'Can a humanist make sense of war?' | A C Grayling speaks to Defence Humanists

ladies and gentlemen welcome to the defense seamless AGM 2016 defense humanists is a section of the British Humanist Association representing serving and retired members of the Armed Forces m OD civil servants and their families I'm delighted to welcome our keynote speaker professor ac grayling thank you very much indeed we're in very great pleasure to be here and I've been invited to talk on the subject of what humanists must think about war and in order to approach that in a systematic and circumstantial way and we have to be clear about what human humanism is and we've all heard about humanism and also we need to just think a little bit about what war is and you may have heard about war so if we get those two things clear we can make an approach from the standpoint of a humanist that look and to begin with that humanism is a non-religious ethical outlook an outlook in other words on what life matters what life means to us in our reflection about how to live and and asking and answering questions about what sort of people we should be what kind of society we should occupy the Bakey thing about humanism has been well put by someone once remarking that humanism is not an ism that is to say it's not a doctrine it's not a set of do's and don'ts it's not a set of of criteria that have to be satisfied in order to count as a humanist rather it's an attitude and the attitude is let us be at our most generous and sympathetic when we think about other people our fellows in the human story and let us be as creative and as thoughtful as we can be in the living of our own lives humanism actually has its roots in classical antiquity when you go back and think about that great moment in the development of civilizations between about the seventh and the fifth centuries before the Common Era you notice that the the great thinkers of the time who was so influential in the Western tradition called Socrates and his successes in the philosophical tradition in India Prince Gautama who's known as the Buddha and in China Confucius and there were all near contemporaries of one another all three of them were philosophers not religious leaders they didn't found religions the Buddha asked his disciples not to make him a god and not to turn his teaching into a religion but of course we've all seen the life of Brian and we all know about the shoe the shoe and so there is a natural human tendency to to turn people into prophets and preachers when they didn't intend to be such but their teachings were in their origin philosophical teachings and philosophy for them meant a very very essentially the question of how to live how to infuse life with purpose and with meaning and in the case of Socrates it was a challenge that he issued to his contemporaries to reflect on the ideas that shaped and colored the way they saw life and society and in that lies the the roots of this great humanist with a small aged tradition which has run alongside the influence of religion in the last couple of millennia and more tune of millennia and has very very often indeed been the actual and sometimes the avowed outlook of most reflective and literate and thoughtful people and so it is an attitude it's not a doctrine doesn't tell people what to think it tries to urge people to do some thinking to make some serious choices it would be very reflective indeed about the kinds of values that they choose to pursue and how they're going to relate to others so as an attitude it doesn't close down the conversation about what your politics might be or what in detail you might think about particular crises that are happening in the moral universe around you it leaves it open to discussion and the hope of course is that people were always in that discussion try to adopt the one method do you remember TS Eliot says there is and that one method is to be intelligent so that is the basis if you like of a humanist outlook so what would such an outlook mean for thinking about conflict about war about the use of force as a solution to problems in our world well you may very well find among humanists pacifists you may find among humanists people who think that there are justifications for the use of armed force at certain times for the purpose of resolving certain kinds of crises or difficulties in our world now it happens just by by a coincidence that at this present moment I'm writing a book about that very subject so it's just a happy a happy coincidence on the three great questions which one might ask about the question of war in general one is is there an answer to be given to their question what causes war why do Wars happen and the second is um what what are the effects of war and the third of course concerns the question about just war and we're all very familiar with the fact that Just War Theory asks us to consider are there ever justifiable grounds were going to war and what kinds of considerations govern behavior during the course of war so the your said bellum and the European bellow points that are central to that debate the first question about the causes of war of course this one which has no single answer and there is a veritable babel of suggestions about why this is so the least plausible of which is that it's because human beings and mainly the male version of human beings are aggressive and are prone to resort to violence to to solve problems and then parallels are drawn with chimpanzees who as you know male chimpanzees get together in gangs and going to attack other chimpanzee gangs and there is this idea that somehow are their innate aggression is part of the human makeup but there are two things to be said about that merely to raise a question mark because it's a complex issue and I'm not suggesting that I have a an answer to it but but to two things immediately strike me and that is that most of what happens during the course of a a full-blown war and let's take the example of the Second World War as a focus for attention here most of what happens during the course of a war is very nonviolent a great deal of planning a lot of work in factories a lot of logistics going on transport a lot of lorries a lot of putting together uniforms and getting together food and pouring over maps and making plans I try to do those things in an aggressive frame of mind and you're quite likely not to do it very well so you might you might actually if you were to work out proportions recognize that maybe 90 percent or or so of what happens during war tends to have to happen in a reasonably calm frame of mind otherwise you're not going to be able to carry out the sharp end of it that the bit which is very noisy and and destructive very well so may very well be that war as the cliche has it as a episode or says of events of great violence and destructiveness of death of maiming of injury of individuals and these things of course do happen is somehow the major content of a state of war and the fact is that it isn't so when you think about elderly and gentlemen as in the case of the first and second world war sitting around cabinet tables in deciding to go to war it's not that they're all foaming at the mouth and gnashing their teeth I that they're - one imagines a certain degree of calm reflection so the idea that that the cause of war is the aggressive instinct that makes us leap out of our barroom chair and punch somebody on the nose well it can't really be like that so it's obviously got to be a much much more complicated thing and when you look at the vast amount of literature there is indeed on the question of