The Irony of Technological Warfare: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Critique of Just War, Secular Rationalism, and Technological Progressivism in Military Weapons

Abstract

Reinhold Niebuhr stands alone among many 20th century theorists of religion and politics for at once rejecting both the natural law tradition of just war, as well as the secular-rationalist tradition of his progressive contemporaries. Nowhere is his dual criticism more evident than in his critical stance on technology in war. For Niebuhr, technological advancements were not only inevitable, but sometimes necessary to develop in the face of advances from nefarious actors in world affairs. But using technologically advanced weapons risked destroying the moral authority of a nation by engaging in utilitarian calculus. Religious and military ethicists concerned with the integration of technological advancement in contemporary war would do well to consider Niebuhr’s thought and how it might be developed further in order to address the new concerns raised not only by modern tools such as drones, hypersonic weapons, and AI, but also by whatever yet to be developed technologies remain past the temporal horizons.

1. Introduction

Military technology often advances faster than military ethics. The introduction of new platforms often risks blowback, adverse consequences when the technology crosses from military to civilian use (Lin 2010). In just the last ten years, the advent of unmanned aircraft, or drones, on the battlefield has proliferated from novelty to mainstream. Newer platforms, such as hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence, further confound the ethical space in which moral and strategic theory overlap.1 In search of answers to these difficult challenges associated with advancements in military technology, scholars routinely return to the foundations of international relations and just war theory looking for new insight from old sources.

One such strain has included a thoroughgoing reconsideration Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian realism, and the larger American Augustinian tradition of foreign policy. During the Obama administration, for instance, David Luban (2012) examined Saint Augustine’s articulation of classical just war doctrine vis-a-vis drones. Others such as William Scheuerman (2010) returned to Niebuhr specifically as one among many classical realists who offer insights for global change. More recently, Gregory Moore (2020) has examined Niebuhr as a full-fledged theorist of international relations. Niebuhr’s influence on the theory and ethics of statecraft is of course beyond question. It therefore makes sense to consider how Niebuhr can structure our thinking on the influence of technology on modern warfare. Niebuhr participated in the debates over American power throughout much of the Cold War, and his writings on both technology and the morality of war address many of the most ethically challenging times of American foreign policy. This essay contends that he took a critical stance on technology, ever cautioning against a triumphalist posture that believes technical achievements will always reduce conflict or tend in that direction.

The remainder of this paper has two sections. First, I discuss Niebuhr’s engagement with the just war and pacifist traditions in US foreign policy. Niebuhr criticized both as failing to live up to the Christian standard of love of neighbor. Just war theorists, he contended, misidentified the impact of human sin on our rational-technical achievements (specifically in natural law ethics). American pacifists—among whom he numbered for a time—imported a secular anthropology at odds with Christian ethics. Both placed too great a role on human reason to work through the more profound and meaningful problems of human experience. Second, I discuss Niebuhr’s writings on technology itself, specifically the technological issue of his day: nuclear weapons. Niebuhr reluctantly accepted their development but deplored their use. Weapons of such advancement might seem at first to provide solutions to the pressing questions of war and peace when they are created, but in time they introduce many more problems and undermine the ethical standing of those who wield them.

2. Niebuhr on Just War

Niebuhr’s writings are often contrasted with the just war tradition, especially the natural law variant found in the Catholic intellectual tradition and among the few Protestant scholars such as Paul Ramsey who worked within that same natural law tradition. For these men—i.e., those in the natural law tradition—just war was not a legal doctrine used for juridical evaluations of war and peace but a world view that focused squarely on the problem of the use of force in political life. In the view of natural law thinkers, the world in which man finds himself remains incomplete, and man yearns for its completion in the Incarnation of Christ. But in the absence of such a completion, man’s natural rationalism points to specific ends, specific goods which human reason can know without the assistance of God. In short, until man fully unites with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, each person has access to the temporary cardinal virtues of prudence, courage, temperance, and justice.2 In the final analysis, however, the cardinal virtues fall short, Augustine suggested, and must be infused with, and purified by, the theological virtues. But until then, the cardinal virtues help shape the attitudes and actions of man’s relationship with his neighbor for the better.3

Niebuhr was likewise concerned with the problem of the use of force, but he approached the problem as a Christian realist, as one who accepted the constraints of political realism but infused it with the Christian ethics of love of neighbor and commitment to a durable peace. As such, Niebuhr took exception with the natural law approach to just war.4 Natural law, he argued, misunderstood the Fall and by extension, mankind’s relationship with justice. Natural law, Niebuhr argued, “assumes a human participation in a universal reason in which there is no ideological taint” (Niebuhr 1953, p. 172). Instead, the world for Niebuhr is “a tragic world, troubled not by a finiteness so much as ‘false eternals’ and false absolutes” (Robertson 1992; Niebuhr 1940, p. 49) Man is so far removed from the good in this interpretation that no rational, man-made institution can ever hope to achieve anything remotely close to real justice because men are too easily fooled by these false absolutes and too prone to pride and egotism.

