Month: June 2004

One can argue that by its ordinary Magisterium the Church has infallibly defined that wars can be just, but it has never tried to infallibly define the precise conditions that must be met for a particular war to count as just. The conditions enumerated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2309) are certianly true in their broad outline, but there remains potential for doctrinal development in this area.

On thing that may force that doctrinal development to occur would be the advent of widespread use of non-lethal weapons.

Church thought on just warfare has been affected by developments in weapons technology before. When the crossbow was developed in the Middle Ages, Pope Urban II forbade its use against Christians. So did the Second Lateran Council, which stated: “We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on” (Canon 29).

Current attitudes toward warfare are heavily shaped by the experience of World War II, which ravaged Europe the current generation of Vatican officials were young, and the Cold War, which threatened to turn nuclear when they were in middle age. The assumption presently made in Vatican circles is that increasing technology ineluctably makes warfare more and more deadly, making it harder and harder to justify. This perception is displayed at a number of places in the Catechism, including in the conditions of a just war, which state in part:

The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

Certainly the possession of modern means of destruction weighs heavily on anyone planning to use them, but the concept the Church is expressing needs to be further refined. It is not a given that better weapons automatically lead to deadlier wars. The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, were both far less deadly for both sides and for the civilian population than would have been the case had they been fought in the 1940s, when carpet bombing was commonly imployed to get at munitions factories within urban areas. Modern “surgical” warfare may still be messy, but it is far less deadly.

Studies have been done on the casualties caused by warfare at different technological levels and the results are quite clear: The more primitive the weapons are, the more people get killed by war. It is in the most primitive societies that the highest percentage of the population dies by warfare, and it is in the most technologically advanced societies that the fewest people die. (NOTE: I know people will be curious about these studies, so I’ll post more information on them soon.)

One of the reasons for this, undoubtedly, is that the more lethal you and your opponents’ weapons are, the more carefully you are going to think about whether you really want to go to war, the more motivated you will be to find options other than warfare to settle your differences. Another reason is that it is possible to apply force more precisely and have fewer casualties as collateral damage.

What remains to be seen is what effect the development and widespread deployability of non-lethal weapons will have. Paradoxically, it might have the effect of making wars even less deadly–but more common.

All of this is likely to give Catholic moral theologians fits, and the debate will rage for several generations. Doctrinal development seldom happens quickly, and do not expect it to happen on this question for years to come. As long as the destruction of World War II and the terror of the Cold War remain living memories for Vatican officials, a re-examination of this question will be out of the question.

Periodically news stories appear about the next-generation weapons we currently under development. Some of these are improvements on things we already have (e.g., conventional bombs that make a bigger boom), but the most interesting are the non-lethal weapons that may change the future of warfare.

In this story is reported a device known as the Active Denial System. Excerpts:

WASHINGTON – Test subjects can’t see the invisible beam from the Pentagon’s new, Star Trek-like weapon, but no one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds.

People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly.

“It tricks the pain sensors into thinking they’re on fire,” said Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M.

Garcia knows firsthand. He was among hundreds of test volunteers, standing in a doorway with his back facing the device.

“They did a full body back shot,” he said. “It hit in the small of my back first. For the first millisecond, it just felt like the skin was warming up. Then it got warmer and warmer and you felt like it was on fire.”

He said he lunged out of the doorway.

“As soon as you’re away from that beam your skin returns to normal and there is no pain,” Garcia said. “I thought to myself, ‘Why you wimp. You know it’s not causing any damage. You’ll be able to override it.’ Each of the next three times, I was on there a little bit longer.

“The fourth one was the longest. It was about two seconds. It felt like my hair was on fire.”

The Active Denial System is only one of many non-lethal weapons under development (others are described in the story).

Should they become widespread, such weapons have the prospect of altering current understanding of just war doctrine. More on that tomorrow.

This is terrific. Seems young people are getting sick of the immodest fashions their parents have been irresponsibly allowing them to buy for the last few years, and sick in such numbers that the manufacturers are starting to take notice.

(Tip of the Stetson to Thoughts of a Papist College Student)

This is terrific. Seems young people are getting sick of the immodest fashions their parents have been irresponsibly allowing them to buy for the last few years, and sick in such numbers that the manufacturers are starting to take notice.

