I’m still dealing with the intellectual aftermath of Kenneth Minogue’s The Liberal Mind. In that book, he tells us:
War is habit-forming, and peace is confusing to many people who cannot deal with conflicting standards and feelings of guilt. [page 111]
I’m aware of others who made comments about the eerie and morally disedifying attractiveness of war to many men who are seeking to avoid not just moral confusion but also seeking to escape what seem to be boring lives. And I myself still sometimes dream of waging violence against some Other threatening those and that which I value. Sinners we are and the major danger to those who would wish to do better is our tendency to justify our favorite sins and, being habituated to war, we modern human beings of the West, especially Americans, have tended since 1914 or so to invent justifications for any and all military actions against those who are different from us.
Perhaps the basic problem is what I’ve noted recently — most human beings are sheep and not well-formed for independent and self-directed lives. We don’t know how to amuse ourselves and this makes us victims of exploiters who provide despicable and mind-numbing entertainment. More than was ever true of the Soviet Union of Stalin’s days or China of Mao’s days, in the modern West, minds and moral characters are shaped by scoundrels of various sorts, politicians and political commentators who get our juices flowing and help to further shut down our brains, educationists who prefer teachers and students who shut up and get on with the mindless routine. We are primed to jump at opportunities — such as wars against enemies well-defined at least in the propaganda — to prove to ourselves we are energetic and morally-directed creatures who can accomplish something more than applying bureaucratic rules to the applications passing over our desks, something more than drinking some good wine or a fine micro-brewed beer as we catch a few hours of television.
Maybe Thomas Jefferson was right when he wondered if Americans would have been better off illiterate rather than having what he called a `perverse literacy’. Illiterate human beings have a hardheaded common sense, of a parochial and otherwise limited variety to be sure, which allows them to deal with reality without the aid of television or rap music. Like those with a higher literacy and access to books or music or other substantial stuff, preliterate people don’t get bored. The first group are more likely to complain there are too many (serious and good) books and not enough time. The second will loosen up as some tune up fiddles and pipes. The first will go looking for a library or will sit quietly with “Volume Mi-No” of the encyclopedia which seems so archaic and so comforting. The second will sit without feeling boredom or may go looking for some woodwork or painting to do. Those who are semi-literate will read Stephan King or Thomas Harris novels or will surf the Web or the cable television looking for something to satisfy a stimulated but poorly focused brain.
As Jefferson realized, our illiterate ancestors were more properly skeptical about any government officials or big-city merchants who made promises of a better life. A knowledgeable historian may well say that Jefferson was wrong in some ways, but the point remains that there is such a state as `perverse literacy’ where the human being has traded in a fully concrete view of the world for one where concrete reality is partially and — usually — incompetently organized to one or another abstract scheme. And I will add, perhaps redundantly, that those whose skills of literacy lead them to writings by or about Jefferson, or the writings of Lord Acton or Forrest McDonald, Charles Beard or Hannah Arendt, will be capable of amusing themselves and of engaging in intelligent conversations about our current mess. They will also be capable of evaluating the mindlessness of our politicians and political commentators for what it is and also capable of evaluating the claims of historians and philosophers and moral theologians.
The semi-literate or `perversely literate’ human being, smart or not so smart, college-educated or 8th-grade dropout, doesn’t know how to evaluate the world in that way. They absorb one or another schemes advertised to represent reality, having little talent for or developed skills for evaluating those evaluation schemes, so to speak. And few there are who can build new understandings of reality, whether that understanding is in the wrongful form of a scheme or in the form of a narrative which uses specific schemes in limited and well-defined ways.
Modern men have absorbed morally disordered schemes which give false descriptions of reality and provide horribly misleading guidance for action in the world we inhabit.
We’re easily bored and our heads have been filled with romantic images of that most horrible of human activities — war. We think glory when the reality is scared men pissing or shitting in their pants as soon as the guy next to them is beheaded by a piece of sheet-metal shrapnel. We think of armies advancing when the reality is that tanks are rolling over the rubble of schools and hospitals covering the corpses of innocent human beings of all ages. We think of precision bombing when the reality is one alleged enemy in the midst of a village of innocent human beings or even no more than a wedding party celebrating the Afghan way by shooting rifles into the sky. This is a reason our equally confused American leaders start too many wars and probably a reason the United States can’t win wars nowadays. It’s not that we need to be more realistic in a nasty way or more realistic in a morally compassionate way. We need to be more realistic. Period. We need to pay attention to the stuff and characters in our universe and we need to pay attention to the story in which they play roles in a story which is unrolling. And we, however `we’ is defined, are among those characters.
