Wars, like the political
eruptions of teenagers, groan under the weight of moral justification:
We are fighting to protect ourselves, protect democracy, establish
democracy, end atrocities, avenge former mistreatment, dissuade
dictators. We have to save something from something or for something.
If we don't fight, this boogie or that boogie will take over the
world.
When you notice that all
teenagers do the same things at the same time, you suspect that what
is involved is hormones. So with wars. Military adventures only seem
to be about things. Really they are just military adventures. We fight
for the same reasons fish school and peacocks strut--because it's how
we are.
You don't think so? Step back,
look at the world on a scale of centuries, and it is obvious. History
is one long repetitive story of war. Start anywhere: The Old
Testament, the Eddas, Homer. When the Greeks of classical antiquity
were not fighting Persians, they fought each other. The Romans fought
everyone they could find and often, when they needed a new emperor,
each other. In the Middle Ages, knights fought as a hobby; when they
couldn't find anyone to fight seriously, they held tournaments and
fought for sport.
Wars pass by in their
thousands, The War of Spanish Succession, of Jenkins's Ear, of the
Roses, of this and that and practically everything. We're still doing
it--everywhere, always, today, yesterday, tomorrow.
Why?
Because we are over-brained
apes. Fighting is built into men (far less into women). Our instincts
crave it. Watch young males in a movie theater when Star Wars is
playing. They will be on the edge of their seats, leaning
unconsciously with the maneuvering of the swirling space-fighters,
adrenaline pumping, thinking "Get him, get him, get him!"
It's how we are. Videogames,
football, boxing, jousting, paintball, NASCAR, gladiatorial games,
drag racing, dueling, war, and bar fights are expressions of the same
drive.
We fight as naturally,
inevitably, and unthinkingly as dogs sorting out questions of
territory. What is instinctive seems so perfectly reasonable that we
seldom ask whether it makes sense. Perhaps army ants believe they are
fighting for some forested virtue.
If you are male, and don't
believe in instinct, find a big man with a pretty girlfriend, and put
your hand on the wrong part of her topography. Without reflection, he
will arrange for you to make several mortgage payments for your
dentist. But why? You didn't harm her in the least. For that matter,
how comfortable are you in a dark forest when you hear something . . .
moving? Even if you know it has to be a deer or a house dog?
Instinct rules us. Little
girls left to themselves play house and care for dolls. Little boys
form hunting packs. As a kid of ten in a civilized suburb, I joined
with my buddies to venture into farther suburbs unknown to us. We had
a distinct sense of venturing into alien and possibly hostile
territory. When we encountered other kids, there was a sizing up, a
calculation of the odds, a question of whether to run, fight, or hang
out. We were unconsciously practicing for adulthood, like tussling
puppies.
If people have an inbred
desire to fight, so do they have an inbred moral sense. In the past a
king could simply strip the peasants of their provisions and ride off
to put cities to the sword. What people thought didn't matter. Today a
modicum of support from the public is needed. In war, people do
ghastly things that in time of peace they regard as hideous.
Comfortable folk unafraid will not readily approve. Thus lying is
essential to war. People must be frightened, enraged, or both.
It is easy to arrange. Half of
the population is of below-average intelligence, four-fifths are not
sure where the enemy nation is, and fully ninety percent do not know
what countries border on it. Further, people do not handle
abstractions well. Instead they personalize, confusing the enemy
nation with its Evil Leader: Iraq is not twenty-five million rather
ordinary people; rather it is Saddam Hussein. Cuba is not an island of
eleven million agreeable people who sing and dance splendidly; it is
Fidel Castro. Warring governments encourage this confusion.
Part of the boilerplate of war
are the atrocity stories used to arouse hatred in the public. Armies
commit atrocities-your army, my army, the other guy's army. Everyone
agrees that everyone else does it. When no real atrocities are
convenient to hand, governments manufacture them. Some are so
conventional that there ought to be a rubber stamp: Babies are
bayoneted, women's breasts are cut off, and pregnant women are
disemboweled.
Curiously, a company commander
who takes sniper rounds from a village of 250, and calls in an air
strike, will say that he has never seen an atrocity. Nor were the
carpet bombings of London and Hamburg atrocities; rather these were
legitimate burnings alive of children, the unlucky, and the slow. If
truth is the first casualty, reason isn't far behind.
It is useful in war that
people do not respond emotionally to what they cannot actually see. A
thousand abstract dead mean nothing, whether they died in a war or an
earthquake. This explains the desire of the military to control the
press. An inattentive democracy will tolerate a war provided that it
is described as surgical and intended for high moral purposes; and
that the footage shows videogame bombs falling precisely on distant
targets. This also arouses pride in their gadgets.
If television showed a
soldier, anybody's soldier, with his face shot away, interior of the
mandibular joint glistening cartilaginous white, the man gurgling in
agony with globs of yellow god-knows-what bubbling out of his throat,
the war would suffer in the ratings.
Thus you will never, ever,
ever see footage of the dead and wounded as they actually are. Not
ever. This is said to be to protect the dignity of the injured. No
it's not. It's to keep small-town Idaho from vomiting and saying,
"Stop!"
Morality? Countries have none.
They pretend for political effect. China objects to our brutalizing of
Iraq, yet was perfectly happy to brutalize Tibet. France objects to
our behavior in the Mid-East but behaved savagely in Algeria.
Countries celebrate defensive wars to drive out invaders but, a few
years later, are invading someone else's country. It's how we are. You
might as well look for morality in a used-car lot.
