Wars and Rumors of Wars
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Some comments on my Ernst Troeltsch episode provoked me to thinking further about the wave of public enthusiasm that sometimes greets the outbreak of a war, and also gave me pause to think about war more generally. I have often said that philosophy of history and philosophy of war are close cousins. This episode is about that kinship.
In the particular case of the First World War, the wave of public enthusiasm for the war has been given a name: the August Madness. How are we to understand the August Madness and those who participated in it? Beyond the specifics of the First World War and the August Madness, public enthusiasm for war poses many conceptual problems. How and why does the individual respond to social contagion? Is it right to be enthusiastic for a just war? Why does public enthusiasm for war flag in longer conflicts? Ought measures to be taken to shape or modify public enthusiasm for war?
Troeltsch was an enthusiastic supporter of the German war effort, at least initially, though his views changed over the war years, as did the views of almost everyone involved in the war effort. There is a discussion of Troeltsch’s wartime activity in Robert J. Rubanowice’s Crisis in Consciousness: The Thought of Ernst Troeltsch (1982):
“On 2 August Germany sent an ultimatum to Belgium demanding the right to cross Belgian territory. War was declared on France the following day, and on 4 August German troops crossed the Belgian border. It was to the theme ‘Following the Declaration of Mobilization’ that Troeltsch addressed himself in this the first of several dozen public wartime exhortations. His remarks were not original and were undoubtedly reiterated during those early days of the war in hundreds of wartime rallies not only in Germany but in the homelands of all the war’s participants. Yet they were needed at the time and exceedingly appropriate. In this speech the motif of unity was a central thought: ’Prince and worker will join hands,’ Troeltsch exclaimed, and the nation will stand together as one man, united from the extreme right to the extreme left. He felt Germany was entering into a struggle for its very life and continued existence as a nation against envy, hatred, and the spirit of revenge. In thus defending German values, Troeltsch urged, Germany was in effect fighting for the freedom and development of humanity itself’.”
The response of Troeltsch was the rule, not the exception. Most intellectuals, including philosophers and theologians, historians and scientists, at least initially supported the war. Today we want to believe, against all evidence, that intelligent individuals everywhere will all categorically reject war. This has never been true, and the support for war wasn’t tepid and hesitant, either. Initial support for the war upon its outbreak was so enthusiastic that it came to be called the August Madness.
Not everyone caught the madness. There were a few exceptions. Bertrand Russell’s account of the August Madness is especially helpful, as he personally knew many intellectuals who were swept up in the war fever of August 1914. Russell was both horrified and unable to comprehend the celebratory atmosphere:
“The first days of the War were to me utterly amazing. My best friends, such as the Whiteheads, were savagely warlike. Men like J. L. Hammond, who had been writing for years against participation in a European War, were swept off their feet by Belgium. As I had long known from a military friend at the Staff College that Belgium would inevitably be involved, I had not supposed important publicists so frivolous as to be ignorant on this vital matter.”
The reference to Belgium is to what came to be called the Rape of Belgium. This requires some background to be meaningful. In the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, Belgium was a part of the Netherlands, but it subsequently separated itself from the Netherlands and by the 1839 Treaty of London was established as a neutral nation-state, the violation of which neutrality was an act of war and automatically drew in other nation-states.
The Schlieffen Plan, which was the German plan for the war, was predicated upon the Germans Marching into northern France through Belgium. Alfred von Schlieffen, who did not live to see the war he planned, said, “Let the last man on the right brush the channel with his sleeve” — the idea being a wide swing through Belgium as far north as possible, and then heading south to take Paris. Schlieffen also planned for the force on the German right, coming into France through Belgium, to be overwhelming, involving by far the greatest part of Germany’s military forces.
Germany knew that the violation of Belgian neutrality would bring in other nation-states, and the Schlieffen plan built this into its assumptions: Germany would rapidly go through Belgium to take Paris before the Russians were involved, and, after France had been defeated, transport the army by train to the eastern front and defeat the Russians in turn. The timetable was everything, and that was the problem. Further, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, in charge of the German war effort, but who did not live to see the end of the war he started, had weakened the right, and the Russians mobilized more rapidly than expected, which resulted in the Battle of Tannenberg on the eastern front.
