War as Retreat

A coincidence of events this week has led me to a surprising (and perhaps controversial) insight: war is not as complex as it may seem; at least compared to times of peace, it may even be fairly simple.

During war there is a concentration of purpose. When we’re not at war, activity is less focussed, purpose is diffused among a multitude of perspectives and causes; what I mean is that everybody is too concerned with their own personal matters, seen from within their own perspectives, to even recognize that a ‘bigger picture’ exists: we don’t appreciate the full scale of life because there’s hardly any reason or cause to look out and consider it, there are few signs that such generalities are real at all.

Whereas during war, the little pockets of moral and intellectual security we inhabit are exploded, compelling us to receive a more comprehensive impression of life, albeit life of a simpler mode – organized around a single public cause, or a few publicly shared catastrophies – compared to the complex and almost incomprehensible flourishing variety of creative activities in peace. One of these creative activities is to personally imagine that we actually understand – or at least that somewhere somebody understands – ‘what it’s all about.’ It only seems simple because we’re free to create the conditions (the routines, conventions, and ideals) in which we may imagine it is so.

These personal ‘pockets’ of life are much like Plato’s allegorical cave; but since we construct them ourselves, with no regard to what may be outside them, there is no entrance or exit through which to climb into the general light of knowledge. Instead, these pockets slowly disintegrate or crash against each other, blinding us by the light that is then allowed to penetrate through inconvenient gaps and cracks. And instead of learning to adust to this light, we cover our eyes while attempting to patch the holes, or we retreat to an even smaller pocket.

It is partly because of that irresponsibility that wars happen; it’s almost as if some higher powers use war as a way to reorganize the mess made by our disordered mass of jerry-rigged routines and ideals – the incompatibilities generated during long periods of specialized ignorance.

No new elements are introduced to life in times of war; what happens is that a few factors become amplified (which were always there, either latent, or covertly working behind the scenes), they become more distinguishable and important. These distinct factors help us recognize a few vague outlines of a bigger picture. Because the more complex picture of peace is rarely noticed, the war-picture is the biggest and most complex view we ever see in a truly general light; this is why war has the reputation of being difficult to understand – because it is the only general problem that most people even attempt to understand.

Before I continue, let me say that I’m worried that these suggestions may seem disrespectful to soldiers, victims, and their families, especially those who’ve lost loved ones, especially those who bear a complex emotional burden. But the complex emotional burden of death – the burden of loss and confusion and anger with life and one’s God – is experienced even in the most peaceful times. This is why I hesitate to juxtapose war with peace: victimization and violence have rarely been very far away in even the most ‘peaceful’ times – and if there wasn’t intentional violence, then there have at least always been cruel accidents. The safer we seemingly are, the more shockingly these events effect us – and it may be partly because of this that we choose to go on indefinite moral vacations whenever it’s immediately affordable to do so, I mean, whenever there are no urgent general problems.

My favourite example of this kind of protectionism is in the Paul Haggis's Crash. It’s easy to mistakenly simplify Crash as ‘about racism.’ (In fact, such a simplification is itself an example of how we tend to retreat from complex problems – in this case, a number of semi-related dramatic episodes, which are really about (if they are ‘about’ anything at all) the challenge of human relations in an interconnected world of strangers – and cover the complexity with an encompassing conclusion.) But racist ideas are only one specific way in which we use routines, conventions, and ideals to shield us from more complex, general problems: a racist belief is one kind of over-simplified ‘encompassing conclusion’; racism is one way people attempt to shield themselves from complexity, rather than working with it directly, in the full light of fact and reason.

The opening lines of Crash (which I don't remember exactly) suggest that cars – our "boxes of glass and steel" – symbolize roughly the same kind of security zone that I’m talking about. One result is that our sense of security is just as artificial as the boxes we create to maintain that sense; we still can’t avoid unforeseeable accidents, and we might even become so preoccupied by security that we miss the more immanent dangers right under our feet, as demonstrated by Sandra Bullock’s character. Another result, which is suggested rather explicitly in the film’s opening lines, is that we may become so isolated and enclosed that we feel inclined to crash into each other just to feel alive.

