A few weeks ago a reader said that I had a blind spot on Christian pacifism. He may well be right. I admit I have never been persuaded by the pacifists' arguments, and I have heard them all. However it is only fair to add that since Hiroshima I have been equally unimpressed by anti-pacifist arguments, and I have heard them all, too. For if the pacifists are guilty of arrant utopianism, they are not alone; the vaunted "realism" of their opponents has little to do with the realities of the nuclear age.
The moralists who talk of modern war as if it were subject to rational controls must know that their theories are the stuff of textbooks, no more. Sure as shooting, another general war will mean the use of nuclear weapons.
Even America dropped the atom bomb, and at a time when victory was within sight. What power, especially what totalitarian power, will hold off from using the hydrogen bomb with defeat in the offing?
I take for granted, then, that another general war will mean nuclear warfare and wreak unimaginable horror and destruction. What will follow from this destruction civilized men can not envisage. Certainly it will not be world order or "peace" as the word has been understood. And a war that does not reestablish order and peace is not a just war.
If you believe this, my pacifist friends ask, why aren't you with us? I have to answer with a "logic" that is not logical: I am not with you because I am involved in the general evil. I know that America's "militarism" has kept us from destruction. Under the stresses of the past decade, would the world still be intact if only the West knew the secret of nuclear war? I don't know. I am sure, though, that we would be wiped out if Russia alone had the secret. Therefore what peace we have had is the bitter fruit of mutual fear. I could not conscientiously advise the U. S. Government to strip itself of nuclear defenses. And as long as I want America to maintain these fearful weapons I must share the moral burden; I can not join the pacifists though I can be glad they are around to say no.
Such reasoning will not pass the test of textbook investigation. In an ethics-class debate I would lose my shirt. But it seems that the only way to win that debate would be to talk as if the traditional criteria for a just war were actually relevant; I know they are not. Or one could take the position that they are not relevant and urge the Government to dismiss the Marines; in the interests of peace, I am not willing to do that, either. So I will have to keep on losing arguments and count each day that Armageddon is held off as another victory. That is a hell of a way to live. But, under the circumstances, no one can doubt that this is a hell of a world we live in.
None of these personal views is important except as a context in which to discuss the imprisonment of Dorothy Day and ten of her followers. The Catholic Worker people were jailed because they refused to take shelter during an air-raid drill. They refused in order to protest against the very moral dilemma that leaves me—and my pacifist friends too, for that matter—without a debater's point to our names.
I don't know what to do about the dilemma. If the pacifists actually had responsibility, I don't believe they would, either. But Dorothy Day and her friends want to do something. They are not like me; they are not willing to live without a murmur in a morally ambiguous situation. I think they have more faith in God than I do; I know they have more faith in men. By the simple act of resisting the nation's periodic preparations for doomsday they hope to point up the importance of life over death.
Whether the Government may declare a synthetic "emergency" and suspend civil rights for the duration of a period arbitrarily set by decree should surely interest the upper courts. But it would do less than justice to Dorothy to treat the affair as a civil-liberties case. Miss Day acts in the spirit of the prophets; she is indifferent to legalities. Only a plea of guilty made sense to her, for she and her friends saw their protest not as an exercise of a civil "right" but as a religious duty; imprisonment was something to be accepted not as a legal injustice but as "penance" for the sins of the world.
Imagine surviving a hydrogen bomb and sitting among the ruins, remembering the case of Dorothy Day and her friends. With millions dead and other millions grotesquely injured, what would we think then about their small, pitiful effort to cry out their protest in the days when we rehearsed for annihilation? Who among the survivors would have an unkind word to say about their lack of "prudence"? How would the echo of the Judge's words—"a heartless bunch"—sound to those in the wasteland?
They were sent to jail because out of the ten million they alone said no; they took their harmless soap-box way to say that something has to be done. And, to our shame, there was scarcely a protest from the Catholics of America when one we call a saint was put behind bars. She protested against the destruction of mankind. Those who protest against risqué movies are given Catholic Action medals.