the causes of war you find that there is quite a lot of consensus among at least many commentators around the idea that chief among the causes of war are social political international factors the way societies are organized the way international relations work competition for resources in the past it may very well have been the case that people went to war in order to accumulate resources by capturing more territory or more people whereas the abrasions that happen between nation-states or between interest bloc's in the world can be very fertile in causes of conflict and the use of a force as a way of resolving difficulties always of course marks a certain kind of failure the failure of other means to resolve disputes and difficulties between nation-states so whatever the answer is and there will be a plurality of answers really about the causes of war there's not going to be any one particular answer and it may very well not be because human beings are somehow prone to violence or Auto regression we might be when you're in your car and you're suffering road rage because what somebody else has perceived misbehavior on the road or when you know there are two options what happens in a pub in the evening one is that you get smarter as the evening goes by more deeply philosophical and the other is that you get more irritated by other people's behavior and aggression may play a role in the latter of those but but to think that war is the result of a natural propensity to aggression cannot be anywhere near the whole story and the second reason for thinking that is that look at the effect of combat or involvement in a very sharp end of conflict on human individuals if war if aggression if the desire to fight we're somehow an important part of human nature why are people so desperately traumatized by the experience of war why is it that people are so upset by death or by destruction or by the horror of actual sharpened conflict and when we look at the emerging literature and understanding in psychiatry for example from the First World War onwards about trauma and the kind of stress that follows trauma we see that rather on the contrary human nature is not something which is attuned to or very much likes the fact of violence and destruction and aggression there was one claim made after the first world war actually that in the kitchen armies in among conscripts as opposed to volunteers and conscripts forces tended to be relatively ineffective because such large percentages of their conscripted troops on the frontline were ineffective they wouldn't point their guns at the enemy they would deal ople or just freeze up and not be able to cope and that the people who could cope and who were effective on the frontlines tended to have profiles rather similar in a way to recidivists that is people who weren't as troubled by memories of horrible things happening as as the majority of the population volunteers of course in our armed forces now comprised the volunteers the people who have made a conscious decision about an involvement in something that could involve those very traumatic endeavors and the psychological preparedness for that is very different from the preparedness or lack of it on the part of people who have been dragooned into a military force to serve at the sharp end so you would expect a very different result there but the overall point is if this was somehow natural to us as human beings if fighting aggression destruction causing death and witnessing it if this were a natural feature of our lives we would expect to people to be rather less traumatized by it than in fact they are so I just mentioned those two things about the relatively peaceful nature of most activity in war that their logistical the preparatory aspect of it and the effect of trauma to suggest that it's a bit too easy to tribute to a factor in human nature and the that the sources of war in our societies on the question of the effects of war one of the very unhappy things about war is that it tends to speed up social change industrial change and technological change in 1939 the Royal Air Force was still flying lost the gladiators of course the early Spitfires and hurricanes were coming on stream but there were Gloucester gladiators biplanes still in service in 1939 1945 the Whittle jets had come into service you think about the fact that the Germans were sending missiles unmanned rockets and indeed in the case of v2 s you might even regard them as guided missiles so you know the Second World War really speeded up technological development you think about the war as in fact an industrial and technological race but between the two opposing sides the Allies and the Axis powers and you you realize therefore that times of urgency and emergency really do speed things up and move things on society it was dramatically impacted by the First World War and the Second World War think about the consequences of the fact that very very large numbers of women went to work in factories during the First World War because of the very large numbers of men who had been conscripted into the armies and it was impossible to go back to an Edwardian dispensation and set of attitudes after this very sharp change had happened so war brings about very great changes somebody once remarked about Switzerland rather unkindly the 400 years of peace in Switzerland had produced the cuckoo clock and this is the idea that somehow times of peace the times of of habit of repetition of stagnation whereas times of emergency at times of a very great change that that idea is unfortunately one which has a rather large measure of truth to it you look back at the 17th century at the very heart of the 17th century in Europe the most devastating war that you had ever experienced at that point the 30 Years War between 1618 and 1648 sought as a century saw immense changes really huge changes not just in technological respects or in social respects but actually in the very mindset of humanity an educated literate person in the year 1600 who stepped out of doors on a clear evening and looking up at the sky would have seen the spheres of heaven the Sun the Moon the planets and stars revolving around planet Earth we are at the very center of things and maybe even if you were a person of faith you would think you were at the pinnacle of things as well so if I was creation went by a hundred years later of the Year 1700 if you stepped out of doors on a clear night and looked at the sky you would see vast immeasurable distances the Stars so remote from us each one of them a Sun maybe what can it's going random to say at the beginning of the century that we were not at the center of the universe would have got you burned at the stake as happened to Giordano Bruno in Rome in the year 1600 to Lucila Venini in Toulouse in 1619 but in 1686 a man called Bernard a Bouvier the fontanel was able to publish a book called on the plurality of worlds in which he fully adopted and publicly vowed the Copernican view that we are not at the center of the universe and he did it unscathed there was nothing they had no anxiety that he would be arrested by the Inquisition and put to death now something was happening in the 17th century that was causing a tremendous change of mind let me give you two - another illustration of this in 1606 the play Macbeth was staged in the Whitehall palace in London before James the first of his court and it was a very very tropical play because less than nine months before there had been a terrorist attempt to blow up the King and Parliament this is the Guy Fawkes plot a bunch of Catholic terrorists or as