Paris - The Horror and Three Hopes

Words seem inadequate but we all have to say something.

Of course everything has to start from the fact that our hearts go out to the injured and the friends and families of all the victims. And the witnesses and the emergency services who have to deal with the horror of what they saw. And all the people of Paris and the whole of France. Horror seems to have become part of the fabric of our society for a hundred years or more; the slaughter of the First World War, the unspeakable human degradation of the Holocaust and the fear of nuclear annihilation with any number of military juntas and genocides in between. And now this seemingly joyous negation of everything that humanity is supposed to stand for, this celebration of oppression, torture, rape and slaughter apparently for its own sake. 

This is the darkness of our time and I wish I thought it was going to be over soon but I'm afraid I don't.

And while we somehow learn to live with it I have three hopes:

The first is that we feel a clear and strong sense of solidarity with other people who are suffering in the same way. It is natural to feel especially shocked when murder comes so close but the people of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea and the Yemen are experiencing the same terror on a daily basis. Barack Obama was perfectly right that this is an attack on all of humanity and humanity does not stop at the borders of Europe or "the West". 

The second is that we remain determined and ambitious to stand for exactly the opposite of everything they represent. We have values that are rooted in our ideas of civilisation, our religions and our common humanity and we will stand by them. We will hold on to openness, respect, decency, human rights and the rule of law however much we are tempted to take short cuts and to descend to their level.

And the third is that we think carefully and coolly when we start talking about war. There is a long history of reflecting on whether war can ever be justified. Most people are not pacifists, they believe that war can be justified sometimes, but it is always terrible and often worse than whatever provoked it.

Catholic doctrine sits right in this tradition, saying that war may sometimes be necessary but four conditions must be met before it can possibly be justified:

• "the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• "all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• "there must be serious prospects of success;
• "the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition)."

We face an unprecedented kind of enemy and we are becoming ensnared in a new and unprecedented kind of war - if that is even the right word for it. We know that humanity has been gravely wronged but it is not at all clear to me that this new and unknown kind of 'war' could meet the other three conditons. Can we be sure that whatever we do is a last resort because nothing else could work, that the war itself would work and bring success, whatever we mean by that, and that it would not make things worse? Recent history tells us that wars are often embarked on as a political expedient, for fear of being seen to do nothing, with little consideration for these questions and we have come to regret them mightily at a later date.