This is an added complication, a richer additional meaning, to the words of the historian Carroll Quigley which I quote so often:
The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
It’s not just that the truth already manifested in Creation has to be understood by a timefull process. The fullness of truth can only be known at the completion of the story we call the `world’, our universe seen as morally ordered to the purposes of God. The story goes on and the truth — from our creaturely viewpoint — is still evolving and developing.
To me, this stuff is more exciting than war could ever be if only because human wars, just or unjust, are only a part of this story itself unfolding as part of Creation in its entirety. Others clearly feel different, most especially all those adolescent leaders in Washington and their supporting casts in uniform and in the do-gooder organizations who just love war at a time when we can help those we miss to get back on their feet and become better human beings, that is — more like Americans or Englishmen, and we can also help to rebuild some fraction of the schools and hospitals and roads and agricultural infrastructure we’ve destroyed. And make a profit at that. What a world!
And all the guys at home get to cheer as they watch those precision bombs go down the chimney of a Baghdad building just like Santa Claus. And we Americans can take credit for being almost like St. Francis — the buildings we show blowing up on the television screens are never hospitals. Maybe its an Iraqi military office being hit at a time when the only occupants are janitors and cleaning-ladies. But it’s not a hospital like that pile of rubble down the street which the Pentagon PR guys didn’t mention in their briefing, providing a potent signal of sorts to let the television news-shapers know what be their duty.
What a way to escape boredom and satisfy our patriotic longings. What a noble way to satisfy our desires to sacrifice for our country. “Hey, Joe, grab me a beer while you’re in there. They just machine-gunned some more bums moving around the streets. Probably some America-hating creeps’ll claim they were a bunch of children. Wanna order a pizza? This could go on a while.”
There are guys who’ve been there or who served in the military in supporting roles and could have ended up in combat roles. And there are guys who’ve suffered a lot in various ways. I knew some who went to Vietnam and they were forced to kill some civilians, even young ones, to stay alive. There were some who figured out that Johnson and the other scoundrels in Washington had betrayed the boys in uniform and they weren’t happy about it. There were a lot back home who were suspicious but didn’t want to do anything to damage their respectability. Like the nice men in the bureaucracy described by McNamara in his memoir of the Vietnam era, the leaders of our churches and towns and universities mostly went quietly about their duty, acting as if there were no stench of moral decay coming from the White House, the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, Langley, and so many other places. It was a moral mess. Even legitimate wars of defense can be messes of accidental killings of innocents or even your comrades-in-arm. Even legitimate wars can corrupt the leaders and ordinary folk back home. We should treat war as the very dangerous activity that good historians describe. And some of those good historians were warriors themselves. You could help your understanding of war as a brutal activity by reading On Killing by Lt. Col Dave Grossman or War as I Knew It by Gen. George Patton or A Rumor of War by Lt. Philip Caputo.
I agree with Professor Minogue’s comment: “War is habit-forming, and peace is confusing to many people who cannot deal with conflicting standards and feelings of guilt.” I also think it quite strange because the guys who are in the real fighting see lots of conflicting standards. A fire-fight is going on and there’s suddenly movement in the high grass off to the side. Fire or not? I talked to a guy who was a U.S. Army Ranger in Vietnam and he said he fired and later found the corpses of an elderly lady and three small children. Did he do wrong? Should he have taken a little bit more risk to his own life and the life of his comrades? I don’t know. I wasn’t there — basically the title of a too-young-to-go novel about Vietnam I play with in my minuscule time which is spare while I have functional eyes. Oh, for young eyes. There’s too much to do while so many who parade as God’s chosen ones, called to work as clergymen or Christian intellectuals, seem to find time to watch an American’s allotment of television and movies — and what sort of Christian would subject himself to that mind-numbing, soul-destroying experience which is so large a part of the problem I’m writing about here.
