The Immorality of Abstraction

Perhaps the most famous photograph from the Vietnam War captures a naked girl, her arms outstretched and her face contorted in terror, running toward the camera. We understand immediately that she is also running away from a scene of devastation and destruction. Her face reveals what is hidden by the smoke in the background.

Over fifty years later, that image remains powerful enough to bring home the reality of the Vietnam War to people who were not even born when the last American troops were airlifted from the country. It has become for many a symbol of the United States’ misbegotten intervention in a conflict that was not ours to fight, and never should have been.

In February 2026, at the very beginning of the Trump administration’s undeclared but nonetheless real war on Iran, about one hundred and twenty students (and thirty or more adults) were killed when their elementary school in Minab was destroyed by American missiles. The site had been deliberately targeted, though the deaths were apparently not intended: Fed outdated intelligence that identified the building as a military installation, an AI-assisted targeting system (reports claim) failed to flag outdated imagery and inconsistencies in the intelligence. Relying on the “judgment” of the system and failing to consult the single “civilian harm mitigation” expert still employed by Central Command after massive reductions in the mitigation program by the Trump administration, military officials approved the strike.

In times past, the collective shock of the American public at this mass destruction of schoolchildren might have forced a different administration to acknowledge the error, remove those responsible, and suspend the use of AI systems to identify military targets, even as the war continued. Instead, public opinion was divided, and the Trump administration denied responsibility for the attack, rejected a September UN report detailing the destruction and deaths, and, as of this writing, has not released a report on its own investigation, announced any disciplinary action against those who approved the strike, or made any known changes in its use of AI targeting systems.

Despite the mounting evidence of U.S. responsibility, the American public has moved on, apparently accepting that such deaths are the inevitable result of the way we wage war today — and, more importantly, accepting that the way we wage war today is itself unavoidable.

While I have publicly opposed the war on Iran from its inception, I mention the deaths of the Iranian schoolchildren not to single out the Trump administration’s actions^[1] but because these deaths are the most recent example of a reality that has extended across the wars and military interventions waged by every U.S. administration for decades. The record of civilian casualties in the Clinton administration’s bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo, the George W. Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Obama administration’s drone attacks in Yemen and Somalia (to name only a few) is just as grim — and the public’s easy acceptance of such deaths in each case has been just as unsettling.

“It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it,” Robert E. Lee declared as he surveyed the devastation at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. As one of the Confederacy’s greatest victories unfolded, the massive casualties — not of civilians, but of soldiers on both sides — weighed heavily on Lee. The sight of thousands of men who had been maimed or killed did not allow him to abstract the coming victory from the human cost of the battle.

Today, the relationship to war of most Americans — up to and including Lee’s modern-day counterparts in command and the elected and appointed officials who direct the U.S. military — is entirely abstract. With the exception of those who have sons and daughters serving in combat zones, Americans now are more likely to view war in terms similar to a video game — in large part because that is the way U.S. military action has been presented to them by the government and the media since the initial “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq in 2003 (and in some ways since the Gulf War in 1991). Flesh-and-blood civilians have become, in effect, NPCs (non-player characters). While the death of civilian NPCs is never the objective in a video game, players never mourn their loss.

Yet every one of those civilians whose deaths are lumped under the barely euphemistic phrase collateral damage is a real person who has a name and a history and a family and friends. What she no longer has is a future on this earth.

In “Against Killing Children,” the first essay in Wendell Berry’s posthumously published Dispatches from Rural America (Counterpoint, 2026), Mr. Berry quotes from a forty-plus-year-old essay by George Kennan, the chief architect of the Cold War policy of containment. In “A Christian’s View of the Arms Race,” Kennan, who over the decades had become a critic of U.S. foreign policy, wrote: “Victory, as the consequences of recent wars have taught us, is ephemeral, but the killing of even one innocent child is an irremediable fact, the reality of which can never be eradicated.”

“Kennan,” Mr. Berry writes,

could have told us, as we have been told many times, that a nuclear bombing of a large city would kill thousands of children, and we would read right on. When he asks us to consider the killing of one innocent child, we stop, and we imagine what would be the absolute finality of the death of a child we love; we imagine unending sorrow.

Why does the death of one child strike us as a terrible reality, while the death of thousands leaves us unmoved? “It is important,” Mr. Berry writes, “that a society addicted to statistics, as ours is, should realize that the human imagination, and therefore human sympathy, does not respond to large numbers.” In imagining the death of a single child, we make that loss real to ourselves in a way that the death of one hundred and twenty schoolchildren never could be. And as soon as we make it real, we remove it from the realm of abstraction.

