Judging the past

In light of yesterday's post about Nagasaki, I wanted to share this from Darwin Catholic--though I have to be honest; I'm still trying to figure out just what it means:

The fact of the matter is, identifying the right side of history is easy -- indeed so easy that it's easier if one doesn't actually know much about history. So easy that there is virtually no moral action involved.

To be sure, choosing the wrong side of history can be a significant moral wrong. To support the Nazis or support slavery or support Stalin in this day and age shows a deeply twisted moral sense. But to oppose these three is so easy, and so obvious, from this point in history, that there is little to no virtue involved.

To congratulate oneself for admiring the right side of history is to assign oneself virtue one has not earned. Indeed, it is often more a sign of pride than of virtue. Without question, we should admire those in history who acted virtuously, but we should not consider ourselves to have performed any great virtue by doing so. Nor should we be quick to consider ourselves the superiors of those "ordinary people" in history who failed to rise to the standards of our heroes. We look at their actions with all of the clarity of distance, and none of the danger of immediacy.

In one sense, I have no particular quibble here. If what Darwin Catholic is saying is simply that we don't get to puff ourselves up pridefully for seeing (at the safe distance of the future) what was right about the past, and what was wrong--especially while ignoring our present sinfulness--then I agree. There is nothing so tiresome as the kind of person who is forever proudly excoriating his ancestors in the Bad Old Days, who approved of a) racism, b) sexism, c) environmental waste, or d) all of the above, while ignoring his own approval of abortion, for instance.

But if we're talking about, say, the discussion as to whether or not it was morally licit to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have entered into a different sort of discussion. When I talk about this, I may sometimes dispute some of what gets repeated as fact--that Truman had no other, better choice, that an invasion was definitely going to kill at least a million people on each side (or more or less, etc.), and so on, but my judgment concerning the morality of the dropping of the A-bombs does not depend in any way on these contingencies. Truman could have believed with the utmost sincerity that the Japanese were secretly planning a massive invasion of California, that this invasion was imminent, and that it would give them a foothold in America from which to fight a protracted and likely successful war of occupation against us--and it still wouldn't have given him the ability to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a morally licit way. The use of nuclear weapons in populated areas**, given that it always involves a hugely disproportionate killing of innocent civilians, is always gravely morally evil and outside the parameters of the Just War theory.

What changes based on circumstances is something that neither I, nor you, nor any historian or philosopher, nor any other human being is capable of judging--and that is the level of moral culpability of those who acted to drop the bombs.

I can't know if or the extent to which President Truman is personally morally culpable for the evil of the decision to use the bombs on Hiroshima or Nagasaki; nor can I know the personal moral culpability or the extent of that culpability of any of the people involved in the creation, building, and planning stages of these dreadful attacks. That the acts were evil, however, I can state--and not only because of what Darwin Catholic calls the "clarity of distance;" I can state this based on the moral principles involved.

Now, does this make me better than people who cheered and celebrated here in America when the bombs were dropped? I happen to know the answer to that one, and it's not a pretty answer--no, because up until I was at least thirty years of age I always believed that the United States had been perfectly justified in dropping those bombs, and looked down on those who thought otherwise as lily-livered hippies who lacked the resolve to deal with Our Enemies (who went from the Soviets to Saddam Hussein in Gulf War I to others, as I recall) as they should be dealt with.

I'm not proud of that time in my life, and I don't offer any particular excuses for it (except for the excuse that every Catholic of my generation has, which is that we were abysmally catechized; I think that I might have heard of the Just War theory, but I certainly had no idea that it frowned on things like, say, nuking entire cities full of civilians). I believed that the "No nukes!" people were all Peasnjustess types, aging liberal nuns who were as passionately against nuclear weapons as they were for socialism and bad pantsuits. I believed that to criticize America's conduct in a great conflict like World War II was to hate America herself.

The story of how I came to see my errors is long and boring, and bears a lot of resemblance to the story of how I came to see my errors regarding torture, so I won't describe it here. Suffice it to say that in convincing myself that the US was justified in using the A-bombs, I also had to think of the Japanese people as somehow deserving of that kind of destruction--to think of them, in fact, as less than human.

So when I say, now, having worked through my errors and come closer to the mind of the Church on this subject (not at all by my own merits, but by grace, and the kind example of others wiser than me), that I'm not at all trying to judge those in the past who approved of the bombs, or defended their use, or otherwise tried to make excuses for them, I mean that most sincerely. It is the job of God alone to judge the hearts of men. But it is our job, all of ours, to seek the truth--even if encountering that truth is unexpectedly painful and productive of the natural sorrow we might legitimately have, at what man is capable of doing to man.



**I leave open the possibility of using a nuclear device in an unpopulated area for a beneficial purpose, such as destroying an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. The bad effect of truly awful movies being rushed into production after such an event is outweighed by the good effect of Earth not being destroyed, or at least decimated.

UPDATE: Jimmy Akin with an important new post on the subject.