-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Blood Rites - Origins & History of the Passions of War
Barbara Ehrenreich(C)1997
Metropolitan Books
Hennry Holt & Companty
ISBN 0-8050-5077-9
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Well-written and thoughtful; when all is said and done, the veneer between
passions, expectations, propaganda and thought can be very thin.
Om
K
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So elemental is the human need to endow the
shedding of blood with some great and even
sublime significance that it renders the intellect
almost entirely helpless(1)
--MARTIN VAN CREVELD
1
THE ECSTASY
OF WAR
Different wars have led to different theories of why men fight them. The
Napoleonic Wars, which bore along with them the rationalist spirit of the
French Revolution, inspired the Prussian officer Carl von Clausewitz to
propose that war itself is an entirely rational undertaking, unsullied by
human emotion. War, in his famous aphorism, is merely a "continuation of
policy . . . by other means," with policy itself supposedly resulting from the
same kind of clearheaded deliberation one might apply to a game of chess.
Nation-states were the leading actors on the stage of history, and war was
simply one of the many ways they advanced their interests against those of
other nation-states. If you could accept the existence of this new super-
person, the nation, a battle was no more disturbing and irrational than, say,
a difficult trade negotiation--except perhaps to those who lay dying on the
battlefield.
World War I, coming a century after Napoleon's sweep through Europe and
northern Africa, led to an opposite assessment of the human impulse to war.
World War I was hard to construe as in any way "rational," especially to that
generation of European intellectuals, including Sigmund Freud, who survived to
ponder the unprecedented harvest of dead bodies. History textbooks tell us
that the "Great War" grew out of the conflict between "competing imperialist
states," but this Clausewitzian interpretation has little to do with the
actual series of accidents, blunders, and miscommunications that impelled the
nations of Europe to war in the summer of 1914.(2) At first swept up in the
excitement of the war, unable for weeks to work or think of anything else,
Freud was eventually led to conclude that there is some dark flaw in the human
psyche, a perverse desire to destroy, countering Eros and the will to live.(3)
So these are, in crude summary, the theories of war which modern wars have
left us with: That war is a means, however risky, by which men seek to advance
their collective interests and improve their lives. Or, alternatively, that
war stems from subrational drives not unlike those that lead individuals to
commit violent crimes. In our own time, most people seem to hold both views at
once, avowing that war is a gainful enterprise, intended to meet the material
needs of the groups engaged in it, and, at the same time, that it fulfills
deep and "irrational" psychological needs. There is no question about the
first part of this proposition--that wars are designed, at least ostensibly,
to secure necessaries like land or oil or "geopolitical advantage." The
mystery lies in the peculiar psychological grip war exerts on us.
In the 1960s and '70s, the debate on the psychology of war centered on the
notion of an "aggressive instinct," peculiar to all humans or only to human
males. This is not the place to summarize that debate, with its endless
examples of animal behavior and clashes over their applicability to human
affairs. Here I would simply point out that, whether or not there is an
aggressive instinct, there are reasons to reject it as the major wellspring of
war.
Although it is true that aggressive impulses, up to and including murderous
rage, can easily take over in the heat of actual battle, even this statement
must be qualified to take account of different weaponry and modes of fighting.
Hand-to-hand combat may indeed call forth and even require the emotions of
rage and aggression, if only to mobilize the body for bursts of muscular
activity. In the case of action-at-a-distance weapons, however, like guns and
bows and arrows, emotionality of any sort can be a distinct disadvantage.
Coolness, and the ability to keep aiming and firing steadfastly in the face of
enemy fire, prevails. Hence, according to the distinguished American military
historian Robert L. O'Connell, the change in the ideal warrior personality
wrought by the advent of guns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from
"ferocious aggressiveness" to "passive disdain."(4) So there is no personality
type--"hot-tempered," "macho," or whatever--consistently and universally
associated with warfare.
Furthermore, fighting itself is only one component of the enterprise we know
as war. Wars are not barroom brawls writ large, or domestic violence that has
been somehow extended to strangers. In war, fighting takes place within
battles--along with much anxious waiting, of course--but wars do not begin
with battles and are often not decided by them either. Most of war consists of
preparation for battle-- training, the organization of supplies, marching and
other forms of transport--activities which are hard to account for by innate
promptings of any kind. There is no plausible instinct, for example, that
impels a man to leave his home, cut his hair short, and drill for hours in
tight formation. As anthropologists Clifton B. Kroeber and Bernard L. Fontana
point out, "It is a large step from what may be biologically innate leanings
toward individual aggression to ritualized, socially sanctioned,
institutionalized group warfare."(5)
War, in other words, is too complex and collective an activity to he accounted
for by a single warlike instinct lurking within the individual psyche.
