s unavoidable battles honorably and graciously rather than trying to win them. Winning is, in any event, ultimately futile.
This leads to the notion of “nonattached action,” the idea that one should fight virtuously rather than trying to win by any means necessary. Gandhi discovered this idea in the Bhagavad Gita as a student in London, when he was asked to lead a discussion on the meaning of this most popular of the Hindu scriptures.8 The lesson stuck with the young man, and later in life he applied it in political struggles, first in South Africa and then in India, where he molded the concept of nonattached action into the strategy of nonviolent conflict that he called satyagraha. Gandhi thus found a way of redirecting war into a different kind of struggle: the struggle for truth.
Although satyagraha is often described as a means of conflict resolution, it is basically a theory of conflict. Gandhi was fascinated with the idea of conflict and saw it as a way of broadening one’s view of the truth. He insisted that in any clash it was necessary to look beyond personal differences to the larger issues behind each side. Every conflict, Gandhi reasoned, was a contestation on two levels: between persons and between principles. Behind every fighter was the issue for which the fighter was fighting. Every fight was on some level an encounter between differing “angles of vision” illuminating the same truth.9 It was this difference—sometimes a difference in worldviews—that must be resolved in order for a fight to be ended and the fighters reconciled. Gandhi’s methods were more than a way of confronting an enemy; they were a way of dealing with conflict itself.
One could undertake a war on poverty or a war against injustice as a real war in a Gandhian sense, as something more than metaphor. It could be a way of acting out warfare in nonviolent terms. Though it is not an overtly religious approach, it is compatible with religious ideals and has been championed by various religious leaders. It is no surprise that the civil rights martyr Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to India to study Gandhian ideas and methods before embarking on his own nonviolent campaign for the civil rights of all Americans. One could imagine, then, that the urge to war could be fulfilled nonviolently in ethical confrontations over vital public issues. The lawyer I met in Mindanao might still be engaged in a great struggle for the rights of his Muslim coreligionists, even though he is not taking up weapons or intending to cause bloodshed. But perhaps in his mind it is war all the same.
Living with Competing Realities
Let me finish my story about the Filipino lawyer who had gradually abandoned the idea of cosmic war. I have said that he continues to be committed to the cause of justice for Muslims in the region. He helped to negotiate a peace agreement that guarantees their full political participation in public life and full access to government benefits. In working out the implementation of the agreement after it was signed by President Duterte in July 2018, he continues the struggle. So in that sense he is still engaged in a struggle for justice, a kind of nonviolent war.
What I have not mentioned is the religious awakening that he has experienced in recent years. Increasingly, he told me, his Muslim faith has become a more vital part of his personal life. He prays regularly, he goes to the mosque weekly, he participates in all the major holidays, and he is attempting to raise his children on a virtuous path. Part of this increased religiosity, I suspect, comes with age and responsibility. As individuals move from youth to middle age, many turn to traditional social and cultural institutions for support and to share the responsibility of ethical mentorship for their children.
But I sensed that in his case it was more than that. He seemed eager for me to know about this aspect of his life these days. I asked him whether it has replaced his earlier commitment to the cosmic war of battle against the government. He paused before answering, as if he had not entertained this idea before. “Perhaps,” he said. “For whatever reason, it is real.”
The Muslim lawyer has made an accommodation between war and religion. At one time the two realities were fused in an image of cosmic war, a righteous battle in which bloodshed was expected and no holds were barred. Today he sees the world differently. War and religion continue to be a real part of his life, but not in the form of cosmic war. He keeps them separate, as alternative ways of thinking about the world and being in it that do not prevent him from engaging fully in ordinary civil society.