The invasion of Belgium was predictably messy, and the Germans conducted many reprisals in Belgium against the civilian population, which they justified as measures taken against civilian partisans (i.e., they shot Belgian civilians suspected of being partisans). German conduct in Belgium (i.e., “The Rape of Belgium”) provoked a significant backlash among all the European powers, not only a diplomatic backlash, but a popular backlash, especially after the burning of Louvain, starting 25 August 1914.
In Germany, there was a backlash against the backlash. An manifesto was published, called the Manifesto of the 93 (04 October 1914) — “To the Civilized World,” An die Kulturwelt!, by “Professors of Germany,” signed, inter alia, by the philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, historian Karl Lamprecht, physicist Max Planck, philosopher and psychologist Wundt, biologist Ernst Haeckel, historian Eduard Meyer, philosopher Rudolf Euken, and the mathematician Felix Klein. There were the names I immediately recognized in skimming through the signatories. Interestingly, Ernst Troeltsch was not among the signatories. I don’t know if he was not asked to sign, or if he was asked and refused.
The mobilizing not only of soldiers but also of popular sentiment on both sides of the conflict is one of the most important developments of mass war in the age of popular sovereignty. European wars of the eighteenth century had largely been wars of maneuver between professional armies, with little involvement of the civilian population. With the advent of mass society, the mass support of population was necessary for a major war effort, and the European public obligingly provided this support to every nation-state that declared war and began mobilization. This public support for and vicarious participation in the war (at least in its early days) may be considered an additional trigger or escalation that allowed what might have been just another localized Balkan war into a global conflict.
Hannah Arendt has argued that it was the emergence of mass man that resulted in the discontinuity in our history between the twentieth century and the tradition that preceded it. Arendt’s primary work on mass man is The Origins of Totalitarianism, but it Between Past and Future she explicitly identifies mass phenomena a break in recent history:
“…neither the twentieth-century aftermath nor the nineteenth-century rebellion against tradition actually caused the break in our history. This sprang from a chaos of mass-perplexities on the political scene and of mass-opinions in the spiritual sphere which the totalitarian movements, through terror and ideology, crystallized into a new form of government and domination. Totalitarian domination as an established fact, which in its unprecedentedness cannot be comprehended through the usual categories of political thought, and whose ‘crimes’ cannot be judged by traditional moral standards or punished within the legal framework of our civilization, has broken the continuity of Occidental history. The break in our tradition is now an accomplished fact.”
Going back to the beginning of the war, on 02 August 1914,the same day a young Adolf Hitler was celebrating in the Odeonsplatz in Munich along with thousands of others, Russell recounted his evening stroll around Trafalgar Square:
“I spent the evening walking round the streets, especially in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, noticing cheering crowds, and making myself sensitive to the emotions of passers-by. During this and the following days I discovered to my amazement that average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war. I had fondly imagined, what most pacifists contended, that wars were forced upon a reluctant population by despotic and Machiavellian governments. I had noticed during previous years how carefully Sir Edward Grey lied in order to prevent the public from knowing the methods by which he was committing us to the support of France in the event of war. I naively imagined that when the public discovered how he had lied to them, they would be annoyed; instead of which, they were grateful to him for having spared them the moral responsibility.” (Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Chapter 8 “The First War”)
Russell’s further reflections on his experience of the August Madness also tell how he had to change his ideas of historical causality and explanation as a result of these experiences:
“Although I did not foresee anything like the full disaster of the War, I foresaw a great deal more than most people did. The prospect filled me with horror, but what filled me with even more horror was the fact that the anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population. I had to revise my views on human nature. At that time I was wholly ignorant of psycho-analysis, but I arrived for myself at a view of human passions not unlike that of the psychoanalysts. I arrived at this view in an endeavour to understand popular feeling about the War. I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the War persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity. Gilbert Murray, who had been a close friend of mine since 1902, was a pro-Boer when I was not. I therefore naturally expected that he would again be on the side of peace; yet he went out of his way to write about the wickedness of the Germans, and the superhuman virtue of Sir Edward Grey. I became filled with despairing tenderness towards the young men who were to be slaughtered, and with rage against all the statesmen of Europe.” (Op. cit.)
