It has been the hope of many people that the 2014 commemoration of the Great War will go further and deeper than has previously been the case, in sounding “the length and breath, the height and depth” of public remembrance. The Catholic Theological Association conference, focusing upon both remembrance and collusion, is an attempt to do precisely this by marshalling the resources of Catholic Social Thought and other theological insights. What, then, should we be looking for?

To begin with a broad historical thesis. Hannah Arendt observes that the “danger of violence” is precisely its unforeseen and implacable tendency to escalation. It possesses a destructive momentum that will quickly overtake even the self-restraint of limited, non-extremist goals, and infect the entire body politic: “[t]he practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”Footnote ¹ She notes this dynamic as a characteristic of the Cold War, indeed the atomic bomb represents a kind of culmination of a process with an earlier genesis:

The unpreparedness of the participants which Arendt notes here has echoes of the charge of “thoughtlessness” that she lays against totalitarian systems, as personified by Adolf Eichmann. Her judgment that the 1914–18 conflict represents a qualitative turning-point in the history of human conflict, on account of the unprecedented mechanization of fighting, is commonplace. It is well-captured by the opening to Walter Benjamin's essay “The Storyteller” that speaks of the moment when human “experience” ceased to be a guide for existence and communication:

The term “paradigm shift” is a tired one, but three significant mutations should be noted. Firstly, the change within Catholic Social Teaching itself, with regard to the ethics of warfare. At least one paper at this conference will address the theme directly, so there is no need to say much here, except to note a general transition: from consideration of the circumstances under which war was legitimate (a reflection rooted within the just war tradition), in the direction of an increasing pacifism that questions whether any war under modern conditions can be regarded as legitimate. Certainly, there is a complex balancing required, between rejection of war as a “scourge” on the one hand, and the right to legitimate self-defence and the need to protect the innocent on the other. Nevertheless, there is an unambiguous assertion that war is “the failure of all true humanism” and “always a defeat for humanity”.

Though much is still to be worked out satisfactorily, the just war tradition has established criteria for jus ad bellum and jus in bellum – for going to war in the first place, and for restraint upon the conduct of adversaries once conflict is under way. More recent discussion has looked to expand the tradition by attending to moral criteria for a jus post bellum, i.e. for the aftermath of conflict. In each case the teleology of military action (i.e. it aims at promoting a genuine peace) is significant, while the principles of discrimination (the need to distinguish between military targets and innocent civilians), and proportionality are clearly inscribed in both CST as well as in secular international law. Within this framework, a respect for non-violence is part of Catholic tradition, even if an unequivocal commitment to nonviolence is absent.

The problematization and subsequent reshaping of the contribution of Catholic Social Teaching, including the just war tradition, arise to some extent through the advances in military technology, which make it virtually impossible to fulfill the conditions for a legitimate conflict. The complex interplay between technology and law has played out since the invention of the cross-bow; with regard to the twentieth century, however, the questions have been raised by new practices which clearly fail to abide by proportionality or discrimination. The challenging developments include: trench warfare, the use of chemical weapons, and the mass aerial devastation of civilian populations, by firebomb or nuclear device.

To some extent “Hiroshima” would seem to stand as a terminus ad quem, with the just war tradition virtually useless as a paradigm for encompassing such destructive potential. Here, it is the ethics of possession and deterrence which take centre-stage, since the actual deployment of such weapons is simply incompatible with the teleological criterion of peace. It is recognition of this which has no doubt contributed to a greater prominence of non-violent voices and activists in the Catholic tradition, and a more explicit resistance within that tradition as a whole, to the acceptability of war.

As we have seen, Hannah Arendt notes a continuity between these phases of a “disastrous new role” for force, whose autonomous momentum causes it to predominate at the expense of politics; the mechanized devastation of World War I is only “one short jump” away from the new possibilities in the atomic age. Nevertheless, there seems to be a qualitative difference, not least in the paradox of deterrence noted above: that the telos of nuclear weapons, the definition of their success, as it were, is a kind of stasis, their non-deployment enabling a terrified coexistence under the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction. Paradoxically, actual war is “unthinkable” – a possibility too monstrous to be realized, though the paradox lies precisely in the fact that such a scenario has indeed been thought through and prepared for.

In our own context, the situation is different once again, with new challenges to discrimination and proportionality, above all with the phenomenon of terrorism. Here, too, the interplay of technology and law presents new aporias. With the development of weapons which are allegedly more “humane” in their capacity to strike against “smart” targets, war has become “thinkable” once again. These are weapons that can in fact be used; indeed in many respects their use is more desirable than the alternative technology, they represent an “advance”. The most prominent example, drone technology, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), presents new ethical challenges, to the extent that we can discern here a further paradigm-shift.

