-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Blood Rites - Origins & History of the Passions of War
Barbara Ehrenreich(C)1997
Metropolitan Books
Hennry Holt & Companty
ISBN 0-8050-5077-9
-----
I can not say enough about this book. These excerpts do it little justice. I
strongly recommend reading this book.Well-written and thoughtful; when all is
said and done, the veneer between passions, expectations, propaganda and
thought can be very thin. There are chapters on the warrior elites, the
sacralization of war, the effect of missle(guns/longbow) warfare and war
worship. A very important book.
Om
K
-----
Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion,
and lift up himself as a young lion: he shall not
lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the
blood of the slain.
--NUMBERS 23:24
12
AN IMAGINED BESTIARY
"The nation" is one of the most mysterious categories of modern thought. It
is, most citizens of nations would agree, something that people are willing to
die for. But anyone seeking a more precise and scientific definition will be
plunged into a swamp of turgid scholarship, which gets even more deeply
frustrating if the quest is expanded to include the passions inspired by
nations, or nationalism. There are not many things people are willing to die
for that they cannot point to or touch or even adequately put into words.
One historical reason for the mystery of nations and nationalism is that the
great social theorists of the nineteenth century were transfixed by something
far removed from the thought of glorious and voluntary death. After the
hideous bloodletting of the Napoleonic Wars, Europe lapsed into a period of
peace and economic development. It was the capitalist market economy,
burgeoning throughout much of Europe since the early 1800s, that fascinated
Karl Marx and Adam Smith. As John Keegan writes, Marx put all his emphasis on
the market economy largely because, at the time when he wrote, finance and
investment overshadowed all other forces in society, and the military class
exhausted by the Napoleonic wars and dispirited by the defeat of its interests
in Russia in 1825 and in France in 1830-was at an unnaturally low ebb of self-
confidence.[1
The rise of the market favored a new "materialist" view of humanity--as
rational, calculating individuals seeking to advance their individual
interests. In fact, the phrase "the Wealth of Nations" in the title of Adam
Smith's 1776 volume is a misnomer; only individuals, or corporations, were the
possessors of the wealth that built factories and harnessed the power of
steam. "Nations" were of little interest to Smith or to Marx, and in the harsh
capitalist world their theories described, there was no possible motive for
giving anything, perhaps especially one's life. In the Marxist paradigm that
has played such a large role in Western social thought, nationalism could only
be a form of "false consciousness," a seemingly irrational distraction from
the class struggle through which working people, banding together, would
advance their true interests.
For a long time, the puzzle of nations and nationalism could be sidestepped by
assuming that nations are "natural" groupings analogous to biological
families. If there were indeed significant genetic commonalities among, say,
French people or Germans, then it could be argued that a soldier giving his
life for one of these nations is, in some small measure, acting in his own
genetic self-interest. But even the most venerable nations turn out to be
mongrels. France has its Bretons, with their distinct language and traditions;
Britain its Scots and Welsh; Spain uneasily embraces the Basques and
Catalonians. Furthermore, most of the world's nations are hardly venerable but
are newcomers like Uganda or, for that matter, Italy. Instead of being rooted
in fixed bloodlines, nations are fairly arbitrary agglomerations, forever
being shaped and reshaped, like Russia or Yugoslavia, by the vicissitudes of
politics and war.
In Benedict Anderson's memorable phrase, nations are not natural but "imagined
communities," whose imagining has taken a great deal of conscious effort. In
the European cases, intellectuals had to resurrect the folklore and epics
which could be used to give people a sense of a common past. The printing
press, along with the new market in what we now call "information," had to
publicize these findings to increasingly literate publics. State-sponsored
schools had to impose a common vernacular language on what was often a
hodgepodge of dialects and then educate people to literacy in it. Equally
strenuous efforts were required in the third world, where national boundaries
had often been laid down arbitrarily, for the convenience of the European
colonialists.
The work of Anderson, and of historian Eric Hobsbawm, has much to tell us
about the creation of nations as a purely cognitive undertaking: How do people
come to believe there is such a thing as Serbia or France? What these scholars
fail to explain, however, are the passions that attach themselves to the idea
of the nation--the emotions of nationalism. In Imagined Communities, Anderson
seems to promise at the beginning to explain the religious power of the nation
over its citizens, but we are quickly immersed in the relatively bloodless
business of "imagining"--the construction of common languages and
"traditions," and so forth. The reason for this oversight, it seems to me, is
that these writers, like most who owe something to the Marxist tradition, pay
almost no attention to war as a factor shaping human societies. But what is
France if not as defined against England or Germany? What is Serbia if not as
defined against Germany or Croatia? "From the very beginning," as the military
historian Michael Howard has written, "the principle of nationalism was almost
indissolubly linked, both in theory and practice, with the idea of war.[2
The immediate forerunner of nationalism, as we have seen, lies in the
experience of community engendered in the mass armies of prerevolutionary (and
prenationalist) Europe. In these armies, the individual soldier knows that he
is threatened by distant forces, foreigners who wish him dead. He knows too
that he is, as an individual, helpless in the face of this threat. But he is
not just an individual; he is a unit-- as the constant drilling, if nothing
else, convinces him--of something far larger and more powerful than himself.