Russell engaged in anti-war activism and was eventually jailed for it. While in jail he wrote An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, which the governor of the prison was obligated to read for seditious tendencies before it was allowed to be published. Russell is a witty and entertaining writer, and sometimes he lets his wit run away with him, so that the passage quoted above has a lot of interesting ideas about how wars start, but it is mixed with a lot of unhelpful rhetoric.
Of course, many if not most parents love their children, but they also sometimes love their ideals and their country, so that they see no contradiction in loving their sons and sending them to war. On the contrary, military service in wartime is sometimes seen as a privilege and an honor, and this privilege and honor is sometimes shared within the family milieu as an expression of familial love. Parents who shield their children from the realities of war can do them as much harm as parents who acquiesce in the drafting of their children, and when parents use their influence and social position to keep their sons out of war it can become a source of social friction, as it became during the Viet Nam war.
Russell’s psychology thus leaves something to be desired in its lack of subtlety, but he was right to have called into question his previous beliefs about war, and to look for some other historical explanation for the advent of the war and its subsequent expansion. Russell eventually gave a series of public lectures on his new views of war and its causes, which were eventually published as Principles of Social Reconstruction in the UK and as Why Men Fight in the US. One of these lectures was attended by the young philosopher T. E. Hulme, who, writing pseudonymously as North Staffs, called Russell’s work “The Kind of Rubbish We Oppose.”
Public letters were exchanged, Russell defended his views, and Hulme attacked Russell for his pacifism. It is unlikely that anyone changed their mind or learned anything as a result of this exchange of incommensurable perspectives. There is an unbridgeable temperamental chasm that separates men like Russell and men like Hulme. Today we would say that Russell and Hulme had different values, and in fact Hulme uses the philosophical language of values and axiology to defend his criticism of Russell. Russell and Hulme together serve as an interesting window onto the debate over war, its causes, and its motivations, but their debate was by no means unique, nor were the conditions of the First World War unique in the initial outpouring of public support. Many wars have seen such an out pouring of public support, and support for war can appear out of the most unlikely circumstances.
After the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, the Thermidorian reaction and the rule of the Directory, it would have been easy to argue that France was exhausted, demoralized, and in no condition to wage war, but once Napoleon came to power he raised an army of more than a million men; French revolutionary armies swept over Europe initiating a generation of warfare on the continent unlike anything since the Thirty Years War. Even after Napoleon abdicated and was banished to Elba, when he returned he was able to raise yet another army, and when he lost at Waterloo, the British removed him to the isolated island of St. Helena to make sure than nothing like the 100 days happened again. Probably this was a legitimate concern.
While many wars have seen an outpouring of public support, we still need to see support for the First World War at its outbreak in its historical context. Europe had not seen a continent-wide war since the Napoleonic wars, a hundred years previously. The largest war between the Napoleonic wars and the First World War was the American Civil War, and military representatives from most of the European nation-states were present as observers, since that’s where the action was to be found. Obviously, this left European civilians and the European landmass untouched; the experience of war was distant and easy to ignore.
The American Civil War saw the introduction of technologies that were an intimation of industrialized warfare to come — I am thinking of the Gatling gun, rifling both in small arms and artillery, steam-powered ironclads, and the use of the telegraph. In Europe in this period there were a number of relatively small wars of relatively short duration, including the First Schleswig War (24 March 1848–08 May 1852), the Second Schleswig War (01 February 1864–30 October 1864), the Austro-Prussian War (14 June 1866–22 July1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (19 July 1870–28 January 1871). All of the wars I have named here were wars of the consolidation of a unified Germany.
The Russo-Japanese War (08 February 1904–05 September 1905) was another matter. It was maybe the most prescient conflict, making use of Maxim guns and dreadnaught battleships, which proved to be a foretaste of what was to come. And in the years immediately prior to the First World War, a number of not-so-small wars in the Balkans erupted. When the First World War began, most people expected a short, sharp war like the Franco-Prussian war, strictly limited in spatial extent and temporal duration. This expectation was part of the miscalculation that allowed the war to grow to planetary proportions.
