Light Perpetual

I had to make two attempts, one several months ago, but I read Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual this week. I can’t say why, but the fist time around I just couldn’t grab on to any of the characters. Even the second time took a little effort and a hundred or so pages. And that lag getting into the book came as a surprise, since the opening chapter is such a completely gripping start.

I don’t think it would be a spoiler to say that every character dies in the first chapter (it says as much on the inside jacket) when a German V-2 rocket explodes at a Woolworth’s in London in 1944. What follows and what makes up the rest of the book is a series of snapshots from the lives that would have gone on had a bomb not gone off when and where it did.

Shoppers, saucepans, ballistic missiles: what’s wrong with this picture? No one is going to tell us. Jo and Alec, as it happens are looking in the right direction. Their gaze is fixed on the gap between the shoulders of Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Canaghan where the rocket is gliding into view. But they can’t see it. Nobody can. The image of the V-2 is on their retinas, but it takes far longer than a ten-thousandth of a second for the human eye to process an image and send it to a brain. Much sooner than that, the children won’t have eyes any more. Or brains. This instant—this interval of time, measurably tiny, immeasurably vast—arrives unwitnessed, passes unwitnessed, ends unwitnessed. And yet it is a real moment. It really happens. It really takes its necessary place in the sequence of moments by which 910 kilos of amatol are delivered among the saucepans.

In one sense, the opening chapter is meaningless to the story and the characters whose lives play out on the pages that follow, since at no point do we revisit what really happened. In another sense, however, much like with the whole of any story, or poem, when you close this book at the end, you can’t help thinking simultaneously about the beginning, about how the stories of these characters have never actually taken place, the lives of each as a child violently cut short. This makes what is otherwise a fairly simple novel into something much more moving—and haunting.

I’m reminded a little of how I felt—or in the inverse of how I felt—at the end of Adam Makos’s A Higher Call. Makos tells the true story that revolves around two pilots, one American B-17 pilot named Charlie Brown, and one German Bf-109 pilot named Franz Stigler. Because Stigler chose not to shoot down a nearly crippled B-17 after a bombing of Bremen, Brown and his crew live to see the future and the families they would never have known because that future and their families would not have existed.

Makos describes the scene at a filmed meeting between Charlie Brown and his crew and Franz Stigler in Massachusetts in 1990:

From above it must have looked funny, the circle of people crowding around one small man in the center, hugging him and one another amid the sounds of tears and laughter. But everyone that day owed something to Franz Stigler, the man in the middle. Because of him, twenty-five men, women, and children—the descendants of Charlie, Blackie, and Pechout—had the chance to live, not to mention the children and grandchildren of Charlie’s other crewmen. . . .

From above, the circle of people blended as they hugged near the [B-17] bomber’s wing, becoming just one mass, bigger and greater as the gaps between them vanished.

That, of course, was a true story all the way through, while Spufford’s story is only based on a true event. (There really was a Woolworth’s in London destroyed by a V-2 rocket in 1944.) But the effect of each story is nearly the same. Somehow, deep down, the thankfulness of the one story is nearly interchangeable with the lament of the other. The fact is, I can imagine, for individuals and for the world, a moment like this—a circle viewed from above as people hug and blend, give thanks and reconcile—for all the lives that went wrong as much as for the ones that went right.

One of the things I like most about Light Perpetual is how Spufford so humanizes each character. This is not a sob story about simply wonderful lives that never got their chance. Though it might be a little overdone at times, each of his characters has as much trouble and tragedy as anything, but each still has some chance for meaning, joy, redemption. Each life is set on some trajectory in a way that we all know as both intimately chosen and yet vastly uncontrollable.

As one character, Jo, is observing a group of young students later in the book, she wonders about the glories and the harms that await them:

But you can’t warn them, any more than you can tell them in terms that would make sense to them that their transformation is glorious. Youth isn’t visible to them, any more than air is. It’s the condition of their lives, but it isn’t a thing that they could imagine not having, and therefore could imagine as being desirable in itself.

