War in the founding of a People – its revolutionary act of constitution and constituting – is in and of itself a value for that People. A response to Dr. Robert Higgs, "War is Horrible, but…"

[Editor's note: this piece was written in response to Dr. Robert Higgs' article, "War Is Horrible, but . . ."]

The question has been raised by many thoughtful men whether war is a good thing. In this question, a further question develops. Is war better or worse than peace? We often hear by way of conclusion that peace is the objective and that war is a necessary means, albeit a last resort. To ponder this declaration for but a minute or so is enough to render it if not meaningless then just plain wrong.

A nation or people form from fraternal and patriotic bonds of shared language, culture, faith, history, destiny, and ultimately geography. There will always be converts and latecomers, but the founding experience includes at least these aspects.

For a People to establish a political order there must be a physical place for existence – national existence in modern parlance. In this place, or around this place, there must be defensible borders so as to distinguish between this People and Others. They must be defensible because land mass, and a desirable one at that, is in finite supply. To live as a nation and People has always meant, at least as far back as history allows us to look, that a People takes land from Others to establish its borders.

We have located the first instance of war. Clausewitz tells us, as if we need an authority to understand this, that war is “an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” The “our” in “our will” is the People as a nation. The opponent is the Other who occupies the land mass we covet. Unless one wishes to take the view that nations and peoples should (“should” being understood ontologically) never have come into existence and instead mankind should have remained as Selves with no Society, a view quite contrary to the evidence of what man is in actual existence, war as a founding experience would be a virtuous act – a good.

But might war merely be a “means” to a good end? What if the land could be acquired through other less violent means? Might good sense dictate the less confrontational approach? This is a more difficult discussion but certainly we can all agree that war as a founding experience for a People has profound if not mystic importance beyond merely the capture of a territory. If the act of war and its concomitants — sacrifice and patriotism in the face of danger and death — are elements of the very bonds which create a People, then war would be not a means but very much a part of the good end sought.

For those resistant to this idea, we might learn something from the far more pedestrian discipline of contract law and the experience of matrimony. In contract law, we have long understood that one of the reasons for reducing agreements to the four corners of a document only later to be signed, to affix special seals and to formalize with special ceremonies for such things is to bring the weight of seriousness and commitment to the understandings of the moment. The parties wish to impress upon themselves and their successors that this agreement is meaningful and requires the commitment of all the signatories and their beneficiaries to make it lasting and profitable. While such transactions fall prey to disputes, breaches, and abrogation, they are more likely to stand the test of time than the casual hand shake, if not for any other reason than the parties have made the effort to articulate their understandings in an explicit and public way.

Similarly in matrimony. The pomp and ceremony has an effect on the parties which goes far beyond the moment. And, a ceremony which includes the solemnities of a shared faith and agreement before G-d pursuant to the laws of the land is all the more profound and lasting for it references the individuals within a context of family, nation, and the Divine.

War in the founding of a People – its revolutionary act of constitution and constituting – is in and of itself a value for that People.

Having said this much, the idea of building and preserving a nation and the ongoing value of war seems assured. The question remains, what of “peace?”

We’ve sufficiently reduced “peace” in lieu of nations as a contradiction to existence simply. Even the great political philosopher of the Enlightenment, Hobbes, or the far inferior, Locke, would not suggest that the state of nature was more than a rhetorical device to undo man’s existence as ontological or purposeful in the meaning of Telos. But given national existence, is peace preferable to war?

If by peace we mean the absence of violence, then one must respond that it is a silly question. First, man does not exist in this world in such a pristine state. Man cannot even live with his loved ones, his own flesh and blood, without the basest eruptions of violence. How would one suppose he do so in the broader context?

Further, how is it that one supposes that national existence and Peoples are fixed and finite commodities? Precisely because of the nature of the bonds which hold a People, national existence and Peoplehood are a relationship of experiences of the Whole (represented by the Terms of Existence: Self, Society, G-d and World, which as a Whole transcend the Part or mere material existence) requiring constant recommitment, constitution, and constituting. Lacking such continuing constitutional experience, national existence and Peoplehood deteriorate as we have seen even among the greatest of nations.

War it could be argued is very much a part of this. As nations weaken or as others form, war is a virtue in either case.

But we, modern men, who have so embraced science and its technological advances as so much a boon to humankind, recognize immediately that in our world the scientific applications in war can mean global destruction. In this case, war loses its virtue in all but one instance. That instance of course is where the destruction of one’s People or national existence is no less an evil than the destruction of the world.

This frightening possibility, made possible by modern science, suggests something quite shocking does it not? And, if one were to contemplate, without recourse to the rather shallow distinction often made between science and scientism, what modern science, meaning modern reason, means for man’s existence simply, we begin to fathom the depth of what should be our shock and dismay.

If indeed it is possible for man to examine and manipulate the world based upon the necessary assumption that everything is reducible to mathematical physics — and that is the necessary assumption of science because without it it simply doesn’t work – then the very Terms of Existence are reduced to the Part. This is what we refer to as the Redirection.

If what I say is true (and it is not my analysis but Robert Loewenberg’s of the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies), then it is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Because if it is true, then Peace as the end of man properly understood, if not absolutely so, is not merely possible, it is desirable. And if you understand these matters well, as for example did Alexander Kojève – a man once described as the Unknown Superior and the great expositor of Hegel – then you understand that Peace is murder and you recognize both Islam and its passive form, Liberalism, as the convergence toward Peace Loewenberg has written of at the Institute.

And, if these matters are true, then our Catholic friends should understand that there is no dialogue possible with modern reason from within modern reason as recently suggested. Dialogue as speech, as Logos, simply does not exist for modern scientific man and no hermeneutics will make that shocking fact go away.