On the Ethics of Violence

Compassion, Mercy, and Necessity

I have lost track of the number of dead children I’ve seen pulled out of rubble in Gaza. One scene in particular sticks with me. It was a scene of a father I saw on X shortly after the hospital bombing. I don’t know if what I saw was caused by the hospital bombing, only that the two coincided in time. The father had the expression of a corpse. It was like someone had gone into his soul and precisely turned off all the parts that allowed him to perceive or even remember anything good until only horror remained. I knew with a certainty that he wished he was dead. For in each hand he held a sack and in each sack he carried what was left of one of his children. One sack was plastic and held what appeared to be a wet, red mass. The other sack was canvas and held an arm, small fingers still intact poking out of one end of like a long baguette out of a bag of groceries.

There was quite a furor over who exactly bombed the hospital. In fairness, even if I left aside all other evidence and had to purely guess based on that one video, I would guess that it was a Palestinian rocket misfire if only because that video disappeared very shortly afterward and I haven’t seen it again. And for whatever else it is worth, all the evidence I’ve seen in this particular case exonerates Israel and reframes the initially reported hospital bombing down to the loss of a parking lot. I don’t really care for the purposes of this writing. Whether I see them or not, whether news of them ever reaches my ears, whoever dropped whichever bomb, some other number of parents are going to endure the cruel fate of carrying the remains of their children out of rubble in plastic sacks. For everything that follows in this essay, it’s enough for that to be true.

There are many people who feel it is somehow an offense to their honor or dignity to be asked to spare a public thought for the dead on a particular side of the conflict. As if it is not a human courtesy to look upon something terrible and say, “I wish it were otherwise” but an accusation that one is unfeeling or wicked. As if the person making the request —or often simply making a statement aloud to themselves in the strangely personal yet public style that only social media allows— is attempting to call you out, to test you like a witch, and find whether or not you are truly human. If I hate anything about the internet, it is that we all approach one another as gunslingers waiting for our chance to shoot. All done not even to meaningfully resolve some disagreement but merely to take a moment of ugly satisfaction that we got one over on someone else, usually a stranger.

I understand where those instincts comes from. It feels like a sharp, cynical wisdom that you’d better not let your guard down. Better not expose yourself to something that will only come back to bite you later. You have to harden yourself for what’s ahead and it isn’t your job to feel terrible for everyone in the world. Yet I believe this is an incorrect impulse because what we owe to the dead is something we also owe to ourselves, and to allow what another person thinks to stop you from publicly mourning the loss of innocent life is the highest folly. Simply put, our hearts were made to be stomped upon. Again and again. Over and over. It is not nearly so wise as you might suppose to try to shelter a heart from pain because to do so is to deny the heart its duty. A broken heart is a connection to the world as it is and a motivator to push toward a world that ought to be.

I’ve stopped looking at pictures of the dead, but I take a few minutes to think on them each morning and pray. I pray that the bombs will spare the innocent, especially the children. I pray for the Israeli hostages and that they’re soon reunited with their loved ones. I pray for the Israeli soldiers to be safe and that every strike they make will be just and that the guilty will die quickly and without pain. I pray that the dead find their way to some other kind of existence. And I pray for everyone I don’t know to pray for, which I think is a sort of clever trick to play on God, and that maybe if I simply think the correct else-statement or for-loop thought that one day I’ll somehow hack the code of the universe and bring about world peace.

I do this because I would want someone to do it for me and my family even if they couldn’t do anything else. I have a very loose but workmanlike faith in God. And I don’t know what God is for if not as a sort of placeholder to provide a last hope that it is possible to balance scales like these in some way that we cannot comprehend. A simple, desperate hope that even the unimaginable can be made alright in the end.

I also think it is important to publicly express these sentiments for purely practical reasons.

In times like these, for those of us not involved in the conflict, we have two duties. One is to see clearly and speak clearly, so that the conditions which will cause the restoration of peace can be quickly identified and known. I think part of that is at all times communicating the desire for peace. Communicate with ever-fresh, never-dulling pain your distaste for the violence. State and restate what the conditions are to return to peace until you have essentially painted a very bright button for your enemy to push that says “STOP THE KILLING.” Of course your enemy doesn’t want to push that button and that is why the conflict has begun but as pressure mounts your job is to make pushing that button look more and more attractive to factions on the side of the enemy. The better of a job you do at that, and of making sure everyone knows that you’ve provided that button with reasonable conditions, the better the chance you’ll win allies. And the more allies you win, the more impossible the situation of the enemy becomes, and the more likely it is that some internal schism will occur where one faction wins out to press that button and stop the killing.

