This article appears in the Progressive magazine May 2015 issue.
For some years, I thought I was, or hoped I was, a Christian
pacifist, for I wished to honor Christ’s peace-enabling instruction to
love our enemies, returning good for evil, and His unquestioning
generosity to the poor. But finally, in a fit of realism, I was
compelled to recognize how deeply in disfavor among Christians were the
actual teachings of the Gospels as well as the undiscriminating social
behavior of Jesus of Nazareth, who dealt out his kindnesses to God knows
whom.
I was having enough trouble at the time with sheep-killing dogs,
without inviting the animosity of fiscally costive and violent
Christians. I therefore became merely a moral pacifist, for even the
immoral normally are not offended by morals. I declared myself opposed,
not to killing per se, but to mass killing, killing in cold blood, and
killing for profit—in short, to industrial warfare.
In my heart, in fact, I could find no deep
repugnance against killing people who deserve to be killed. And I
understood perfectly the impulse and the satisfaction of killing some
objectionable person in the heat of anger. I did object to wiping out
the entire population of a city in order to kill a mere few who were
despicable or dangerous, and also to indiscriminate attacks against
large numbers of offenders at the risk of killing even a few who were
innocent. That such epical destructions were imposed coldly or coolly as
technological feats, from a distance, as “part of the job,” and greatly
to the enrichment of war industrialists, seemed to me to compound their
evil.
But then I was trumped by military
technology. Just as I was settling fairly comfortably into my moral
pacifism, along came precision weapons, sometimes known as smart
weapons. Smart bombs gave me not too much trouble. A smart bomb, after
all, despite its name is still a bomb. I found that I, at least, was too
moral a man to wish to observe closely or tolerate pacifically the work
of a smart bomb.
It was the advent of the drone that shook
me, for it seemed actually to present the possibility of the selective
killing of individual offenders, which offered the further attractions
of being an act of passion and far cheaper than killing hundreds or
thousands in order to kill one. I am very sure, contrary to the doctrine
of progress, that the smartest, most precise weapons so far invented
are swords and daggers, for each of them had its employer attached to
its handle, which tended to eliminate the possibility of mistaken
identity or collateral damage. But I thought the drone might be a pretty
tolerable substitute.
Like most would-be pacifists, I suppose, I
am an imaginative person. Until better informed, I imagined that when
personalized drones had come online, our President’s office had been
fitted with a drone-activating button in easy reach. And when the case
against an evil-doer had been made beyond reasonable doubt by his
military advisers, our President would cry out in hot-hearted passion:
“Thus as ever, O enemy of peace!” He would punch the button, and down
would topple his singular foe at a very appreciable savings to the
Pentagon.
But, alas, the drone, in this case as in
every other, would not be deployed directly by the President or by any
of his underchiefs. It would be deployed in a foreign country, by a
small technician at home in the United States, while he and our
President would be having lunch, though not, of course, together. Also,
the drones were not as precise as I had hoped, for they sometimes miss
the designated enemy and hit an innocent bystander—the sort of
operator’s error that we must classify as normal. The enemies of peace
resent these errors just as much as we peace-lovers would. And so the
drones have very likely made more enemies than they have killed.
So that ended my time as a moral pacifist supporter of precision warfare.
Meanwhile, as is the fashion in the
industrial age, the technology of war has been busily seeking peacetime,
or at least civilian, commodification. Even as our military drones are
dealing death to despisers of peace and freedom, they are being marketed
at home as toys, as mechanical substitutes for human workers at a very
appreciable saving to corporations of the service economy, and, like all
previous miracles of modern technology, as solutions to many previously
unsolvable problems.
The drone, according to its evangelists,
is on its way to becoming a transformative technology, like the
automobile. But unlike the automobile, which established itself somewhat
slowly because of its dependence on improved roads, the drone depends
only on the air, which is already available, and apparently usable or
abusable at no cost. And so the drones are already upon us in force,
solving the problems of real estate agents, farmers, electric utilities,
and hobbyists, as well as causing some official concern about safety
and privacy. The proper officials and agencies, we are informed, are
going to make rules to assure that drones will be used as lawfully and
safely as automobiles.
Well. The people who ought to be worried
by all this will be the professional worriers. This will be no job for
amateurs. Even so, the drone is entering the domestic economy, the
homeland neighborhoods of peace and good will, from its ongoing history
of spying and killing. Do the concerned officials—do the manufacturers
and marketers—think that only the government is interested in spying and
killing? As a reasonably observant moral pacifist, I have noticed that
legitimate public violence breeds, and is bred from, illegitimate
private violence. If official agencies of the government violate the
privacy of citizens, as we know they do, why should not unofficial
persons and businesses offend in the same way? If the government uses
the latest devices of precision killing to kill its enemies, why may
that not be taken as proof of the efficacy of those devices for the same
use by private persons? As a person of imagination, I can easily
imagine the handiness of a drone to the needs of a private entrepreneur
in contractual murder. Would not killing by remote control be the ideal
solution to some of his or her larger problems?
