Mercy, war, and the lessons of Lucius Seneca

 As tragedy and horror continue to unfold in the Middle East, I turn as always to Lucius Seneca.  Seneca was among the clearest moral thinkers of his era, which is not to say that he was a perfect man, nor that he did not have blind spots, but to read his letters and texts, even thousands of years later is still to find wisdom lacking from those who claim leadership.  There are some aspects of Israel, Gaza, Hamas and the conflict with the Palestinians which should be simple.  Blinkered minds feign complication, but if you find yourself seeking to explain or excuse the use of rape and the decapitation of children as a weapon of war, you are beyond the reach of reason, as alas, so many are.  What is far more complicated is the challenge of how to respond when faced with an adversary no less evil than the nazis, but merely less capable due to a technological, logistic and numerical imbalance.

No one asked the Allies to agonize over the civilian casualties in Germany when fighting the nazis, and if we are honest, part of it is that the politics of 2023 demand treating a group far more committed to the nazi cause now as a protected class because of modern identity politics, and the way that identity politics warp moral reasoning.  You can be as evil as a nazi by any real moral calculus, but the good guy by leftist logic if you have the leftist-approved identity characteristics and location in their conception of an oppressor-oppressed dyad.  Neo-Calvinist bullshit permits you to commit any atrocity and still claim moral salvation by divorcing moral salvation from action.

Yet the fact that leftists are blinkered, and the fact that one faces an adversary of implacable evil does not absolve one of the responsibility to abide by the moral requirements that others do not.  What are those requirements?

What are the moral laws of war?  To face evil does not absolve one of the responsibility of virtue.

The laws of war have changed rather dramatically over history.  Once upon a time, armies lined up across a field from each other, and charged.  Consider what this implied for cavalry.  Cavalry, obviously, had quite an advantage.  Insert a concept of honor.  Attack the man, not the horse.

What, though, if pikemen use pikes to stop a cavalry charge?  It may violate a code of honor, but it can win a battle.  How do we assess this?  Rules and codes have long been the subject of battle and war.

Up through the modern era, though, what has remained relatively consistent has been the idea that war should be fought between soldiers.  Lines on a battlefield meant that soldiers fought soldiers, and the question of pikemen, for example, was a question of what constituted a legitimate tactic between soldiers.  Animals?  Interesting question, for carnivores.  There was, and mostly still is an agreement that targeting civilians is out of bounds.

Civilians have always been casualties, even when war was basically armies lined up on the battlefield.  In the simplest demonstration, armies had to eat, wars had costs, soldiers ate as they went, trampled fields, and that had costs.  Add siege warfare, and civilian casualties multiply.  Even before explosive ordnance, even with armies lining up on a battlefield, civilians paid a price.  They always have.

As weapons changed, civilians have paid higher prices, even with an understanding that it is out of bounds to target them.

Assuming honor, which is quite a heroic assumption, so to speak.

What of Fat Man and Little Boy?  That, obviously, is what made them such fraught moral decisions.  I will make no attempt to convince you either way on the matter.  As I said, "fraught."

But that leads us to terrorism.  Terrorism has a definition.  It is intentionally targeting and killing civilians in order to provoke fear in the civilian population, so that their fear will force the outcome you are trying to achieve.  It is the most fundamental violation of the laws of war, which is why we actually do have international laws, which it does violate.

Here, though, is why so many leftists approve of terrorism.  

Yes, the modern left loves terrorism.  Just listen to assholes like this Cornell professor claiming that he was exhilarated watching the Hamas attacks.  Love wins!  Hate has no place here!

Yeah, sure.  That was love, winning.  Hate Jews have no place.

Leftist ideology reduces everything to power dyads.  There is an oppressor and an oppressed.  That is all.  If you believe that the world is nothing but a set of oppressor-oppressed dyads, and that the oppressed is always the good guy, then how should conflict be waged?  The oppressed is, by definition, in the weaker position, so conventional warfare is off the table.  Terrorism, by default.  This, actually, is exactly what "exhilarated" Professor Russell Rickford in the clip posted above.  This is why are you seeing so many leftists cheer for the torture and murder of civilians.  They advocate terrorism as nothing more than a pike against cavalry.  Russell Rickford and his ilk see the rape, torture and murder of civilians as a pike against cavalry.

