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Collateral Damage, Part 2

by Richard Dawkins

In warfare, public opinion is now prepared to tolerate far less collateral damage than used to be the case, and this is a revealing symptom of a more general and heartening trend. Not only are the civilian casualty rates in Iraq and Lebanon far lower than those in the bombing raids on Dresden, London or Hiroshima. Of greater moral significance, there was nothing collateral about those civilian casualties in 1945. In Dresden and Hiroshima, civilian casualties were part of the plan. Maybe there were military targets in Dresden but, on that terrible night of Feb 13th 1945, the theory of the British bombers was that of the firestorm – and you don’t use a firestorm to disable a factory or a railway marshalling yard. A firestorm is designed for the specific purpose of burning people. As many people as possible. The following is from Alexander McKee’s book, Dresden:

From a firestorm there is small chance of escape. Certain conditions had to be present, such as the concentration of high buildings and a concentration of bombers in time and space, which produced so many huge fires so rapidly and so close together that the air above them super-heated and drew the flames out explosively. On the enormous scale of a large city, the roaring rush of heated air upwards developed the characteristics and power of a tornado, strong enough to pick up people and suck them into the flames.

And here is an eye-witness account:

The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then – to my utter horror and amazement – I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.

Here is a picture of victims of the Dresden raid of 13th February 1945..

Now, contrast the fire storms of 1945 with the smart bombs of today. It is not just that modern electronic technology makes it possible to guide bombs, by satnav and other clever techniques, literally to a particular street address and not the house on either side. Such sophisticated targeting systems cost money, and it is spent specifically to avoid civilian casualties. Smart bombs are designed, at least in part, to minimize collateral damage. Obviously Air Marshall Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, architect of the Dresden raid, didn’t have at his disposal the technical know-how to make smart bombs. That’s not the point. My point is that, even if he could have used smart bombs, he wouldn’t have wanted to. The whole rationale and purpose of Bomber Harris was to kill civilians.

I am not arguing that Bomber Harris was morally inferior to Donald Rumsfeld. Judging each by the moral standards of his own time, they might come out as roughly equivalent. The interesting point is that the moral standards change on a timescale of decades. The moral Zeitgeist shifts as the years go by. That is the first of my two points, but why is it interesting? It is interesting because it forms part of a powerful argument against the proposition that our morals come from religion. Here’s what I mean.

Religious apologists will try to persuade you that, without scriptural texts, we’d have no moral compass, no guidelines for what is right and what is wrong. Anybody who advocates basing our morals on the Bible has not read the Bible with sufficient attention. It is, of course, true that you can find verses of the Bible, and the Koran, which we today might regard as moral, for example the Sermon on the Mount. You can also find verses suggesting that the worst thing you can do is make a graven image or break the sabbath. Both deserve the death penalty, as does cheeking your parents. The Bible is an ethical disaster area with islands of decent morality dotted about here and there.

When sceptics point to particularly nasty bits of the Old Testament – for example the disgusting story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac (or his other son Ishmael according to Muslim tradition), religious apologists are apt to reply in exasperation: “Yes of course, but we don’t believe that any more. We’ve moved on.” And that is precisely my point. We have moved on. Theologians have moved on and have rejected the nasty verses (or written them off as ‘symbolic’ or ‘allegorical’ or ‘poetic’) while accepting the nice ones literally. But on what basis do they decide which verses to accept and which to reject? I don’t know. But I do know that, whatever that basis is, it certainly cannot be scriptural.

This is where the shifting moral Zeitgeist comes in. I am not going to attempt here to explain the shifting Zeitgeist. For my purposes, it is enough that it is a real phenomenon. And the shift in our tolerance of collateral damage in warfare is one powerful example of it. Another example is the change in our attitudes to racism, sexism, homophobia, slavery and many other such belweathers. You can call it ‘something in the air’. Public opinion moves in a mysteriously synchronous fashion, usually in the direction of becoming more liberal and gentle, although there are temporary reversals such as the United States is undergoing at the moment. The vanguard of opinion in one generation may lag behind the most reactionary and conservative representatives of a future generation. Abraham Lincoln was far ahead of his time – but his time was the nineteenth century, when just about everybody was racist by today’s standards. Here is what Lincoln said in 1858:

I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

I don’t know why the Zeitgeist changes so consistently, but it does. Newspaper editorials, judges’ decisions, parliamentary or congressional debates, dinner party conversations, all add up to ‘something in the air’. Our rapidly decreasing tolerance of collateral damage in warfare is one manifestation and an important one.

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