In The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes puts this eclipsed, front-loaded sense of childhood quite powerfully:

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

And yet, out of such unknowable, uncontrollable, chaotic sludge come all the tainted goodness and glory and light worthy of the name “life.”

Jo again, reflecting on that same group of students as they sing together:

Can they hear it, this immense organised sound they are making together? Can they hear the organ that they have briefly become, whose separate pipes are all those sticky pink organic tubes in teenage bodies? Imperfect pipes, made of damp twisted cartilage without a single straight line, pumped up by weird fluttering bladders, and yet capable of sounding a chord that seems to lay hold on some order in the world that already existed before we came along and started to sing. Making an order that matches an order. Music is strange, she wants them to see, and one of the things that is strangest about it is that it comes from our messy bodies. Sing, Hayley. Sing, Tyrone. Sing, Jamila, Simon, Samantha, Jerome. Don’t stop till you must. Notice if you can that your temporary orchestra of hormones and still-digesting Big Macs from lunchtime can be coaxed into playing the music of the spheres. If you let yourself be the instrument.

Then the bell goes, and they clatter away laughing.

I think what I would like to see is a book like this, with almost the exact same introductory chapter, but written for characters in the Middle East—say, a family in Afghanistan, killed by a U.S. drone strike. Zamir, Faisal, Farzad, Arwin, Benyamin, Hayat, Malika, Sumaia—what lives might they have lived, “those particles, flecks, shreds, lumps and pieces that, previously, were parts of people; people being missed, waited for, despaired of . . .”? Isn’t this worth wondering, too?

But what has gone is not just the children’s present existence . . . It’s all the futures they won’t get, too. All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be?

Which is to say, how can that loss be measured except by the standard of its own existence in time? How can the loss of life be known except by remembering it and lamenting its loss? In the words of Barbara Kingsolver, when she visited Ground Zero in Hiroshima:

I was moved beyond words, even beyond tears, to think of all that can be lost or gained in the gulf between any act of will and its consequences. In the course of every failure of understanding, we have so much to learn.

There is more than enough in any given day’s newsreel, public or private, to provoke this kind of lament, to plead a deep humility, and to warrant a corresponding hope.

It seems right to end where Spufford begins:

Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light.

Come dust.

dim, flickering candles

David Brooks:

Then there is the way partisan politics has swamped what is supposed to be a religious movement. Over the past couple of decades evangelical pastors have found that their 20-minute Sunday sermons could not outshine the hours and hours of Fox News their parishioners were mainlining every week. It wasn’t only that the klieg light of Fox was so bright, but also that the flickering candle of Christian formation was so dim.

Supposed to be a religious movement. Good thing for those accused, “it’s a relationship not a religion,” and, ipso facto, they cannot be guilty as charged.

But seriously, this is a thoroughly insightful article, both encouraging and discouraging to read. However, I’m going to be nit-picky just to make a few points, if only for my own sake and my sake’s clarity.

In 2020, roughly 40 percent of the people who called themselves evangelical attended church once a year or less, according to research by the political scientist Ryan Burge. It’s just a political label for them. This politicization is one reason people have cited to explain why so many are leaving the faith.