a proof sash on showcased up it's not quite that rigid any longer they just terrorize us in different ways but there they were tried to blow up the King in Parliament in November of 1605 so it was a very very topical play because it was about the killing of a king about the murder of a king and one thing that Shakespeare could happily rely on was that the audience watching this play would have recognized that the killing of a king is not merely a crime it is a blasphemy because Kings ruled by divine right the king is the regent of the deity on earth now in 1649 43 years later from the very same building Charles the first was marched out onto a scaffold that his head chopped off and nobody in in the crowds watching this event some of whom must have been at the premiere of that play 43 years before force that the world was being turned upside down remember in Macbeth Macbeth himself thought before the murder of Duncan that the horses might eat one another in the stables and that the graves would open and the ghosts of the Dead would emerge at midnight that the owl would fall on the Falcon instead of the other way around so that everything was upside down but nothing was upside down in 1649 except the idea of monarchy itself now these are just little examples of major changes that were taking in the mindset of this century against the background of this terrible war a war that was so destructive that if he said one out of every three german-speaking people in the center of the continent of Europe died either directly or indirectly because of the war and the amount of destruction the villages and towns that were burned to the ground the destruction of agricultural property was said to have been very like Germany in 1945 that was the degree of destruction 30 30 years of armies going backwards and wars across across Europe this monumental struggle between the Holy Roman Empire the hapsburgs on the one hand and the Protestant states of Europe and on the other mainly although France despite being nominally Christian Catholic country it sided with the Protestant cause because they wanted to try to limit the Habsburg power but nevertheless it was it was fundamentally a war of religion and it was a very very destructive but the the the awful fact that Wars speed things up not only made the development of our chili and strategy and so on really speed up but also the breakdown of controls in Europe the fact that border posts no longer had guards on them meant that people and letters could travel around Europe and the exchange of ideas helped enormously the efflorescence of of science and a philosophy and of culture the scientific and philosophical revolution of the 17th century was potentiated by the fact of war and the breakdown of controls in society what we are witnessing today in the Middle East is something which has uncanny similarities to that episode in Europe in the 17th century in the following sense what you're seeing today in in the Middle East is a really awful tragic in Tunisia and conflict within Islam itself within Muslim majority countries where Sunni and Shia are struggling with one another a lot of what is happening of course is proxy for the enmity between the Saudis on the Sunni side and Iran on the shear side but it is a devastating event and the Terrorism that sometimes afflicts European and North American countries in the last couple of decades has been a kind of splash over a sort of bye blow of this dreadful implosion that's happening in the Islamic world as it struggles with itself over its its confrontation with modernity and secularism in the rest of the world and this was this conflict in the 17th century Europe was a conflict of ideas remember that the Church of Rome was trying like canoe to stop the rising tide of Thorton and investigation if people at the stake it put Galileo and trial in fact the trial of Galileo was the last great moment when they really tried to stop things and in a way what we might be witnessing in the Islamic world at the moment is desperate struggle to in traditional ways of thinking against the pressures that are making it very difficult to sustain that of course there are many diss analogies as well but it is rather uncanny to see this happening and no doubt like the 17th century like the Second World War like all moments of great distress and change don't forget that even the rise of classical civilization back in the fifth century before the Common Era was the result of a monumental struggle there - the Persian invasions of the Greek world and the Peloponnesian War and the 5th century BC so when you look back at times of great change in innovation and a rapid leap forward they tend to be times of conflict so one of the effects of war is great change and in amongst that change there will be a very least technological development of one kind or another and it may very well be that sometimes to the insufferable nature of war the unacceptability of the political and social structures that have brought war about make people determined to change their societies again this happened in 1945 with the landslide victory for the Labour Party which brought in the welfare state and so on so you can see that war is very consequential when people go to war they can have no confidence in what the outcome is going to be we'll remember when King Croesus of Lydia consulted the Oracle about whether or not she should go to war with Persia the Oracle said to him if you go to war with Persia you will destroy a great Empire he thought ha brilliant you went off to war and it was his own empire that was destroyed and that is a lesson of course that really needs to be remembered and then the third point the point about Just War theory and thinking about whether it is ever justified to go to warn of course this is really the key point for us this afternoon I think and that the second part which is about just behavior in war sort of speaks for itself and I got into a bit of trouble a few years ago writing a book called among the dead cities in which I said that the bomber commands that the attacks on German cities during the Second World War and the attacks by the United States Army Air Force on Japanese cities especially the dropping of the atomic bombs were not justified now this is a very very complicated story and it is one that does get mine into trouble a little bit the fifth group in Bomber Command which is you know was staffed mainly by Canadians who had a very very high casualty rate as a result of the bombing campaigns were particularly upset by the fact that I had argued that in retrospect it was the one thing that we did during the Second World War that we should be least proud of against the premise that this was a war that was justified in my view we had to defeat Nazism and we had to defeat Japanese aggression but then the great question is does that justify everything we did during the course of the war does it justify indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations night after night for years well you will know that in 1949 the Fourth Geneva Convention on conduct of war wanted to include a clause outlawing indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations and both the United Kingdom and the United States refused to allow that clause to be incorporated since both of them had just been doing it big time during the course of the Second World War 1976 a to protocols were added to that convention the first of which does outlaw indiscriminate attacks on civilians and the United Kingdom is a signatory to that protocol to this day the United States is not interestingly