Bombs, Bookstalls, and the Folly of War’s Grand Designers

Among the many images that reach me from your age, one seems to me more instructive than the rest: firefighters picking through the ruins of a book market struck by a missile, the wares of the stall-keeper scattered and charred in the street. We are told of drones in their hundreds and missiles in their dozens, of at least six killed in one country and at least five in the other, of civilians buried in rubble and wounded in their homes. States call these acts defence, retaliation, or necessity; the impartial spectator, if he could stand amidst the fallen books, would struggle to distinguish them from plain destruction.

In The Wealth of Nations I observed that the real opulence of a country consists, not in the splendour of its rulers, but in the annual produce of the land and labour consumed by its people. A book market in a great city, a vinyl shopkeeper lamenting a stock turned to ashes, a warehouse of household goods in flames near a distant capital: these are humble instances of that produce. They are also points in a vast web of contracts, expectations, and mutual dependence, which drones and missiles sever with a swiftness no legislature would dare propose in time of peace.

The division of labour, on which I once bestowed so much attention in the example of the pin factory, is here reversed by the division of hatred. The extent of the market is narrowed not only by wrecked buildings and interrupted roads, but by fear: who will lay in great stocks if depots are targets; who will crowd a market if it may be struck from the sky? Each attack that collapses a roof also collapses a thousand small specialisations—printers, truck drivers, warehouse clerks, the sellers of tea and food that surround any bustling mart. The natural progress of opulence is slow and cumulative; the progress of devastation is sudden and contagious.

Yet I never denied the state its first duty, that of defence, nor its second, the administration of justice. The question, then, is not whether a nation assailed may resist, but whether the manner of that resistance can be justified before the impartial spectator. To rain death upon the ordinary inhabitants of a rival city, or to strike at markets and warehouses far from any immediate field of battle, is to punish those very labouring poor whose innocent industry constitutes the wealth of both nations. When defence is pursued by methods that would shock us in private life, we should be wary of the convenient maxims by which they are excused in public.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I endeavoured to show how easily ambition deceives itself. Men overrate the charms of power and dominion, and will purchase them at the expense of sleepless nights, anxious days, and, it seems, burning cities. Your drones and missiles obey the same old passions under new names. Each government supposes that a somewhat larger, somewhat more terrible blow will compel submission, restore honour, or improve its bargaining in some future congress. But self-interest so understood is not the calm pursuit of subsistence and betterment; it is that restless desire to command and to be admired which so often purchases a kingdom’s misery to adorn a minister’s reputation.

The economic reckoning of these hostilities is more silent, but no less real, than the toll of the dead. A depot of merchandise burned may serve some military design, or it may merely demonstrate that war has been brought ‘home to the public,’ as your reports phrase it. In either case, the cost is not borne by those who choose the targets, but diffused among consumers who face higher prices and fewer options, and among workers who find their employment vanished in smoke. Benefits, if there be any, are concentrated and loudly proclaimed; the losses are dispersed and inarticulate, paid in dearer goods, lost wages, and the quiet despair of ruined small dealers.

I have often warned against the man of system, who imagines he can arrange the different members of a great society as one arranges pieces upon a chess-board. In war, this presumption attains its most dreadful form. Planners of aerial campaigns conceive that by striking here a power plant, there a warehouse, elsewhere a market, they will bend millions of independent minds to their chosen conclusion. They forget that every piece on the great chess-board of human society moves by its own principle, that hatred is as likely to be inflamed as courage to be broken, and that the habits of peaceful trade, once uprooted, are not replanted in a season. To sacrifice the daily security of ordinary buyers and sellers to such hazardous calculations is not statesmanship but a refined species of gambling with other people’s lives.

If there is any wisdom your age might yet distil from these ruins, it is that the prosperity and safety of nations rest less upon the terror they can inflict at a distance than upon the confidence with which their people may buy, sell, read, work, and sleep without fearing the sky. The impartial spectator within each of us, if we allow him to speak, is far more moved by the stall-keeper sifting his husband’s books from the dust than by any boast of drones intercepted or warehouses destroyed. When policy treats such lives as expendable counters in a larger game, it confesses a failure both of prudence and of humanity.