That’s clearly a symbolic exaggeration, but it seems possible that circumstances may be too safe in some cases, thus draining them of the vital qualities that make life worth living. This is a fuzzy area; we’re getting into ideas about human nature that are difficult prove – difficult even to articulate without excessive vagueness. But consider the willingness – or rather, the enthusiasm – with which young people, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, have signed up to fight in wars in faraway places. For a seventeen year-old rural or small-town boy, war is way to feel alive, an adventure, an escape from boredom and routine, an opportunity to grow up. (This was the main motive for enlisting given by one of the veterans interviewed in Ken Burns's The War, which is currently airing on PBS.)

Of course, this is far from a universal sentiment, especially in North America and Europe in the past few decades; but there is no questioning that at least some young people feel this way, and that the actual outbreak of war may depend largely on what proportion of the population exhibits such enthusiasm.

Working from a different perspective, the institutions and conventions that make life regulated, satisfying, and secure for some people, make it rather distressing and perhaps even dangerous for others. This may be a more prominent motive for those enlisting in the US armed forces in the past few decades. Risking one’s life overseas may be the only way to escape risking one’s life in the gang warfare right in one’s own neighbourhood. Another motive may be anomie – a kind of social disconnectedness, alienation, or inability to identify with the activities or values of one's environment. (I would like to have looked at Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, but it was unavailable to me at the time of writing.)

In other words (if you’ll forgive my grossly simplified generalizing), people go to war for two reasons: (a) life is too simple, or (b) life is too complex. Both reasons can be generalized into the same explanation: people need to feel like they have some kind of control, or effect, or relevance, or importance in the circumstances around them.

Those for whom life is too simple – the small-town boys who enlist to fight in search of adventure – the world seems to be a smooth and continuously rounded surface: life has no edge, there is nothing to climb on or grab or sink one’s teeth into. Those for whom life is too complex – like impoverished urban youths, confused idealists, and those who’ve had war brought to them – the world is nothing but edges, with apparently no coherent order, and no consistent surface on which to find a secure footing.

I’m going to dwell on this a little longer, because it is the heart of my case – and the direction of much more of my work that is yet to take shape. It represents an attempt to conceive a new general conception of human nature; though the word ‘new’ is perhaps too strong. What a layperson like me might call the ‘gist’ of this conception has been developing in the human sciences (including management theory) for decades, and it has been approximated by philosophers and poets for as long as there have been philosophers and poets.

What I’m talking about is simply the will to be – not just to exist, but to recognize and be certain of one’s own existence. It isn’t enough for people to be physically alive, we must also experience ourselves in the act of living, we need to see reminders in the world that we’re there – that we have some real importance or effect in life – and that the world would be different without us in it. In 1959, psychologist Robert White introduced something like this as "effectance motivation," and associated it with the aim or need for personal competence.

[I’ll have to leave a more thorough account until a future essay. In the mean time, any interested or sceptical non-psychologists may want to read Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis, especially chapter ten. I also highly recommend the work of Mihaly Csikzsentmihalyi; see Flow, or the more philosophical Evolving Self, or the more practical and business-oriented Good Business. See also Edward Deci & Richard Flaste's Why We Do What We Do, for a popular introduction to 'intrinsic motivation.' With respect to professional psychologists, first forgive what may seem like careless tramping and disregard for conventional methods and assumptions. But consider how changes outside of the profession may soon be important within it. Technology and business (especially ‘Web 2.0' and ‘Enterprise 2.0') may provide the kind of vivid illustrations, dynamic models, and open metaphors needed to establish a more ‘humanist’ psychology: Maslow himself admitted in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature that his ideas were only a rough initial survey, with an inadequate vocabulary and background, which may take decades to develop.]

But our everyday intuitive understanding of human motives is still largely effected by Marxian, Nietzschean, and Freudian notions of power struggle, domination, master and slave moralities, resentment and sublimation, all understood through archaic industrial metaphors. So we tend to generate over-simplified explanations of wars and violence, which seem to take the people-as-machines metaphors a bit too literally: a "boiling-over point" of "pent-up hostility," "imbalance of power," "clash of civilizations," and even my earlier mention of "crashing into each other just to feel alive." These metaphors help to distil complexity and clear away much of the confusion, but none of them can ever be the cause war, nor even the cause of some specific war. (I may not be able to make a case for treating this as a general fallacy, but for an outline of the problems involved in some of the most popular explanations of war and peace, see The Causes of War by Geoffrey Blainey.)

