On the Relativizing of War and Peace: Justice, Competing Conceptions of War, and the Decisive Role of the Non-Religious

The rise of the non-religious, especially the young “nones”, will increasingly affect the way US culture views war, but with what result? The key to approaching this question is not only what the nones are advocating, but establishing what mixture of prominent topical ideas history has handed them. To get at the nature of this mixture by beginning with a general question: what is the most desirable mental attitude among free states with which to attend to the preparation for war? If the nones were to respond to this question, what ideas from other sources and, for the young nones, from older generations do they have to work with? What intellectual historical trends have come down to them? Classical thinking on war and justice continues to recede, so what has been proposed that would take its place? Lethality has been injected more recently into the milieu the young nones are entering. However, lethality is more an attempt to resolve tensions among contradictory agendas. A second, older possibility is a total war mindset, subsuming the state’s entire resources to warring. A third, likewise older option, is prosecuting wars of ideology that seek to crush antagonistic ideas and the political systems that hold them. The author argues the nones will not necessarily choose any of these, but will enable cultural receptivity to each of these three constructs. Alternatively, what about the contributions of classical philosophy to this question? This bypassed fourth avenue, with its emphasis on what constitutes a healthy polis, may provide a richer basis for leading militaries and cultures. The goal here, which the rise of the nones unintentionally imperils, is to secure the State and the soul of the warfighter by constituting or restoring the classical sense of the military’s reason to exist: not as a temporary inherent evil merely to serve state interests, but as a permanent dimension of society in service to the common good, as classically understood.