But this wasn’t the only factor. There was also the factor of technology, in particular the technology of communications and transportation, and there was the factor of mass society, mentioned earlier. Mass war conducted by mass man required new mechanisms of warfighting. One of these mechanisms was the mobilization of society for war. Partly mobilization was about calling up men in the millions to serve in the armed forces. Mobilization also involved the conversion of industry to war production, and the realignment of the economy of entire nation-states to direct resources into the conflict.
Here we see the prescience of Guilio Duhet, whom I mentioned in my episode on the bombing of Dresden, who predicted that this would happen. The ability of a society to mobilize rapidly and completely was understood to be a key to national success in war. After Clausewitz, “total war” became a talking about, but after the First World War, Ernst Jünger wrote an essay titled “Total Mobilization,” which was the basis of his later book The Worker. Jünger had understood that it was total mobilization that made total war possible, and Jünger’s essay wasn’t just a piece of war-mongering or propaganda. It was discussed intensively by Heidegger and his milieu:
“In 1930, Ernst Jünger’s essay on ‘Total Mobilization’ appeared; in this essay the fundamental outlines of his 1932 book The Worker are articulated. In a small group, I discussed these writings at this time, along with my assistant [Werner] Brock, and attempted to show how in them an essential comprehension of Nietzsche’s metaphysics is expressed, insofar as the history and the contemporary situation of the West is seen and foreseen in the horizon of this metaphysics. On the basis of these writings, and even more essentially on the basis of their foundations, we reflected on what was to come, i.e., we sought thereby to confront the later in discussions.” (Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, p.121)
Ernst Jünger’s “Total Mobilization,” was originally published in the 1930 collection of papers he edited, Krieg und Krieger (War and Warrior). Walter Benjamin wrote a review of the book, which he dismisses as “depraved mysticism” and called it, “…nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l’art pour l’art to war itself.” In other words, the book represented war for war’s sake in Benjamin’s eyes.
Once the logic of mobilization was understood, it was inevitable that this total mobilization would constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy for total war, and the new technologies available in 1914 meant that the total war would be planetary in scale. With this war of unprecedented scope and scale — a war that I call the first planetary-scale industrialized war — people then and ever since have gone looking for explanations, which, in the heat of war, meant looking for scapegoats. During the war itself, in 1916, the philosopher George Santayana published Egotism in German Philosophy, in which he teased out a tradition of egotism from Goethe through Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche:
“Egotism — subjectivity in thought and wilfulness in morals — which is the soul of German philosophy, is by no means a gratuitous thing. It is a genuine expression of the pathetic situation in which any animal finds itself upon earth, and any intelligence in the universe. It is an inevitable and initial circumstance in life. But like every material accident, it is a thing to abstract from and to discount as far as possible. The perversity of the Germans, the childishness and sophistry of their position, lies only in glorifying what is an inevitable impediment, and in marking time on an earthly station from which the spirit of man — at least in spirit — is called to fly”
Ten years after the war was over, in 1928, Clive Bell of the Bloomsbury group wrote Civilization: An Essay, discussing how Nietzsche came to be blamed for the war and for the German way of war, at least at first:
“Down with Nietzsche! Ah, that was fun, drubbing the nasty blackguard, the man who presumed to sneer at liberals without admiring liberal-unionists. He was an epileptic, it seemed, a scrofulous fellow, and no gentleman. We told the working men about him, we told them about his being the prophet of German imperialism, the poet of Prussia and the lickspittle of the Junkers. And were anyone who had compromised himself by dabbling in German literature so unpatriotic as to call our scholarship in question, we called him a traitor and shut him up. Those were the days, the best of 1914, when France and England were defending Paris against Nietzsche and the Russian steam-roller was catching him in the back.”