Instinct may, or may not, inspire a man to bayonet the first enemy he
encounters in battle. But instinct does not mobilize supply lines, manufacture
rifles, issue uniforms, or move an army of thousands from point A on the map
to B. These are "complicated, orchestrated, highly organized" activities, as
social theorist Robin Fox writes, undertaken not by individuals but by
entities on the scale of nations and dynasties.(6) "The hypothesis of a killer
instinct," according to a commentator summarizing a recent conference on the
anthropology of war, is "not so much wrong as irrelevant. (7)
In fact, throughout history, individual men have gone to near-suicidal lengths
to avoid participating in wars--a fact that proponents of a warlike instinct
tend to slight. Men have fled their homelands, served lengthy prison terms,
hacked off limbs, shot off feet or index fingers, feigned illness or insanity,
or, if they could afford to, paid surrogates to fight in their stead. "Some
draw their teeth, some blind themselves, and others maim themselves, on their
way to us," the governor of Egypt complained of his peasant recruits in the
early nineteenth century.(8) So unreliable was the rank and file of the
eighteenth-century Prussian army that military manuals forbade camping near a
woods or forest: The troops would simply melt away into the trees.(9)
Proponents of a warlike instinct must also reckon with the fact that even when
men have been assembled, willingly or unwillingly, for the purpose of war,
fighting is not something that seems to come "naturally" to them. In fact,
surprisingly, even in the thick of battle, few men can bring themselves to
shoot directly at individual enemies.(10) The difference between an ordinary
man or boy and a reliable killer, as any drill sergeant could attest, is
profound. A transformation is required: The man or boy leaves his former self
behind and becomes something entirely different, perhaps even taking a new
name. In small-scale, traditional societies, the change was usually
accomplished through ritual drumming, dancing, fasting, and sexual
abstinence--all of which serve to lift a man out of his mundane existence and
into a new, warriorlike mode of being, denoted by special body paint, masks,
and headdresses.
As if to emphasize the discontinuity between the warrior and the ordinary
human being, many cultures require the would-be fighting
man to leave his human-ness behind and assume a new form as an animal.(11) The
young Scandinavian had to become a bear before he could become an elite
warrior, going "berserk" (the word means "dressed in a bear hide"), biting and
chasing people. The Irish hero Cuchulain transformed himself into a monster in
preparation for battle: "He became horrible, many-shaped, strange and
unrecognizable," with one eye sucked into his skull and the other popping out
of the side of the face.(12) Apparently this transformation was a familiar and
meaningful one, because similarly distorted faces turn up frequently in Celtic
art.
Often the transformation is helped along with drugs or social pressure of
various kinds. Tahitian warriors were browbeaten into fighting by
functionaries called Rauti, or "exhorters," who ran around the battlefield
urging their comrades to mimic "the devouring wild dog."(13) The ancient Greek
hoplites drank enough wine, apparently, to be quite tipsy when they went into
battle;(14) Aztecs drank pulque; Chinese troops at the time of Sun Tzu got
into the mood by drinking wine and watching "gyrating sword dancers"
perform.(15) Almost any drug or intoxicant has served, in one setting or
another, to facilitate the transformation of man into warrior. Yanomamo
Indians of the Amazon ingest a hallucinogen before battle; the ancient
Scythians smoked hemp, while a neighboring tribe drank something called
"hauma," which is believed to have induced a frenzy of aggression.(16) So if
there is a destructive instinct that impels men to war, it is a weak one, and
often requires a great deal of help.
In seventeenth-century Europe, the transformation of man into soldier took on
a new form, more concerted and disciplined, and far less pleasant, than wine.
New recruits and even seasoned veterans were endlessly drilled, hour after
hour, until each man began to feel himself part of a single, giant fighting
machine. The drill was only partially inspired by the technology of firearms.
