This one is the outcome of a private email conversation with Jim Putnam, and isn’t easy to write. Actually, outcome is the wrong word – adaption, continuation, change of gear, emergence into daylight ... all of those are closer to the truth. At Jim’s behest, I’m adapting the rambling confusion of one email to something which can masquerade as a coherent public entry.
It started with his posts on love (see here, here, and especially here). I agreed with him that there is no real difference between "love of individuals and the love [he had] tried to define", and that proximity is all that separates them. I'm with him all the way on that, but I've always felt a curiosity at how his passionate commitment in that direction sits alongside one of his past lives - and my own conscience holds equivalent contradictions.
Long ago and far away, a younger me somehow found himself crouched with two others in the stair well of an apartment building. They were separated from companions who were pinned down on the far side of a large open town square by a machine gun crew above them, on the roof. (Notice that I write about "them" in the third person, unable to say "I" or "we". This is very difficult to write, and I retreat into the distance of "he" and "they". In the past, I’ve always dressed the whole thing up as fiction as well; removing that veil is progress of a sort, I suppose.) To cut a long story short, they fought their way up through the building and silenced the machine gun. (More evasive language: to "silence" a machine gun is, of course, to destroy it and kill its crew.) But to fight one’s way through a building is not the Hollywood image of running up some stairs shooting a couple of anonymous enemy soldiers on the way; it’s an obscenely messy and violent business, conducted room by room with gun, bomb and knife, and not everyone in the way is a combatant – an apartment building contains people who never asked have a machine gun on their roof, or soldiers in their rooms and corridors.
Also long ago, in another life, one James Putnam was part of the US Air Force’s nuclear weapons targeting apparatus. I don't know any details, of course, just the fact, but general knowledge about such targeting is common property. Put bluntly, nuclear deterrence targeting translates into plain words as willingness to say, and mean, "there are circumstances in which I will incinerate your civilian population - either to get my way or to frustrate yours".
Neither case, Jim's nor mine, involves the "Foot's Trolley" moral argument where an action which kills a few is weighed against inaction which would result in the deaths of many. If the nature of the airliner attacks on the World Trade Centre had been known in time, I have no problem with saying that those airliners should have been shot down - the innocent lives on board were going to be lost anyway, and the innocent lives saved might have been many. In each of our cases, at their different scales, the innocent lives to be taken were roughly comparable in number to the lives to be saved (and in my case the saved would be combatants, not innocents).
My attitude to targeting (nuclear or conventional) of civilian populations is unequivocal. I can accept the unavoidable necessity of killing combatants who would kill me or mine, or the people whose office sent them there. I can equally accept their unavoidable necessity in relation to my own "side". I can even accept, with distaste, that sometimes accidents will happen and civilian casualties will occur by accident. But I cannot accept the thesis that to plan on killing their civilian population or mine for strategic or tactical reasons within that conflict has any conceivable justification. To do that immediately removes any moral basis for the conflict.
But, of course, in my smaller context I realise that I did exactly that ... and, whatever I feel or think now, I know that might well make exactly the same decision again if I found myself again in the same circumstances. I've always had to accept that the Jim I know now and the Jim who was then are separate people in my mind, but I am in the same position with my respect to myself.
There is an apparent difference between Jim and me. I suspect that it is in his favour, a strength in him and a failing in me. I am appalled by the knowledge of myself; knowing that I might do it again is harder still. He doesn't seem to have that problem; he accepts the past Jim and the present one without obvious feelings of contradiction.
But.
Jim mentioned, in yesterday's T&P post, "love for a Sudanese refugee whom I've not seen other than in news reports". But what about love for the unfortunate civilian in my apartment building, unconnected to the machine gun on her/his roof, or the innocent Russian civilian in his target city, unconnected to the ICBM silos? How can these two parts of ourselves be honestly reconciled? How does the idea of universal love, the desirability of which he and I both share, sit alongside willingness to make the life of a "civilian other" expendable in pursuit of a goal?
I have no answers to that question. I just have to ask it, if I am to have any scrap or delusion of integrity in my heartfelt agreement with Jim that "there are no boundaries to love".
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