Israel is a signatory of that protocol which is why before two attacks Hezbollah it drops leaflets warning the civilians in the area to clear out of the way although it's very Pickwickian because of course that's not going to happen but it is a an attempt to try to observe at least pay lip service to something which is now part of received international law on these matters but if you think about just action in war do you think about the fact that people were conscious during the Second World War of the questionable nature of indiscriminate bombing of civilian centers the Bishop of churches day said in the House of Lords he said were fighting barbarians this is 1943 why are we behaving like them it's a really interesting question that one because it brings home right in the middle of a desperate struggle as the Second World War was that these ethical questions can be very live for people reflecting on conduct in war way way back in the mists of antiquity and when the Mahabharata was being composed and assembled the great poem in that tradition questions about how you treat the enemy the wounded and prisoners were live questions in the mob Bharata we're told you mustn't kill somebody who is whose back is turned towards you you mustn't kill somebody who's wounded and you must take care of the prisoners that you've taken from the enemy there was a famous Duke of Chu in China who was urged by his lieutenants when his forces were already but the opposing forces will not they had broken camp and got into their battle order and he said a gentleman doesn't attack the enemy when they're not ready that's not something which anybody now interested in tactics and strategy would ever possibly think but he waited until they were ready and then got walloped and after his urn he was taken prisoner he said well anyway I at least I behaved like a gentleman even though I'd lost the matter so you can see that thinking about just action in war has been with us pretty well as long as war has been with us I suppose and the the idea that we should be humane in our treatment of prisoners and wounded enemy is I think now widely accepted so it's the other question the question about is it ever justified to go to war well some of you here will be conscious of the fact that Just War Theory has its roots in the thinking of st. Augustine and st. Thomas Aquinas and there is a great deal of self-congratulation on the part of other of Christians of course since centric assonance and Thomas Aquinas have big names in the Christian tradition that thinking about just war is something that was started by them but of course the reason why they thought about it is as follows Christianity is a pacifist outlook turn the other cheek love your enemies blessed are the peacemakers so when Christianity became the official religion of a highly militarized Empire the Roman Empire a bit of regal room was required to justify going to war and not turning your cheek and loving your enemies and this was provided by the thinking of Augustine and Aquinas so it's a rather interesting source or the interesting route for this this kind of thinking and in a way I'm the oddity about the Just War theory that has its roots in that is that it mixes up Prudential and moral considerations men as you know if you've you've read about the stuff is that you certainly have among the grounds that would justify going to war are that you can win it and and that the actions that you take would be proportional to winning it which might mean actually that if you have a very powerful enemy well you should use your nuclear weapons there's got to be proportional to winning it since winning is a justification of capability of winning a war is a justification for going to war and so on those are the Prudential considerations moral ones are that you go to war in order to remedy some great wrong or to protect yourself and the idea is that the planned outcome of the war must be one which is morally defensible it's not that you want to take somebody else's land capture all their women or to steal their resources but that things will be better after the war than they were before that has to be part of the plan and as we've already noticed that is not something that anybody can guarantee well it seems to me that that in in revising and updating Just War Theory one can recognize the Prudential considerations as being just part of their normal common sense attitude that one might take to whether it's sensible to go to war not whether it's justified to go to war but that there are two cases where it's it's quite hard to see how to accept the pacifist approach and let me just preface this by saying that I think and I feel it should be consistent with my own commitment to humanism that one should be as pacifist as one can be as close to being a pacifist as one can be without being suicidal or without failing in a duty to our fellows in the human story in the following two ways self-defense if you really seriously deeply and genuinely believe in the values by which you and your community live and somebody attacks you and you have every reason to think that the person attacking your society is quite likely to subvert those values and impose once that you don't share so for example resisting invasion by by the Nazis in 1947 me to be a perfectly justifiable thing to do because whatever the contrast whatever whatever the state of play in the UK of 1940 might have been it was I think very very much preferable to the state of play in Nazi Germany and so that by itself would have been a justification for resisting and for using force in defense and the other consideration is our responsibility for our fellows in the human story one very significant little moment in recent history was the tremendous atrocity that took place in rwanda burundi with the Tutsis in the hoot-hoot use you may remember the awful atrocities there the massacring of one group by the other and nobody intervened nobody no UN forced went in there no power competent in the in the sense of having the resources the facilities the technology the manpower the know-how nobody went in to stop it and afterwards there was a lot of bruised sensibility on the part of people thinking in NATO and the West in general about this I think it was President Clinton who said we meaning the West have failed in our duty to go in and and stop a terrible atrocity which we could have done had we taken action and that was a failing on our part now that that episode and the thinking that followed it played a major role in what what what decisions were taken about the Kosovo crisis as you may remember there it was decided that intervention was necessary because to see something similar to what had happened in Rwanda Burundi has seemed to people unacceptable that when we see a stronger force beating up on a weaker force it's like witnessing bullying in the school playground the idea that we should take some kind of police like action to try to step in and and stop it and to protect people who are in danger that becomes something of an imperative and I think that some of that thinking that step in there let's do something about this played an unfortunate role in the second Iraq war or in the run-up to the second Iraq war although that might have been more complex it may even have been if you don't want to defend anybody who made decisions about getting involved but it would almost certainly have been an extremely bad thing more dangerous thing if the United States under the last President Bush had gone in to Iraq for a second time absolutely without any allies and you may remember there