I’m aware I sound like an impossible peacenik. Probably like a person who can’t be reasoned with about anything violent at all. And no. Unfortunately, no. I’m not. Part of me wishes that I was. If someone kidnapped a member of my family, I would hunt them down, and I would kill them if that’s what it took to bring my loved one back to safety. I would not treat it as an acceptable condition for the return of peace that their kidnapper go unpunished. So, yes, I would be willing to kill someone who did that. It’s just that I would also go to their funeral, or probably go to their grave the next day out of respect to their family, lay a flower on their grave, and say a prayer for them. I would say I wish that it had been otherwise, that whatever had caused them to do what they did had never happened, that the demon whisper that caused them to do what they did exists in every human heart, and that I wished they’d found their way to a better path. Worst of all, I would do my best to mean it.

And if one of their relatives took offense and initiated new violence upon me, I’d do the same damn thing again. However many times it took. And I would in all the quiet and loud ways necessary, but always without relish and expression of distaste, communicate my willingness to do this because the better part of wisdom is that being willing to do such things often prevents the need to do such things. Having the known capacity to commit violence is the best deterrent against violence, which is something we in the West have almost totally forgotten.

As a society, in the United States, we have been poisoned by cinema and forgotten the simple truth of deterrence. The brain-melting television apocalypse foretold by our forebears is the one apocalypse that I believe has come true. Everyone here thinks based on experiences they’ve seen in movies. Most people’s experience of violence comes from movies where it’s possible to just be so peaceful that no one will ever want to hurt you or the people you love. If they do, just be so incredibly awesome at violence you hurt the people who hurt you and absolutely nobody else. Your enemy will always make choices that allow you to walk away feeling totally clean. From the time we are children, to the moment we pass into the grave, heroes ten feet tall simply wash over all the ugly parts of the world we’d rather not have to think about. I think that gives us really good aspirations about what kinds of worlds we should want and perhaps the most counterproductive possible sense of practicality on how to achieve those positive outcomes.

Our second duty in times like these is precisely to be willing to do violence, to do only the violence absolutely necessary, and to ensure everyone knows you want to do only the bare minimum violence necessary. As part of that duty you must simultaneously not flinch back from doing violence once the course has been set and continuously think about what actions we must take to arrive at the conditions of peace with the least possible damage.

Violence is a funny thing because people feel they ought to have a vote about it, and in a sense we do have a vote on the use of force. It’s just that when it comes to violence we cast bullets instead of ballots, and the only votes that count belong to the men who are willing to pull the trigger. Out of all the people in Palestine, Hamas voted to initiate a war. Only their votes mattered because they were willing to show up with guns and commit butchery.

One of the things I try to talk about here is how societies are structured by invisible tugs and pulls. We exist in a sea of strings made out of mutual predictions and suspicions, passed from mind to mind, all coordinated by our cultures and institutions so that large groups of people can plan on how to arrive at particular futures and move together to achieve them. I call those things Extelligent webs. When we say “the Palestinians” or “the Israelis” we so often reduce it to some single individual in our minds. What we are speaking to in truth is those sort of Extelligent webs, the unifying predictions and suspicions shared across large swaths of a group. From this standpoint, everything I said above is absolutely practical.

I will explain.

Why weep for your enemy? So your enemy knows you are the type of person to weep for him. To display, publicly, that you do not wish to kill him so that he is forced bit by bit to update his predictive world model and change the structure of his suspicions. Put yourself in the shoes of the common Hamas recruit. Does it become more or less difficult to pick up a gun if every bit of evidence you’ve come across communicates that no one in Israel wants to hurt you? You should also weep for your enemy so that you know for yourself, in your own heart, that you did not wish to do anything you were forced to do by circumstances. The reality is that violence feels good when you’re in the middle of it and this practice will help you to contain that.

Why be willing to commit violence despite the first thing? So that your enemy knows this and has to update his predictive model to this end as well. Put yourself in the shoes of the Hamas recruit. You know that you must now initiate violence against someone who doesn’t want to hurt you but will and all you have to do is not pick up the gun. Carrot and stick. Display at all times that you are willing to leave peacefully and that you are willing to defend yourself until you have squeezed your enemy like a watermelon seed between your fingers and have forced him to become, if not your friend, at least non-hostile.

There’s nothing much more offensive to someone in the middle of life-or-death terror than to walk up beside them and say “Your Public Relations is terrible.” The state you are in at those times is one where you want to create clear lines between friends and enemies. You have to protect what the basic essentials of life and anything more subtle seems like the cowardly evasion of your enemy. It seems such a small thing to advise someone that words have power, for words are such quiet things compared to bombs and pixels are so pale compared to blood, and yet over a large enough scale words are as consequential as gravity spinning the solar system into existence from out of cosmic dust. Words transmit the predictive models and chains of suspicion that ultimately inform every human action.

