While it is impossible to cite all the panelists, or even highlights from a few, the one comment that jumped out at me was from Susan Jacoby. The following pretty much reflects my own thinking on this matter:
I think that Thomas Aquinas's "just war" theory, with its links to classical philosophy, has about as much relevance to whether a modern nation should commit itself to war as thirteenth-century understanding of the human body does to modern medicine.
Physicists don't study Aristotle; astronomers don't use words like "epicycles"; any chemist who talked of phlogiston would be laughed at; doctors have Galen on their shelves if they're also antiquarian book collectors. Why is it people think it's OK to cite philosophers whose intellectual universe included the thoughts of these and others as well?
While such a comment might reflect a desire to set aside this entire discussion, I do not wish to do so. Read and ruminate, and come to your own conclusions.
2 comments:
There was a time when the battles in a war were fought during the day with spectators. The armies would line up on the battlefield fight it out during the sunlight while their respective sides would cheer.
Of course people died, and I don't want to minimize that, but the sorts of rules governing that sort of conflict seem pretty irrelevant to our current time when we can bomb most countries back to the stone age in a matter of days or weeks.
They actually did this at the first battle of Manassas in the Civil War, with all the southern gentlemen and ladies gathered around their picnics . . . until the cannon balls started flying and the Union troops started fleeing and shooting at them.
Yeah, Churchill's line about war having once been noble and squalid now becoming just squalid is true enough, I suppose, but only if you believe it was also something noble.
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