First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Myths of War

Mike Doonesbury's daughter is considering enlisting in the military - clearly, a lot can happen in the course of thirty years. How did we get here? How did the hippies of the sixties -- we who insisted with such assurance that our task was to make love, not war - come to this? Have we come to the point of conceding that we were just plain strategically wrong in those days? Do we now think that war sometimes really is the answer? Perhaps some of us were, as the phrase goes, mugged by reality, and found that the use of armed force has a place of legitimacy in our mature view of the world. Others of us cling to the ideals that have shaped our values from then till now, but one thing is for sure; we failed to infect future generations with our own visceral understanding of the wrongness of war. It is not the campuses that are in revolt today about Iraq; it's still my generation - paunchy, balding, divorced, with nests emptying and retirement looming -- who are standing out on the bridges every week, and organizing candle light vigils where we sing songs that are now as poignant of our lost youth as they are indignant about the casualties of war. We were, and for the most part still are, so sure; so utterly certain that human beings killing one another never solved anything, and is intrinsically wrong. In this regard I sometimes think our patron saint should be Cassandra of the Greek myths, the seer who foretold all the tragedies of the house of Aetrus, whose predictions were never heeded or believed.

For myself, having lived my adulthood as a practicing theologian and observer of the human condition, the one thing that has become increasingly clear to me over the years is that neither the causes of war nor the causes of peace are actually rational. What leads human beings to fight and kill, or to refuse to fight and kill, are structures deeply imbedded within both our physiological evolutionary heritage, and in the collective unconscious of our cultural histories. Even though we often make strenuous efforts, before and after the fact, to rationalize it, war is not an intellectual proposition; it is a mythic act.

If this is so, then the balance between war and peace is not likely to be shifted by reasoning. And indeed, I would submit that if rational assessment had anything much to do with it, the human race would have dispensed with this wasteful folly long since. But it seems clear that we can argue logically until we are blue in the face - as any number of those who preceded us in this endeavor have done - and not affect the propensity of nations to make war on one another in the slightest. This is not to say that we who seek an end to this ancient scourge of humanity can afford not to have our wits about us - on the contrary, we shall need all the assistance that thoughtful intelligence can render. But we will get nowhere if we do not address the mythology of war, and recognize the way in which the impulses of force and violence bypass the reasoning brain and address us at levels of feeling and meaning where logic has little power. I would contend that there are three fundamental myths of war that we must understand, and seek to counter at the level of meaning and myth, if we are ever to succeed in shifting the balance of popular human intention in the direction of peace.

The first of these myths is that war is, or can be, just, moral, or holy. In his article in Free Inquiry, fifty-year veteran J. Harold Ellens suggests that we must abandon this kind of language in speaking of warfare, even if we believe war itself in a given instance to be inevitable. No matter how necessary, he claims, the resort to war is always a confession of the failure of statesmanship; it is always "the evil expedient;" and its character is always obscene, bestial, monstrous, degrading, and inhuman. No one understands this more clearly than the soldier who has actually experienced battle, which is why, Ellens claims, nobody hates war like a soldier. To suggest that the righteousness of the cause of a war - even to stop Hitler, let us say, or to liberate slaves (and it behooves us to remember that wars almost never have just one unambiguous cause) - to say that the good of that intention justifies the specific acts of violence, death, suffering and destruction that will occur within the war is a kind of mythic reasoning that veils the reality of ethical decisions made by individuals in situations of enormous pressure, danger, and distress. Accountability for these choices and actions cannot be obscured by the rationale of the war as a whole. This accountability can be seen in two dimensions; first, that nations and cultures sometimes do hold individuals responsible for acts of particular brutality, whether at Dachau, or My Lai, or even perhaps Abu Ghraib. It is an established principle that following orders does not absolve the individual from all moral responsibility for his or her own behavior. That soldiers recognize their own continuing moral autonomy and accountability is also seen in the many instances of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in which unresolved guilt for one's own actions plays a significant role. No matter what they are told by the government or by therapists, former soldiers know that they must individually come to terms with the specific things that they have done, or witnessed, or failed to prevent.

The other testimony that there is in reality no such thing as a just or holy war comes from the world's artists. From "Lysistrata" to "Wag the Dog"; from "The Red Badge of Courage" to "Johnny Got His Gun" and "Apocalypse Now", from Picasso's "Guernica" to Britten's "War Requiem", in every possible medium of expression, the poets and painters and composers of humanity have striven to report the brutal realities of war with enough power to counter the mythology of heroism in which we seek to conceal war's moral truth. There may be no more significant endeavor for those of us who would cultivate the capacity for peace than to keep this body of literature, music, and art prominently in front of the public eye. The mythology of the just and holy, noble and heroic military struggle is an aesthetic creation with a pre-rational, visceral appeal. It is only through the equally visceral portrayal of war's obscene, dehumanizing reality that such an appeal can effectively be countered.

