Spirit in Action
Philosophy of War and Nonviolence - Robert Holmes
Dr Robert Holmes is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester in NY, with a specialty in peace and nonviolence who has taught, written and spoken extensively on related topics.
- Broadcast on:
- 08 Jan 2012
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- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we're going over to the University of Rochester, New York, to speak with Doctor of Philosophy Robert Holmes. His specialty over his 48 year career has been peace and non-violence. And I've read some of his papers, like one called terrorism violence and non-violence, and another named pacifism and weapons of mass destruction. Bob Holmes joins us today from Rochester, New York. Bob, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - You're welcome. - I'm sorry I didn't get to hear you when you were over to this area. You were at one of the colleges in the Twin Cities area. What were you speaking about on that trip? - I was at Hanlon University, and I gave a couple of talks there. The first was on the relevance of Gandhi and non-violence today. Second talk was on social inequality, and whether affirmative action or reparations are the preferable action to take with regard to inequality. - Why would anybody know about that kind of stuff living in Rochester, New York? - Well, I've had a longstanding interest in non-violence and Gandhi and non-violence in particular. I've been teaching a course for 15 years on the philosophy, history, and practice of non-violence. Quite a few of the talks that I give, and most of my writing now is on that particular issue. I also have an interest in social ethics, and I've taught contemporary ethical problems for many years and among the standard array of ethical problems that philosophers deal with nowadays are the issues of affirmative action. And I bring in the concept of reparations there as well, because that seems to me to be a relevant option to consider when one is looking at social inequality. So I have longstanding personal interest in some of these issues, but also professional interest in my teaching. - I don't think it's probably obvious to a lot of people the connection between non-violence, that kind of thought and affirmative action reparations. Could you fill in the picture for us? Why are those things ethical issues? How are they important? How are they relevant in today's world? - Well, with affirmative action, if we contextualize it and relate it to the American experience, of course this country had slavery for many, many decades, and it was an important aspect of the culture of the country and the economy of the country, and it was one of the central elements in the civil war. So the background of this country is one that is founded on social inequality, because slavery probably the paradigm of social inequality. And even though it technically ended with the civil war, still the aftermath of slavery is still with us in very many ways because the freed slaves, although ostensibly they had freedoms of citizens, for all practical purposes, they were second class citizens. Many people feel that today given the disparity in wealth that many African Americans, as well as many other people, so quite a few white people and Hispanics as well constitute an underclass in this country, it appears to be more or less a permanent condition unless people take some action to try to remedy it. Affirmative action in the early years in this country was designed primarily to try to rectify past injustice. So people looked back to slavery and they also looked back to discrimination, which was largely outlawed in the 1950s and then with the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but the after effects of discrimination and slavery persist. So the question is, do we just accept that and say, well, we've extended a formal liberty to all people in the country at the present time and sure there are disparities in wealth, but that's just the way things are and maybe in 100 years or 500 years or 1000 years, those will even out, but it's not the obligation of society or the government to do anything about it. That's one way of thinking about this issue. The other way of thinking is that there's an obligation on the part of society and/or the government to bring about some remedy, some compensation for the past injustice. So this is a very different school of thought and this is the way of thinking of those who favor affirmative action. Now, many of the critics of affirmative action, namely people who hold the view that we should just accept the situation as at the present time, the criticisms they brought led to a change in the thinking about affirmative action. If you look at some of the legal cases over the years, people don't talk so much about affirmative action now, what they talk about is diversity. Affirmative action was, if you like, a backward looking approach to social inequality because it emphasized the injustices of the past. Diversity on the other hand is forward looking because the claim of those who argue for diversity is that we have to look to the future and that the consequences of having a much more diverse society, diversity in the schools and colleges and universities and in the legal profession and in the business world is good for the country. So that's a consequentialist outlook looking towards the future and that's pretty much the preferred approach at the present time. The issue of past injustice and of there being a duty of reparation or compensation for past injustice largely has subsided because so many critics of that particular approach. Now, that in and of itself, those issues in and of themselves don't have a direct connection with nonviolence, but in