It's easy enough to teach a man to shoot a gun; the problem is to make him
willing to get into situations where guns are being shot and to remain there
long enough to do some shooting of his own. So modern military training aims
at a transformation parallel to that achieved by "primitives" with war drums
and paint: In the fanatical routines of boot camp, a man leaves behind his
former identity and is reborn as a creature of the military--an automaton and
also, ideally, a willing killer of other men.
This is not to suggest that killing is foreign to human nature or, more
narrowly, to the male personality. Men (and women) have again and again proved
themselves capable of killing impulsively and with gusto. But there is a huge
difference between a war and an ordinary fight. War not only departs from the
normal; it inverts all that is moral and right: In war one should kill, should
steal, should burn cities and farms, should perhaps even rape matrons and
little girls. Whether or not such activities are "natural" or at some level
instinctual, most men undertake them only by entering what appears to be an
"altered state"--induced by drugs or lengthy drilling, and denoted by face
paint or khakis.
The point of such transformative rituals is not only to put men "in the mood."
Returning warriors may go through equally challenging rituals before they can
celebrate victory or reenter the community-- covering their heads in apparent
shame, for example; vomiting repeatedly; abstaining from sex.(17) Among the
Maori, returning warriors could not participate in the victory celebration
until they had gone through a whaka-hoa ritual, designed to make them "common"
again: The hearts of slain enemies were roasted, after which offerings were
made to the war god Tu, and the rest was eaten by priests, who shouted spells
to remove "the blood curse" and enable warriors to reenter their ordinary
lives.(18) Among the Taulipang Indians of South America, victorious warriors
"sat on ants, flogged one another with whips, and passed a cord covered with
poisonous ants, through their mouth and nose."(19) Such painful and shocking
postwar rites impress on the warrior that war is much more than a
"continuation of policy . . . by other means." In war men enter an alternative
realm of human experience, as far removed from daily life as those things
which we call "sacred."
The Religion of war
Not only warriors are privileged to undergo the profound psychological
transformation that separates peace from war. Whole societies may be swept up
into a kind of "altered state" marked by emotional intensity and a fixation on
totems representative of the collectivity: sacred images, implements, or, in
our own time, yellow ribbons and flags. The onset of World War I, for example,
inspired a veritable frenzy of enthusiasm among noncombatants and potential
recruits alike, and it was not an enthusiasm for killing or loot or
"imperialist expansion" but for something far more uplifting and worthy.
In Britain, the public had been overwhelmingly opposed to involvement until
the moment war was declared, at which time screaming crowds poured into the
streets and surrounded Buckingham Palace for days. In Berlin, the crowds
poured out "as though a human river had burst its banks and flooded the
world."(20) In St. Petersburg a mob burned the furnishings of the German
embassy while women ripped off their dresses and offered them to soldiers in
the middle of a public square (21) When the United States entered the war, on
April 6, 1917, the audience at the New York Metropolitan Opera House stood up
and greeted the announcement with "loud and long cheers."(22)
Hardly anyone managed to maintain their composure in the face of the oncoming
hostilities. Rainer Maria Rilke was moved to write a series of poems extolling
war; Anatole France offered to enlist at age seventy; Isadora Duncan recalled
being "all flame and fire" over the war. Socialists rallied to their various
nations' flags, abandoning the "international working class" overnight. Many
feminists, such as England's Isabella Pankhurst, set the struggle for suffrage
aside for an equally militant jingoism, and contented themselves with
organizing women to support the war effort. "The war is so horribly exciting
but I cannot live on it," one British suffragette wrote. "It is like being
drunk all day. (23) Even pacifists like the German novelist Stefan Zweig felt
a temptation to put aside their scruples and join the great "awakening of the
masses" prompted by war.(24) In India, young Gandhi recruited his countrymen
to join the British army; even Freud, as mentioned above, briefly lost
perspective, "giving all his libido to Austria-Hungary."(25)
But Freud failed to reflect on his own enthusiasm; otherwise he would never
have hypothesized that men are driven to war by some cruel and murderous
instinct. The emotions that overwhelmed Europe in 1914 had little to do with
rage or hatred or greed. Rather, they were among the "noblest" feelings humans
are fortunate enough to experience: feelings of generosity, community, and
submergence in a great and worthy cause. There was little difference, in fact,
between the fervor that greeted the war and the emotional underpinnings of the
socialist movement, which promised land (or bread) and peace. As historian
Albert O. Hirschman has written:
[For] important sectors of the middle and upper classes . . . the war came as
a release from boredom and emptiness, as a promise of the longed-for community
that would transcend social class.(26)
Just after the war, the American psychologist G. E. Partridge observed that
the mood of war had been, above all--and despite the war's acknowledged
horrors--one of "ecstasy." Drawing on the work of early-twentieth-century
German psychologists, he enumerated, in a way that can now only seem quaint,
the various "ecstasies" associated with war: that of heroism, of "taking part
in great events," or of victory ("Siegestrunkenheit"); the "joy of overcoming
the pain of death"; and, summing up all the other ecstasies, the "social
intoxication, the feeling on the part of the individual of being a part of a
body and the sense of being lost in a greater whole (27) The thrill of being
part of a vast crowd, of abandoning ordinary responsibilities in order to run
out into the streets, of witnessing such "great events" as declarations of
war: This was "ecstasy" enough for the millions who would never see actual
combat.