I have no idea what point Brooks thinks he’s making here. Politicization at large is a problem, yes. But people are not leaving the “evangelical” church because of the term’s political label for those who don’t attend. Much “ink” is utilized acknowledging the non-churchgoing who identify as evangelical. I 99% do not give a shit about this statistic—or, 99% of the time it’s talked about, at least. One thing I have not seen get much attention (though perhaps I’m not reading widely enough) is the way that churchgoing, praise-Jesus, never-late-for-Sunday-worship white evangelicals are exactly the same as the non churchgoing evangelicals. I don’t think this is what Brooks is doing here—in fact, I think his point throughout the article is the right one—but this particular statistic, while valuable from certain historical and political points of view, makes it seem as though “evangelicals” who don’t go to church are spoiling the name. They are not. And every single time this statistic is brought up in the context of evangelical deconstruction, or whatever, it is a complete distraction from the point. I know it seems relevant, but I have yet to figure out how, at least for anything but election polls or historical uses of the term. People leaving church, if they are anything like me, do not care about either of those. They care, among many other things, to be sure, that the very same people who taught them the faith—who still presume to teach them the faith—told them Bill Clinton was unfit for office and that they were foolish (if not demonically oppressed) for denouncing Donald Trump. The faith that produces that kind of disparity is doomed, or ought to be. Period.

Here’s another somewhat confusing use of statistics:

Roughly 80 percent of white evangelical voters supported Trump in 2020. But it is often a minority of this group who spark bitter conflicts and want their church to be on war footing all the time.

Again, I’m not sure what Brooks is saying with this, since he doesn’t seem to do anything with his own point here. (I love reading him, but much of Brooks’s writing has a certain “stream of thought,” but very readable, flow, making his paragraphs read like excerpts from another piece.) I know these people exist, but I can think of only one person I know who actively advocates for an ecclesial war footing. And again, I don’t think I’m disagreeing with anything Brooks is ultimately saying, but it seems to me that the extremes he calls a “minority,” and whatever disproportionate clout they carry, are not the problem in the hearts of those who are leaving. People can say what they want about a two-party system, but there is a dizzyingly pervasive binary aspect to politics that insists on its own importance. The “church,” by definition, exists outside of this binary—or is supposed to. In other words, there is a political spectrum within the white evangelical church which it is wrong to be anywhere on. The problem is not from a battle-ready group that sparks bitter conflict. It’s that so many have shown a near complete inability to “speak out clearly and to pay up personally.” And at this point, that characteristic inability has attached itself to so many different personality types that it has nearly become the definition of evangelicalism itself.

I would also add—and I could be way off here—that this seems like a time for quiet, steady-state hupomoné, not church planting. I’m a little surprised that that even made Tim Keller’s list for renewal. Again, I could be way off. But a focus on x,000 new church plants per year strikes me as business as usual for the activism of American evangelicalism. Better for now to abide, endure. As Karl Jaspers put it:

The truly real takes place almost unnoticed, and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed. . . . Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing their existences by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline.

Personally, I don’t see as much cause for hope as Brooks manages to find, though I hope he is right. And I certainly hope that “in the decades ahead the American church is going to look more like the global church.” In the meantime, I do see a fair amount of quietly-brewing faith under the surface of things. That’s what I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for, anyway. (And nose. The sense of smell is a completely underrated spiritual sense these days.)

a penitent thief

Leah Libresco Sargeant:

It is easy to think of our charity or tithing budget as being allocated out of our surplus, but we give ourselves a generous accounting of the essentials that must be satisfied before we can give to others. When St. Basil speaks of giving to the poor, he speaks not of prudent savings but of waste:
“The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.”
What St. Basil describes is not charity but justice. The unused shoes are not mine to give—they belong to the one who needs them. When I carry them out of my house and place them in another’s hands, I am not a magnanimous figure, bestowing gifts, but a penitent thief, asking forgiveness. […]
Augustine saw a neediness on the part of the giver that balanced the vulnerability of the receiver. As glossed by Peter Brown in Through the Eye of a Needle, Augustine linked the duty to give alms to the daily petitions of the Lord’s Prayer:
“‘Daily’”—cottidiana—was the ever-recurrent word Augustine used, whether he spoke of sin, of prayer, or of almsgiving. The human condition demanded this. The soul was a leaking vessel on the high seas. Little trickles of daily sins constantly seeped through the timbers, silently filling the bilge with water that might yet sink the ship if it were not pumped out. And to man the bilge-pump was both to pray and to give alms:
‘Those who work the bilge-pump lest the boat go down do so [chanting sea shanties] with their voices and working with their hands. . . . Let the hands go round and round. . . . Let them give, let them do good works.’”
In her own reflection on this passage, Catholic author Eve Tushnet writes that being asked to give feels like a mercy to her when she is burdened by sin. “I have many grateful, difficult memories of being in the middle of some bout with one of my various sordid sins and being asked for money or seeing someone in need whom I could help,” she writes in her newsletter The Rogation Dragon. “It feels like being allowed, like being given the undeserved chance to serve someone.”