was a major diplomatic effort prior to the invasion of Iraq to try to get together what came to be called the Coalition of the Willing you may remember to get together a number of different states involved so it looked like an international effort and not just solo effort by the United States and I think it would have been a terrible in even worse disaster if that hadn't actually happened and part of the motivation for that must have been we have the ability let's get in there and make a difference this get in there and change or protect or do something and so you could see the the bookends of the the Hutu could see atrocities and the second Iraq invasion as being where we failed to do something there and then we got it into our heads that we should do something and then we did it in the wrong place at the wrong time so you could see this as a moment in the history of the use of force either the failure in one direction of the failure in the other as being something it teaches us a very great deal about justification for going to war justification for using force one doesn't however want to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this matter if one thought well we've we failed to intervene and then we over intervened and so you know where do we find the balance and how do we organize things properly what one wouldn't want to do is to say leave other people's problems to themselves let's just put them into some kind of powder let them sort it out fight it out and you remember what Bertrand Russell says that wars never show who's right they only show who's left when the war is over and you know so just leave them to get on with it and see what happens there to find the balance and to have' are very clear and a very cogent and well thought through case for intervening in some circumstances not in intervening and others would seem to be the intelligent way to go on this so there you would be left with the thought that self-defense if you felt that the structures and the values of a society that you belong to are worth defending and it is important to defend them against the completely different way of thinking about things a self-defense would make the use of force justified and that intervention would sometimes be justified when it is a situation writ large which is like bullying like one entity really imposing itself and committing atrocities against another entity so those two cases I think you could make a case for saying they're justified look back across the landscape of the history of war and ask how many such wars were really justified was the first world war justified is there a consensus to say that it should never have happened there was no justification for it on anybody's part look back at the Napoleonic Wars what was that about well the the monarchies of Europe had ganged up against the the French because they had made themselves a republic and then they ganged up against and Napoleon because he had he had made himself an emperor what they wanted to do you may remember the great justification at the end of the new Pyrrhic Wars was the restitution of a league of the legal entitlement of monarchies and this was a question now and we look back at it that we might want to answer very differently you look back at the reasons for the Wars of Religion in France in the 16th century and the 30 Years War in the 17th what was the justification for them once again none of these none of these wars and they were all major Wars seem to have been justified they should never have happened and the wars that where we do feel that there was a justification you might want to say we were justified in in fighting against Nazism 1939 1940 but that war should never have happened because the war that made it happen should never have happened namely the First World War and so you can go back through the complexities of history but at a certain point do you have to ask yourself whether you're going to take the safety catch off point your weapon at at somebody who's on the other side of some argument and whether is justified to pull the trigger that is the very key issue that any thoughtful and considerate person would want to ask is there a clear thoughtful case which provides us with justification for engaging in this tremendously destructive and dangerous and and upset thing which is armed conflict and in what circumstances are the criteria for that met so a humanist and I conclude on this point now a humanist I think would would say and it is a possible humanist position I already remarked that there may very well be many humanists who because of their humanism feel the pacifism and that it's better in the long term for Humanity in general but even in the face of a threat like a Nazi invasion that you shouldn't resist and that non resistance is a different kind of resistance and you might be able to change minds and change hearts and change the course of history by not resisting that's that's a possible position but it is also a possible position for a humanist to say just because you're a humanist you're not a milksop so if you really believe in something and you're prepared to stand up for it that might sometimes have consequences where you have to do some very unpleasant things I mean it's a bit like going into a hospital for an operation that's an unpleasant thing but you know there might be very good justifications for it and similarly to stand by when you have the capacity to help people who are being in effect being bullied that raises serious question marks as well what do we owe to our neighbors in the human story and surely there is at least the question don't we have a duty sometimes to go to these extreme measures in extreme circumstances so that is a possible position for a humanist to take as well and it happens to be the one that I take thank you very much I think we have time for questions comments and well just get the purport of your question Ryan in just a moment one thing I thought that you were going to say is does the doctrine of the justification of self-defense allow you to act preemptively so you attack a country which you think might be just about to attack you in in self-defense so did you you know just make sure that you don't suffer any of the consequences they do um and that of course provides a big fig leaf for people who want to invade other people's countries they say well we invaded them because we thought they were going to invade us and then you have to be very careful because that raises a whole different question which is about authenticity they sincerity with which something is done and the grounds and justifications you have for it but to go back to your point it actually happens that at any rate in the rhetoric of the Nazi Party in the late 1930s there was no stated intention to go to war with the UK or with the British Empire or with the United States and indeed Hitler was extremely annoyed that the British government declared war in September 1939 because he thought let them have their overseas Empire I want to establish a continental Empire and anyway the the Saxons are you know sort of subset of some northern German tribes so why can't they just see themselves as being our natural allies and so it might have been in these counterfactual questions might have been that if we hadn't declared war in 1939 and if I had taken over the rest of Europe we would have been left alone and we would now just be an extension of Britain in the 1930s but it didn't work out that way I don't know whether you know that all sorts of little peculiarities and glitches that temporarily for a very brief