A second, and perhaps even more powerful myth of war exploits our capacity as human beings for self-sacrifice. This willingness, to give ourselves away for the sake of others; to go hungry, to suffer pain, to lay down our very lives, so that someone else, even someone we do not personally know or cherish, may go on in comfort and safety, is one of the best things about us as human beings. It is one of the most basic structures we have for making meaning with our lives; it is at the heart of what we understand as virtue; it, more than anything else, is what makes us noble. We are designed to be moved at our very core by such behavior; to admire it in others, to aspire to it in our own lives, to teach it to our children. After all, without that willingness to sacrifice ourselves in the service of the common good, what kind of creatures would we be? Monsters of rational self-interest, without dignity or gallantry or heroism, without soul. Who would wish for that?

But like a narcotic, that plugs into receptors designed to receive the brain's natural chemical stimulants, war taps directly into that proclivity to give ourselves away, and to honor the heroes who sacrifice themselves for the greater good. That is why none of us is immune to the summons of heroic altruism, no matter how rational and heart-felt our conscious abhorrence of the human enterprise of war. That is why it is almost impossible to sustain suspicion of those who call upon our better natures, who appeal to our honor with that old, dazzling myth that hypnotizes us every time. War itself is not inherent in our human nature, I believe, but this is, this susceptibility, this enchantment, this urge toward so great a love, toward giving the last, full measure of devotion. For it is sweet, and comforting, to think that we have laid down our lives for the sake of what we love; to be assured that the dear ones we have lost were spent for glory, and the good of us all. Sometimes it is the only comfort that we have.

That capacity for sacrifice in the service of the common good will always be with us; it is inherent in the human condition, nor would we want to remove it. And war - war is always an option, a choice that leaders and governments make, that nations and cultures have, no matter how destructive and senseless we know it to be. Are we doomed, then, by the very nobility of our own altruism? The horrors of war will always seek to bypass our rational and moral discernments, to connect directly with that visceral assent, that urge in all of us to lay so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of our highest values, and to pay grateful tribute to whoever else does so as well.

Thus, I think if we truly want to cultivate peace, we must figure out how to give our loyalty preemptively to a higher vision of the common good. We must dedicate the sacrifice of our lives - not our deaths, but the purpose of our living - to the creation of a world better than war; we must be in touch with a force that gives us meaning more powerful than war's addictive counterfeit. Such a loyalty is not to be commanded by the trivialities of our contemporary self-indulgent culture; there is nothing in it to summon us to higher purpose, to touch the hidden springs of our capacity for selflessness, heroism, and honor. It is, I rather suppose, a spiritual task that we must set ourselves; to find a purpose worthy of us, as war can never be; to bind ourselves in communities of such mutual devotion that our willing sacrifices for one another already fill our lives with sweetness and fitting comfort, and leave no room for the ancient myth.

Is it even possible? Is there any force in human experience that can compete with the immediacy and intensity of war? In his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, reporter Chris Hedges suggests that there is in his jaded observation only one such experience; you know what it is, we have always known; simple, inevitable, the alternative is love. That's what evolution has designed us for; that's what war simulates in the deep recesses of our nature, releasing all our capacity for sacrifice in the service of destruction instead of creativity. Can we learn, could we ever learn, to be so full of love that we could turn away from the sacrificial myth of war as the fraud we know it to be? This is a question that I think communities of faith in particular ought to be striving to answer.

The third myth of war is the construction of enemies, and this is a process of manipulating the public imagination into regarding certain other people as non-human, so that we are willing to tolerate their being killed, and maimed, and driven from their homes by military action for which we are, either directly or by proxy, responsible. We are so familiar with this process of mythic de-humanization that it looks easy, but in fact it is something of a challenge. All other things being equal, most human beings will not willingly kill anyone. As Sam Keen mentions in his book Faces of the Enemy, military studies have shown that in World War II, only 15-20 percent of soldiers ever actually fired at a living enemy target, despite the conditioning that they had undergone to prepare them for battle. Adjustments in training, weaponry, and circumstances reportedly raised this proportion to 95 percent in the Vietnam era, but the extraordinary ratio of rounds of ammunition fired to enemy soldiers actually killed suggests that relatively chaotic shooting with automatic weapons may be in effect a form of intimidation, intended, perhaps unconsciously, to drive the enemy away more than targeted to kill. Ironically, the increased conditioning to fire automatically and mechanically, rather than thoughtfully, while it reduces the percentage of soldiers who are reluctant or refuse to shoot, dramatically raises the incidents of 'friendly fire' casualties.