It was the sense of self-loss, Partridge opined, of merger into some "greater
whole," which showed that war was an attempt to meet the same psychological
needs otherwise fulfilled by "love, religion, intoxication, art."(28) A
historian of our own time, Roland -Stromberg, would agree, writing of the men
who volunteered to fight in World War I:
Doubtless they found hell, but they did not go seeking it;
rather than an itch to kill, hurt, or torture their fellow men,
as Freud claimed, they felt something much more akin to
love.(29)
The mass feelings inspired by war, many noted right after World War I, are
eerily similar to those normally aroused by religion. Arnold J. Toynbee, the
British historian, had been caught up in World War I like most of his peers,
and produced several volumes of "atrocity propaganda" as his contribution to
the war effort.(30) Later, repenting for that brief burst of militarism, he
argued that war had in fact become a religion, moving in to fill the gap left
as the traditional forms of worship lost their power over people. "Man," he
wrote, requires "spiritual sustenance," and if man was now less inclined to
find it in a church, he would find it in the secular state and express it as a
militant nationalism in which "the glorification of War [is] a fundamental
article of faith."(31)
To say that war may be, in an emotional sense, a close relative of religion is
not to pass moral judgment on either of these ancient institutions. We are
dealing with a very basic level of human emotional experience, which can be
approached just as well at, say, a labor rally as at a nationalist gathering
or a huge outdoor mass. Coming together in a large crowd united by some common
purpose, people feel a surge of collective strength, and they may project this
sense of power onto God, the Nation, or the People. El pueblo unido, goes the
left-wing chant, jamas sera vencido (The people united cannot be defeated). As
the nineteenth-century theorist of crowd psychology, Gustave Le Bon, observed,
somewhat haughtily:
In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are
freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness,
and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary
but immense strength.(32)
Individually we are weak, but with God, or through "the fatherland" or "the
working class," we become something larger than ourselves-- something
indomitable and strong. Even those of us who will never experience battle, or
for that matter, God, can know the thrill of being swept along with a huge and
purposeful crowd.
This is one of humankind's great natural "highs," and is, perhaps
paradoxically, as likely to be experienced at an anti-war demonstration as at
a pro-war rally. But it is a high that can be most reliably experienced in
contemplation of an enemy--the "Viet Cong" or, for that matter, the military-
industrial complex--which both excites our adrenaline and serves to unite us.
All "minor" differences (as, for example, of class) disappear when compared to
the vast differences (construed as moral, cultural, and sometimes racial) that
supposedly separate us from the "jerries," the Communists, the Arabs, or the
Jews.
Through the mass rally or the spontaneous gathering in the streets, large
numbers of people can experience something analogous to the transformation
that makes a man into a warrior. Just as the ancient warrior fasted, took
drugs, danced all night, and even became a monster, the crowd, too, leaves
mundane things behind and transmutes itself into a new kind of being, larger
than the sum of its parts, more powerful than any single individual. Consider
the British psychologist Roger E. Money-Kyrle's eyewitness description of a
Hitler rally:
The people seemed gradually to lose their individuality
and become fused into a not very intelligent but immensely
powerful monster, which was not quite sane and therefore
capable of anything. Moreover, it was an elementary monster
. . . with no judgment and few, but very violent, passions....