Another difficulty that inhibits our understanding of war and peace – especially in our own time of individual terrorists, informal networks, and asymmetrical warfare – is that we have trouble conceiving it apart from conceptions of cohesive and distinct governments and groups, with centralized systems of authority and a rigidly defined chains of command. But even if we look at the First World War, when war hostilities were apparently precipitated in the most mechanical way possible – according to predetermined treaties, agreements, and railroad timetables – individual human factors were nevertheless the most important determinant: timetables and treaties still require people willing to follow them (or unwilling to rewrite them), and in the case of the First World War, many people were not merely willing, but fully confident, and even enthusiastic to begin fighting. (See Niall Ferguson’s Pity of War.)

My earlier discussion of motives focussed mainly on soldiers and citizens; but it’s probably even more important to consider the psychology of those in positions of leadership and significant influence. It would a mistake to assume that leaders make purely rational decisions.

I’m sceptical that anybody is capable of blocking-out emotional sentiments to become totally objective; and even the most objective decision-makers are unlikely to have access to all of the facts, or to manage to organize and evaluate all of those facts in their proper order of significance: this is something that usually takes historians decades, even centuries, to sort out. (Which was pointed out by historian Margaret MacMillan in her series of public lectures on "the uses and abuses of history" at UWO this past week.) Besides, especially in democracies, leadership decisions are largely compelled by public opinion; in other words, policy decisions are largely compelled by emotional sentiments – or even more obscurely, by an interpretation of sentiments rendered in aggregate and abstract forms.

So leaders have a lot of information to cope with. And they can’t just postpone a decision until they’re sure all the facts are in (because that may never happen). Leaders are expected to do something as leaders; they’re there to make decisions, so decisions must eventually be made. And in times of great uncertainty and danger, it often appears that going to war is "the only option."

Now this is the whole point of this article: I’m going to suggest that we consider that in many cases – such as America’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and more obviously in the aggressive tendencies of most dictatorial regimes – a decision to make war, or to at make war-like postures, has less to do with real conditions and supposed premises (like perceived threats posed by other regimes), and has more to do with the psychological need to demonstrate competence.

So I’m suggesting that war is a result of human nature, but I’m not suggesting that human nature is inherently violent, power-driven, resentful, or war-like. Leaders go to war as a way to make circumstances understandable; war is an escape from complexity. War is a retreat to position of artificial or forced simplicity.

Of course, it isn’t really so simple. I must be careful not to become too attached to the apparent simplicity of my own ‘encompassing conclusions,’ which may accomplish little more than to satisfy my will to be involved in circumstances. Complicating matters, we must also consider the motives of revolutionaries and tyrants – the Robespierres and Napoleons – whose reasons for fighting develop long before they become leaders, and therefore don’t seem to fit my hypothesis. But people may establish a habit or position of forced simplicity early in life – either as an ideology or an aggressive attitude, or a combination of both – which becomes a life-long strategy that happens to work successfully for a given person in a given time and place, which helps them attain power, which gives them an opportunity to project their aggressive ideology and attitude (their personality, their will to be) into a larger-scale.

There’s a lot more I want to say about this, but none of it quite seems to fit what I’ve already said here. So I invite anyone to suggest comments and criticisms. Meanwhile, forgive me as I clumsily add a few more comments before trailing off.

Margaret MacMillan mentioned Michael Howard during Thursday’s lecture, which led me to take a look at his book, The Invention of Peace, hoping to find some insight into these ideas. On the first page he quotes Sir Henry Maine: "War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention." In the next paragraph Howard adds, "Peace may or may not be ‘a modern invention,’ but it is certainly a far more complex affair than war," and (as he says later in the book) peace is "artificial, intricate and highly volatile."

My theory of war and peace is not very different from others that have already been put forward; like the one that led Norman Angell to believe that sensible and civilized people would never fight another war again – which he published in 1910.

Angell believed – like Thomas Friedman today – that the kind of impulses that lead people into war could be satisfied through industry, culture, and trade; and people would avoid fighting any major wars because they would not want to risk their more peaceful enterprises. But I think what happened then – just as I fear might happen, or hope will not happen in the future – is that the industrial and commercial enterprises progressed beyond people’s ability to understand and control them. So they may have actually defeated their own purpose.

You may notice in the rest of my work, that fighting for an effective balance, trying to understand the complex dynamics of all of our routines and conventions, and warning people of the dangers of not understanding, is my mission – my "moral equivalent of war."