I will seek to explicate these two shifts – in Catholic Social Teaching, and in a specific “humane” turn in recent weapons technology, by means of a third paradigm, the “escalation to extremes”, which is implied in Arendt's work cited above and in the later writings of René Girard. It should be clear that I am using the term “humane” in an ironic sense to convey the sense that highly destructive weaponry has acquired new respectability and acceptability, which need to be reflected upon ethically and even theologically.

What might such a reflection look like? It may be a question of underlining more clearly the principle of humanity that has been cited (along with discrimination and proportionality) as a further criterion for legitimate warfare. “Humanity” becomes an expression of the telos that should prevent ends (law) being subjugated to means (technology). But it is precisely the notion of “the human” which is being perverted and contested here, in the sense that certain kinds of lethal weaponry may nevertheless be more “humane” than others. Precisely here, therefore, a robust statement of the Christian understanding of the humanum is required. I offer the description of the humanum from the late Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx as a guide, which seeks especially to hold in tension an anthropological and a Christological pole. Schillebeekx has recourse to the term “Christomorphic” to describe the orientation of the human pole towards transcendence. Only an understanding of the humanum that is thus oriented can be considered as an authentic delineation of the human.

The invocation of Schillebeeckx and his Christological understanding of “negative contrast experiences” may serve to highlight an important aporia. For all that we are seeking to explore continuities between the three “sorrowful mysteries”, and for all that it is possible to offer a theo-political account of these continuities, there seems to be a sharp line when it comes to discerning the face of Christ. It is possible to offer a “Christomorphic” reading of the tragedy of the First World War: one thinks of Stanley Spencer's paintings, or of the Christological meditations in the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Owen's rendering of the ordinary soldier as the Son who is sacrificed to an inscrutably wrathful divinity, however unorthodox, nevertheless affirms the presence of Christ in the trenches. The same is true of the heroic frontline ministry of Catholic chaplains, which has been justly celebrated in this commemorative year.

It feels much more difficult, somehow, to offer a Christological reading of Hiroshima, or of the Cold War; or, for that matter, of the post-9/11 war on terror. All these events exemplify the recrudescence or “return” of the primitive sacred; they are indeed “negative contrast experiences” that highlight the breach between what is and what ought to be; and yet the face of Christ in these realities is hard to discern.

We will return to this. Firstly, let us reflect upon UAVs/drones, the “weapons of choice” for fighting terrorism, in the light of what has been said, and in particular whether they conform to Hannah Arendt's description of an autonomous force, augmenting itself and tending towards ever-greater violence. Such a view, if correct, runs counter to the enthusiasm for such weaponry as a refined means for targeting (i.e. restraining) violence. Drones mark not simply an advance in the technology of weaponry, but a new era for International Humanitarian Law (also ius in bello, or the law of armed conflict). Organizations such as the UN and Human Rights Watch have condemned them as a violation of the principles of discrimination and proportionality. In actions of asymmetrical urban counter-insurgency (such as many of the recent and current campaigns involving US military), civilians and enemy combatants are often indistinguishable. If this is the case for soldiers making judgments on the ground, it applies a fortiori to autonomous weapons, unable to assess the human intentionality of a situation.

Judgments of proportionality likewise depend upon split-second assessments by the individual soldier of the human cost of his/her action. The argument runs that a human agent is required to make judgments about the enemy's intentionality, and about the calculus of suffering, which enable discriminate and proportionate action. Drone warfare is insidious because it removes important human factors from military conflict. Another aspect of drone strikes is the involvement of non-military personnel in their operation. Questions are raised here about the legal status of such personnel, specifically their right to protection under international humanitarian law. Civilians such as CIA personnel are vulnerable, both as legitimate targets for combatants, and as potentially liable to prosecution for murder. Here, and elsewhere where civilians are used in military operations, the classically-understood relationship between the soldier and the state has changed utterly.

Bianca Baggiarini has investigated some of the implications in a forthcoming article in which she summarises the future of militarized violence as a constant transcending of the vulnerabilities of the citizen-soldier.Footnote ⁴ Along with the increasing use of private military corporations (PMCs), drone technology take us further in the obsessive quest for “clean” bloodless warfare. The figures are striking: at certain points during the US conflict in the Middle East, private contractors have outnumbered US troops; since 9/11, drones have been used in 95% of the US's targeted killings, and the Air Force now trains more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots.