the way in which I think of nonviolence, they are connected because I see nonviolence not merely as renouncing violence, but also as having a positive concern for the well-being of people and for social justice. In the way in which I think of nonviolence, one can't just settle for not using violence or supporting outward violence, one also has to have a concern for social justice as well. You very often hear it said that peace is more than just the absence of war, that peace requires justice as well. Very much the same thing I think is true with regard to nonviolence, that nonviolence is more than just the absence of violence. It entails a compassionate concern for other people and in particular for issues of social justice. That essentially is the connection between these two, nonviolence and affirmative action. - I've also heard it said by the way, and I don't know what you think of this, that to some degree reparations, if you will, for slavery were paid by the fighting of the Civil War. That is to say, I don't know what is it, something close to a million Americans died on the battlefields fighting at the core, I think over the issue of slavery. So overall, do you think that war can actually serve a positive goal, a positive outcome? - Well, with regard to the Civil War, I don't think of the Civil War as constituting reparations or at least adequate reparations for the institution of slavery and for a couple of reasons. I mean, there were roughly 650,000 people died in the Civil War, but this wasn't a cost to the society as a whole, at least in any direct sense. It was a cost to the individual men who died in the war. What happened was that you had people, both volunteers and draftees put into uniform, trained to kill and sent off to slaughter one another in the Civil War, and they paid dearly, of course, as did their friends and family and loved ones. But reparations, as it's usually thought of at the present time, is an obligation of the society as a whole, and not just one particular segment of the society, those who happen at the end uniform at the present time, that's one of the ways in which reparations differs from affirmative action, because with affirmative action, you have people competing for jobs or competing for places in law school or in the freshman classes of colleges and so on. It's the particular individuals who are in competition there who are most directly affected by those policies. So if you have an African-American, for example, competing for a college slot with a white male, and if affirmative action calls for giving preferential treatment to the African-American, then, of course, the person who doesn't get the job or doesn't get the position in college or in law school and whatnot, has been severely disadvantaged, and the courts have found that discriminatory. Reparations, on the other hand, doesn't single out, mostly young people who are applying for jobs who are applying to college or law school. It places the burden on the entire society. Civil War didn't do that, and I don't think it's adequate as a basis for a claim that reparations have already been paid by the North. As for the more general question that you ask about war-serving positive effects, this requires making a couple of distinctions. If one is talking, what I call the macro level, about nation states or collectivities or societies, whatever kinds of collective units we're talking about, then very obviously war can serve beneficial effects because some nations can profit from war, other nations suffer from war. So there are costs and benefits, and pretty easy to see how those are distributed when we're talking at the macro level. But at the micro level of individual persons where we're talking about human beings with lives, with aspirations, with values, with loved ones, with friendship, and so on, if you look at the cost at the micro level, I don't think wars accomplish anything productive. The unusual thing is that you can have apparent benefits at the macro level even though you have horrific costs at the micro level. Curidoxically, a nation can even go out of existence without any loss of life at the micro level. Soviet Union, for example, went out of existence. Basically, bloodlessly, there was no loss of life in the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Whereas with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, there was horrific loss of life. And by the same token, you can have a country remain in existence, say through war and conflict, but at a terrible cost of the lives of individuals. This was true of Vietnam. Vietnam still exists as a country, but they suffer terribly. So in answer to your question, I think sure, at the macro level, it's easy to make a case for saying that war often achieves its objectives. And was prevailed in World War II, Germany, and Japan lost. But at the micro level, was at worth the cost of 50 million human beings who lost their lives and was at worth the cost of the continuing conflict that existed in the international situation following the war with the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, in which we were very lucky to escape a major conflict, possibly even a nuclear war. And what we're witnessing in Korea at the present time with the tensions between North Korea and South Korea are a direct result of the long-term effects of World War II. Paradoxically here also, when we're speaking at the macro level, nations can sometimes seem to profit from having lost a war. Germany and Japan were the losers in World War II, but they're both prosperous nations at the present time. Hiroshima was utterly destroyed with the atomic bomb, but Hiroshima has been rebuilt better than ever. It's a city at the present time. So if we're looking at collectivities