What he feels, as a result, is very different from the anomie sense, common to
mass societies, of being only "one of many," because in this case the many add
up to something greater than the sum of the parts. What he feels is the
confidence drawn from collective strength, which can amount, even in the face
of death, to a kind of joy.
If group living arose among hominids as a response to predation, it seems at
least likely that the human capacity for intense feelings of group
identification arose in the same kind of situation. Long before hominids had
developed a technology of offense and defense--sharpened sticks or spears,
axes and slings--they would have discovered the value of a collective defense:
standing together, making noise, brandishing sticks, throwing stones. As I
suggested in chapter 5, there may have been, over many thousands of years,
natural selection for those humans or hominids who were particularly
enthusiastic about the rituals of collective defense--who derived a
pleasurable thrill from it, that is--as opposed to those, for example, who
abandoned their fellows and ran for the nearest tree. Tree climbers still
abound among us, but there is something in the experience of confronting
danger as a group--an army, for example, or a mob--that can arouse a kind of
exhilaration in almost anyone.
Nationalism, however, is experienced not only by soldiers in armies. It is
experienced, and often more strongly, by civilians who are far from any real
danger and who have never drilled or fought. Nazi "philosopher" Alfred
Rosenberg understood the connection between civilian nationalism and the
intense community forged in armies, writing in 1937:
The German nation is just now about to find its style of life for good.... It
is the style of the marching column, regardless of where and for what purpose
this marching column is to be used.... It is a mark of the German style of
life that no German wants nowadays to feel himself a private person.[3
In the age of nationalism, patriotic ceremonies began to be designed,
consciously or not, to give civilians the feeling that they, too, constituted
a kind of "army," united by common danger and bonded by rhythmic activities
analogous to the drill. George L. Mosse observes that the nineteenth century
saw "the introduction of rhythm into all ceremonies--marches, parades, and
festivals--in order to transform the undisciplined masses into a disciplined
crowd." The "Marseillaise" was the first national anthem set to a marching
beat; in imitation, other nations began to sing their anthems to similarly
infectious and militant rhythms. By "joining in the national liturgy [and]
singing national anthems," Mosse writes, large numbers of people now had the
experience of "sublimating themselves to the greater national community."[4
Other developments, too, were encouraging the civilian to participate in the
thrill of collective defense--from his or her armchair, in most cases. The
various factors which Anderson identifies as preconditions for nationalism: a
common language, a sense of common traditions and history, and organized media
to engage the citizens' attention. The civilian who reads, on a wall poster or
in a newspaper, that the Austrians are marching on Paris or the French are
marching on Moscow--that all that is "French" or "Russian" now lies in peril--
has been drawn into the alarms and thrills of collective defense. The function
of the media in this case is emotional entrainment: Just as the drill causes
men to move in the same way at the same time, the media are capable of
arousing the same or similar feelings in large numbers of civilians at the
same time. And as large numbers of people become aware of feeling the same
thing at the same time (perhaps only because the media are quick to tell them
what everyone else is supposedly feeling), they come to share in the soldier's
exalted sense of being part of something larger than themselves.
This awareness of "something larger" into which the individual might merge is
repeatedly expressed in nineteenth-century philosophical writings. Where
economically oriented thinkers like Marx saw only the isolation and anomie
induced by the capitalist economy, others, like Hegel before him and the
philosopher J. G. Fichte, saw the emergence of a new collective identity
through which, as Fichte put it, "each single person becomes part of an
organized whole and melts into one with it.[4 No doubt the two perspectives
are, as Marx might say, dialectically connected: As the average citizen
experienced an ever greater economic reality of individual isolation, he or
she became more open to--and perhaps even eager for--the feeling of
submergence within some larger community, no matter how vague and imaginary
that community might be.
It is time now to look more closely at this "larger whole" that the individual
"melts into." For the soldier it is, in the most literal sense, the army. The
first modern armies, starting in the seventeenth century, went to great
lengths to strip from each soldier all sense of individual uniqueness and to
impress on him that he had no will or ambition other than that which the army
allotted to him. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, though, in the era
of revolution, the "larger whole" takes on a far less literal meaning, as the
nation, which potentially embraces civilians, too. What is this new entity
that men--and women, insofar as they also achieve the status of
citizens--profess themselves willing to die for?