period at the United Kingdom and France were one country were one state we were actually officially united as one state for about nine days saying it what yeah was long enough was it Edie actually got a pro-european here yeah the and and that was because the the UK government and at the urging indeed of Churchill was convinced that if the Nazi ideology became established as a you know a continuing state presence in the world it would ultimately be very destructive and this is something if he's seen and fought for a long time we've been arguing in Parliament for a number of years all the way through appeasement all the way through the very tremendous efforts that people I Chamberlain and others had made to keep peace you know we now look back on Chamberlain and we sneer at the idea of appeasement and think it's weak but you know for people who had witnessed or who had actually been in the trenches in the First World War the thought of another war was just too horrifying was just too much and they were desperate to try and keep peace in Europe and so that the that the whole question of self-defense becomes very tricky when you when you put yourself into the mindset of people thinking as it might be in 1938 or in the summer of 1939 about the international situation of all the different possibilities all the different ways that it could play out what do you do there would have been people and sure there were people who took the view that it would have been justified to preempt to you know take action in advance I mean go back to them to the late you know in the period immediately out of the First World War you may remember that the Royal Flying Corps had become very big by 1918 it was the biggest air force in the world then it had become the Royal Air Force against the wishes of the Army and Navy who wanted to absorb the sort of Air Wing back under their own control and the people who had been running things in the RFC wanted the the new Air Force to be an independent entity and the people at the top of the Air Force at that time were trying to persuade government by saying to them the next war is going to be a bombing war and it would be very short and it will be whichever country as the two countries and they thought naturally of being didn't France as they bombed one another it would be whichever country has the greater resolution to put up with bombing which the RAF that at that time thought would of course be us because the French are much more lily-livered than we are so they wouldn't be able to you know all sorts of crazy things had been thought you'd be absolutely amazed when in the Second World War there were a lot of discussions about what to do about Germany when the war was over Germany had been united by Bismarck just you know back in there towards the end of the nineteenth century and it already caused two world wars so what's to do with Germany is obviously a danger it's too big it's too strong and it's too militaristic in its ethos in its society so one one very very senior member of the United States cabinet suggested sterilizing or German males they're horrible in a kind of eugenic proposal a second much much better proposal was that all young Germans should be taken and dispersed around the British Empire taught to play cricket then sent back and then they were behave themselves it was a serious suggestion suggestion and the suggestion that was eventually adopted was that Germany should be split in two to become two countries which would weaken both halves of the countries and that actually happened and to begin with and this was actually accepted by Churchill and Roosevelt at the at a conference in Toronto in 1943 that Germany should be de-industrialized and it was John Maynard Keynes who said to Churchill if you do that you're gonna have a dead man tied to your ankle so you've got to allow it to remain in an industrialized country just just for economic reasons but the splitting of the country that was something that they did decide to do so you know the crazy things that people think and and plan to do but in there in the 1920s their whole thinking about war was that Wars would be short very violently destructive because there would be bombing wars and it would just simply be a matter of national resolution as to whether you who put up with that the policy um well a great philosophical answer to that question yes and no I mean I think there was quite a lot of understanding of the difficulties that the Jewish population of Germany was facing all the way through the nineteen thirties actually crystal nacht and the dispossession of Jewish business owners and people leaving and then of course the Kindertransport and so on so actually there was quite a lot of of awareness of racism the rhetoric that came out of Hitler's mouth and out of the mouth of his senior Nazi Party colleagues about Jews about Slavs and their desire for leoben's round and then the activity the angelus of Austria and taking over Bavaria and in the whole of the Czech Republic and then the attack on Poland I mean it was perfectly clear that this was an aggressive dangerous and the rhetoric was horrible and unacceptable unfortunately of course there were a lot of people here and in other parts of Europe as well who agreed with some of that stuff you know anti-semitism was a kind of reflex at that time you may remember that horrible line in TS one of TS Eliot's poem who is talking about Venice the rats beneath the piles and the Jews beneath the lot I mean that was something that at that time when that poem was published in the 1920s or whenever nobody you know was horrified by it it was just a reflex remark so the mindset of the world at the time what was not as antipathetic to Nazi rhetoric in all sectors of society as it is now but people were certainly aware of it you don't believe they'll make a catastrophe if you don't intervene you're something else but what if your allies does believe that we're in the hierarchy of justice if you like intervention yes I mean that poses exactly the kind of difficulty and dilemma that must often be felt by allies when they're allies you know really got the bit between their teeth about something and the very nature of a dilemma is that there were reasons on both sides that are very compelling in both directions that's exactly why it's a dilemma was very hard to decide what to do and given the in calculability of consequences it makes it even more difficult to do when people are going to die and you're going to be using weapons so it's a very good question and it can only be answered in a case by case basis this is one of those in fact there are many such situations and you think about the the great problem of war and you know let's take a step back and just remind ourselves of something how many years centuries it takes to build things up and how you can bomb it in a matter of seconds how you can destroy things of great very very great value that have been the accumulation of human endeavor over very long periods of time so these are desperate decisions that that people have to take and the reasons therefore for getting involved in it have to be very compelling reasons and can only be case by case reasons this is so this is one of those situations where you can't have a general rule you really have to look at the detail and although there are elements of both of those going on today in terms of Syria and Isis do you think that we as humans should be sanguine about what our countries know I think I think the the advisable thing or is always to be troubled but by what's happening even if you think well actually