I shall not engage such blinkered, tortured reasoning.  One cannot reason with one so lost.  One weeps for a person so lost to decency.

Instead, I address the moral problem of a dual asymmetry.  Hamas seeks to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible, with a technological inferiority.  There is the moral asymmetry, and the technological asymmetry.  Israel seeks to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, with technological superiority, but to protect their own civilians, they need to kill Hamas, which uses Palestinian civilians as human shields because Hamas wants to maximize Palestinian civilian deaths for a PR stunt, using international leftists as useful idiots.

Even the nazis weren't so psychopathic as to maximize their own civilian casualties.  Process that, and process the blinkered reasoning of leftists tripping all over themselves to side with Hamas, and to beg Israel to do as Hamas says, and cease fire, and so forth.

Now, consider the moral dilemma of Israel, which is the only side thinking in moral terms.  The side using rape as a weapon, and using its own civilians as human shields is not thinking in moral terms, so I will not consider their side.

During Seneca's time, he never had to contend with the question of weapons capable of such explosive power.  Yet what if he did?  Does a country have a right of self-defense?  Yes.  If the attacker who strikes first hides soldiers and weapons among civilian populations such that the only way to counter-attack and defeat the enemy, once attacked, leaves civilians dead in the nation that struck first, then the blame will fall squarely on that enemy.  If you attack me leaving me no choice but to kill your civilians in response and self-defense, those civilian deaths are on you, not me.  That, by strict moral logic, is no dilemma at all.

Moreover, the prince (in Seneca's terms) who does not defend his people in this manner has no right to lead because he does not serve his people.  That is his primary responsibility.  The moral logic of telling the prince that he must care more for the civilian deaths of the country that attacks his own civilians than for his country's self-defense is not a moral logic that would make sense, either to Seneca, or really, anyone thinking with clarity.

No cease-fire.

Relentlessness until victory.  That is what is demanded by virtue because anything less is a failure to defend one's own nation from brutality unceasing and unreasoning.

Where, though, does the question of civilian death fit?  The lessons of Lucius Seneca.

Seneca warns of the evil of cruelty, and the importance of mercy.  Consider these two.  If you want to understand the depth of the evil of Hamas, understand that its basis is cruelty.

Rape, as a weapon.  Once you lose sight of that, you cannot see anything clearly.  I guess #metoo doesn't count if you're Jewish.

I cannot emphasize enough how much contempt I have for the left, their hypocrisy, or how much their hypocrisy and anti-Semitism have done to ensure my unwillingness to associate with their movement.

Cruelty.

In defense of his people, the prince cannot respond with cruelty.  Consider, for example, the fallacious argument that Israel needs to respond with something called "proportionality."  This is not an original response, but precisely how many Palestinian women would you like Netanyahu to order dragged out of their houses, and raped in the streets?  How many Palestinian children decapitated in front of their parents?  How many burned alive, tortured and murdered?

That would be the very definition of "proportionality."  Virtue demands otherwise because virtue demands that one acts in self defense, and without cruelty.  Cold efficiency, without cruelty.

There is no place for cruelty.

Seneca writes extensively about the importance of mercy.  Let us first distinguish between mercy, and justice.  It is not mercy to spare the innocent, but justice.  Mercy means sparing the guilty when it is in your power to do otherwise.

Seneca writes about mercy as a beneficent exercise of stately power, within the state.  The prince exercises mercy, forgiving when he could punish, and Seneca argues that mercy is vital for many reasons.  We are all morally flawed, and all in need of forgiveness, so mercy is an avoidance of hypocrisy.  He argued, too, that the prince who exercises mercy does not rule in fear for his own safety or rule, because few have cause to fear from him.  To grant mercy is to invite mutuality.  To do otherwise is to live in a state of fear and cycles of vengeance seeking vengeance.  Seneca gives anecdotes from classical history of those who forgave and benefited, and those who refused, to their own undoing.