I suspect that his way of dealing with these two great alternative realities, war and religion, is not uncommon. There are, as Robert Bellah observed, multiple realities that can overlap. One does not have to choose one or the other. One can live in a world in which a war mentality exists and not let it consume you, and where religious realities exist and not let them devour you. Of course some people will go to the religious and bellicose extremes, but for many of us the temperate way of dealing with alternative realities is to accept them as just that, alternatives that can illuminate facets of daily life without overwhelming them.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells wrote a pamphlet encouraging the British to engage the Germans in a “war to end war.” The phrase was picked up by US President Woodrow Wilson, with whom it is widely associated and often repeated as evidence of his naiveté. World War I most certainly did not end war; World War II was far more costly in lives and set the stage for what was de facto the third world war of the twentieth century, the Cold War. Nor do the wars of the twenty-first century hold the promise of ending all wars in the future, and no one dares to suggest that they might be. War, it seems, is with us for all time. The war worldview, in which chaos is conquered through cosmic battles between good and evil, is perversely attractive. We are strangely drawn to the idea of war, both real war and perhaps even more so the wars of our imagination. The flood of images of imagined wars in movies and novels and video games seems to be an unending torrent. As a species, we humans seem to need war.
We also seem to need religion. Marx may have predicted that religion would wither away, and some theologians of the secular 1950s and 1960s may have announced that God was dead, at least in a traditional sense. But God seems to have come back to life in the twenty-first century. The percentage of believers in Europe and the United States continues to decline, but the expression of their belief is more public and outgoing than before, and in the rest of the world belief flourishes. The religious imagination continues to thrive.
So these great alternative realities, war and religion, continue to exist as part of our cultural creativity and social striving. But we need not succumb to the temptation of thinking solely in terms of either religion or war. And even those who do persist in thinking in these ways can be tolerated, as long as they do not act out their imagined realities and force them on us. If our next-door neighbors are obsessed with a certain set of extreme religious beliefs, we can regard them as peculiar or pathetic if we wish, but unless they demand that we follow those beliefs or act in a way that disturbs our peace, we are not bothered by them. In the same way we can abide militants committed to war realities as long as they keep it to themselves and do not build bombs in their bathrooms or harass the neighbors.
In other words, we can acknowledge that people are capable of living with multiple realities and still get along in the world. Cultural traditions from literature to religion enshrine images of warfare without encouraging anyone to act on those ways of thinking. Fortunately we are still united, most of us, in the reality of everyday civil order. These alternative realities may challenge and fascinate the mind. Whether we adopt them fully and make them dominant in a way that determines our actions and disturbs the tranquility of others is a calculation that each person has to make. We can either control them or succumb to them. The choice is ours.
It is possible to abide the violent images of war as long as they stay in the realm of the cultural imagination. In an interesting way, then, perhaps the cure for the horrors of war is religion. When the alternative reality of religion encompasses a conflict of ultimate values on a transcendent plane, this imagined warfare can excite human creativity without destroying it. Humans will always imagine war and will always imagine religion; perhaps these are the most creative acts of human consciousness, to envision such extraordinary reaches of cosmic confrontation and to pose such dramatic alternatives to everyday reality as war and religion provide. But it is also within the creative power of the species to think reasonably about differences and profoundly respect the sanctity of life. Perhaps this latter impulse will eventually be war’s captain and humanity’s saving grace.
Notes
1.Interview with the author, Cotabato City, Mindanao, Philippines, April 3, 2018.
2.Paul Robinson, ed., Just War in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003).
3.John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
4.Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 2016).
5.Author’s interview with Michael Bray, pastor, Reformation Lutheran Church, and editor of Capitol Area Christian News, Bowie, Maryland, April 25, 1996.
6.René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 36.
7.Simone Kühn, Dimitrij Tycho Kugler, Katharina Schmalen, Markus Weichenberger, Charlotte Witt, and Jürgen Gallinat, “Does Playing Violent Video Games Cause Aggression? A Longitudinal Intervention Study,” Nature, March 13, 2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0031-7.
8.I discuss this incident in Gandhi’s life in Mark Juergensmeyer, “Gandhi vs. Terrorism,” Daedalus 136.1 (Winter 2007): 30–39.
9.Gandhi, writing in Young India, September 23, 1926 . I explore Gandhi’s ideas further in Mark Juergensmeyer, Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution, revised edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.