Kennan’s essay appeared in his book The Nuclear Delusion (1982), but, despite the title of the volume, Mr. Berry notes that Kennan “saw too that the ‘conventional’ technology of modern war, like the nuclear bomb, was incapable of distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants, and therefore that ‘war itself ... will have to be in some way ruled out.’” Kennan anticipated by over twenty years Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s statement in a May 2003 interview that “given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war.’”

It is in this context, I would argue, that we should understand a passage in Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas that has stirred some controversy because of the way in which the Holy Father phrased it:

Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the “just war” theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. ... The use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.

In a footnote, Pope Leo refers to a passage in Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli Tutti (2020):

In recent decades, every single war has been ostensibly “justified.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the possibility of legitimate defense by means of military force, which involves demonstrating that certain “rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy” have been met. Yet it is easy to fall into an overly broad interpretation of this potential right. In this way, some would also wrongly justify even “preventive” attacks or acts of war that can hardly avoid entailing “evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”

Cardinal Ratzinger warned of this as well in 2003, when the George W. Bush administration sent Michael Novak to the Vatican to try to persuade the Holy See to revise the 1,500-year-old conditions for jus ad bellum so that the Iraq War could be pitched as “just.” The “concept of a ‘preventive war,’” Cardinal Ratzinger noted, “does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

St. Thomas More was the first to write that it is all too easy to miss the forest for the trees, but five hundred years later, Kennan and Berry and three consecutive popes have each, in their own way, reminded us that the trees matter, too. Indeed, there is no forest without the trees, just as there is no “Iranian people” that can be abstracted from, and targeted separately from, this schoolgirl here, that nurse over there, and that dissident who has been working for years to change the regime that President Trump has held up, time and again, as an excuse for threatening to destroy an “entire civilization” composed of dissidents and nurses and schoolgirls and millions of other people who have names and histories and families and friends.

“Humanity,” Pope Leo writes in Magnifica Humanitas, “possesses far more effective and capable tools [than war] for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.” Pete Hegseth would undoubtedly dismiss such words as “woke,” and far too many Americans would agree, because our imaginations have been weaponized by first-person shooter video games and action movies in which the “hero” racks up a body count of hundreds of people without a hint of remorse and 24/7 “news” that is more propaganda and polemic than journalism.

The weaponization of our imagination has consequences at home as well. Mr. Berry draws a connection between the abstraction that has made Americans all too fond of war and all too easily accepting of the unnecessary deaths of Iranian schoolchildren and the sense of resignation and inevitability that too many of us experience when we hear of the latest school shooting somewhere in the United States:

We have assumed, evidently, that we can commit or tolerate so great a depreciation of life and of human life and of the lives of anybody’s children at no cost to ourselves. But how do we preserve against the force and effect of that nothing the wholeness of our hearts? How do we keep it from reducing our valuation of our own children?

When we abstract the forest from the trees, and treat the abstraction as more important than the reality, we — intentionally or unintentionally — absolve ourselves of any moral responsibility for the actions we take based on our abstraction. Think of the conspiracy theories about “crisis actors” that Alex Jones promoted, and far too many people believed, after Adam Lanza’s massacre of twenty first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. To Jones and those who gave his theories a hearing, those twenty-six lives were not even as real as the Iranian schoolchildren killed by American missiles.

Or think of Edgar Maddison Welch, whose name you have probably never even heard, who became so obsessed with “Pizzagate” that he drove hundreds of miles to Washington, D.C., to attempt to free nonexistent child sex slaves from the basement of a pizza parlor that had no basement. He was sentenced to four years in federal prison, during which his two very real children were deprived of their father’s presence.

Pope Leo’s use of the word outdated is not, I think, the best way of expressing what he had in mind regarding just-war theory and the use of force today. But it is clearly true that the world in which just-war principles were developed and more or less successfully applied for fifteen hundred years no longer exists, because technology and industrialism have increased our capacity to kill large numbers of people very far away at no physical risk to ourselves.

“No physical risk,” however, is not the same as “no risk.” The moral risk, the spiritual risk, of waging war in this way is far greater than ever before. With every civilian life lost that we dismiss as “collateral damage,” our moral sense becomes more attenuated, to the point where our own spiritual lives hang in the balance.

Just-war theory has never only been about safeguarding the physical lives of those against whom war is being waged. It is just as much, and perhaps even more, about protecting the spiritual lives of those who wage war. If just-war theory is in any way “outdated,” the remedy lies not in abandoning it altogether but in infusing it with a healthy dose of the moral imagination, so that those who wage war and the people who support them can still comprehend “the absolute finality of the death of a child we love” and the “unending sorrow” experienced by the parents of a child whose life was taken in the name of an ephemeral victory. Only such a remedy can reawaken our sense of moral responsibility and break us out of the complacency, resignation, and immorality bred by abstraction.

Earlier installments

Walking with Wendell Berry

Continuing the great conversation

The CountermarchScott P. Richert