This chasm between Niebuhrian realism and just war is most apparent in the different approaches to the problem of violence and war. In the just war tradition, both secular and religious, war is permissible when the conditions of the jus ad bellum are met. Yet once in war a different set of principles govern the conduct of waging war (jus in bello). These two frameworks—and recent additions such as jus post bellum and jus ad vim—operate in conjunction with international law to narrow the scope of wars which are deemed “just”. Both theoretically and practically, the number of wars which meet the just war standard are considerably smaller than the number of actual wars in human history. Importantly, however, in the just war tradition a theoretical space remains for a war that is not only permissible, but arguably, obligatory.

In contrast, Niebuhr viewed war as a necessary evil. Christians must oblige themselves to a presumption against force so as to keep their actions in line with the commandment to love one’s enemies (Mt 5:43–47). Niebuhr’s commitment to love of neighbor was the reason for initial embrace of pacifism.5 It was the same love of neighbor which compelled him to reject pacifism in the interwar years when it became obvious that doing nothing was worse than accepting, however reluctantly, a horrific war in the defense of innocents and civilization. Niebuhr nevertheless cautioned that war unleashes the worse aspects of human nature and encourages the most vicious dimensions of human violence. Extended wars drive men to despair and a final death devoid of God’s mercy, not repentance (Niebuhr 1942, p. 183). This was Niebuhr’s starting point for the problem of justice.

To unpack the point further, we might consider Niebuhr’s sojourn into and out of pacifism. Niebuhr thought the Allies of World War I were vindictive toward Germany. Rather than see Germans as future partner in the mutual, cooperative effort of international peace, the European powers sough collective ridicule and sanction. This caused him to doubt liberalism’s ability to achieve its ends of a progressive, peaceful world. If the likely result of a “good” war was Versailles, then it followed that honest Christians should reject modern war and statecraft. Later, Niebuhr had begun to question pacifism. In his only public dispute with his brother over the proper response to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Niebuhr questioned whether doing nothing was equally problematic or worse than a reluctant embrace of war (Inboden 2014). Niebuhr eventually divorced himself from pacifism because, although it begins with noble intentions, the modern expression of Christian pacifism had either rejected or forgotten about man’s propensity to sin and the limitations of achieving real justice (Niebuhr 1953, pp. 2–5).

For a Christian to achieve real justice, individuals need an active resistance of pride and power both in their own hearts and wherever evil manifested itself in the world. Pacifism was right to resist the pride and lust for power in the hearts of individuals. It placed love of neighbor as the supreme ethic from which meaningful human relations could be founded. The flaw, as Niebuhr saw it, is that modern pacifism was mostly a heresy—it imported the fallacy of modern thinkers like Rousseau who embraced a flawed view of human nature (Niebuhr 1952, pp. 5, 20, 46, 124, 170). Niebuhr reminds us that genuine humility begins with a recognition of our own fallibility and that it is a core virtue precisely because it reinforces the need for self-critical analysis about one’s intentions. As a virtue, humility can temper our rush to violence, but it can also temper our rush to non-violence when others are set on abusing power politics for nefarious ends.

Niebuhr’s departure from pacifism and his criticism of natural law just war mirror each other. In both instances, Niebuhr’s primary concern is the ability, or rather limitation, of achieving real justice through man-made institutions as well as his insistence that love of neighbor and humility (to militate against self-delusion) were crucial aspects of political ethics. Ever the pastor, Niebuhr believed the church played an important role in the attainment of justice. The church has the responsibility for building the spiritual conditions within which secular powers can establish a more just peace (Niebuhr 1953, p. 163). In turn, statesmen are obliged with building the proper socio-political conditions that free men and women to pursue God. And although the tensions of political life, mistrust between individuals, and weakness of social institutions limit the extent of what can be achieved, a durable peace is nevertheless possible for Niebuhr. A durable peace arises through a prudential merger of international order and the pursuit of justice within that order (Niebuhr 1953, p. 196).

Niebuhr never intended an international order to be achieved through a world government, nor was he defending an empire of the west. He long maintained a skepticism about the capacity of individuals to assent to a world power of such scope because the world lacked the mutual trust and respect necessary for building an international community (Niebuhr 1953, pp. 15–32). Technology may have created an indirect global community because it created a world of interdependent states; but the world lacks the tighter cohesion of a genuine community. Such a community cannot be brought into being by coercion, nor could it be feigned by pacifists hoping for the better. Against those who believed that a world state could be built first only to have world society follow, Niebuhr replied that trust and respect of Niebuhr are not created through power and coercion. Indeed, it is the community which gives rise to the ultimate authority of the state—especially in democratic ages—not the other way around.