you know you think about the Kurds and the danger will the Yazidi for example in the trois ities that have been committed against them especially against your ZD women and it makes you think you know I don't really like to get in there and punch a few noses myself and and so there you may feel that taking some action is a duty not merely something justified but in a case like this and the whole situation in Syria and Iraq is is so messy that I'm asking question what should one be doing now now we know that British and and US Special Forces are much involved there we know that the use of air power can't be a complete solution to the problem although it's it's no doubt a big help we've learned burned our fingers on arming people who have subsequently turned around to to bite us I mean that happened at arming the the fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and that was the proxy war and then we left weaponry in the hands of the people who became jihadis afterwards and now now we're fighting them and they're shooting us with our own guns and so on so you know all the complexities of the situation are tremendous how you help in a situation has to be something at that scrupulous planning and fortune consideration has to go into and they're very scrupulousness of it means delay and it means that you know people like Isis get an advantage while you're still working out how you're going to fight them it may very well be and here an unhappy fact a really really unhappy thought the reason that narcissism was and the whole project of German militaristic expansionism came to a very shuddering halt in 1945 was that the defeat of Germany was total Germany was was absolutely hammered the population the material fabric the whole structure of Germany its industrial base everything was completely hammered and it had to be rebuilt pretty well from the ground up the the victory over over Germany and Japan both cases was overwhelming now when the invasion of Iraq occurred in 2002 and a Rumsfeld the rumsfeld ian doctrine was let's get in there and beat the iraqi army and leave the fabric of iraqi society intact well what was the result if you leave things intact you leave weaponry intact if soldiers can change into civilian clothes and melt into the population and then start an insurgency later on what you failed to do is to as it were clear the ground of the enemy you just haven't done it and you've just created resentment and and left in place all the structures that could come back and cause what has as it's turned out to be a suppurating chronic case of continuing civil and other kinds of war so somebody who was just brutal about this would have said if you're going to get invade iraq you better go in there absolutely flatten it to the ground so that there's this there's no comeback there's no possibility of anybody you know rising up and causing an insurgency so the the very unhappy lesson that we learn from this is that if you're going to do this do it don't do it with one hand tied behind your back or with any scruples or something and of course that kind of advice is horrifying I mean does one really want to do that it's if somebody had said to President Bush and Don Rumsfeld this is the only way that you can really solve this problem would they have been prepared to do it no they thought they could do it the cheap and you know in the minimalist fashion just beat the army and then everything else is going to be okay and the population will rise up and be pleased that we did it turned out that they weren't yes it can I mean there are cases where you know you know that your enemy is developing a nuclear weapon and their intent in using it against you and time is running out and so on and you're thinking about protecting your your population in yourself and that might be a very clear-cut case where you might do it but as I said earlier the idea of self defense by preemption is a terrible fig leaf it's an excuse that anybody could use to do anything and that's why I invoked the concept of authenticity this has to be a genuine authentic and based sincerely conceived matter it has to be true that you're in imminent danger and that if you don't do anything you're going to be zapped and then you've got a justification for doing it but boy you'd have to be very very careful because you know you could imagine mr. Putin using the pre-emptive argument to invade just about anybody you wanted to well again you see I think in a lot of conflicts now you know we have this we have this very strange situation where the mightiest military in the world the United States military is is pinned down and held down and given a very very bad time because of asymmetric forms of conflict that small groups of insurgents who really know the ground and who have no fear of of death they're you know they're going to get their 72 but somebody said raisins is the true translation of that term that would be very bad news for them if it turned out to be true but you know so that they can they can hold down a mighty military machine and and so the the that the way wars are fought now and the way you think about preemption and the way you and and and the scrupulousness with which you try to do it so you're trying to stay just on the line of international norms about behavior in conflict and I suppose I don't know cuz I really looked at it enough but I've noticed that in some cases the Israeli Defence Force has taken action in Lebanon and in Gaza Strip which has they've claimed to be pre-emptive they're striking against sources of rockets into into Israel and they try to do it in a way that they claim is proportional and it's directed just that the insurgents and so on but of course they cause a huge amount of collateral damage and this concept of collateral damage which means babies and children and women and someone being killed in these things is in itself another great big fig leaf so it's a very very messy and difficult situation and they could solve the problem by going in there and zapping everybody again it could be the 1945 solution just you know flat earth policy and then that's almost a lot of months for all but if you pick away at it and you try to stay this side of international law and you and you have your justifications and you're never going to really close that wound it's just going to keep on bleeding given the current nature of our pissy days and the fundamental extremists that we fight fighting sending the middle east in the moment and their borders and the British Way of dealing with it seems to be moving towards more secular society that's not we're finally and the Americans some things are going more religious my question is how concerned about Donald Trump well I'm you know at the moment it's just a fog of amusement that he's got as far as it hasn't you want to how the heck that's happened you know and if he became president about good god I just hope that there would be enough sensible people around him to keep his hands off any buttons that they don't need to be in control of it is terribly worrying actually when you see the polarization political ideological religious and other polarizations have been very dramatic in the last couple of decades haven't they and and that this raises a great question about the overall strategy of how to deal with the world which has become so conflicted with itself in so many ways and so many levels just look at the political situation in our States of America you look at the gulf between Democrats and Republicans in a constitutional setting which actually relies upon bipartisanship the whole structure of