But dunking on Nietzsche wasn’t really a viable war aim, so Bell humorously considers how civilization became the positive war aim the British were casting about for:
“…then it was that to some more comprehensive mind, to someone enjoying a sense of history and his own importance, to the Prime Minister or Professor Gilbert Murray I dare say, came the fine and final revelation that what we were fighting for was Civilization…”
We saw with Rubanowice’s book on Troeltsch that the ideal war aim for Germany was nothing less than humanity, and now we see that the ideal war aim for England was civilization. Given the nature of wartime propaganda, these two could have been swapped, salva veritate (if indeed any truth at all is involved in the matter). Recall from an earlier quote that Bertrand Russell wrote he was surprised to find Gilbert Murray on the pro-war side, but Russell shouldn’t have been surprised, as most academics and intellectuals were.
The historical context of the eruption of the First World War — specifically, that it was a major war that occurred after a long peace, and expected to be a brief diversion, after which events would rapidly return to normal — suggests a possible partial explanation for August Madness and the many intellectuals who rushed to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the conflict. Peter Turchin in his End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration explains violence in cyclical and generational terms, in which conflicts, “…would simply be replayed again when a new generation, not immunized against violence, took over.” It is the personal experience of violence that immunizes a society against conflict escalation one person at a time, and, if this experience is absent, the escalation can be unchecked:
“…high levels of violence accelerate the transition of most radicals into moderates. The radicalization curve falls as precipitously… because radicals are the ones who drive violence, instability also declines. The social system regains its stability. But in this inertial scenario, the root cause of instability — the wealth pump — continues to operate. Gradually, elite numbers begin increasing. Meanwhile, the moderates who suppressed the… peak of violence are slowly retiring and dying off. The uneasy peace holds for the next generation (twenty-five to thirty years), but then there is a repeat… fifty years later.”
Is this a sufficient explanation? How much violence is enough to immunize a society against escalation? The same individual whose comment prompted this episode expressed the view that things are different now, and interestingly, different for technological reasons — just as war itself is different for technological reasons. He wrote:
“[Turchin] might be right about the past. But nowadays, with tv, radio, etc. I think that people are well aware of what war means. Let’s hope they are in Brussels, Washington and Moscow too.”
I disagree with this. There are some individuals who might find a graphic record of the horrors of war off-putting, and it may be enough to immunize them against violence, but there will be others who are attracted and fascinated by the violence. Partly this would be because of the unfamiliarity of violence, after a generational gap, which makes it mysterious and interesting, but partly it is because of a human, all-too-human attraction to violence, whether familiar or unfamiliar. It is uncomfortable to talk about this because it appears unflattering to human beings, but there is nothing new about it. Freud faced it head-on:
“…men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but… a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.”
Freud had lived through First World War and he saw the Second World War approaching, as indeed many saw what was coming. When the Treaty of Versailles was being signed, French General Ferdinand Foch, who wanted a permanent occupation of the Rhineland, said, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” He was right, but he didn’t live to see the continuation he predicted.
The First and Second World Wars taken together resemble the Thirty Years War in their brutality and unresolved war aims (there was also parallels with the Peloponnesian War), and the twentieth century taken whole resembles the Hundred Years’ War if we look at it from the origins of the First World War through the end of the Cold War — again, the escalation of brutality and unresolved war aims driving incessant conflict. But when war aims are “humanity” and “civilization” it is difficult to determine when they have been achieved. As far as my knowledge goes, there are no quantifiable metrics for having successfully defended humanity or civilization.
The mid-twentieth century in particular was a convulsion of violence of apocalyptic proportions. The sky was filled with airplanes, the sea was filled with ships above and submarines below, great cities were destroyed in a single night, entire populations were displaced, and millions upon millions were killed. This proved to be a robust immunization to violence. Because of the scope of the carnage, a consensus emerged among the survivors that civilization might not survive the next such convulsion, and, since that time, military engagements have been carefully managed to make sure that they will not escalate to totality.
But, as time passes, the memory will fade. Those who saw the spectacle with their own eyes will pass and, like the defenders of outmoded scientific theories, their version of events will be supplanted by a historian’s narrative that speaks more directly to the dominant paradigm. When each generation re-writes history for its own purposes, it does so in the light of its own experiences, be they experiences of violence that immunize a society against conflict escalation, or experiences of stability that render violence mysterious and therefore romantic. With the passage of time, enough time, there will come a time when apocalyptic ideas once again have a certain luster, and men will be fascinated that such things as once happened were possible. They will dust off the lessons of the past and plan the next epic convulsion that other men with other fascinations will chronicle, describe, and attempt to understand how it all could happen again.