a pelican in the wilderness

Isabel Colegate:

I have been to Farne Island, off the coast of Northumberland, in very heavy rain. Leaning over the cliff behind St Cuthbert’s chapel the smell of fish was overpowering; there must have been at least fifty cormorants perched up and down the cliff below. The island’s desolation is beautiful, even in the rain, even with the cormorants.
It rained on Iona too, but not on the evening we arrived. We landed in perfect weather, the sea silkily blue and quiet, the sky clear and the air as sweet and soft as we remembered it. It was in the morning that it rained. We set off all the same to find the hermit’s cell, marked as such on the map. The kind young man in the shop had suggested that we should go round the hill, because it was less likely that we would get lost. The hill was steep and boggy, he said, and there was no path. If we went round we could walk on the flat ground beside the sea before turning up into the rocks. We might get lost there too, but it was easier walking.
Following his directions we came to the white shell beaches of the Bay at the Back of the Ocean, where there were oyster-catchers, a single sandpiper, and a few eider ducks sitting motionless on the glassy sea. Past the first rocky outcrop we turned inland and crossed the uneven sheep-grazed turf towards the higher ridges. The rain had turned into a gentle drizzle. The rocks receded before us, repetitive shapes of grey in the still grey air whose soft touch was damp on our faces. Here a tiny stream, there a patch of swamp, with bog cotton growing in it and sea pinks at the edge. We climbed, the sea behind us. A solitary walker said, yes, she had been to the hermit’s cell once, it was over there somewhere, beyond the next ridge, or the one after that, a little to the left perhaps, and higher up. We began to flag, separated to widen the search, lost each other, added our faint cries to the crying sheep, despaired.
I sat on a tussock and two minuscule rock pipit chicks floundered helplessly in a ditch at my feet. Removing myself hurriedly to a nearby rock, I watched the parent bird, beak full of food, hopping and chirping a foot or so above them, failing to find them. The other parent bird chirped in agitation from the rocks. Time passed. The chicks presumably drowned. Should I have lifted them out on to a rock where the parent could see them or would I only have made matters worse? Wasteful nature cared not at all, and I was lost, and this was the desert.
If it was St Columba, or one of the twelve monks who came with him from Ireland to lona in 565, who had made the cell among these grey rocks, on this yellowish turf sprinkled with tiny flowers, among the rock pipits and the white-rumped wheatears, it would have answered his need for self-abnegation as perfectly as the sands of the Sahara did for St Antony or the northern forest of Temnikov for St Seraphim of Sarov. It was nowhere, bathed in the pure light of nothing. Each rock differed only subtly from each other rock, each swampy patch could have been the one I had walked through ten minutes before. There were crows, but faraway on a higher ridge; they did not have the look of crows that bring bread to hermits. The sea was out of sight, guarded by rocky distance, the pearly clouds concealed the sun. One might dissolve into the soft atmosphere; the seasons would change, cyclical rather than progressive; only one’s bones, showing through the flesh, would mark the physical journey towards the stark skeleton whitening among the stones.
We struggled on, of course, and in the end we stumbled upon a small circle of stones and convinced ourselves that this was the place. Then we limped back and were revived by soup and walked quite easily along to the abbey to be amazed by sound. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists were on their Bach Cantata Millennium Pilgrimage and had come to lona for the day of Bach’s death. To be more accurate it was the day before his death; they were giving the concert that afternoon as well as on the following morning because so few people could be fitted into the abbey. The logistics defied the imagination. All their instruments and equipment had had to be transported from the mainland to the island of Mull and from Mull across the sea to lona. Three days earlier they had been in Mühlhausen, two days later they were to be in Anspach. Tickets for the concert were free, because Iona is a holy island.
The cantatas they sang for Bach’s death day were among his most sublime, being on the themes of death, fear, faith and holy joy. The last chorale was sung outside the abbey, in front of the west door. Afterwards, in the low evening sunlight, incongruous on this remote northern island, a tall man in a frock coat stood smiling and bowing, a neat group of superlative musicians looking slightly shy behind him. Together with the audience scattered around the grassy mount in the churchyard we acclaimed them, thinking of St Columba, thinking of Johann Sebastian Bach, thinking of our mysterious species’ extraordinary need for something to praise, something to glorify.
St Columba, or St Columcille as he is known in Ireland, set off with twelve monks for Iona in 565. It seems he had no idea of being a missionary. There had been some kind of quarrel, possibly over a question of copyright. It seems the saint may have copied a particularly beautiful psalter without the permission of the bishop to whom it belonged. The local king forced him to return the copy to the owner of the original, but later St Columba, himself the son of a princely family, defeated the king in battle and won back the psalter. But as a monk who had taken up arms, he had to be exiled, in penance.
He had already founded monasteries in Ireland and he continued his work among the Irish who had settled in western Scotland, his reputation for peace-making and holiness spreading wherever he went. It is said that when at last he was weakened by age, St Columba was resting on a rock when the old white horse which brought the milk every morning to the monks of Iona came and laid his head upon his breast. The horse wept and foamed copiously, but the saint would not allow the monks to lead him away until he had given the affectionate beast his blessing; and the next day St Columba died.

essential vulnerability

Juliette Kayyem:

The historical significance of asking Jews to carry badges had been lost on me; so was the idea that access is both a vulnerability and essential to the institution.
At airports, stadiums, even schools, safety and security procedures are put in place to protect the essence of the institution itself: travel, recreation, education. We may not like the fortress aesthetic, but we’ve come to accept it.
But what if the essence of a place is that it is defenseless? What if its ability to welcome others, to be hospitable to strangers, is its identity? What if vulnerability is its unstated mission? That is the challenge I hadn’t considered. … To make a soft target harder would more likely change the target than deter the attacker.
In security, we view vulnerabilities as inherently bad. We solve the problem with layered defenses: more locks, more surveillance. Deprive strangers of access to your temple, I urged the committee members, and have congregants carry ID. They would have none of it. Access was a vulnerability embedded in the institution, and no security expert could change that—we do logistics, not souls.
The standoff in Colleyville ended with the attacker dead and the hostages unharmed. But all around the country, synagogues are no doubt convening their security committees, wondering what more they can do to defend their members without losing their essential vulnerability. A synagogue is not like an airport or a stadium. When it becomes a fortress, something immeasurable is lost.

our life and death are with our neighbor

Rowan Williams:

We have to forget our self-protective habits in order to discover our shared challenges. But what science alone does not do is build the motivation for a deeper level of connection. We act effectively not just when we find a language in common to identify problems, but when we recognise that those who share these challenges are profoundly like us, to the extent that we can to some degree feel their frailty as if it were ours – or at least, feel their frailty impacting directly on our own, so that we cannot be secure while they remain at risk.