The challenging reality is that soldiers on both sides of the front line often have more in common with one another than they do with the commanders and civilians at whose behest they fight. This is seen in the story of the 1914 Christmas truce, when British and German infantry in the trenches of France ceased fire to sing Christmas carols and play soccer together in honor of the shared holiday. It is also the point of Thomas Hardy's ironic poem, The Man He Killed:

Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have set us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot at him, as he at me,

And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead, because--

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe; of course he was;

That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd enlist, perhaps,

Off-hand like--just as I--

Was out of work--had sold his traps--

No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You'd treat, if met where any bar is,

Or help to half a crown.

Despite these commonalities, however, soldiers subjected to constant fear and especially those who experience the loss of comrades for whom they have come to have affection, can soon be made to transfer their rage about the situation in which they find themselves onto the enemy. This is facilitated by visible racial differences, and when, as is often the case, the opposing sides do not speak a common language. Then it becomes easy to give de-humanizing names, like "huns" or "gooks" to the enemy, and these usually do not distinguish between combatants and civilians who share the same characteristics of language and ethnic identity.

But it is not only the soldiers themselves in whom the work of mythic dehumanization must be orchestrated. The entire culture of a nation pursuing military conflict has to be brought into assent and support of what its soldiers are doing, if war is to be sustained over time. We have all seen this done; we are seeing it now, in the images created by the news media and in works of popular imagination like editorial cartoons and TV shows, around the citizens, leaders, and soldiers of Iraq, particularly those in the category of "insurgents", and around Muslims, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups in general. It is a little trickier when the justification for war is the liberation of a nation's citizens from a tyrannical leader - we need to vilify Saddam Hussein and his associates, while at the same time maintaining sufficient public sympathy for ordinary Iraqis that it continues to seem like a good idea to risk American lives to help them, as we are supposed to be doing. These images in the public mind are all mythical archetypes, offered to help us sort the world into categories that will allow us to live with the violence that is being done by our government in our name. To resist these invitations to social consensus requires focused reflection and intention; skepticism is a draining perspective to maintain -- no wonder some of us are a little tired and cranky by now.

In reflecting on Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's study of military conditioning entitled The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, one reviewer concluded, "What impact this [training] has once these brave men [and women] return to society is uncertain, but you can bet that one cannot turn their humanity on and off like a light switch." None of us can, of course; and that is perhaps the final myth of war, that we can enter into some sort of moral suspended animation, where we make ourselves and our soldiers confront situations and behave in ways that in any other circumstances would constitute irrational violence and madness, and then at some arbitrary moment of either exhaustion or political expediency, click back over to the rules of civilized conduct again. What is in fact surprising is that we actually do this as well as we do, as often as we do. The soldiers come home, the grass covers the scarred battlefields, we rebuild the bombed cities, and life goes on - and the myths persist that wars are holy and just, that our sacrifices have all been for the greater good, that our enemies brought upon themselves the destruction that they plainly deserved. But the cost -- the final cost in enduring nightmares, in family and civic violence, in the tears of widows and the loneliness of orphans, in lives that are never whole again -- this we do not calculate, for if we could ever truly measure it, the immensity would be unbearable to know.

The myths of war are old; they go back to the earliest human civilizations we know of, and likely before. No matter who we are, no matter how deeply reasoned and long held our convictions about the folly and waste of war, we are still vulnerable to the power of those myths. We resonate to the summoning of self-sacrifice, we cannot help wanting the forces of good to overcome the forces of evil, we can all be conditioned by fear and duty to relinquish our moral compass to someone else's authority. But my friends, these among many other quirky and amazing and tragic qualities, are what make us human - and we share them with every other soul on planet Earth. It is our common humanity that the myths of war exploit; in the end what connects us to other people is larger and more deeply true than anything that has ever separated us, or ever could. Let us learn to live out of that awareness, and build our future upon that reality, for it is a hope bigger than hate, and a vision more compelling than violence. It is humankind's oldest and dearest dream; it is what we have all wanted, all along; it is the holy wisdom that calls us to believe not the ancient myths of war, but the real possibilities, every day anew, of peace.