On behalf of private landowners like
myself, moreover, I have a number of questions. Though I have never shot
at an airplane passing across my land, or ever publicly objected to
their passing across, it has seemed reasonable to me to suppose that my
proprietary rights begin at a point at the center of the Earth, rise up
from there to my surface boundaries, and from there extend outward,
maintaining their vertical trajectories, infinitely into the sky—and,
therefore, that I might very properly collect a toll for any use of the
aerial right-of-way between my line fences. It will no doubt be wisest
to let that go for the time being. But the coming of the drones does
raise immediately the question as to how high, in present law and usage,
my rights of property and privacy may extend above the surface of my
land. My trees, for example, I believe to be standing free in my own air
and light. Do I then not have the right, below at least the tops of my
tallest trees, or the tallest trees of their species, to live and
breathe freely in my own unharming peace? And do I then not have the
right to shoot down with any weapon legally available to me a drone
invading that space? How else might I effectively resist such an
invasion? Locking gates, obviously, will be of no avail.
What, then, are we to say in behalf of
mere citizens, those who have no perceived need for spying or killing,
who do not covet technological toys, who would like the service economy
actually to serve, even if slowly, and who wish only to live in peace
and quiet with their neighbors? Might they not reasonably feel that
their properties, their privacy, their peace, even their lives, may be
threatened by this “emerging industry”?
I do. I felt sufficiently threatened to
revise my pacifism yet again. I became a luddite vigilante moral
pacifist. In that capacity, I wrote the following letter to the National
Rifle Association:
Port Royal, Kentucky 40058
December 26, 2014.
National Rifle Association
11250 Waples Mill Rd.
Fairfax, VA 22030
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am a small landowner concerned about the rights of property and
of personal privacy. As such, I look upon the encroachment of “drones”
into the domestic life of our country as a significant danger. The small
and affordable drones now being promoted and sold to the general public
do not merely threaten the rights of property and privacy; they could
also be the means of the destruction of property and of life. I
therefore ask if you would be so kind as to tell me the kind of shotgun,
shells, and shot that I would need to disable one of these invasive
devices. Anything you can do to help me—if only the necessary
specifications on a postcard—I would greatly appreciate.
Sincerely,
Wendell Berry
WB/tb
To my true and sincere disappointment, the
NRA has given me no answer. If it had recommended an appropriate
weapon, I would as promptly as possible have bought one. As a retired
squirrel hunter I possess only a .22 caliber rifle which, given its
disuse and my blurring eyesight, would virtually guarantee the safety
even of a squirrel.
Perhaps the NRA entertained some paranoid
fear of entrapment. (By me?) Or perhaps they failed to see my vision.
What I foresaw was the advent of a new bloodless sport, which would
require the purchase of a drone gun by almost every pacifist, as well as
by such vegetarians and animal-rightists as might object to spying,
killing, and the overcrowding of the atmosphere by countless fuming,
noisy small aircraft. This could amount virtually to a new birth for the
manufacturers of sporting firearms. I have had many pleasant thoughts
relating to this possibility, but I will mention only one, which I
believe to be both exemplary and suggestive: Since the drones would not
be protected game birds, shooting them “over a baited field” would be
perfectly legal. In the future now so ardently foreseen, it would be
possible to have one of your friends order you a book from Amazon and
then to shoot the delivery drone. Members of an urban neighborhood,
worrying about the increase of pollution, the noise, the danger to
pedestrians and to children at play, might individually order many
books, bringing forth a volley of drones that could be met by a volley
of gunfire from the concerned citizens, who might even salvage the
books.
But now another, and a most disturbing,
thought has occurred to me. Perhaps the NRA did not answer because
officials there were embarrassed to tell me they have no answer.
Perhaps, even probably, they would have had to tell me that the only
anti-drone weapon would be another drone. I would then have no recourse
except to purchase and deploy in my own defense an anti-drone drone,
which would be to establish within my own domestic life and economy the
one-upping logic of war itself. To this there can be no foreseeable end,
except the exhaustion finally of raw materials and fuels.
This side of exhaustion, the logic of war
is good for business. The business plan of industrial war—the production
of products to be destroyed—is logically and economically perfect, sure
to keep us thriving while the world lasts. So long as we have a supply
of expendable metals and fuels, as well as expandable humans and other
creatures, the economy will grow and the stock market will flourish.
But it was the need to oppose that very
business plan, and to stand as far as possible aside from it, that
turned me toward Christian pacifism to begin with. I see now that my
arguing toward a pacifism more practical than Christian has been in
vain. (I assume it would be about the same for pacifists of other
faiths.) I see now that there is nothing in technology or law that can
prevent us poor humans from reducing ourselves by the ever-renewing
forms of violence against one another—and always for the sake of some
high cause, such as the nation, the economy, God, freedom, or peace.
That is the trap in which our animal feet, like our self-glorifying
minds, are craftily caught. And so, the obvious risks notwithstanding, I
now return to where I began. Our only peace, finally our only safety,
is in the trying and dangerous countercraft, the neighborly love that
endureth all things. Can we, can I, imagine it in this age of metals
loosely flying?
Wendell Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmental activist, and farmer.