Baggiarini notes also that the enhanced sight and interpretation of data associated with the new technology reduces the importance of the politicised act of human “witnessing”, understood as eye-witness testimony and the production of truth. The military application of drones, and the privatized outsourcing of violence, together signify “a troubling of embodied combat, citizenship and sacrifice” (p.7). More precisely, there is an erosion of the synthesis of citizenship and sacrifice which is distinctive of modern conceptions of citizenship. She cites Julian Reid (2006: pp.2–3) to the effect that “liberal regimes [which idealize peace] have now committed to war without end, temporally, spatially, and politically.”Footnote ⁵

Ian G.R. Shaw and M. Akter write of the “unbearable humanness” of UAV weaponry in the tribal areas of Pakistan.Footnote ⁶ They are among a number of commentators who note President Obama's levity, when he controversially made a joke about “Predator” drones at a White House dinner in 2010, as symptomatic of this technology's dehumanizing effect. A further symptom is the familiar disquiet that similar “skills sets” are required for operating drones and for playing video games (even as the distancing that this analogy suggests is belied by the rates of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by operatives). Shaw goes on to explore the particular imaginative geography of “targeted killing”; the link between vision and strikes which are “accurate, efficient and deadly”, reaches its apotheosis in the post-Hiroshima rendition of the entire globe as a grid “targets”, to be destroyed as soon as they are visualized.

“Exceptional technology” is being deployed in “exceptional territory”; Shaw draws on Agamben's discussion of exceptionality to comment on the geo-political factors which make this area of Pakistan a highly abnormal space. The outcome is a fetishization of the drone, presented to the world in mystified and masked form as an autonomous agent. Shaw quotes a US Air Force colonel: “It's kind of like having God overhead. And lightning comes down in the form of Hellfire” (quoted in Shaw, p.1502).

Once again the general issue is the interplay between law and technology, such that these weapons have the potential to undermine the international legal system's ability to preserve a minimum world order. The accusation of their “dehumanizing” tendency is strong: that as well as dehumanizing the victim, the perpetrators of violence are themselves desensitised, with a lowering of their moral and psychological barriers to killing. Drone technology, it is alleged, is uniquely destabilizing because of its violation of cardinal principles of International Humanitarian Law, and because of the systematic evacuation of the human element from warfare. This bracketing of the human is a concern for two reasons: firstly, it reduces the scope for decision-making within conflicts which would lead to minimization of innocent casualties etc.; secondly, the use of non-military personnel for waging conflict (to take the example of the CIA operatives) is a formal violation of the principle of discrimination, but more profoundly, a subversion of the traditional mode of being a combatant: someone whose behavior is rigorously codified and protected.

To put this concern into a religious or spiritual key: drone warfare allows for the disavowal of sacrifice, and the transcendence of the physical, moral and economic limits of the human body. Yet the body is essential in the imagining of sacrifice, since the latter requires humans (including perpetrators) to bear witness to violence.

Does this development herald therefore a postmodern “end of sacrifice”? It is not strictly true to claim this, not least since a number of commentators seem to regard drones as a high-tech expression of “pre-modern” violence. Baggiani suggests, rather, that what is demonstrated here is the increasing unevenness of sacrifice. In keeping with the basic mimetic theory of Girard, the imagery of sacrifice – meaning blood, transcendence and moral achievement through the destruction of the body – seems only to gain purchase when there is the need to regenerate a militarized consciousness. No such sacrificial performance takes place on the part of the West (at least with regard to its own victims; one might point to the fetishizing of the executions of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as examples). Both military outsourcing and remote warfare by drones strive to render sacrifice irrelevant.

Here lies a clue to the horrific and graphic barbarity of the executions, carried out and recorded by Islamic State extremists in recent months. It is clear that such acts are intended as a provocation, intended to incite a militarised response from the West. On a deeper level, the ritualistic resonances of such killings may be read as a counter to and protest against the invisibility and anonymity of remote-controlled killing, and perhaps even a reminder of the sacrificial link which the West seems intent on evading.

Let us consider the following testimony, from Michael Adebolajo, one of the killers of Lt. Lee Rigby outside a barracks in Woolwich, on 22ⁿ May 2013. Adebolajo describes himself as a “soldier of Allah”:

The words are of course chilling, given the manner of Lt Rigby's horrific death, but there is little to object to in the logic of Adebolajo's defence. It is an appeal out of and to the logic of codified warfare, in which the duty of the soldier is acknowledged as a terrible necessity, proportionate, fully cognizant of the human cost of doing his duty. It is not, as far as we can tell, cynical or manipulative; there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this appeal. We should also note the readiness of Adebolajo and his companion to die in the course of the violent action they undertook.

