How can we be good allies as bystanders during war?

Being from the Middle East, it is hard to avoid thinking about war. I’ve lived through three, as well as an event I’ll discuss here that may as well have been war. But I am fortunate enough to be a bystander to the many ongoing wars today, and this has me thinking about the majority’s actions, those not immediately part of a given conflict, and how they can best assist those suffering the war. The tragedy of war’s victims is devastating. But the actions of bystanders can sometimes add to this devastation. In place of pacifistic solutions, they can fan war’s flames, elevating it to even greater heights by offering more deadly weapons by way of alliance and assistance.

But I am convinced by the opening words of Emanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity, that:

Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same.

So, I want to make a case, in two parts, against the actions of so many bystanders today.

I was in Beirut, Lebanon, on August 4, 2020, when a large amount of ammonium nitrate exploded, killing hundreds, injuring thousands, and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. The explosion, widely attributed to yet another governmental failure, is considered one of the most potent non-nuclear explosions on Earth. It was felt more than 120 miles away, as far as Cyprus.

I was a mere two miles away, so I have a lot to say. But my focus isn’t really on what happened. What I want is to draw attention to some observations from my lived experience, in particular to a sudden psychological change that caught my attention. The explosion occurred near the end of a year-long revolt against the government’s corruption and incompetence, beginning October 17, 2019. Despite many serious long-standing grievances, overnight, the explosion introduced a new sentiment and discourse. The protests’ largely peaceful but firm opposition gave way, for the first time, to the language of revenge and a desire to retaliate by murder, symbolized by protesters carrying nooses with cutouts of our politicians hung on them. I didn’t just witness this, I felt it myself happen overnight.

I don’t want to downplay the explosion’s scale. If we survived, it was by luck. For weeks it felt like there was blood and glass everywhere, as we wondered who survived and who didn’t. But I don’t think actual loss alone evoked the desire for revenge. Once I got my bearings, I felt the desire almost instantly. Speaking to others, they seem to have felt it too. There’s something curious about this. Because all things considered, the event wasn’t more destructive than the many crimes perpetrated against our population over decades. Even before the explosion, people had been committing suicide in despair and protest. We had no electricity, massive inflation, and our money was held hostage by the banks. Though plenty could have previously justified it, the widespread desire for revenge was still new.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this fact. My conclusion, perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone who has lived under the fires of modern war, is that though it is within our ability to build massively destructive weapons, it is not in our ability to withstand them psychologically.

In the face of personal aggression, I think it is natural, or at least expected, that immediate surprise and fear give way to anger. This anger is unlikely to decrease when attacked alongside others. But war’s modern instruments, like the explosion we faced, do something much worse. They replace a personal attack with a deeply impersonal one, directed at you and anyone around you, whoever or whatever you are, indefinite faceless others. The attack is against all and none, lacking all consideration for individuals. One wants to say it is against humanity in general. But it’s worse. The act seems directed at life itself, any life unfortunate enough to be caught in the line of fire.

There is something deeply alienating and offensive about being subjected to this violent, impersonal gesture. Personally, I think this gesture was a central reason behind our newfound desire. If we are entirely and generically dispensable to the perpetrators, then whoever they are, they have no regard for life. Demonstrably inhuman monsters. In response, our desire seems both righteous and rational. Righteous because we wish to rid the world of moral monsters, and rational because it makes no sense to try and coexist with monsters.

So much for the first part of the thought, let’s consider the other. Imagine a bystander who watches this or a similar event unfold. And let’s grant that we, the victims, are indeed righteous, rational, and vengeful in light of what has occurred, and that the event was indeed nontrivially brought about by perpetrators. How can this bystander be a good ally to us? To me, then?

One possibility, which seems to be the modern political solution worldwide, is that the bystander can empower the victim to enact their revenge with arms. The rationale seems to be that this helps serve justice by standing against a clear oppressor and with the clearly oppressed. And had this happened after the explosion, no doubt it would have assuaged our vengeful feelings. So, besides justice, the response seems immediately psychologically beneficial.

But I wonder if, in retrospect, the morning after these dark events, we victims will look back on the assistance we received with kindness. Will we think the offered arms for our good or a mere indulgence of our impulses? Would I have thought that empowering my revenge has bettered my lot? If the answer is not a clear no, then I hope I can at least offer some reasons for doubt.

First, my righteous anger as a victim was directed at those who performed inhuman gestures. But by enabling my response in kind, though a righteous retaliation, the bystander has helped make me more like those whom I so despise. I, too, would have now performed and relished the violent impersonal gesture.

Second, and relatedly, the bystander will have also helped justify the initial act of violence. What previously seemed wholly unjustifiable is revealed, through my enactment, to be sometimes justifiable—since I, a presumed innocent, sometimes justify it.

Third, it is unclear whether the bystander helped further the cause of justice. Those I (hypothetically) destroyed in retaliation will now have left behind new righteous victims. Because monstrous or not, the perpetrators were persons and not really monsters. Short of establishing them as an absolutely hostile alien life form, it is unlikely that their monstrosity was so pervasive that they had no innocents attached to them. Those innocents have now been subjected, as we were, to radical violence they did nothing to deserve. Through chance, they were connected to wrongful others. And even if we pin blame on the guilty they’re attached to, it is far from clear that towards them, we are blameless. Mustn’t we now help them enact their revenge too?

Fourth, I wonder whether the bystander, not blinded by my vengeful passion, might not have thought of better means of assistance with their cooler head. Were they unable to console me, help me rebuild, pursue justice without succumbing to vengefulness, or ostracize the perpetrators? Were they equally furious? Misled by their good will? Or worse, only willing to offer this type of assistance?

And finally, I wonder whether their assistance has served humanity. From the standpoint of the future, we are now all more morally burdened. By violence done to us, violence we succumbed to in return, and violence that even undermined the bystander’s innocence, now party to this tragic conflict. All this without acknowledging the murkiness of who is right and wrong, the possibilities of elongation, escalation, failure, and mutual destruction.

More can be said by way of clarification, in favor, and against. But I cannot hope to offer a full defense here. Instead, I hope that you can now at least partly share in my puzzlement as to how our modern world, with its intellectual and international institutions built to foster pacifistic relations, has failed to think of more effective and moral roles for bystanders. How the harsh ordeal faced by those living through war on every side is marginalized in favor of a discourse largely focused on a group of privileged men, ‘leaders,’ largely insulated from the wars they help create and collectively invest in as they continue to build an inhuman “order from which no one can keep his distance.”

The Current Events in Public Philosophy series of the APA Blog aims to share philosophical insights about current topics of today. If you would like to contribute to this series, email RichardBGibson@hotmail.com.

Rami El Ali

Rami Ali works on the philosophy of perception, technology, and phenomenology. He is currently pursuing a second PhD on virtual reality at the University of Arizona. He was previously associate professor and head of the philosophy program at the Lebanese American University, and a graduate from the University of Miami.