I recently finished an essay entitled “Destructive Obedience: U.S. Military Training and Culture as a Parody of Christian Discipleship” for a reading course on war and peace in Christian thought. The paper is rather lengthy, but I’m trying to figure out a good way to share pieces of it here at Vox Nova. To tide you over, here is a passage from an article by Emmanuel McCarthy and John Carmody which gets at the argument I make in the paper. (Too bad I only found it tonight and could not incorporate it into the essay!)
To say, “I will not kill a fellow human being,” is an expression of consciousness flowing from a profoundly catholic, empathic awareness of the “other” as “self.” To say, “I will kill a fellow human being,” is the consequence of an external, patterned, repetitive, cultural and parochial undermining of the pre-existing human faculty and tendency toward empathy, by means of intentional information-deprivation or distortion. The “other” becomes an abstraction that is less than “self.”
[…]
Be not deluded. Abstractions can kill. Here the battlefield is the human mind. All is won or lost there. All nations, all militaries, all institutional religions, all corporations know this — and Jesus knows this, which is why His first public word was metanoiete, “change your minds.”
[Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy and John J. Carmody, “Killing Abstractions: The Battlefield of the Human Mind,” The Sign of Peace: Journal of the Catholic Peace Fellowship 8.2 (Spring 2009), pp. 14-5.]
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