[W]e heard for ten minutes about the growth of the Nazi Party,
and how from small beginnings it had now become an
overpowering force. The monster became self-conscious of
its size and intoxicated by the belief in its own omnipotence.(33)
But there is more to the "religion" of war than the thrill of the mass rally
or of the battle itself. In between wars, there are ample reminders of the
collective high induced by the threat or actuality of war. The tribal war
chieftain had his collection of skulls or similar trophies to contemplate in
times of peace; the ancient emperor had his stelae commemorating victories,
his temples to Mars or Minerva. In the modern European world, according to
historian George Mosse, war cemeteries and monuments serve as the "sacred
spaces of a new civil religion"(34)--lovingly tended and solemnly redecorated
year after year. The grave of the "unknown soldier" is an especially stirring
reminder of the moral transcendency of war: In war the individual may be
entirely obliterated for the higher cause, made nameless as well as dead. Yet
even in this abject condition, he, or at least some remnant of the "glory"
associated with his passing, lives on forever, symbolized by a perpetual
flame.
By the twentieth century, war, and the readiness for war which is so much a
part of nationalism, had become the force unifying states and offering
individuals a sense of transcendent purposefulness. Today, even in peacetime,
the religious side of war is everywhere manifest. No important state function
can go forward without the accompaniment of drumrolls and soldiers at
attention. The inauguration of presidents, the coronation of monarchs, the
celebration of national holidays--these events require everywhere the presence
of the soldier as a "ceremonial appurtenance."(35) Where there are no true
soldiers, exclusively ceremonial ones may be maintained: Even the
Vatican--which, one might imagine, needs no further embellishment with quasi-
religious pompery--has its Swiss Guard.
The word "sacrifice" summed up the religious passion of war for generations of
Europeans and Americans. In the rhetoric of religious militarism, killing the
enemy was almost an incidental outcome of war compared to making "the supreme
sacrifice" of one's own life. Dying in war was not a mishap inflicted on the
unfortunate, but the point, almost, of the whole undertaking. "Happiness," the
German poet Theodor Korner declared at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, "lies
only in sacrificial death."(36) Mosse has commented on the extensive
"cooptation of Christian symbolism and ritual to sanctify the life and death
of the soldier" in World War I.(37) The war was compared to the Last Supper,
the soldier's death to the martyrdom of Christ-- in, for example, postcards
showing angels hovering over handsome, contented-looking, and apparently
unwounded corpse.(38)
Not all Europeans, at all times, have seen war- as an occasion for a
beautiful, sacrificial death, of course, but the notion is a widespread one
and not only among urban, industrialized cultures. In his ground-breaking
study of "primitive" war, the American anthropologist Harry Turney-High
offered numerous examples of similar sacrificial fervor among tribal peoples.
He reports dryly that on Mangaia, for example, in Polynesia, [the] high-born,
noble Tiora did not shrink when informed by the war priests that their god
demanded his sacrificial death at the enemy's hands. He went against the foe
alone and they obligingly killed him, unaware that his immolation was intended
to accomplish their own defeat.(39)
Caesar reported that the Aquitanians had an elite society of fighters called
solidurii, or "bound-by-duty," who were sworn to share one another's deaths in
battle or else to kill themselves.(40) There were similar "no retreat"
societies among North American Indian tribes. A Crow could "vow his body to
the enemy," which meant he was prepared to die in an attack against hopeless
odds.(41)
Self-sacrifice is perhaps the least "rational" of all human undertakings.