at the macro level, you come out with very strange value judgments or moral judgments. And I think it's important not to use those as a basis for judging the effects upon individual living, breathing human beings. - You've been a professor of philosophy. It sounds something like close to 50 years at University of Rochester in New York. Obviously, one of the aspects of nonviolence that you've had to take a look at has been the Just War theory. And there's a number of theories, counter, pro and counter over the centuries. Could you lay out for people what you can say about Just War theory in favor of it, counter of it and how wars in general have measured up against that kind of standard? - Yes, the Just War theory has two different dimensions to it. There is one aspect of the Just War theory. It's often referred to as use ad bellum. But that simply means justice in the recourse to war. The Just War theory sets forth a number of conditions, all of which have to be met before a nation or a state is justified in going to war. The list that you get varies somewhat with different Just War theorists. But basically, first condition is that you have to have legitimate authority, not just any one or any group of people can wage war, but there has to be an established authority within a society or a state. Secondly, and in some ways, perhaps the most important condition, there has to be a Just Cause. What constitutes a Just Cause varies considerably in the accounts of different Just War theorists. St. Augustine, back in the fifth century, who was frequently considered the father of the Just War theory, said that a Just Cause involves the avenging of the violation of a right. So if a state had a right violated or its rights violated, then had a Just Cause for going to war. At the present time, many Just War theorists either say that self-defense is the only Just Cause for going to war, or there is a much more complex set of conditions, which include protecting innocent human life, preserving the conditions of a decent human existence, defending human rights of various sorts. And the American Catholic Visions have actually set out a much more elaborate conception of a Just Cause, which includes those notions. Now, interestingly, before I say more about the conditions of the Just War theory, that particular approach opens the door to using force to intervene in other countries on human rights issues. And that's one of the grounds of which so-called humanitarian intervention has developed and been discussed at great length in the last 10 years. In addition to legitimate authority and a Just Cause, virtually all Just War theorists require that there be a right intention, as they call it. St. Thomas Aquinas added this condition to the conditions that Augustine had discussed. And he said that you have to have the right intention, which means an intention to bring about a good, rather than evil. And we can see the simple examples of this just in everyday life. If I go to the movies, my intention is to be entertained for a couple of hours. That's what I intend, and that's good. But I can foresee that going to the movies will separate me from $15 or $20, depending on how much popcorn I eat and so on. And that's bad, but that's not my intention. And by the same token, I can foresee that if I drive to the grocery store to get a loaf of bread, my intention is to get the bread, and that is good. But I can foresee that I'm going to burn a certain amount of gasoline, and that all things being equal is bad. So that's foreseeable, but that's not part of what I intend. So if we take this distinction, which seems to make perfectly good sense in a lot of just ordinary context, and we apply it to the case of war, we can see how just war theorists begin to mount the justification for war, which they want to provide, because they claim that when you go to war, you can foresee that you're going to cause a lot of death and destruction and harm and so forth. But so long as you are intending only to good, and as long as various other conditions are met as well, then you're justified in doing that. In addition to right intention, just war theorists want to emphasize that there has to be some probability of success, no point going to war with all of the costs of it, so on, if there's no chance that you're going to bring about what you want to achieve. Furthermore, and this is one of the most important of the conditions in this dimension of the just war theory, that is what justifies the recourse to war. Just war theorists, at least until recently, have said that war must be a last resort, that you must pursue all of the avenues for a peaceful resolution of whatever issues divide you and your adversary, before you resort to war. Recently, some just war theorists have pretty much wanted to scuttle that particular condition, because if you look back at some of the recent wars that the US has been involved in, I'm referring now to the Gulf War in 1991, then the later war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, which are still ongoing. In each of those cases, it's pretty clear that war was not a last resort. If you review the evolution of the US attack upon Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait, at no point was there any attempt for a negotiated settlement. Then President Bush, that is the father of our recent president, that made it clear that he wouldn't negotiate with Saddam Hussein, and issued an ultimatum that Hussein had to withdraw Iraqi troops from Kuwait, and which eventually they did. But war wasn't a last resort. It was almost the first thing that then President Bush began preparing for after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. And very much the same thing was true with the attack on Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attack, in less than a month after the attack, the US wage war on Afghanistan, even though there were no Afghans involved in the 9/11 attack, 15 of the hijackers of those planes were Saudi Arabians, and none of them were Afghans, and none of them were Taliban. So the Taliban was not directly involved in any way in that attack, the Taliban, of course, were largely in control of Afghanistan, but not entirely so. There had been an ongoing civil war, the so-called Northern Alliance in the Northern part of Afghanistan was still holding out against the Taliban, and we sided with them. But the point is that in less than a month after 9/11, we waged war on another country that had no demonstrable connection with 9/11, other than the fact that Osama bin Laden had been training in Afghanistan. The Taliban, we demanded that they turn over Osama bin Laden, and they said that they could do so if we produced evidence that he was responsible for the 9/11 attack. We didn't do that, and there still is not conclusive evidence that he was responsible for it. He denied it at the time, even though he approved of the attack. And partly also, I think a cultural matter came into play here, because among Muslims, there's the idea that if someone is a guest in your home or perhaps in your country, you have to treat them with respect, and you don't just turn them over to their enemy, which they would have done if they turned over Osama bin Laden, assuming that they could have found him, and that they could have turned him over if they'd wanted to, which is open to question. By the same token, the attack on Iraq, that wasn't the last resort. We had maintained that they had weapons of mass destruction. We sent inspectors in, they couldn't find anything. We could have sent more inspectors. We could have sent in 200,000 inspectors rather than 200,000 troops if we had chosen to, but we chose war. In any of that, coming back to my point about the condition of last resort, many just war theorists think that these three wars are just wars, but since they fail to meet the condition of last resort, they want to drop the condition of last resort. It's one of the criteria for going to war. I should add one further qualification there. There's a condition of proportionality, which most just war theorists feel has to be met before one is justified going to war. That's just basically that the good that one expects to achieve by the war must outweigh the bad and cost in lives and suffering. The other dimension of the just war theory has to do with the conduct of war. Once you've gone to war, then the just war theory says you should conduct the war according to certain standards, whether you were justified in going to war in the first place or not. Here, once again, proportionality comes into play because individual actions in war must be expected to bring about a greater good than bad, but the important distinction here is what is often referred to as discrimination, and that is one must distinguish between those persons whom one may justifiably kill in wartime and those whom one may not justifiably kill. And there are two different ways of drawing that distinction and both pro-war and anti-war people tend to favor the one that's best supports there to get a position. The simplest way of drawing the distinction is to say that it's okay to kill soldiers in wartime, but it's not okay to kill civilians. This has some historical precedents and it's fairly simple criterion because soldiers are expected to wear uniforms. And in fact, that's one of the reasons historically why soldiers wear uniforms is so that they can be easily identifiable as fair game to kill. The other distinction, however, is between the innocent and the non-innocent. Many people argue, and I would myself, that one may not justifiably kill innocent people in wartime. I would also argue that one can't justifiably kill non-innocent people either, but that's a more controversial issue. And the reason why this is a much more difficult distinction to operate with from the standpoint of discrimination is that it's not easy to tell who's innocent and who's not innocent. And one might argue fairly plausibly that a lot of soldiers are actually innocent, at least with regard to the issues that led to war, because very often they had no part in undertaking the actions or setting the policies which have led to war. And very often it's the case they don't even know what a lot of those issues are. Sometimes when soldiers are sent off to other parts of the world, they couldn't even locate the countries on a map if they were asked to do so. So arguably, many soldiers are innocent, and at the same time, if a war is an unjust war, might very well be that many people who are actually civilians are non-innocent, because say in a country like ours, the president is a civilian, he's not a military officer, even though he's commander-in-chief of the forces, and by the same token, cabinet officers and others, and similarly with cabinets in parliamentary governments, very often are civilians, so they might not be innocent. So the distinction between innocent and innocent is a very difficult one. And when you are dealing with wars that are of the sort we see going on in Afghanistan, and now to a lesser degree, but still significantly in Iraq, this becomes an important issue, because these are basically guerrilla warfare that's going on there. These are people who are in their homeland, and a power, a mighty power, military power, like the United States, is prepared and has the weaponry for much higher levels of violence than are represented by these particular conflicts, and it makes it difficult for them to use their weapons to our advantage without causing a great number of casualties to civilians, and that's what we're seeing in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and that's the source, I think, of much of the justified criticism of those two wars. There has been over the last two centuries, I believe, a very significant change in terms of the proportions of civilians and soldiers who die in war. It used to be, as you mentioned, with uniform-wearing soldiers. It used to be that soldiers were the primary casualties of war. Maybe I think the numbers were something like nine soldiers for every civilian. In guerrilla wars and in the wars that we've seen for the last 25, 30, 50 years, I think those proportions have almost flipped. I understand that something like nine civilians die now for every one soldier. Number one, can you confirm that understanding of what's happened, and does that make just war, and the conditions of just war just unattainable in the most recent wars? Yes, those are the figures that have been quoted, that the proportions have just about reversed through the 20th century and up to the present time. And with the advances in weaponry and technology and so on, you simply can't use these weapons, certainly in the kinds of contexts that we're seeing in the present world with a lot of guerrilla warfare and interventionist policies and so on, without killing large numbers of civilians. And I think this is a permanent condition now of warfare. As for the implications for the just war theory, I think you're precisely right to raise the question of whether or not this basically undermines the just war theory, and I think it does, because there is no way that the condition of discrimination, that is, the condition for the just conduct of war, for that to be met, given the kinds of situations that we're now encountering in the world. When you look at advances in technology, and this is just very, very recent now, with the use of pilotless drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they began with the so-called predator drones, then they brought in the Reapers, which were a more advanced model, and coming down the pipe very soon is the Avenger, which will outdo both the predator and the Reaper. But two things are important about this development in technology. One is that these are far more likely to kill civilians than soldiers on the ground who can see more or less what they're shooting at. And interesting incident in the early years of the war in Afghanistan when they first began using the drones, the people who man the drones, that is, were at the controls of the drones, sighted three men standing out in the open somewhere in Afghanistan. I've forgotten where it was. And one of them was significantly taller than the other two. Now Osama bin Laden, as people may know, is very tall. He's about six foot five. So they figured because one of these men was tall, he might be Osama bin Laden. So they fired a missile at him, and they vaporized these three men. Turns out they were shepherds. They didn't get Osama bin Laden. But the point is that using that kind of weaponry, just about guarantees that you're going to kill a lot of civilians and kill a lot of innocent people. But the other aspect of this kind of warfare, which we're moving toward at a fairly rapid speed now, is that it distances the people who are fighting that kind of warfare from those who they are killing. For example, many of these drones are controlled and operated from nearby Syracuse, which is just down the road aways from Rochester. It takes four men to run all of the controls to operate these drones. If they come in in the morning, and they go into a compartment with these controls, and they operate drones, and they fire them, and they kill a certain number of people, presumably each day, or certainly every few days, and then at five o'clock, or whenever their time is up, they go home with their families. Then they come in the next day, it's just a job for them. It's almost as though they were playing a video game, and they're distanced from the killing that they are doing. And this emotional distance makes it, I think, psychologically a lot easier for people to kill other people, and to do so in great numbers than was the case when people were wielding swords, or rifles, and so on, and fighting close at hand. But there's still another disturbing aspect of this kind of warfare, and that is that, if one accepts the view that soldiers are legitimate military targets wherever they are, then one could easily conclude that guerrillas, or terrorists, or whomever, could legitimately attack various sites within this country, where these drones are being controlled by military, or by the CIA, the CIA controls, some of them. And that almost immediately opens up the United States to a legitimate attack. So these developments are disturbing developments with regard to technology, and they have important bearings upon the application of the just war theory to the assessment of war. Now, I would add that people seem to think that the just war theory is the only moral perspective from which to evaluate war. In fact, it's almost considered the default position. And a lot of philosophers, theologians, and others, when they talk about war, they almost immediately turn to the just war theory and evaluate it in those terms. Well, the just war theory isn't the only moral perspective from which to evaluate war. It's just one among many possible perspectives. I won't detail the various kinds of ethical theories, but virtually all of the standard ethical theories could provide an alternative perspective from which to evaluate war. So utilitarianism, for example, which basis right and wrong, will simply, on the consequences of actions, that's an alternative to the just war