If an international order is to be maintained at all, then, it must come from a different source than state coercion. As a realist, Niebuhr believed that the presence of power as a source of social order was both hazardous, and—as we have seen—inescapable. Even in peace, the misuse of power can (and often does) weaken and destroy the justness of domestic peace. Power infects society and creates fault lines between the minority that wields it and the masses who endure it. How much more dangerous is power when it is wielded by a single world state? A meaningful balance of power, not only between nations, but within them, is a necessary condition to build order. The structure and aims of states, therefore, has as much to do with peaceful relations as the power relationships between them.

3. Irony of Technology

Niebuhr’s criticism was not reserved only for just war and pacifist theories. His prophetic tone included a critical engagement with secular technological society.6 America, he contended, had a deeply ironic element, rooted in the secular-rationalist belief that technology can elevate society beyond social and physical conflict. Progressives—both right and left—believe that most if not all conflicts are the result of misunderstanding (Niebuhr 2008, p. 4). Creating ever more robust ways to promote communication, international society, so the argument goes, engenders within nations goodwill, thereby reducing conflict. In the presence of conflict, the first step of any solution should be dialogue and legal compromise, followed by conflict only when all other options have been thoroughly exhausted. And when war breaks out, it must be regulated by strict legal codes (borrowed from the just war tradition and secularized over the last few centuries). These progressive beliefs contended that technology—viz., advancements in both natural and social sciences—will solve most or all problems of world society.

According to Niebuhr, the technological society brought forth by progressivism and industrialization made international conflict more, not less, likely (Rasmussen 1989, p. 44). Niebuhr thought we had reached the point of diminishing returns in the use of law and technology alone to create harmony and unity. Technological society succeeded in extending the “margins of physical security and comfort,” Niebuhr conceded, “but the extension of the margins does not guarantee the further development of cultural values. It may yet lead to a preoccupation with the margins and obsession with the creature comforts” (Niebuhr 2008, p. 59). Nor were Niebuhr’s concerns limited strictly to cultural dimensions of the US. World culture, too, appeared too concerned with the margins rather than developing and strengthening values. The underlying logic invariably involves the creation of spaces of non-violence and law without examining what might happen in those spaces. Niebuhr’s point is that no community can truly exist without a real substantive cultural binding, and that no such binding exists in global society.

We can see this best when looking at Niebuhr’s view about nuclear weapons, since they posed many of the same ethical challenges as drones, cyber technologies, and artificial intelligence do for us. Niebuhr maintained a cautious defense of possessing nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence even as he criticized their use. The tools created and unleashed during the Second World War made America more secure only insofar as they helped the U.S. win the war. After the war, these same tools unleashed an economically sophisticated nation, and ensured the feeling of freedom and security held by Americans. But the simple fact that American’s had such weapons made their use ever the more likely. Statesmen are often constrained in their moral imagination by the pressing realities they witness. These constraints Niebuhr considered both tragic and ironic. When writing on the development of the nuclear bomb, Niebuhr resigns himself to their presence, explaining that FDR had “no choice” when authorizing the development of nuclear weapons because he needed to ensure American security against Nazi efforts to build the same weapon (Niebuhr 1945, p. 233).

But accepting that the bomb was built under compulsion does not preempt the critique of a lack of moral imagination. We are permitted to criticize policy-makers, he stressed, “for lack of imagination in impressing the enemy with the power of the bomb” without the devastation inflicted on Japan (Niebuhr 1945, p. 233). Could other alternatives been devised to demonstrate the destructive power? Perhaps. Perhaps not. As mentioned above, Niebuhr maintained that it was never possible to “refuse to develop [the bomb]” because the Germans were well on their way to building it first (Niebuhr 1945, p. 233). At the height of the war, the consequences of failure were incalculable.7 Nevertheless, in using the bomb against Japan, Niebuhr believed that America had fallen to depths of “Nazi morality” by justifying the use of nuclear weapons as more humane because it would bring a quicker end to the war (Niebuhr 1945, p. 233). Nuclear weapons are a byproduct of “total war” because technology “enables men to harness the resources of a society for a certain end totally” (Niebuhr 1945, p. 233). It is therefore not the destructive power of nuclear weapons that made them so dangerous, but the approach that leaders have regarding the objective of war.

By using nuclear weapons, America had brought a swift end to the war and ensured not only her survival in, but dominion over, the international system. It was a world without war at last; but it was not a world in which we should have been happy to live. Whatever moral authority America had as an innocent nation, set apart from the realpolitik of Europe and the rest of the world, had been obliterated. Niebuhr was unsurprised that technology had once again brought forth its ironic and tragic curse on society; for technology helps humans create ever more efficient ways to accomplish our goals—but often the use of these tools undermines our moral positions, especially in war.

