The Hegemony of the “Cause”

There is something inherently flawed about the notion of placing a cause, however just and noble, before human life. The injunction “thou shalt not kill” was regarded as the highest ethical breakthrough of humanity. As the concept developed further, the protection of human lives formed the mainspring of the state and the community. For Plato, the state originates in human necessity and there could be no other grounds for its origin other than to secure and safeguard the life of its inhabitants. Aristotle increased the remit of the state by inclusion of welfare function of securing not just life but a “good” one at that. Any concept is bound to go through several transmutations. This is indeed desirable as long as the essential principle is not lost. But the practice of centuries has shown the steady devaluation of human lives when it is placed against the driving cause of a group or a state. This has taken place at two levels: the first is at the level of the state where victory in war mattered over the lives of the soldiers and sometimes even citizens; and, the second is at the level of the non-state actors, for whom the realisation of their goals meant an inevitable sacrifice of human lives, especially when the enemy was a more powerful group or the state.

The most odious manifestation of this tendency has been the use of human shields by groups, who consider themselves to be fighting for a higher cause against what they perceive to be an oppressive enemy. In Darfur, the militia led by the Janjaweed faction as well as the splintered groups in their fight amongst one another and against the government have often resorted to this. Militants in Israel and Palestine, in Kashmir and other zones of insurgency and terrorism consider the systematic and deliberate targeting of civilians of the enemy zone to be an essential tactic of combat. But to save their own skins, they use their own community people as armour. To justify this, another deviation takes place from the original principle of equal value of all human lives. Now human life gets graded differently where the life of the enemy group is not worth much, the life of one’s own group is worth more but the highest value is placed on the self-appointed guardians of the “cause”, which brings together, defines and strengthens the group. Thus, the pro-Taliban clerics holed up in Lal Masjid in Islamabad found nothing wrong in using women and children as human shields against the Pakistani troops. The same is true for states who view the loss of lives of their citizens due to armed conflict or terrorism as being more significant than those of human casualties of other states.

So what is the implication of all this? Does it mean that the “cause” supplants the citizens’ life and welfare as the basis of state/group action? Does not a cause originate within the space of collective grievance/interest? But recent acts of violence have infused the cause with a life of its own, where its fulfilment gains primacy over the lives of the people it seeks to represent. Such causes, in many cases, have ardent loyalists across national boundaries. This has the potential to shake the Westphalian construct of the territory-bound state and forms the essential plank on which one can build a trans-national realm that operates mostly on the cultural and intellectual planes. The more worrisome consequence is the undermining of human life.

The twentieth century was crowned as the century that gave legal form to the universal concern for human rights and made the life of an individual sacrosanct. But a regressive drift took place with the recrudescence of many sub-national groups who followed the Machiavellian dictum of the end justifying the means. They derived the legitimacy of their acts from their cause even if it violated the basic canons of human rights. For instance, those engaged in terrorism absolved themselves of any wrongdoing by stating that their goal sanctioned such behaviour. When states used the same reasoning in carrying out “just wars”, the loss in terms of human lives was much more, for example, the USA waging its war against terrorism where more civilians died than terrorists. The shift from jus ad bellum, where force was legitimately used to correct a grave wrong or redress the basic human rights of populations to an arbitrary use of the meaning of a ‘just war’ guided by a ‘just cause’ has resulted in both the states and non-state actors (this needs a reformulation of the conventional perception of war as being waged between two states) flouting the rules of war, especially the rule that prohibits the targeting of non-combatants.

The just cause principle blends in with the Realist proposition of state security and interest being of prime importance, even if it meant identifying and killing those considered as threats within the state or without. The extreme form of this is when the state itself is viewed as the ‘cause’, for instance, the Hegelian state, which was considered a “perfected rationality”, an absolute end in itself. This allowed for its distorted interpretations by the Nazis and the Fascists. At present, many non-state actors have started playing important roles in international politics. They, too, have the potential to cause great harm to human lives and rights with ‘just cause’ formulations that are not bound by regulations or concern for human lives.

This does not mean that espousing a cause will always lead to such dangers. Men need to be motivated by an ideal to develop and progress. This is only a precaution against making any cause absolute and beyond the pale of criticism. For the state, as the Contractualists had stated, the security of its citizens has to be the determining criteria of state policies. It cannot be the other way round. Further, it cannot undermine the lives of citizens of other states for its own interest or protection. The Sophists had placed the human being as the centre of all thought and action and felt that no cause could be seen as the command of God or an expression of the principle of justice or of representing the “general will”, both of which are abstract terms. For the non-state actors, sacrificing human lives for the sake of a higher cause is a tendentious proposition. There is no cause higher than human life.