A decade after Appomattox, faced with a situation similar to ours in Iraq — a society half-reshaped and restive, a low-level insurgency, a mounting financial cost — the North elected to abandon Reconstruction, return power to the defeated slaveholders, and forsake the people it had fought a war to free. For a long time they were praised for it by pro-Southern historiographers who saw Reconstruction the way the Left sees the Iraqi occupation, as an overzealous attempt to impose a way of life by force on an unwilling culture. Later it was pointed out that Reconstruction was hardly worse than the apartheid that came after and that perhaps the North should have stayed longer and done more to root out the pathologies of the conquered South. ~Ross Douthat, RealClearPolitics.com

Hat tip to Michael Brendan Dougherty.

The language of Sozialtechnik and the therapeutic state drips from Mr. Douthat’s review of Harry Stout’s Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War. Thus pre-war Iraqi society was “dysfunctional” and the post-bellum South still suffered from “pathologies” that, in hindsight, might ought to have been “rooted out” by far-seeing Yankee do-gooders. By Mr. Douthat’s reckoning, atrocities seem to be the inevitable (a word that comes up frequently in Mr. Douthat’s column) product of idealistic wars for high-minded (and abstract) goals. Why this does not lead him to conclude that these sorts of wars are inherently flawed and wrong does puzzle me.

Societies do not really have pathologies, though many of us have become accustomed to this sort of language being thrown around in discussing social conflicts. What are the “pathologies” of the South? Perhaps it is the South’s “failure” to embody the principle of equality bandied about (but not necessarily practised) by zealous Yankees? But, even by the standards of an advocate of the therapeutic state, the South can only be held to have such a pathology if there is something actually abnormal and diseased about such a society, which is to let Reconstruction rhetoric establish the bounds of what is normal and healthy. This is a pretty dubious premise. Thus military occupation and the tyrannical disenfranchisement of men who dared to act on commitment to principles of self-government are the vehicles of moral authority and represent only the beginning of the mass psychological “cure” that Mr. Douthat plainly believes Southerners needed. More drastic and permanent measures were apparently required to “root out” what was wrong with the Southerners. Generally conservatives leave this sort of rhetoric of uprooting growth and the excision of social tumours to revolutionaries who have few scruples about the human and moral costs of this kind of political therapy.

Just war theory does not exist, as he claims, to “ease the tensions between Christian ethics and the nature of warfare,” but to draw bright, clear lines beyond which Christians cannot conscientiously go in their support for wars that do not meet the exacting standards of the theory. On the other hand, George Weigel and his colleagues, for example, are very good at “easing the tensions” between Christian ethics and the nature of warfare–they have eased them so much that the requirements of the former disappear almost entirely.

It is one of the great errors of many modern Christians, many of them self-styled conservatives, that they seem to regard just war theory as a kind of fortunate loophole, a way of allowing them to support war just like a ‘normal’ person would without having too many reservations about it. Without the proper elaboration of just war theory, there would not be “tensions” between Christian ethics and warfare, but fierce and outright opposition to Christian participation in war in general. Just war theory enhances, indeed creates, the tensions between our normal obligations as Christians to justice and charity and our contingent, proper obligations to our secular authorities and the claims of justice and charity in particular cases as they relate to the good of our commonwealth. When these two sets of claims do not fundamentally conflict (as they certainly would do in the case of, say, an unprovoked war of aggression waged for someone’s notion of “noble ideals”), Christians can and ought to recognise the justice of a particular cause and come to its aid.