Anthropologists may debate whether it is rational, in a self-serving sense, to
fight for land or women or to avenge some wrong. But there is no
straightforward biological calculation that could lead a man to kill himself,
like one of the solidurii, or to die--possibly unwed and childless, like the
Crow warrior--because he has sworn a vow.* [*The biologically "rational"
explanation for certain kinds of altruism is that it promotes the survival of
one's kin, and hence of genes that are similar to one's own. It could be
argued that this explanation applies to situations in which men die defending
their immediate clan or families (although the practice of exogamy has
guaranteed that even clans and families will be of varied genetic makeup). But
it is somewhat more of a stretch from a band or tribe of loosely related
individuals to the mass, genetically polyglot armies of both ancient and
modern states.] "At bottom, the reason why fighting can never be a question of
interest," the military theorist Martin van Creveld writes, "is--to put it
bluntly--that dead men have no interests (42)
A cynic might dismiss the religiosity of war as a mystification of its
mundane, ignoble aims, all the rhetoric of sacrifice" and "glory" serving only
to delude and perhaps intoxicate otherwise unwilling participants. At some
level, the cynic would be right: The results of war--the burned villages,
bombed cities, sobbing orphans and captives--are the same whether the war was
undertaken in the noble spirit of self-sacrifice or was driven by less worthy
motives, like vengeance or greed. Thus most scholars have no doubt felt
themselves justified in slighting the high-flown rhetoric and rituals of war
to concentrate on its technology and impact. Of all the volumes on war listed
in the bibliography of this book, only a half-dozen at most concern themselves
directly with the passions that have made war, to so many of its participants,
a profoundly religious undertaking.(43)
But there are at least two reasons to take seriously the religious dimension
of war. First, because it is the religiosity of war, above all, which makes it
so impervious to moral rebuke. For millennia, and long before the
Enlightenment or even the teachings of Jesus, people have understood that war
inverts all normal morality; that it is, by any sane standard, a criminal
undertaking. Buddhism, arising in the fifth century B.C., condemned war, and
one of the most bluntly reasoned anti-war arguments ever made comes to us from
the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti in the fourth century B.C.:
When one man kills another man it is considered unrighteous
and he is punished by death. Then by the same sign when a
man kills ten others, his crime will be ten times greater, and
should be punished by death ten times.... Similarly if a small
crime is considered crime, but a big crime such as attacking
another country is applauded as a righteous act, can this be
said to be knowing the difference between righteousness and
unrighteousness?(44)
But war, as Mo Ti must have realized, enlists passions which feel as
"righteous" to those who experience them as any of the arguments against it.
The other reason to study the religiosity of war is for what it has to say
about us as a species, about "human nature," if you will, and the cliched
"problem of evil." Other creatures, including our near relatives the
chimpanzees, have also been known to kill their own kind with systematic zeal;
certain species of ants even do so on a scale and with a tactical ingenuity
fully deserving of the label "war." But of course no other species exhibits
behavior we recognize as "religious," and none can be said to bring exalted
passions to their acts of intraspecies violence.
So, we might well ask of ourselves: What is it about our species that has made
us see in war a kind of sacrament? Not all wars, of course, have excited the
kind of passion aroused by World War I. But does the fact that humans can and
often do sacralize the act of killing mean that we are more vicious than any
other creature? Or is it the other way around, with our need to sacralize the
act of killing proving that we are, deep down, ultimately moral creatures?
Which are we: beasts because we make war, or angels because we so often seek
to make it into something holy?
A psychologist might offer one sort of answer, based on the anxieties that
seem built into the individual life cycle, but here I am interested in another
kind of answer, drawn from efforts to reconstruct our collective biography as
a species, our history and prehistory. Since the search for prehistoric
"origins" has become distinctly unfashionable among contemporary
anthropologists, I should explain, first, that the kind of origin I seek is
not a hypothetical event, or "just-so" story, like the mythical rebellion, in
Freud's Totem and Taboo, of the "primal horde" against its patriarchal leader.
"Antecedent" may be a better word for what we are after here: Hunting is an
antecedent of war, almost certainly predating it and providing it with many
valuable techniques; here we seek a similarly long-standing antecedent to the
sacralization of war.
Second, it should be acknowledged at the outset that to know the origin of
something is not, of course, to know why it persists or plays itself out, over
and over. But in the case of repetitive, seemingly compulsive patterns of
behavior, the first step to freedom may be to know how it all got started.
Like a psychologist facing an individual patient, we need to uncover the
original trauma.
We begin, in the next chapter, with the most clear-cut case of sacralized
violence that human cultures have to offer: religious rituals of blood
sacrifice. Even in times of peace, the religions of many traditional cultures
were hardly aloof from the business of violence. In fact, their rituals have
very often centered on the act of killing, either mimed or literally enacted,
of humans or animals. As Rene Girard emphasized in his classic Violence and
the Sacred, violence was, well into the historical era, at the very core of
what humans define as sacred, and the first question we will address is why.
In the conventional account of human origins, everything about human violence
is explained as a result of our species' long prehistoric sojourn as hunters
of animals. It is the taste for meat and the willingness to kill for it that
supposedly distinguish us from other primates, making us both smart and cruel,
sociable and domineering, eager for the kill and capable of sharing it. We
are, in other words, a species of predators--"natural born killers" who
carried the habit of fighting over into the era of herding and farming. With
the Neolithic revolution, wild ungulates were replaced as prey by the animals
in other people's herds or the grain stored in other villages' fortresses; and
the name for this new form of "hunting" was war. In this account, the
sacralization of war arises only because the old form of hunting, and probably
also the sharing of meat, had somehow been construed as sacred for eons
before.