theory. Similarly, Kantianism, which looks to the rationality of actions rather than their consequences, is still another alternative. And there are various other permutations of theories that one could appeal to. And I think that far preferable to the just war theory is a theory which attaches highest value to individual persons that use individual persons as precious in and of themselves, and as having intrinsic value in and of themselves. I think there are virtually no circumstances. I'm speaking personally now. Virtually no circumstances in which one is morally entitled to kill another person nonconsensually. Whether or not consensual killing in medical context is justified. Well, it's another issue, and I'm not talking about that. But virtually no conditions under which one may justifyably destroy a being of intrinsic value. And that's what one does in warfare. Whatever one achieves at the macro level, whatever the social and political objectives are, that one is aiming at. I think that that provides, for me, the starting point of a very different approach to evaluating war. Given all the criterias of a just war, maybe very few, if any, measure up to it, can you think of a war that comes closest to fulfilling the qualities of a just war? Well, most people, of course, cite World War II as the paradigm of a just war. In fact, it's even been called the best of all possible wars. I don't share that. I think World War II was an unnecessary war. I don't think it was a just war in terms of proportionality and discrimination. And of the 50 million people who died, most of them were civilians in a left-up world in a terrible state afterwards. It put an end to Hitler, but it didn't put an end to fascism and to the way of thinking that was represented by Hitler, because we still have neo-fascist, not only in Germany, but in Russia and the United States and elsewhere. So my view is that no modern war represents a just war. That is, I've come to be a pacifist. And I think that when one looks at the sorts of rationales that people give for war and you strip away the propaganda and the deception and duplicity and so on, up for governments and trying to rally people to support wars, you strip that away and wars are pretty awful things. And for the most part, involve enormous miscalculations on the part of government leaders. And it's easy to go back in history and just in recent history and see how government leaders over and over again miscalculate the effects of war. World War I, they thought, would be over in about four months or so while it wasn't. World War II, when Hitler invaded Russia, the expectation was that it would just be a matter of a few months before they would have conquered Russia. That was obviously a mistake. The US thought that in Vietnam and now we're thinking in Iraq and Afghanistan that those wars would be over quickly and that if we just trained enough people to do the killing for us and on our behalf and so forth, that the world would be a better place but we misjudged and only after we got drawn into a long and extended conflict in Vietnam that we come to see that that simply wasn't a winnable situation. And I think we're gonna find exactly the same thing in Afghanistan at the present time. And the war in Afghanistan is expanding now into Pakistan as well. I wanna stress that I don't agree with the thinking of a lot of people which is that a lot of critics say of the war in Afghanistan think that what's wrong with the war is that it's not winnable. That way of thinking suggests that if it were winnable then that would be okay. I think the war is wrong whether we win it or not. I think it's on winnable but even if it were winnable, I think it's a wrongful war. And I don't see any war that fully meets even the criteria of the just war theory. Though I don't think that that is the preferred way of evaluating war but there's nothing in the theory itself of the just war to guarantee that there are any wars that actually satisfy those conditions. Some people have noticed that recently and that's possible to be a what might be called a just war pacifist that is you might think that the just war theory is the proper theory from which to evaluate war morally. But you might conclude that no war satisfies those conditions. I happen to hold that view not with regard to the just war theory but I think that if one uses one's philosophical imagination, you can construct hypothetical wars that might be justified when I look at the wars that actually go on in the world and look at the cost, not only in terms of casualty, some of battlefield but the emotional and psychological costs say to our troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of the higher incidence of suicide and drug addiction and domestic violence and so on with the post-traumatic stress syndrome. These don't get added into the casualties of war but they're part, they're central to what war is all about. And I don't see any war that is justified when one looks at the broader picture of the human cost of those wars at the micro level. - Wow, you've covered a lot of ground. I better remind our listeners that we're speaking to Bob Holmes today. He's a professor of philosophy, University of Rochester for one more day in New York. He's been there just shy of five decades. This is Spirit and Action and I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. This is a Northern Spirit radio production and our website is northernspiritradio.org. Visit the site to see all of our archives of the past five and a half years and connections to our host links ways to follow up and find them. Again, we're speaking with Bob Holmes over in Rochester, New York. He's written extensively, thought extensively and it feels to me like you're invested in acting. You want