But how can human beings be fascinated by the violence of war? One of the things we don’t talk about much, partly from the discomfort of facing it, is that some men have the peak experiences of their lives in combat. This isn’t universal, but it doesn’t have to be universal to have a certain degree of explanatory power. Of the men who are sent into combat, some are broken by it, and are never the same again afterward. Many, perhaps most, tolerate it as best as they can. They aren’t broken by the experience, but they also have no love for it. There remains, however, a certain minority for whom combat is their peak experience.
As with all instinctive attractions, some only discover that this is their element after they have been exposed to it, but, again, there are a few individuals of heightened feelings and expectations who know what their calling is even if they have never seen it, never been exposed to it, have never even heard of it. Such men would create war for themselves even if all memory of war had been extirpated from our records. I once met a man like this, and his stories of the Second World War were truly apocalyptic. He said — and I quote from memory — “We went over there to kill and destroy, and that’s what we did.” Was this every soldier’s experience? No, of course not, but it is the experience of a few. These few require war for self-actualization, to employ the language of Maslow.
An example of this is Ernst Jünger, whose memoir of the First World War, Storm of Steel, made him a famous figure. Jünger described what came to be called the Fronterlebnis — the distinctive experience of fighting on the front lines of trench warfare — for those who flourished in this violent atmosphere. This was not the typical experience of war, but it was a new experience of war emergent from the changed social and technological conditions under which the war was fought. And it wasn’t only Germans like Jünger. On every side there were men who discovered their calling in the trenches. Among the Italians they were called the Arditti — the bold ones — who didn’t merely tolerate the war, they gloried in it.
It is sometimes claimed that the last form of the personal duel in industrialized warfare was the experience of fighter pilots in dogfights — curiously, we sometimes read this side-by-side with the claim that air warfare is dehumanizing, impersonal, and technical. Everyone has heard of the Red Baron, and many have heard of the great aviation aces of the Second World War, but “aces” emerged in all forms of combat — in tanks, in submarines, and among frontline soldiers. These were men who intuitively mastered the new technologies and took to them as if by instinct.
This was implicitly foreseen by Guilio Duhet, but the spirit that drove this was made quite explicit by the Italian futurists, and especially in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (originally published in 1909):
“We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath — a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
Earlier I mentioned that Walter Benjamin wrote a review of War and Warriors, which included Jünger’s essay on total mobilization. Benjamin opened this essay with a quote from Léon Daudet, which he gives as, “L’automobile c’est la guerre” (“The automobile is war”). Benjamin comments on this quote:
“This surprising association of ideas was based on the perception of an increase in technical artifacts, in power sources, and in tempo generally that the private sector can neither absorb completely nor utilize adequately but that nonetheless demand vindication.”
Despite this explicit recognition of what he calls a surprising association of ideas, here we see how completely Benjamin missed the plot. A little further on Benjamin wrote of War and Warrior:
“These authors nowhere observe that the new warfare of technology and material [Materialschlacht] which appears to some of them as the highest revelation of existence, dispenses with all the wretched emblems of heroism that here and there have survived the World War.”
But heroism wasn’t eliminated, it was transformed, or even transfigured. The personal duel, and the sense of honor intrinsic to this form of combat, lived on in planetary-scale industrialized war, but it became a marginal experience, an outlier in the midst of the millions of men who went to war and who were in no sense suited for killing. Junger wrote about this in his Storm of Steel:
“I was busy with the training of a small shock troop, since I had come to understand in the course of the last few engagements that there was an increasing rearrangement of our fighting strength in progress. To make an actual breach or advance, there was now only a very limited number of men on whom one might rely, who had developed into a particularly resilient body of fighters, whereas the bulk of the men were at best fit to lend support. Given these circumstances, it might be better to be at the head of a small and determined group than the commander of an uncertain company.”