“immense confusing holiness”

Brian Doyle:

As a fan’s notes for grace, a quavery chant against the dark, I sing a song of things that make us grin and bow, that just for an instant let us see sometimes the web and weave of merciful, the endless possible, the incomprehensible inexhaustible inexplicable yes, . . .
Look, I know very well that brooding misshapen evil is everywhere, in the brightest houses and the most cheerful denials, in what we do and what we have failed to do, and I know all too well that the story of the world is entropy, things fly apart, we sicken, we fail, we grow weary, we divorce, we are hammered and hounded by loss and accidents and tragedies. But I also know, with all my hoary muddled heart, that we are carved of immense confusing holiness; that the whole point for us is grace under duress; and that you either take a flying leap at nonsensical illogical unreasonable ideas like marriage and marathons and democracy and divinity, or you huddle behind the wall. I believe that the coolest things there are cannot be measured, calibrated, calculated, gauged, weighed, or understood except sometimes by having a child patiently explain it to you, which is another thing that should happen far more often to us all. In short I believe in believing, which doesn’t make sense, which gives me hope.

you are who you hear

Tim Keller, on navigating the water of today’s political crises:

The way to navigate such waters is still to follow the book of Proverbs’ prescription for your words. They must be honest, few, extremely well-crafted, usually calm, always aimed to edify (even when critical) and they must be accompanied with lots of silent listening.

I would only add—extremely critically, I think—that we must listen to, follow, praise, and simply pay attention only to those others who do this, or at least aim to do this, as well.

“an enigmatic nexus of all these things at once”

Jan Swafford (asked to review the “artificial-intelligence-created” realization of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony”):

I’m midway in the philosophizing here, but my point so far is obvious enough: The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most. Deep Blue isn’t playing chess anymore and Watson isn’t on “Jeopardy!” because nobody cares. It doesn’t matter. We humans need to see the human doing it: Willie Mays making the catch that doesn’t look possible. When it comes to art, we need to see a woman or a man struggling with the universal mediocrity that is the natural lot of all of us and somehow out of some mélange of talent, skill, and luck doing the impossible, making something happen that is splendid and moving—or funny, or frightening, or whatever the artist set out to do.
That’s half the answer to why I wasn’t expecting much in the way of revelation from DeepLudwig. The other has to do with a conviction about computers in general and artificial intelligence in particular, when it comes to their attempts to play ball on our turf in one way or another. Here’s my assertion: True intelligence is in a body. Intelligence outside a living body, as some sort of abstraction, is innately impossible, or should be given another name.

William Hasselberger:

Unlike game worlds, the real world lacks fixed rules and a single, pre-defined objective: “Manhattan isn’t Atari or Go — and it’s not a scaled-up version of it, either,” writes Larson. The real world is ever-changing, open-ended, unpredictable, and inexhaustible in its meaningful details. It is rich in linguistic and cultural meanings, including social roles and settings, gestures, speech acts, texts, stories, traditions, and so forth. How many potentially important details does a buzzing street corner have? Infinitely many. […]

When we interpret the world around us, we do so with the help of an expansive range of concepts, rich in emotions and values: love, trust, betrayal, longing, hope, grief, remorse, shame, passion, abandonment, commitment, deception, guilt, generosity, brutality, humor, bravery, selfishness, wisdom, and countless others. […]

Together, these human-centric concepts form a framework through which we “take in” and interpret the human world. We acquire this set of ideas and interpretive skills through enculturation, the learning of language, life experience, and the reflection on our experience, all of which are rooted in our physical, emotional, and biological nature. These concepts are indispensable for any non-superficial grasp of human life — which means they are also fundamental for human intelligence. There can be no “human-level” general AI, one worthy of the name, that does not adequately imitate this level of human thought.

Does this set the bar too high for general AI? No, it brings into view what human intelligence is, what that holy grail of AI research would be. As John Haugeland wrote in a classic and still pressing 1979 paper:

“There is no reason whatsoever to believe that there is a difference in kind between understanding “everyday English” and appreciating literature. Apart from a few highly restricted domains, like playing chess, analyzing mass spectra, or making airline reservations, the most ordinary conversations are fraught with life and all its meanings.”