to see change in the world happen, Bob. You said that personally, you had a point of view about what would constitute just violence between people or not. Basically, you said that it wouldn't be valid. Now, you referred to personally, but you're a professor of philosophy. As you talk about all this stuff, this non-violence and just war, I have the feeling that it's got a significant amount of personal energy. This isn't just a scholarly pursuit. This isn't just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin kind of thing. Was there a point where you were a scholar and you got caught up in the passion of it or did you go into this philosophy and its concomitant subjects because of your passion? No, I didn't go in because of my passion. My training in graduate school in philosophy at University of Michigan was in what one might call analytic ethics, stealing with ethical theory and interesting issues, but which didn't really have any bearing upon practical matters, practical affairs going on in the world. Much of my early work for a number of years was of that sort, that is my professional academic work. At the same time, I became concerned with issues of war and peace. The Vietnam War was starting to get underway and there was a nuclear arms race and so on. And I found myself devoting more and more of my time and energy to activism of various kinds, both political and otherwise. I even ran for Congress as a peace candidate back during the Vietnam War. Eventually, I began to realize that I had to bring together my professional academic work and my practical concerns, ethical concerns with what was going on in the world. Then it began to dawn on me that that was a perfectly legitimate thing to do. That is that there were genuine philosophical issues involved in nonviolence and in pacifism and issues of war that philosophers hadn't adequately worked out and that this was a legitimate area of academic and more specifically philosophical concerns. So eventually, I brought those two together and at the present time, that's almost exclusively where my energy is going and I'm still doing work on nonviolence and on issues of war because nonviolence is still in its infancy so far as human civilization is concerned. Gandhi has said that nonviolence is as old as the hills and of course he's right because you can find the origins of nonviolence back in early Indian thought. But at the same time, nonviolence isn't really understood and we've only scratched the surface of what there is to be explored and understood by nonviolence. And I think this is true even if the work of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, that as far as they took us in the understanding of nonviolence still, they left a great deal to be done and I've become convinced that if the world is going to survive indefinitely, that we have to make a commitment to nonviolence and we have to transform what I would call a culture of violence that exists in the world today into a culture of nonviolence. And I think this requires studying nonviolence at all levels of the educational system from the earliest grades right up through public school and in a college level as well. And I find that the college students that I teach in my course on philosophy, history and practice of nonviolence are really intrigued by the notion and it opens up ideas to them and thoughts to them that most of them had not seriously considered before. I think that quite apart from its practical bearing on resolving issues in the world today, the study of nonviolence is just intellectually and exciting and interesting area. I'm hoping that the time will come when colleges and universities throughout the country will have programs in nonviolence. And the practical bearing of that, I say that the study of nonviolence is intellectually exciting. I find it to be so and I think the students do as well. But in the longer term, I think it holds the hope for the salvation of humankind. It's a long process and you can't make the transformation from a culture of violence to a culture of nonviolence overnight, you have to be patient, you have to expect that it's gonna take a long time. What we can do here at the present time is to make a small effort in that direction to help move things along ever so slightly in the expectation that that will encourage others and set the stage for others to follow suit. And then perhaps in a thousand years, maybe the world can be changed. That I think is the hope for humankind. And I think it's naive to think that humankind will survive indefinitely. I don't think there's any guarantee that human beings will still be living on earth, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 years from now if they continue on their present path. We could very well become extinct. That could have been said that we humans are intelligent, but we may not be intelligent enough to save ourselves. Well, I would like to see us use our intelligence and our moral sensibility to try to save ourselves and to save much of the animal world and the environment as well. And this is the challenge of nonviolence that I see. - You spoke about ethics, you spoke about morals, you've used words like good and evil and maybe you're referring to other people's definitions of those. Obviously, this program called Spirit in Action and I have a spiritual basis to what I do, what I think about. I'm curious what your background is, religiously, spiritually, what provided you with motivation, what provided you with guidance and maybe what have you thrown off is not being particularly useful as well. - Well, I was raised in the Presbyterian Church as Protestant and I attended regularly and so on through high school. I began exploring other alternatives through college. I actually