We’ve made ourselves and our children into invincibly ignorant and willfully stupid people, living in a morally perverse dreamworld. I speak not of the worst among us but the mainstream among us and, over time, the alleged elite — teachers and clergymen and political leaders — have refused to do their duty and have instead charged to the head of the herd as it heads toward barbarian and morally disordered regions. We who are now the members of the responsible generation were ourselves once the children under the misguidance of an earlier generation of adolescents masquerading as adults but now the West has been thoroughly looted, in cultural resources still more than in financial resources. The end-time, in a manner of speaking, approaches fast as the likes of Alexis Tocqueville, Hermann Melville, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Garet Garret, Hannah Arendt, Paul Kennedy, and Jacques Barzun have been prophesying. I could even add some of the Founding Fathers who were pessimistic about the moral maturity and moral character of Americans. And, no, I’m not saying the world is ending, only that an age of prosperity and promise is ending in a horrifying and destructive manner.
This may seem a funny way to summarize a large-scale cultural and moral critique, but:
We don’t know how to entertain ourselves properly.
Incapable of finding enjoyment in the care of animals or woodworking or reading serious history books or reading even serious mind-candy, we sit in front of the television and imagine ourselves to be the sorts of human beings with more initiative and greater moral character. We imagine ourselves as explorers and great warriors or — increasingly — as celebrities to be admired because of our fame. Masses of defenseless human beings and the infrastructure of a major city are but props for our imaginations shaped by Rambo and Star Wars. An adolescent mind struggling through regions of violence toward some sort of good moral order would be better served by dreams of a good number of American politicians and a few generals standing on the scaffold, about to pay the price for what they did to young American men and to the Vietnamese, to more American men and the Iraqis.
I’ve found myself that dreams of vengeance against our own treacherous leaders can help move me along the path toward a better Christian moral order, however strange to the likes of St. Francis it would be to reach moral order by way of dreams of vengeance of the sort God has denied to us.
Vengeance? No, that is forbidden us. Calling to account? Yes, if we Americans were capable of being a moral self-governing citizenry.
It’s easier to seek entertainment in dreams of fighting the Other, the Other which is evil and which is devoted to destroying us. It’s hard to work with a pile of planks to turn them into a table-top and just as hard to read serious science and serious theology to establish a meaningful opinion about any possible conflicts.
Let me repeat a quote from by Henri Bergson:
[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work. [page 172, “Time and Free Will”, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 2001 reprint]
Before going on, I’ll remind the reader that Farmer Wendell Berry is as much an artist as is Poet Wendell Berry.
We are potentially free and also potentially morally well-ordered because we’re born as social creatures and a human sort of freedom and also good moral order are to be found in our social relationships, some of which we can `sublimate’ even to love of God. When we are truly free, we aren’t Hannibal the Cannibal satisfying despicable desires. We aren’t flaccid and passive creatures enjoying stupid and evil movies about Hannibal the Cannibal or Rambo. But that is what too many of us are — flaccid and passive creatures who enjoy not only evil movies but also news of evil and unjustified violence inflicted on many innocent human beings and perhaps a few who are alleged to be evil in the way of American political leaders — that is, they kill or order others to kill innocent human beings.
To the extent that these Americans, political leaders or applauding followers, are free, then we can say: “[Their] acts spring from [their] whole personality.” This is not a good thing — to have a personality which is devoted to moral disorder.
On the other hand, anyone who reads On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, an airborne Ranger and then a psychologist, will learn that ordinary Americans of previous generations, moral and decent men, who killed face-to-face in battle because they thought it morally justified were still suffering occasional nightmares decades later after years of intense suffering of that sort. I think those men discovered that war isn’t much in the way of pleasurable entertainment, at least not for men of moral character. Lt. Colonel Grossman even tells us those men refused to put on their uniforms to march in such events as Memorial Day parades. They were willing to put on their uniforms to fight again if their country needed them, but thought parades and the like were too much like celebrations of killing others — some more of that entertainment of a morally despicable sort.
A morally well-ordered warrior has to be a little detached from the destruction and death he inflicts on enemies and on some innocents who might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A morally well-ordered citizen-soldier struggles unsuccessfully for that detachment, aware if only after the fact, that he has inflicted horror and brought it into his own self. I would hope that we will someday reach the point where citizen-soldiers who don’t have to kill or even see in person as others suffer as a result of armed force won’t try to derive vicarious pleasure because of the heroics of those who did have to fight and kill and maybe wade through muck containing human remains. I would certainly hope those at home will gain a true respect for what some endure not because they suffered but because of the suffering they inflicted or helped to inflict on others.
Read Lt. Col. Grossman’s book if you have any doubts: except for a small percentage, some — and perhaps most — good men will pass through their own suffering and move on but will carry the suffering they inflict on others for the rest of their lives, though there is some merciful attenuation over time. This is a good thing. Painful but good.