No doubt much of "human nature" was indeed laid down during the 2.5 million
years or so when Homo lived in small bands and depended on wild animals and
plants for food. But it is my contention that our peculiar and ambivalent
relationship to violence is rooted in a primordial experience that we have
managed, as a species, to almost entirely repress. And this is the experience,
not of hunting, but of being preyed on by animals that were initially far more
skillful hunters than ourselves. In particular, the sacralization of war is
not the project of a self-confident predator, I will argue, but that of a
creature which has learned only "recently," in the last thousand or so
generations, not to cower at every sound in the night.
Rituals of blood sacrifice both celebrate and terrifyingly reenact the human
transition from prey to predator, and so, I will argue, does war. Nowhere is
this more obvious than in the case of wars that are undertaken for the stated
purpose of initiating young men into the male warrior-predator role a not
uncommon occurrence in traditional cultures. But more important, the anxiety
and ultimate thrill of the prey-to-predator transition color the feelings we
bring to all wars, and infuse them, at least for some of the participants,
some of the time, with feelings powerful and uplifting enough to be
experienced as "religious."
Having made that case--convincingly, I hope--in the first half of this book,
Part II will consider the sacralization of war in historical times, and its
evolution from an elite religion observed by a privileged warrior caste to the
mass religion we know today primarily as nationalism. It is in our own
thoroughly "modern" time, we will see, that the rituals and passions of war
most clearly recall the primitive theme of resistance to a nonhuman threat.
pp. 7-22
--Notes--
Chapter 1
1. Van Creveld, The Transformation of War, p. 166.
2. See, for example, Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War, pp. 14-20.
3. Stromberg, Redemption by War, p. 82.
4. O'Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 119.
5. Kroeber and Fontana, Massacre on the Gila, p. 166.
6. Fox, "Fatal Attraction: War and Human Nature," p. 15.
7. McCauley, Clark, "Conference Overview," in Haas, The Anthropology of War,
p. 2.
8. Quoted in Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, p. 42.
9. Delbruck, History of the Art of War, p. 303.
10. See Grossman, On Killing.
11. In the mythologies of the Indo-European tradition, Dumezil relates, thanks
"either to a gift of metamorphosis, or to a monstrous heredity, the eminent
warrior possesses a veritable animal nature. Dumezil, Destiny of the Warrior,
p. 140.
12. Davidson, Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe, p. 84.
13. Keeley, War Before Civilization, p. 146.
14. Hanson, The Western Way of War, p. 126.
15. Griffith, Samuel B., in his introduction to Sun Tzu, The Art of War, p.
37.
16. Rolle, The World of the Scythians, pp. 94-95.
17. Keeley, p. 144.
18. Sagan, Cannibalism, p. 18
19. Metraux, "Warfare, Cannibalism, and Human Trophies," p. 397.
20. Stromberg, p. 182.
21. Ibid, p. 233.
22. LeShan, The Psychology of War, p. 67.
23. Quoted in Alberti, Beyond Suffrage, p. 50.
24. Mosse, Confronting the Nation, p. 64.
25. Quoted in Stromberg, p. 2.
26. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, p. 5.
27. Partridge, The Psychology of Nations, p. 23.
28. Ibid., p. 22.
29. Stromberg, p. 190.
30. Ibid., p. 53.
31. Toynbee, A Study of History, p. 18.
32. Le Bon, The Crowd, p. 34.
33. Quoted in Fornari, Franco, The Psychoanalysis of War, p. 151.
34. Mosse, Confronting the Nation, p. 32.
35. Vagts,-A History of Militarism, p. 21.
36. Quoted in Mosse, Confronting the Nation, p. 70.
37. Ibid., p. 25.
38. Ibid., pp. 74-75.
39. Turney-High, Primitive War, p. 214.
40. Ibid., p. 215.
41. Ibid., p. 213.
42. Van Creveld, p. 158.
43. I would include in this category LeShan, Mosse, Fornari, Partridge, and
Young, as well as bits and pieces of many others.
44. Quoted in Sun Tzu, p. 22.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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