Abstract
Every aspect of human life and thought is called into question by the climate crisis. Lynn White sparked a conversation decades ago about how Christian biblical interpretation and theology have shaped humans’ damaging action on the environment. Now, Mark Douglas’s new book suggests that a particular strand of Christian ethics—the Christian just war tradition—bears particular fault for the climate crisis, precisely because of the ways in which it shaped and was shaped by modernity. But none of this shaping took place in isolation; the history of ideas cannot be understood apart from the material, environmental forces that interact with human agency and thought. Douglas uses the lens of environmental history to produce a nuanced and critical account of the just war tradition as it developed at the end of the medieval era and into the modern one. The result is an original, provocative work that not only yields valuable insights about the just war tradition, but also provides a model of how interdisciplinary engagement can help Christian ethicists to be more self-aware about our own theorizing and ‘attend to the possible consequences of their ideas as they play out over time’ (p. 50).
Douglas traces the development of the just war tradition in tandem with the development of the modern social imaginary, as marked by instrumentalism, autonomy, universality, and immanence. First, Francisco de Vitoria takes a step towards instrumental reasoning, as the discovery of the new world with its seemingly unlimited resources influences him to pay ‘less attention to the impact of war on the nonhuman natural world than had many of his predecessors’ (p. 42). While he affirms the humanity of native peoples and therefore the applicability of the jus gentium in conflicts with them, his treatment of them as profoundly ‘Other’ paves the way for increased violence and, ironically, the slave trade. Hugo Grotius furthers the tendency to instrumentalize the natural world with a legal framework that emphasizes individual autonomy and justifies war as a mechanism for the defense of private property. Finally, the US Constitution, in Douglas’s analysis, illuminates how much of modern constitutional law arises from the just war tradition; he also points out how this trajectory led to problematic notions of progress and freedom that have contributed significantly to the attitudes and practices that have produced climate change. Along the way, Douglas treats the reader to nuanced presentations of multiple streams and eddies surrounding these thinkers, always with an eye towards the historical and environmental contexts.
Like some other recent thinkers from Samuel Moyn to Pope Francis, Douglas expresses skepticism about the just war tradition's continuing usefulness. But his goal is not a grand disavowal of all forms of just war theory. Indeed, he places himself ‘among those who are persuaded by the arguments the tradition makes about the ambiguous goods of peace and justice and the nondemonic qualities of force and violence’ (p. 242). Still, like any form of ethical thought, the just war tradition can and will be abused. For instance, ‘Vitoria offered De Indis as a restraint on Spanish claims to the new world and Spanish willingness to wage war to realize those claims, only to have his work in De Indis used to justify those claims and undergird those wars’ (p. 50). Or, in attempting to limit warfare to ‘legitimate authorities’ only, just war theory has contributed to the development of a notion of state sovereignty that is profoundly ill-suited to shape responses to transnational problems like climate change and migration. Nevertheless, Douglas clearly sees a role for the just war tradition in helping ‘to prevent, reduce, and mitigate suffering’ (p. 50). In order to do this, however, it must develop beyond the flawed forms of the modern era in order to far better attend to the interconnectedness between the political world and the natural world. Douglas plans to do such constructive work in a future book that will build upon this one (and his previous book on Christian pacifism) in order to outline a Christian approach to just war in the Anthropocene.
This book would certainly be accessible to advanced undergraduates and serve as an effective introduction not only to the just war tradition, but also to the development—and trajectory—of modernity and the ‘Secular Age’ à la Charles Taylor. The author presents complex ideas in remarkably lucid prose, with many lovely and pithy turns of phrase: ‘human beings … pursue goods imperfectly and imperfect goods’ (p. 243); ‘immanence displaces teleology’ (p. 228); and ‘during a time of conceptual bricolage at the entrance into an environmental age’ a critical retrieval of the just war tradition provides important material (p. 291). Finally, a real strength of the book is its tone of intellectual humility. Douglas realizes that even as we criticize the flaws of an inherited tradition, we ourselves introduce new flaws. No Christian ethicist can ‘shape traditions that are beyond reproach or regret’ (p. 50), and so humility, confession, and repentance are just as necessary in our scholarly endeavors as in other areas of Christian life.