In comparison to the millions who fought and died and had no taste for war, the few who took to modern industrialized warfare represent only a very small fraction of the total. Others who fought with no particular love of fighting, however, could recognize the fascination it held for others. J. Glenn Gray was a soldier in the Second World War, a counter-intelligence officer, and a philosopher — a very different man from Ernst Jünger, and he fought in a different war. Twenty years after the war was over he wrote The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, making an effort to describe some of the fascination that men have for battle:
“Millions of men in our day — like millions before us — have learned to live in war’s strange element and have discovered in it a powerful fascination. The emotional environment of warfare has always been compelling; it has drawn most men under its spell. Reflection and calm reasoning are alien to it.”
In it he also quotes Ernst Jünger:
“The monstrous desire for annihilation, which hovered over the battlefield, thickened the brains of the men and submerged them in a red fog. We called to each other in sobs and stammered disconnected sentences. A neutral observer might have perhaps believed that we were seized by an excess of happiness.”
No doubt there are altered states of consciousness that are only experienced in battle; experiencing an altered state of consciousness for the first time, under unique circumstances, will make an impression on anyone. Take millions of young men in their physical prime, already combative, driven by testosterone, expose them to excitement and danger, and it is no wonder that some have the time of their lives.
This problem of enthusiasm for war — whether on the part of combatants of intellectuals — is partly a psychological problem of understanding how the individual responds to war, how their intentions, their expectations, their desires and disappointments, all feed into conflict escalation. It is also partly a sociological problem of how groups of individuals respond to social forces, which can also be called social psychology. Today, social psychology doesn’t give us much help, as it is the branch of psychology that has been hit hardest by the replication crisis. Unfortunately, social psychology is corrupt. We’re on our own, thrown back on the resources of philosophy, from which the positive sciences originally sprang.
Enthusiasm for war, then, is also a philosophical problem. For the analytical philosopher of history, there is the opportunity for conceptual clarification, for explanation, for laying bare the hidden threads of causality, for heroic objectivity in the face of passion (since war arouses passions that mark few other historical inquiries). For the substantive philosopher of history, there are the questions of the inevitability or the preventability of war, the intelligibility of war as part of the historical process, and laying bare the hidden secrets of the human heart.
There are also a great many ethical questions. In my episodes so far I haven’t laid any emphasis on the relationship between philosophy of history and ethics. My recent episode on Berdyaev would have been an opportunity to do this, as history was through and through a moral problem for Berdyaev.
The problem of explanation in history, that I touched on in relation to Patrick Gardiner and Carl Hempel, is also an ethical problem insofar as moral motives are drivers of historical action (and of inaction), unless we hold that human beings are mere marionettes, with our strings pulled by natural forces. I don’t say that moral motives are the sole drivers of action, but they count among many drivers of action, some of which are moral, some amoral, and some immoral.
Earlier I mentioned the sense of honor that is attached to individual combat. There are, of course, many values and virtues associated with war, not only the values of the frontline soldier — valor, courage, boldness, steadfastness, integrity, chivalry — but also the values of the society that goes to war for admirable ideals — as the claims for Germany to be fighting on behalf of humanity and England to be fighting on behalf of civilization. It is only after the war has run its course and the bodies of soldiers begin returning from the battlefields that the ideals look tarnished. In abstraction, in splendid isolation from their consequences, these ideals are what found societies and drive them forward in history. Perhaps this is what Walter Benjamin meant when he wrote: “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.”
In the righteous condemnation of war, the ideals and values and virtues celebrated in wartime are neglected, or intentionally obscured. In times of war enthusiasm, like the August Madness, the ideals and values and virtues of peace are neglected, or intentionally obscured. And so it is that we lurch from peace to war and back to peace again, as in Turchin’s generational model, but as much from the chaotic process of history developing an unstable oscillation that destroys societies exposed to these forces as from generational cycles.
Once again the spectre looms of human beings as mere marionettes, whose strings are pulled by forces of history that we do not control. We haven’t yet discovered a way to construct a social order that does not give way to these unstable oscillations between war and peace. There have been many hopeful attempts, some familiar to us in our own time, but none that endure over the longue durée. And this is the point at which political philosophy intersects with philosophy of history.
There are more unsolved problems here than solved problems. Perhaps there are only unsolved problems.