Alan Jacobs:

Hasselberger in his review of Larson does not directly invoke the principle of charity, but I think that principle or habit undergirds much of what he says about conversation: “When we interpret the world around us, we do so with the help of an expansive range of concepts, rich in emotions and values: love, trust, betrayal, longing, hope, grief, remorse, shame, passion, abandonment, commitment, deception, guilt, generosity, brutality, humor, bravery, selfishness, wisdom, and countless others.” All of those emotions and values are closely related to our need to converse with others and the assumption of sense-making that follows from that need. Turing Tests at their worst are a cheap exploitation of some of the habits most deeply characteristic of our humanity.

Mary Oliver:

As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

not for me

Günther Anders (1951):

“At the very moment when the world becomes apocalyptic, and this owing to our own fault, it presents the image . . . of a paradise inhabited by murderers without malice.”

Barack Obama (October 19, 2016)

And I think right now we probably have the balance about right. Now, you wouldn’t know that if you talked to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or some of the international activist organizations. Certainly you wouldn’t know that if you were talking to some of the writers who criticize our drone policy. But I’ve actually told my staff it’s probably good that they stay critical of this policy, even though I think right now we’re doing the best that we can in a dangerous world with terrorists who would gladly blow up a school bus full of American kids if they could. We probably have got it about right.

Azmat Khan (2021):

The trove of [Pentagon archive] documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.

The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.

The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.” […]

In the end, what emerges from the more than 5,400 pages of records is an institutional acceptance of an inevitable collateral toll. In the logic of the military, a strike, however deadly to civilians, is acceptable as long as it has been properly decided and approved — the proportionality of military gain to civilian danger weighed — in accordance with the chain of command.

Lawrence Lewis, the former Pentagon and State Department adviser whose analysis for the 2018 study was quashed, said in an interview that the military’s technological prowess, and the highly bureaucratized system for assessing how it is employed, may actually serve an unspoken purpose: to create greater legal and moral space for greater risk.

“Now we can take strikes in city streets, because we have Hellfire missiles, and we have fancy things with blades,” he said. “We develop all these capabilities, but we don’t use them to buy down risk for civilians. We just use them so we can make attacks that maybe we couldn’t do before.” […]

Of the 1,311 assessments from the Pentagon, in only one did investigators visit the site of a strike. In only two did they interview witnesses or survivors. […]

Even when allegations were deemed credible, the military often undercounted the toll because victims, unseen by the overhead camera before the strike, remained invisible in the aftermath.

Wendell Berry (1999):

We thus are elaborating a surely dangerous contradiction between our militant nationalism and our espousal of the international “free market” ideology. How do we escape from this absurdity?

I don’t think there is an easy answer. Obviously, we would be less absurd if we took better care of things. We would be less absurd if we founded our public policies upon an honest description of our needs and our predicament, rather than upon fantastical descriptions of our wishes. We would be less absurd if our leaders would consider in good faith the proven alternatives to violence.

Such things are easy to say, but we are disposed, somewhat by culture and somewhat by nature, to solve our problems by violence, and even to enjoy doing so. And yet by now all of us must at least have suspected that our right to live, to be free, and to be at peace is not guaranteed by any act of violence. It can be guaranteed only by our willingness that all other persons should live, be free, and be at peace—and by our willingness to use or give our own lives to make that possible. To be incapable of such willingness is merely to resign ourselves to the absurdity we are in; and yet, if you are like me, you are unsure to what extent you are capable of it.

Here is the other question that I have been leading toward, one that the predicament of modern warfare forces upon us: How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don’t kill any children for my benefit.

If that is your answer too, then you must know that we have not come to rest, far from it. For surely we must feel ourselves swarmed about with more questions that are urgent, personal, and intimidating. But perhaps also we feel ourselves beginning to be free, facing at last in our own selves the greatest challenge ever laid before us, the most comprehensive vision of human progress, the best advice, and the least obeyed:

“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

(A follow-up post is here.)