(Tip of the Stetson to Thoughts of a Papist College Student)

Okay, that’s the end of our reproductive apologetics sequence for now.

We now return external links to family-friendly mode.

If you read the pope’s writings about sex, you’ll find him referring to it as a mystery. That’s not only true of human sexuality, it’s true of sex in general. There are still an awful lot of things we don’t know about it–more scientific mysteries to be explored. One is: Why so many organisms use sex as a means of reproduction? Why isn’t it supplemented by asexual reproduction more ofthen than it is? The answer to those questions isn’t clear, and is getting less clear as doubt is cast on one of the most popular theories proposed to explain it.

That theory is known as the Red Queen hypothesis–named after the character from Alice Through The Looking Glass. Just as, in the novel, the Red Queen told Alice she has to run as fast as she can to keep in one place, the Red Queen hypothesis holds that organisms need to keep shuffling their genes through sexual reproduction in order to avoid getting killed off by biological threats like parasites, germs, and viruses.

Problem is, new information casts doubt on the Red Queen hypothesis, suggesting that the benefits of sexula reproduction aren’t enough to explain its prevalence in the world. Those are only the benefits of sexual reproduction that we can presently perceive, of course. Further research may turn up fully satisfactory explanations.

But for now, sex continues to be a mystery–even on the biological level.

Science fiction is rife with stories of invasion by B.E.M.s (Bug-Eyed Monsters), but an invasion that affects many people in the real world is that of the G.E.M.s (Green-Eyed Monsters). Yes, jealousy is a fact of human existence.

A recent study, however, showed that it affects different countries in different ways. The country that reports the most jealousy is Brazil, while the country that reports the least jealousy is Japan.

Also, jealousy affects the genders differently. Men tend to experience more jealousy at the thought of their wives having sex with another man, while women tend to experience more jealousy at the thought of their husbands having a strong emotional attachment to another woman. Both genders experience jealousy at both things, but they tend to experience a stronger jealous reaction over one than the other.

The article presents some speculation from different schools of psychology on why this is (though it seems plausible to me that it is because men are more focused on sex than women and women are more focused on emotional bonding than men, leading each gender to experience the strongest jealousy when its special focus is threatened.)

What is even more interesting is why different countries report different levels of jealousy. The study found that it doesn’t seem to be a random thing. There is something that the jealousy rate correlates with: the fertility rate. The higher the fertility rate is, the higher the reported jealousy rate is.

Japan, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. For a start, it seems that the Japanese engage in marital relations far less often than any other country surveyed. A recent study found that the Japanese engage in such relations an average of 36 times per year, which is about half the rate of the next lowest country on the survey (Hong Kong, where the rate was 63 times per year).

America was at the top of the list (124 times per year on average), but before people start chanting “USA! USA! USA!”, remember that the rate of marital relations is not the same as the fertility rate–at least not in a country with widespread contraception. Thus it is Brazil that has the highest fertility rate, and correspondingly the highest jealousy rate.

What does this tell us about human relations and human nature? For a start, it tells us that the cultures in which couples are doing their job reproductively are the ones that have higher jealousy rates. Why would that be? Well, here’s a possibility: Marital relations get people attached to each other emotionally. If you don’t have marital relations often, you don’t get as attached to your partner emotionally and don’t feel as threatened at the possibility of unfaithfulness in marriage (whether it is sexual or emotional unfaithfulness that you find most threatening). Similarly, if you stunt the growth of the emotional bond by using contraception to frustrate the natural result of marital relations, you end up caring less about your partner’s faithfulness and thus have lower rates of jealousy.

You’ll also probably wind up with higher rates of divorce and adultery.

This points up the whole reason for jealousy in the first place: It reinforces the bond between the couple. It helps keep them together in faithful, stable unions that help propagate the species. Of course, nobody should let feelings of jealousy drive them to do irrational things, but kept within the bounds of reason, the jealous impulse (i.e., feeling threatened and/or angered by the thought of sexual or emotional unfaithfulness) is something that strengthens the couple’s union. If that union is allowed to express itself in regular, non-contraceptive marital relations then it will benefit from that strengthening.