大象传媒

Good morning. I recently bought a Victorian army officer鈥檚 sword, which is surely not everyone鈥檚 sort of impulse-buy 鈥� but as someone who teaches Victorian literature, I was pleased to own such a vivid artifact from the period. I was unprepared, though, for how moving I鈥檇 find it. Drawn from its brass scabbard, you can see its battle scars, and I can鈥檛 stop wondering about the young man who once wielded it: what desperate fear he must have felt, and perhaps inspired.

Ancient Greek philosophers made a distinction between warriors who fought close-up and those who fought from far away. Hand-to-hand combat was honourable; archers were regarded with suspicion, as comparatively cowardly. The latest news from Ukraine and Russia tells of how missiles and drones can wreak hell from hundreds of miles away. Without getting into strategic justifications for such weapons, their sheer range itself gave me pause for thought.

Battling with a sword means looking into the whites of your enemies鈥� eyes. That must be horrible thing, precisely because it鈥檚 a human thing 鈥� whereas modern technology risks reducing warfare into a video game. Firing weapons from a great distance shields combatants physically and to some extent psychologically; but there may be an unexpected cost to pay too.

The true soldier fights, according to G. K. Chesterton, not because he hates what鈥檚 in front of him, but because he loves what鈥檚 behind him. It鈥檚 a profound thought. The message of the Gospels is, however, even more provocative. It asks Christians to love not only their own but also their enemies. This challenge is immense 鈥� but it becomes effectively impossible when our enemies are mere blips on a computer screen, and so no longer legible as human beings in the first place.

I don鈥檛 have any solutions for how to make modern warfare less dehumanising. But perhaps, having identified this problem in the extreme case of war, the same problem might at least be addressed in the lower-stakes environment of our everyday lives. It鈥檚 not to trivialise the horrors of war to note that, as technology reduces human encounters on the battlefield, so our peacetime encounters increasingly operate within a virtual, inhuman space too: from email to social media. It鈥檚 salutary to think how far we, who are not in mortal danger, might break cover from those technologies that hide us from each other 鈥� especially when it comes to broaching difficult issues.

Dostoevsky once remarked that 鈥淭o love someone means to see them as God intended them鈥�. But first, presumably, we must be able to see them at all. If we must fight things out, whether with people we know or with those we鈥檝e never met 鈥� and sometimes we surely must 鈥� there may be a Christian as well as ancient Greek virtue in doing so while looking into the whites of each other鈥檚 eyes.

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