Three components are important.  In order for mercy to be a consideration for Seneca, the person must be, in some sense, wrong or guilty.  The person must be in your power such that it is your choice to punish or not.  Finally, and this is critical, mercy becomes logical when the exercise itself is a corrective mechanism.  Seneca's anecdotes are tales in which spared lives are better for having been spared because mercy, itself, is a lesson.  The alternative, vengeance, is a dangerous lesson.

With Hamas itself, guilt is not in question.  They are the terrorists, the attackers, and the government.  They are to be defeated, yet not yet defeated, not yet subdued, nor facing judgment.

Suppose Israel had every member of Hamas captured.  Would the exercise of mercy be appropriate, by Seneca's logic?  No.  None are correctable.  Any not killed on the battlefield should be executed for war crimes.  If correction is not possible, and mercy would not provide a lesson or a self-protective mechanism, then Seneca would not advise mercy.  Defeat them on the battlefield, and execute those captured for war crimes.  Mercy cannot be justified, even by Seneca's standards.

Half the population of Gaza are children.  Children are innocents, and noncombatants.  Saving as many as possible is not mercy, but justice.  Mercy necessarily and definitionally involves the guilty.  There is a moral standard by which one would seek to minimize civilian casualties, yet Israel's responsibility is to defend its own population.  Israel was brutally attacked, and it must respond.  If it responds with cruelty, resulting in unnecessary civilian casualties, that fails to meet the criteria of virtue, by Seneca's cruelty standard, but Israel's task is to defend Israel, which was attacked.  Israel must ensure Israel's safety.  Hamas put Palestinian civilians in danger through its attacks, and its use of human shields, and Hamas holds the moral culpability for the civilian casualties.  Any country not named "Israel" is simply allowed to defend itself in like circumstances, and note that risks to Russian civilians when Ukrainians make incursions into Russia are not considered to be the same moral atrocity as a single Palestinian death.  Why not?  Leftist identity politics.

What, then?  (To use a phrase that appears in my translations of most Seneca texts.)  No more civilian casualties than are necessary to find and defeat the combatants, and mourn those who inevitably die, but Israel cannot be deterred from what is necessary by the inevitability of civilian casualties, put in harm's way as human shields by Hamas.  No more, but alas, no less.  And mourn the necessary, death being the inevitable end of all life anyway.

Memento mori.

Nobody asked the Allies to agonize over potential civilian losses on the German side, or go light on the nazis for the sake  the German civilian population.  Did you ever think about the German children who died?  Probably not.  Does that make you a shit person?  No.  It means that war is brutal, and it has a price, and the nazis needed to be defeated.  Hamas has as a stated goal the death of all Jews.

Where, then, is mercy?

Is there a clean line between Hamas combatant and innocent civilian?  No.  Just as there was not after WWII, there is not now.  Remember that Hamas was the elected government in Gaza, creating positions beyond Jew-rapist and concert-goer-murderer.  How many faceless bureaucrats worked for the nazi party, or even just got drafted?

How about the civilians who voted for Hitler?  Were they culpable, morally?

Yes.

But no one ever even considered trying them for war crimes, nor should they have.  There were, and are a wide range of people with moral culpability.  Some could, in principle, have legal culpability.  If you take action in support of war crimes, then you are, in part, a war criminal.

This is where mercy becomes vital.  Hamas will break.  Al Qaeda, ISIS... they broke.  Hamas will break because its existence cannot be permitted by humanity any more than the Third Reich.  Yet who is punished?  That is the same question as who is shown mercy?

Not, who is spared because of innocence, as with children, to the degree that civilian casualties can be avoided in war, but who that is guilty is shown mercy?

The answer, for Seneca, is this.  Whoever can be shown mercy should be shown mercy.  This is not a question for battle tactics.  This is a post-victory question, but it matters.  Mercy matters.  Seneca believed that you show strength through forgiveness, and more importantly, you teach through forgiveness.  He was, in many ways, an optimist.  He believed that the act of showing mercy could win over one's adversary, however implacable.  Can that happen?  Can that happen?  Yes.  Does that happen?  That is another matter.

But one must try.  Virtue requires trying.

You'll die anyway.  Memento mori.  You must try.