The heart of Niebuhr’s criticism of progressive culture lies in the irony of US history (Niebuhr 2008, pp. 17–42). From its origin in Calvinist pessimism and Jeffersonian isolationism through the First World War, Americans were long resistant to engaging global politics because doing so threatened their self-conception as an exceptional nation. Even as the religious attitudes gave way to a dominant secular culture, the notion that America is akin to a city on a hill remains entrenched in the public ethos. Over time the liberal ethos coopted and transformed the exceptionalist thesis. Liberalism, according to Niebuhr, “…has always oscillated between the hope of creating perfect men by eliminating the social sources of evil and the hope of so purifying human ‘reason’ by educational technique that all social institutions would gradually become the bearers of a universal human will, informed by a universal human mind” (Niebuhr 2008, p. 68). The historical experience of the American project, Niebuhr continues, forms “a particularly unique and ironic refutation” of the liberal dream (Niebuhr 2008, p. 72). Our self-evaluation of our intention to use power virtuously is often illusionary and our reliance on technology often begets more troubling ones.

American achievement with nuclear weapons was a watershed moment in the culmination of technological society. Americans had mastered nature itself. They simultaneously found themselves masters of the world and engaged in existential struggle against Communism. The central danger of American history. Americans, used to a natural world easily subdued, tend to confuse their mastery of technical things with a mastery over history itself. Naturally, therefore, they could become frustrated with the recalcitrant choices of other nations who refuse to yield to the American conception of history. Rather than accept the limits of power, Americans “might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations. The political term for such an effort is ‘preventive war.’ It is not an immediate temptation; but could become so in the next decade or two” (Niebuhr 2008, p. 146).

Niebuhr was quick to point out that “a democracy cannot of course, engage in an explicitly preventive war”, although he does not say why. One reason for the silence is that he may take for granted an audience not unfamiliar with the principles of just war ethics (Niebuhr 2008, p. 146).8 Niebuhr’s chief concern that “in a decade or two” from the early 1950s, when he published Irony. If anything, the risk for a cataclysmic response might be more likely now than when Niebuhr wrote. During the Cold War, Soviet nuclear weapons restrained American nuclear weapons as much as the other way around; the American war in Vietnam humbled Americans from any belief that they could compel history. It is unclear whether the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have engendered anything beyond a similar return to the kind of isolation Niebuhr criticized early in his career. If and when Americans depart from a pessimistic isolationism, the most likely outcome seems to be a return to a secular progressivism that believes in America’s ability to mold history to its design. And should any nation supplant the US as the world’s most powerful nation, a Niebuhrian reading of history warns us from thinking that a new superpower would fare any better.

4. Conclusions

When taken together, Niebuhr’s criticism of technological society and the just war tradition led to four preliminary conclusions. First, just war theories have thus far missed the deeper moral hazards at issue in favor of what Christian realism considers superficial elements of American foreign policy. New and ever more carefully specific categories of just war (e.g., ad vim and extra bellum) confound the moral discourse of war and peace. Instead, we are better served by re-evaluating the sources of conflict not from point of view of liberal progressivism but from a point of view that takes both the creative possibilities and destructive tendencies of mankind into consideration.9 Second, foreign policy cannot be evaluated from some abstract “empirically objective” standpoint alone. Scholars must therefore use their own moral imagination to see the world as statesmen do: as a complex web of opportunity and constraint. Third, conflict is not a result of misunderstanding which can be remedied with greater communication and education. Instead, it has its roots in the egotism of human nature and the real presence of evil in the world. Evil must be resisted by good men and women even if military force is necessary to that end.

Forth, Niebuhr reminds us that political realism can never fully work in the self-interest of our nation without inviting moral judgement. Modern realism stresses the cool, dispassionate calculus of the national interest. It does not concern itself with moral constraints and obligations, save protecting a nation’s blood and treasure. Not the Christian love of neighbor, but self-interested pragmatism is the chief virtue of contemporary realism. Any realism that rejects morality in favor of a purely pragmatic technical procedure will, however, necessarily descend into cynical nihilism (Niebuhr 1953, p. 130). More to the point, even on practical grounds, amoral realism is quite unrealistic because of the sense of obligation of each person to his or her neighbor (Niebuhr 1953, p. 130).

It is not possible to speak for Niebuhr regarding what he would or would not say about the use of newer weapons such drones, artificial intelligence, and whatever new systems yet to be invented. He would stress the tension between the moral hazard of power on the one hand, and the obligation to confront evil on the other. New technological weapons do not appear ex nihilo. They are products of a progressive technological society that presumes technology and rational institutions can reduce or eliminate warfare by accounting for enough variables. We can therefore infer that among the greatest hazards, new technologies developed in a secular-rationalist approach to statecraft risks a dangerous hubris. Any new technology may indeed help strengthen national security, but they are at times equally likely to weaken the moral imagination necessary to wield them on behalf of justice.