Adebolajo's reasoned defence of his action in killing Lt. Rigby is perhaps atypical of Islamist justification – certainly if we compare it to the pronouncements that have accompanied more recent atrocities by IS combatants. Nevertheless, the inversion here is indeed paradoxical; the presence within his testimony of the “normalising” and familiar logic of the traditional soldier – dulce et decorum est – by an Islamist extremist, and the increasing evacuation from the Western conduct of warfare of precisely this classical military mentality (which I have attempted to identify in the controversy regarding drone warfare). This is the second of the three paradigm shifts, which, I argue, needs to be thought through.

In short, the change of emphasis in Catholic Social Thought is occasioned by and accompanies a profound shift in the nature of mass combat, which is different in kind from other technological developments, and which would seem to denote a “dehumanising” tendency within our conception of war (paradoxical as this may sound).

The discussion of sacrifice opens up an analysis in terms of the reflection on sacrifice and order in the works of, which Baggiarini sees a relevance here in the work of René Girard in her claim that drones are high-tech expressions of pre-modern sovereign violence. This leads us to ask about the significance of bodies in relation to sacrificial violence, and what is happening in the disembodied versions conflict which we are now witnessing, and which are exemplified in the two practices of outsourcing of conflict and using unmanned weapons. In the year of total warfare, we are experiencing a critical turning-point in the history of soldier-citizenship, sacrifice, and technological change.

A third shift can be discerned, therefore, which is to some extent a historico-religious account of the first two. In his later work, René Girard takes up from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz the notion of an “escalation” or “paroxysm to extremes” in conflict. Author of the famous treatise On War, Clausewitz is generally credited with the assertion that “warfare is the continuation of diplomacy by other means”. Such a formulation is forever incompatible with the assertion within Catholic Social Thought that war is always “a failure of humanity”; CST rejects the notion that war could ever be legitimately regarded as a dimension of statecraft.

What is significant, for Girard, is the prescience by which Carl von Clausewitz saw his own paradigm breaking down. In his last book,Footnote ⁷ Girard follows Clausewitz's argument that the mass mobilisation of populations for warfare – symbolised above all by the Napoleonic armies of 1806 – will lead eventually to a negation of war's katechonic function. The Greek term katechon here refers to the function of restraint of chaos and disorder, which, according to a line of interpretation from Augustine through Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt in the twentieth-century, defines the political. War, the use of limited violence under strictly codified conditions, operates “sacrificially”, insofar as it affords protection for the majority of the population at the expense of the self-sacrificing few.

Under modern conditions, and specifically with the ever-escalating rivalry between France and Germany, this “sacrificial” channelling of violence became less and less effective. The mass of the population was no longer protected from destruction, as became evident in the twentieth-century, first during the World Wars, secondly during the epoch of the Cold War, and now under the threat from contemporary terrorism. Every citizen is a combatant, simply by virtue of living his or her life, taking public transport, etc. Conflict is both globalised and extended indefinitely in time: the “war on terror” has the status of a permanent state of emergency. Whether we decide that society is underpinned by a social contract, or by a balancing of “friend or foe”, in both cases the presuppositions of an Augustinian or Hobbesian security no longer hold. The violence which was previously held in check by the institution of codified warfare, now globalised and loosed from its katechonic constraints, threatens to engulf us totally.

We noted above one US colonel's use of religious language in describing the God-like hovering of drone bombers, waiting to strike like lightning. Shaw notes that ‘the drone performs the military logic of a “war without the war” to its extreme, which is to say, a war without bodies, a war of machines, and a war of discrete and surgical strikes from the sky’ (p.1502). The Girardian scholar Jean-Pierre Dupuy offers a similar account of “the Bomb” during the Cold War period, an epoch which was one long act of homage to our externalised violence, a “false god”, as implacable as the most destructive forces of nature. Dupuy notes with astonishment the trust which humanity placed in this deity – as the secret history of frightening near-misses makes clear, we have survived thus far by luck, rather than through the protection afforded us by the nuclear world order.

Girard, for his part, has explicit and unsettling recourse to the language of apocalypse and apocalyptic, though in his case the religious sentiment is in earnest. Specific aspects of our situation make it unique, and indeed uniquely dangerous. The decomposition of the sacred mechanism in the modern period shows up this ambiguity. How we react to the collapse of sacrificial safeguards will determine whether or not we have a future at all: