Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

It's been a long time since I've read a book that made me feel so defensive.

Even now, having completed Samuel Moyn's "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War," I can't decide if the problem is me or Moyn. Moyn's central idea here is that the United States has made its wars more palatable for public consumption -- particularly with an emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties, but also by focusing ever more on the international laws of war -- and in so doing has made it easier for the country to find endless wars with little or no public restraint. "American concern with war has become focused on ensuring it is humane -- not whether it drags on and on, or even should be fought in the first place," he writes.

I agree with part of Moyn's assertion. We're a country that goes to war pretty easily. Sometimes there's a debate, as when the United States invaded Iraq. Mostly, there's not: America fights or facilitates violence in places like Syria and Yemen with barely a peep of interest from the public and only the scantest attention from major media organs. And I also believe that America's increasing use of drone strikes has helped make our wars more invisible to that public, letting us spread death to alleged terrorists around the world in a fashion which invites blowback, but which is easy to ignore because U.S. soldiers are safely immune from the immediate threat of reciprocal violence. How can somebody in the Middle East take revenge against a pilot based in Las Vegas?

And yet, I really struggle with Moyn's notion that the people who try to keep war within certain bounds after it has been declared -- lawyers mostly, those who have developed the laws of war and then applied them vigorously -- have somehow enabled war. Moyn argues that as the focus on fighting wars "legally" ascended, the power of antiwar forces in American life receded. "Compared with the antiwar forces of the past, humanitarians were a far preferable foe, occypying more common terrain," he writes. Observers were right to ask if the military's "self-humanizations since My Lai entrench violence more than they regulated it." Is the choice really between arguing against war and arguing against using torture at war? It seems like I ought to be able to do both, right? Can't I be a pacifist, yet also argue against targeting civilians while the war is underway? Am I really assenting to war by criticizing its conduct? Maybe there's room for "both-and," but it's difficult to argue against Moyn's contention that it hasn't worked out that way. In his telling, the lawyers who represent Gitmo defendants might be honorable, but they're also patsies. I find that hard to swallow.

Another source of frustration: Moyn seems to wish that opponents of U.S. wars would focus more on legal arguments that those wars have often violated the United Nations' ban on wars of aggression. I find that idea naive (particularly since Moyn points out repeatedly how the laws of war have often been bent and broken with little repercussion) as is the idea that war can be stamped out. As I've written elsewhere, I've long lived at the edges of pacifism -- but I also believe there will always be wars and rumors of war. Am I betraying my own stated principles to believe in "don't kill civilians, don't torture detainees" the best second-best I might get? Am I a hypocrite? Or is Moyn being impossibly utopian? That's what I suspect is true, but again: Maybe I'm just being defensive.

If I find "Humane" to be frustrating, I also find it useful -- unexpectedly as a quick primer on Leo Tolstoy and his pacifist activism, but also the rise and development of international humanitarian law. He also provides a useful thread of how major powers have tended to observe the laws of war loosely, and usually not at all when fighting non-white peoples. American forces, for example, have often found easy justification for brutality against Native Americans, Filipinos, Vietnamese an "War on Terror" combatants. The rules are supposedly for civilized people only.

Still, it was perhaps unwise of me to read Moyn while tensions are on the rise -- the weeks I spent with this book coincided with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm angry and scared about matters of war and peace right now, anyway. Today, I watched a video of a Russian tank running over a Ukrainian civilians' car with the driver still inside. If war has become humane, it is difficult to see the evidence this week.

On Ukraine and pacifism

 My tendencies toward pacifism -- I'm not sure I have the right to call myself a total pacifist -- stem from a few influences. My dad was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, one of the few young men in his community who was accorded that status by the local draft board. And when I was an adolescent, my family moved into a Mennonite community, and I eventually attended the local Mennonite Brethren college, and the Menno tradition of Christian pacifism left its mark on me even after I left the church.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine this week has made me realize that there was a third factor in all of this: For my entire life, the United States -- the country where I live, and thus the context for my dovishness -- has pretty much always been on offense. We go to other countries and make them feel the "shock and awe" of our tanks and bombs and missiles, but we have never been in the position of so many Ukrainians right now, making life-or-death choices to defy a murderous onslaught. Even after 9/11, the United States packed up its kit bag and made war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We've never really been on defense. Weirdly, living in a militaristic country that fights all its wars "over there" made it easy to be a pacifist.

That's not Ukraine's situation. And it's difficult not to be humbled -- assuming these stories are real -- by the Snake Island folks or the guy who died blowing up a Russian bridge to stop the invasion's advance. These were people who lost their lives in a probably futile attempt to protect their families and communities from having to live under the violent thumb of tyranny. That's not very pacifist. I think I'm OK with that. 

Common Book: The haze of war

"After a war, there were always recriminations about its consequences. But when it started, the haze of militarism, pride, and virtue obscured the possibility of moral choice—or even awareness that, in the end, you could lose." - Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.

Ralph Gage, RIP

On my last day at the Lawrence Journal-World, I burned all my bridges.

The whys and wherefores don’t really matter; indeed, they’ve basically turned to dust. What matters is that I had seen the end coming, had arranged to move onto a lucrative new job elsewhere in media, and then — once everything had been put into motion — got my feelings hurt. I reacted badly. I went around the newsroom, shook hands, made it plain that I was full of rage, gathered up my belongings and rather ostentatiously marched out the front door. It was impetuous, and probably stupid. I was 34, married a bit more than a year, had a few nice awards under my belt and considered myself somewhat ambitious. I was still young enough to think I had a future. 

What I didn’t count on was a series of cascading failures: The economy, the media industry, my health. I really didn’t have a clear-eyed view of my own foibles, for that matter, and how they could bring me down.

When my health went, in 2011, I was already at the end of my rope: I’d lost my job in Philadelphia the year before — it still hurts to write that — and was broke, with a wife and young son to support and no idea how to do it. A sudden brush with death brought me to my lowest point. It felt like nothing could ever be good again.

That’s when Ralph Gage reached out to me.

Ralph was a longtime veteran of the Journal-World. He was a journalist and then managing editor, general manager and eventually chief operating officer of the company. He was known in the newsroom for having a gruff personality. He could be scary, frankly. When I burned my bridges at the paper, I figured he was one of the people I had burned. But while I was in the hospital, he reached out to me on Facebook — checking to see if I was OK, if he could offer any support, rooting me on as I recovered.

It was humbling. I never expected to hear a good word from him again — and, to repeat, I probably didn’t deserve to. He didn’t owe me any kind of grace. He gave it freely.

And he gave it again when I returned to Lawrence from Philly, eight years after I’d left. He wrote to several people who had the ability to give work to freelancers, vouching for me and asking them to send some assignments my way. I didn’t ask for it. He didn’t have to do it. And that support was meaningful.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had the good fortune to make a bit of peace with a number of people that I thought I’d broken with. It’s such a relief to let go of grudges, to free yourself of the burden of anger. I’m great at carrying that anger, to my eternal detriment. I don’t think Ralph intended to serve as an object lesson in the power of grace — I don’t think I ever let him know how much his kindnesses meant to me. I’m not sure I would’ve known how to have that kind of talk with him. Now I won’t get a chance: He passed away this weekend.

So I’ve tried to learn from his actions toward me — to be more careful about recognizing the human beings whom I deal with, to remember that they’re more than the sum of their interactions with me, have more facets and needs and wants than I’m capable of perceiving. To consider their pain instead of using it as an excuse to return anger for anger. I am not good at this stuff yet. I might never be. All I know is I didn’t expect to learn those lessons from Ralph. Life is funny. 

— 30 — 

Bag O' Books: 'Freedom,' by Sebastian Junger

The central tale of this short book involves a long hiking trip -- a series of trips, actually, as we find out in the afterword -- that Junger took with some combat friends, along the railroad tracks of Pennsylvania, camping along the way, darting into towns for quick meals at diners. Along the way, some ruminations about freedom, which in some cases literally means "unencumbered": Junger has a lot to say how mobile hunter-gatherer tribes are more free -- and freer from hierarchies of wealth and rank -- than the place-bound farmer-city society that we call society. (He also notes that such freedom has its limits: Even the "most free man in the world" ultimately needed to connect to society.) There are detours into the relationship between testosterone and dominance, the similarities between the Taliban, the Irish of the Easter Uprising and the steel mill strikes of the Industrial Era. A short book with an even simpler message: "If you can't run a mile with all your gear, you've got too much gear."

* Book 1 of 2022.

My bucket list for 2022

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

No resolutions. But a few things I'd like to do.

* Finally read Robert Caro's "The Power Broker.": Kind of astonishing I've made it this far into my career without checking that box. I've read and loved literally every other book that Caro has published. This one intimidated me, though. I've already ordered a paperback version through the local bookstore, and ergonomically I wish to hell there was an e-version. But there isn't. 

* Travel. I've barely left the state of Kansas the last two years, except to go to Arkansas to visit my wife's parents. I'd like to go someplace that's not where I usually am. One possibility: Getting on Amtrak's Southwest Chief and head west. Never been to Albuquerque. But I'd also really like to return (home?) to Philadelphia, which we'd planned to do the summer of 2020. You know how that went.

* Find my "thick community." Nuff said. 

Missing 'thick community,' still

Photo by Monstera from Pexels

Bonnie Kristian is my editor at The Week. She's also a columnist for Christianity Today. Her latest starts:

This is a season for taking stock of who we are, how we live, and what we are building. It is the best season, perhaps, to ask ourselves the question of poet T. S. Eliot’s choruses from The Rock: “Have you built well?”

In 1934, Eliot penned The Rock to fundraise for 45 church buildings near London. Appropriately, his frequent theme was building—not only churches but also the church as a thick community, an institution, a people seeking knowledge of God, a sanctuary from alienation and futility.

“The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without,” Eliot said. So, how are we building?

The phrase "thick community struck me, and reminded me of something I wrote about a year ago this time: "In 2021, I need to rebuild my personal community."

Even before the pandemic, I was a freelance writer who works from home and who attends church once or twice a year. It didn't feel great! I could go days without leaving the house, even, unless I made a real effort. Oh, I have a few friends I see now and again, and sitting outside the coffee shop with a socially distanced group of men has saved my sanity over the last few months, but the truth is it has been awhile since I was enmeshed in the networks he describes here. I feel their absence.

To be sure, I'm not sure how to reclaim those networks for myself. But I've come to realize I need to try, somehow.

I haven't made great progress. I go to the coffee shop regularly, but mostly I just sit there alone.

Truth be told, I miss the church community I had 20 years ago -- miss it ferociously. When I left the church, I did a fair approximation of re-creating it among a group of people roughly my age who were regulars at the downtown coffee shop. But those folks have largely moved on. And I find myself missing the richness of my life during those years. Outside of the family in my house, the people I talk to most are online -- on Twitter or colleagues that I message throughout the day. I know I'm missing something important, something I love. I know I'm missing "thick community," and I don't have the foggiest idea how to rebuild it.