even considered the ministry at some early stage. Eventually, I drifted away from formal religion and I gravitated to the Quakers largely because of their peace testimony. And I attended Quaker meeting in Rochester, New York for a couple of decades. Still have warm feelings and some connection with the meeting, but I never, never actually became a Quaker formally. I've drifted away, even though I still have some connection, but I'm not a regular attender any longer at the Quaker meeting, but I have taken away much of the, I think what I see is the spirit of Quakerism from my association with the Quakers and but I see a philosophical basis for this as well. I see human beings as having within themselves, each one, an element of what one might call the divine, whatever, precisely that means, but I think that to signify that each person has a capacity to act in ways that represent the best of a conception of what a divine being or God or whatever you might wanna call it would do or how such a being would act in various situations. I see this idea closely associated with the idea of love as developed in Christianity. Now, according to traditional Christianity, you have a Garden of Eden and you have the original sin and original sin was transmitted down through all of its descendants of Adam and Eve so that every person, every human being thereafter was corrupted in nature. It was through divine grace that my human beings had the possibility to be regenerated. And if one looks at, again, a fairly standard Christian conception of divine grace, divine grace is an act of love on the part of God. God extended divine grace to human beings even though they didn't deserve it. So human beings were sinful, they were corrupt, they didn't deserve any better than they were getting, but God nonetheless out of love extended divine grace to them. My view is, and this is one of the things that I try to get students to see is a possibility. My view is that each person has within himself or herself the capacity to extend love to other people who may interact with whether or not those people deserve it. And insofar as people do extend love in that sense, they are acting in precisely the way that God is represented as acting in traditional Christianity. Now, I'm absolutely convinced that every person, every individual has that power or capacity to extend love as a gift, as it is in Christianity, as a gift to other people, not just the people you like and not just people you are close to or love in a romantic sense or a feelable sense, but to everyone, everyone that you interact with without qualification. This can be done whether or not one is a Christian, that is one can disconnect this idea from Christianity altogether. And whether you're a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist, one can extend love to others in that sense. We all have latent within us the power to do that. This is an important element in nonviolence, at least nonviolence understood as a way of life. And this is certainly true for Gandhi and to a certain extent Martin Luther King as well. So I see this as a spiritual analysis of the notion of love and its central importance to the concept of nonviolence and whether or not people choose to do this, we're free to do it or not to do it. And I emphasize that nonetheless, it's a capacity that we have and it's a capacity that represents the very best in human beings. And even though I'm not particularly optimistic about the future of humankind, I'm very optimistic about human nature and the capacity of humans to design a better future if they choose to do so. Whether or not they will in fact do that, I don't know, but the capacity is there. And I believe that it's centered in our capacity to love unconditionally as a gift, whether or not we think they deserve it. - I'm totally with you there Bob. It's amazing to me to consider the 50 years or so that you've been working in as a professor of philosophy. The growth that you've had, I think maybe it's, if the human race went from just scholarly knowledge to the depth of concern for the world, the well-being of the entire world that you've mapped out over the entire train of your academic career, we'd all be better off. I wanna thank you for joining me for Spirit in Action with your retirement as of tomorrow. And I hope you go forward to do many great things even though theoretically you're not working anymore. - Thank you, Mark. - We've been visiting today with Dr. Robert Holmes, professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester, New York. We're gonna take you out for this edition of Spirit in Action with Peter Paul and Mary's version of Down by the Riverside, Study War No More. ♪ I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Study war no more ♪ ♪ I'm gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ I'm gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ I'm gonna walk with that prince peace ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ I'm gonna walk with that prince peace ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Study war no more ♪ ♪ I'm gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ I'm gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ I'm gonna lay down that atom bomb ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ I'm gonna lay down that atom bomb ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Study war no more ♪ ♪ I'm gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ I'm gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ ♪ In the study war no more ♪ - The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World", performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is "Spirit in Action". ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ (upbeat music)