Seneca's philosophy was a philosophy built on the idea that even those who are wicked at least recognize virtue when they see it.  He believed in a kind of universality of virtue, the challenge being that jihadists sincerely believe that they are virtuous.  They cannot recognize virtue.  Therein lies the challenge.  Can one committed to so warped an ideology recognize true virtue?

Seneca was faced with Nero.  He was never in a position of power over Nero, but rather, exiled by Nero, yet Seneca believed that a man as evil as Nero was capable of recognizing and learning virtue.  He tried.  He tried and he risked when he was not the one in power.  Of course, Seneca's relationship with Nero was, shall we say, more complicated, if you read through the history, but he tried.

What will you do when you are in power?  And can you say that anyone is as morally deranged, individually, as Nero?

There must be a line.  This is a strange war.  The ideology that divides the world along the lines of oppressor-oppressed dyads-- leftism-- warps your perception of moral calculus because it teaches you that the stronger is the more evil and the weaker is the more righteous, but in this case, the militarily weaker side adheres to an ideology and uses tactics that are as evil as any in human history, and anyone who dares to challenge my claim must defend the use of civilian rape as a weapon of war.

By all means, offer your defense of rape.  Free speech means you are free to advocate rape, but do not demand that I take your side.

This war is the very disproof of leftist thinking.  Yet in so doing, it presents the greatest moral challenge to the side which possesses the military strength.  The challenge is not merely the challenge of defeating an enemy that hides behind its own civilians as human shields, but how to apply the principle of clemency, that most important of virtues.

And Seneca was right.  Mercy is vital.  It is the very core of virtue, not merely for the potential pragmatism, but for teaching through action, for its recognition that all may eventually need clemency as no one is without any wickedness, and the moral lesson that if the only way to preserve yourself is through the perpetuation of a cycle of vengeance, when you die anyway (memento mori), remember that your choice is how you die, and whether or not you die with virtue.

Clemency, and your willingness to extend it is where virtue rests.

Guilt extends far beyond the men who dragged women out of their homes and raped them for sport, or parachuted into a concert to murder concert-goers.

Yet to punish everyone with so much as a smidgeon of guilt would be, in essence, to commit genocide.  Contrary to a popular leftist lie, if Israel ever wanted to commit genocide against Palestinians, they would have been dead long ago.  I did those calculations in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks.  45 MOABs, or equivalent ordnance.  That's it.  Israel has always tried to avoid civilian casualties, while Hamas tries to maximize civilian casualties on both sides.

"Genocide" has a meaning.  Leftists love to change the meanings of words as part of postmodernist language games, but this one has a meaning.  A real one, more important for Jews than anyone, save Romany, Armenians and a scant few others.

There must be a line.  The maximum amount of mercy that can be extended is the amount that Seneca says should be extended.  Does that incur risk?

Yes.

Is it safer to go on vengeance quests?  No.  And those who live by terrorism do not live in safety either.  They kill each other, and they will never live in civilization.  They cannot, by definition.

Civilization is created by virtue.  To fail to show virtue is to abandon civilization.  Mercy is not given because it is deserved, and make no mistake, those who abet terrorism deserve none.  Mercy is given because virtue requires it.  Mercy is given because it is the only way.  Mercy is given because without it, there is no path.  No civilization, nothing.

Does mercy incur risk?  What of it?

Do you die by giving mercy?  You die anyway.  Memento mori.  The question is whether you die virtuously.  Others will not.  Will you?

So many music choices for today.  I'll go with my favorite jazz guitarist, Lenny Breau, and his cover of Cannonball Adderley's classic, "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy."  This is from The Velvet Touch of Lenny Breau- Live!  Breau was on my list of silly exclusions from Rolling Stone's absurd list of greatest guitarists last weekend.  If you know anything about the instrument, pay attention to his Chet Atkins and classically influenced fingerpicking, the flamenco, the harmonics (Breau was the player who taught everyone how to use artificial harmonics).  This is just amazing.  As far as I'm concerned, any list of such guitarists should consist of guitarists who scare other guitarists.  Lenny Breau scared other guitarists.