I say all of this because I’ve started to suspect Israel is on a losing course. The war, as they are currently fighting it, cannot be won for the same reason that the United States could not defeat the Taliban. We could stack Taliban corpses higher than they could stack American corpses, for every missile the Taliban launched we could launch five-hundred and better, but the pattern that animates new bodies to enter into the fray remained intact. We never accomplished the most essential objective, nor did we ever understand it to be essential, that we had to convince the enemy himself that he was behaving immorally in his own heart. We were focused on fighting a tangible story. So we did things like turn a blind eye to poppy fields or bacha bazi boys in exchange for fighting men, never understanding that as we did so that we told a story to the people of Afghanistan with our actions and that the moral of that story was “Never trust an American.”

There’s still plenty of blood to be spilled after you’ve figured out the right story to tell. Your enemy understands the power of words as well and will lie and twist the facts around to make sending your message more difficult. You can’t magic away a heart that has turned from reason to poison or speak to ears that are deaf to your words. Those people will have to be found and killed because if you don’t they will come and kill you. Would to God it were otherwise, but we do not live in that world.

The difference is that if all people are set on the same understanding on what is important to communicate and why, then not one drop of blood needs to be spilled that isn’t necessary. The first group of people who needs to receive a clear message is your own people. The second is your allies. And the third, crucial group, is your enemies. If it is understood not by your own soldiers, or allies, but by your enemies themselves that you move with the purpose of justice and if you prove, repeatedly, that you can create a safe and sheltered place for those who simply lay down their arms you can attack the Extelligent web of the enemy. You can strike at the pattern that animates new soldiers to enter the fray.

I’m not waving a magic wand. I know that currently, and for the past almost hundred years, most Palestinians would choose Hamas terror over Israeli peace. If you put the choice down in front of them three-fourths of them would rather be shelled by Israel than protected by Israel. There’s nothing you could ever say, today, to sway those people. However, all cultures are made of factions. In times of conflict at the scale of populations, your real objective is to change the nature of the enemy’s Extelligent web. That means replacing one faction with another, or creating space for another faction to prosper. Imagine the cultural devastation that would occur if the one-fourth faction that would choose an Israeli peace were given a separate sanctuary and spawned their own Extelligent web? The nature of the conflict itself changes. It’s no longer Israel against Gaza and the West Bank. It’s no longer Israel against the Palestinian people. Even among hard-liner Israelis there’s no way to message those things coherently if even a few thousand Palestinian people live peacefully in their own area.

There are probably several hundred thousand Palestinians who would choose an Israeli peace. Probably high tens-of-thousands who would meaningfully engage in their own security and protection if selected carefully. What moves are left to Hamas and its allies in such a situation? Treat the peaceful Palestinians as enemy targets? And if Israel protects them, what is the message Hamas sends to its own population? Who gets to be the true group of Palestinians? Hold the line. Keep that population safe. What happens next? The pattern that sustains Hamas begins to fray. The group boundaries become unstable. If you open some pathway to defection then what happens to the unstable group?

This would take much longer than I think anyone wants to hear at the present moment. Probably something like a hundred years, with all kinds of reversals and counter-reversals, hardships, and betrayals. But if you want an opinion that isn’t mine, from someone who was there in Iraq and watched as the United States poured its strength like water onto the sand to no gain, then I’d recommend this podcast with Jocko Willink who was involved in the pacification of Ramadi.

This is the only long-term strategy I can imagine that isn’t simply part of a cycle of growing Palestinian strength, an attack, a counter-attack that causes high regional instability, and then a return laying low while the hostile Palestinian factions regather strength. Remember your enemy needs to be a target of your propaganda. Remember your enemy is made of factions at whatever level of analysis you care to imagine, including the individual. Remember you have to drive wedges between the factions in order to change the structure of their Extelligent web. Nothing human is workable, practical, or stable unless you approach it with carrots and sticks.

If on my day of judgement I have to stand before God and He tells me that it wasn’t supposed to be this way, that upon seeing that father with his two bags full of his dead son I should have immediately surrendered and preferred my own death to fighting, then I think he will be more likely to forgive my ignorance than my avarice. If I can tell Him I tried my hardest to see what was right and that I did my best to build the best road to the best future, and never forgot the tragedy of snuffing out each little spark of His light… then maybe He will understand.

I’m going to try to write some more essays on the subject of violent human conflict over the coming days. We’re moving into a world where a lot of things are becoming possible that weren’t possible before. We can’t keep thinking of these things the same way we always have. The next essay on the subject will be called “One Hundred Million Flying Handguns.”