A Terrible Love of Hope

Abstract

All nations want Admiral Sir John Fisher said, they want a peace that suits Most people?including maybe you and me?and most nations?perhaps all nations and surely the United States?are not pacifists. It is not simply that they sometimes or often fail in practice to live up to their pacifist commitments. It is rather that they are not committed in principle to pacifism. They are not pacifists in theory. They do not oppose war, all war, categorically and without exception. At the same time, of course, it is not that they do not value peace at all. It is rather that they hold other values to be more important than peace, to be ethically higher than peace, to be ethically more fundamental than peace. They are not fundamentally pacifists. They are fundamentalists for something else. This something else could be anything else at all?for example, democracy, freedom, equality, rights, prosperity, livelihood, territory, homeland security, children, family, clan, class, nation, tradition, doctrine, sect, religion, revelation, revenge, or justice. At most, fundamentalists for something other than peace support peace when, but only when, it serves their more fundamental value or values. They support peace when it seems instrumental to do so, support peace when, and only when, it suits them. And these supporters of pacifismwhen-it-suits have a simple strategy recommendation for all supporters of pacifism-in-principle: If the sheer absence or end of war really is your highest value, then just surrender unconditionally. To support peace only when it suits is to support war whenever it suits. It is to support war when it seems to serve, or seems to be instrumental for, one's fundamental value or values. It is, further, to recognize and sanction the need, if one is reflectively to realize those fundamental values, for ongoing complex cal culations to determine if and when and where and against whom this in-principle instrumental justification for war may be, or may become, realized in fact. It is to make every perceived change in circumstances an opportunity, or perhaps an obligation, to retotal the pluses and minuses for going to war. Moreover, it is to experience all places as in-principle possible battlefields for justified war, all