the American Constitution with you know the White House and Congress and the Supreme Court really relied on the possibility of there being compromises and and negotiations and with the GOP becoming so extreme or the Tea Party and so angry about how the world is going that's now broken down even to the point where the United States government runs out of money in one minute before midnight and we know needing trillions of dollars and it's an embarrassment for them and a terrible situation and that's just one of many different kinds of polarizations and the religious polarization so between people who have faith in people who don't between different faiths and of course there they are opposition is even more dramatic as we see between the Sunnis between the Shiite and all the sub G I because there are 62 different sects in Islam by alle whites and various others and this this fragmentation of one part of minority part of Islam is a source of running conflict that conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India now between Muslims and Christians and Pakistan as we've seen recently I mean the whole thing is fragmenting in a very bad way so we're faced with a difficulty and the solution to the difficulty is by no means easy to specify but one important part of it has to be that opportunity for jobs economic opportunity the opportunity to live a life of which is more flourishing and peaceful has to be part of the story there have to be other kinds of solutions systemic social economic solutions which make the push towards conflict and violence less of an option for people a book has just been published now unfortunately I don't have the title and author two authors just on my tongue at the moment but it's a it's a book which asked the question why are so many Islamic terrorists engineers it asked this question a very high proportion of Islamic chose to be an engineers and it addresses the question of the education level of people who have been known to take part in terrorist atrocities and the answer that drops out of it is one that you you feel there has to be the right answer and that is that in a lot of Middle Eastern countries where the economies are stuttering along and have been dependent on military age you know billions of dollars in the US as in Egypt for example for such a long time there are just no jobs there's no opportunities for people and they become very disaffected if you're a young male you're educated you may have traveled you may have had part of your education abroad you may have seen what life is like there and you're compared to life back at home you may have been tempted by what you've seen in the West that even indulged you know drank a few beers and smoked a few cigarettes and slept with a few girls and so on then you come back to your own society feel the tension and they and the difficulty of making anything out of life and so you become angry this is one trajectory that they describe but the overall suggestion is that lack of opportunity the higher unemployment levels the fact that in the Middle East the average age is extremely low of the population at large and there's a very big young population but this is fertile ground for disaffection anger resentment and you might have millions of people who feel that way and will only take a few thousand to pick up a gun in order to express their resentment and anger and you've got a problem do you think you just occasionally change when you look in the cyber environment rather the kind of physical warfare well that's a very very very interesting question and in fact we do tend to overlook the fact that there is already a war in cyberspace with hacking and disruption of communications and sort of government computing potential and so on and there is a another aspect to it as well which is robot warfare drones and unarmed ground-based weapon systems autonomous weapon systems which are out of purview of human control and so you know all these things are coming on stream if they're not there already and we have to ask about the effects of these things on and you know on thinking about war and its justifications because if you have a whole fleet of unarmed unmanned autonomous weapon systems by land sea and air and you point them in the direction of the enemy what then you know and could they go wrong could they turn around and come and zap you instead and so forth but cyber war that the war in which there's constant attack on your on your systems and you know trying to crash your computers and access your data and that that goes on all the time already and has been for some for some time so the whole there's a race out there on encryption and protection of systems and this has now got to two levels of technical sophistication which sort of beyond most people to understand exactly what's happening but this is now wedding trend happening for a long time ever be justifiable for a nation to control the narrative even if that notes it was false to control to control announcer to control people's perceptions saving life even I'm afraid the answer to that is yes but because it has always been a common practice that propaganda information given to the home population has been managed does not cause panic as to encourage people to reassure the population to misinform the enemy I mean this is a standard technique you know loose talk saves cost lives you may remember those things that posted as a read up in the Second World War and so that this is management of perceptions is management of emotions and we all think for example how doubt he and and sterling the British population was under the Blitz in fact it's not true it was all a lot of problems a lot of panic trying to stop people from leaving London you know and while the Blitz was on but didn't want to have huge numbers of refugees swarming out into the countryside and overwhelming villages and towns I mean there were some difficulties like that and yet today even today we will look back on that and say you know think about those broadcasts Big Ben chiming and this is London Calling and people listening you know what did people think now how brave we were and how we stood up for it I suppose we did in one way but in other ways it was sometimes pretty touch-and-go and our perceptions today are being managed successfully by the way they were managed so you're absolutely right about it management of perceptions management of emotions management of information of what people know what they see is tremendously important and actually it has a downside which is this almost all the major news services of the world BBC ITN CNN all these ABC News they don't broadcast pictures onto our television screens screens what it actually looks like in a place of conflict now what casualties actually look like and what's actually happening on the ground they tend to be a highly edited you know to save people's horror and in a way that's a pity because if people did see what it was really like maybe sentiment about conflict would be different I know that I speak a lot more than Spencerian so and I thank you sincerely for being so generous to Defiance to come down these two countries always and providers for such a thought-provoking - so I'm sure most join me what's going

Channel: Humanists UK

Views: 8,251

Keywords: BHA, Humanism, Secularism, Atheism, Agnosticism, Education, Talks, Lectures, BritishHumanistAssociation, Non-religious, war, peace, nuclear disarmament, just war, A C Grayling, philosophy, Defence Humanists, MoD

Id: AfIFIvAssgs

Length: 70min 54sec (4254 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2016