The depersonalization of violence: Reflections on the future of personal responsibility

Abstract

"In the realm of Moloch," Martin Buber once remarked, "honest men lie and compassionate men torture. And they really and truly believe that brother-murder will prepare the way for brotherhood! There appears to be no escape from the most evil of all idolatry." 1 Religious connotations aside, it would, of course, be naive to suppose that the attainment of brotherhood is often a management-level motive for what Buber calls "brother-murder." Yet, insofar as there are still many people all over the world who have been taught to justify their killing by an appeal to some higher morality, transcendent cause or futurist vision, Buber's concern is of great interest from the viewpoint of a sociology of knowledge. On the other hand, as human societies and especially their wars become ever more centrally and even automatically controlled, the private and public examinations of conscience of the world's countless dutiful warriors appear to have remarkably little to offer towards the development of a world-oriented theory of value. For, while Buber assumes, the modem world denies or, as far as possible, deems it irrelevant that the individual is responsible for anything mere challenging than a willingness to play the game whenever called "from above" to do so. And even if our systematization of life and death has not yet entirely silenced the so-called voice of conscience, will that voice really make any historically perceptible difference in the long run? Is there, in short, any reason to expect that anything like a sense of personal responsibility can survive in a world that includes among its parameters such complex phenomena as bureaucracy, automation, nationalism and limited resources? On the side of optimism, some such existential commitment to personal responsibility is represented in the thinking of a growing number of people, especially among the educated young, in most quarters of the planet earth. In particular, it is the kind of thinking to which the United States Supreme Court recently gave some national legitimacy when it decided, in effect, that, whether motivated by religious conviction or not, the pacifist conscience should have other socially accepted options besides prison or exile. This can hardly be thought of as marking the end of the age o~ militarism, but it may well be recognized in history as a slight but significant bend in the road. On the side of pessimism, however, few men really believe that a world in which all are at peace with one another is even remotely possible; nor, given their sense of boredom, impotence, anomie, existential vacuum or