The first clue is that the nation is not a static community, but one that is
imagined as existing in time. As Anderson puts it' rather ornately, the nation
is "a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty
time."[6 It has a past; it is nothing, in fact, without a past. Even brand-new
nations attempt to situate themselves within some long-standing tradition (the
human struggle for freedom and self-determination, for example) or recurring
necessity ("When, in the course of human events . . ."). Much of the work of
"imagining" the nation as a community lies in the effort to resurrect or
invent a national past, and this past is in most cases defined by war: Serbs
look back to the battle of Kosovo in 1389; Americans look to Lexington and
Bunker Hill. As Michael Howard has written:
France was Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena: military triumph set the seal on the
new-found national consciousness. Britain was Trafalgar--but it had been a
nation for four hundred years, since those earlier battles Crecy and
Agincourt. Russia was the triumph of 1812.... Italy was Garibaldi and the
Thousand.... Could a Nation, in any true sense of the word, really be born
without a war?[7
The nation, then, is our imagined link to the glorious deeds--or the terrible
atrocities still awaiting revenge--that were performed by others long ago.
To put it another way, the nation is a warrior lineage in which everyone can
now claim membership. With the democratization of glory, every citizen is
encouraged to think of himself or herself as a member of a noble bloodline.
"The French" replace the Bourbons. And as every noble lineage had its special
heraldry, every nation has its flag. The exaltation that a patriotic citizen
feels at the sight of his or her flag is, in part, pride in the imagined
lineage to which every citizen now belongs: "Those who came before us" and
"those who gave their lives so that . . ."
A similar upgrading of the common person occurred in Japan in the nineteenth
century, after the Japanese had reembraced the gun and created a modern mass
army. According to Edwin 0. Reischauer:
Modern mass education had quickly spread the strong nationalism of the upper
classes of the late Tokugawa period to all Japanese, but more remarkably, it
had soon convinced the descendants of peasants, who for almost three centuries
had been denied swords and other arms and had been exploited by a military
caste above them, that they too were members of a warrior race.[8
But a lineage is still a lifeless abstraction compared to what we think of as
a nation. A lineage cannot act except through its individual representatives,
whereas nations "act" all the time: They enter into alliances, issue
statements, make treaties, and, most decisively, make war. Even more
anthropomorphically, one commonly reads of nations "mourning," "remembering,"
"risking," and "daring." To thinkers like Hegel and the even more overtly
nationalist writers who followed him, the nation was a living being--the
"organism" Anderson refers to, only not merely "sociological," but with an
occult sort of life of its own. As Hegel put it, substituting "state" for
"nation":
Predicates, principles, and the like get us nowhere in assessing the state,
which must be apprehended *as an organism,* just as predicates are of no help
in comprehending the nature of God, whose life instead must be intuited as it
is in itself[9 (emphasis added).
Even the least philosophical patriot understands the nation as something that
"lives," at least in the sense that it will "live on" after him. Hence the
readiness, even eagerness, of the patriot to die for his country: If the
nation is an immortal being and he is part of it, then, in dying to defend it,
he is in fact participating in that immortality. Just as, in ancient
religions, blood sacrifice had a fructifying, generative function, helping to
make the crops grow and herds increase, so too the sacrifice of oneself for
the nation can be construed as a life-giving act. "The Gallipoli campaign has
been described as 'the most glorious failure in military history,'" the Sydney
Morning Herald observed in 1922:
But was it a failure to Australia? It has made us a nation. Was the price
worth paying? Are not nations like individuals? If the nation is to be born,
if the nation is to live, someone must die for it.[10
In the opinion of Hegel and the later theorists of nationalism, nations need
war--that is, the sacrifice of their citizens even when they are not being
menaced by other nations. The reason is simple: The nation, as a kind of
"organism," exists only through the emotional unity of its citizens, and
nothing cements this unity more decisively than war. As Hegel explained, peace
saps the strength of nations by allowing the citizens to drift back into their
individual concerns:
In times of peace civil life expands more and more, all the different spheres
settle down, and in the long run men sink into corruption, their
particularities become more and more fixed and ossified. But health depends
upon the unity of the body and if the parts harden, death occurs.[11
Meaning, of course, the death of the nation, which depends for its life on the
willingness of its citizens to face their own deaths. War thus becomes a kind
of tonic for nations, reviving that passion for collective defense that alone
brings the nation to life in the minds of its citizens. Heinrich von
Treitschke, the late-nineteenth-century German nationalist, put it excitedly:
One must say in the most decided manner: 'War is the only remedy for ailing
nations!" The moment the State calls, "Myself and my existence are at stake!"
social self-seeking must fall back and every party hate [partisan hatred?] be
silent. The individual must forget his own ego and feel himself a member of
the whole.... In that very point lies the loftiness of war, that the small man
disappears entirely before the great thought of the State.[12
Considered as a living being or "organism," the nation is clearly both
awesome, like a deity, and at the same time far less admirable, in the sense
of being constrained by any kind of morality, than the individuals it
comprises. Ordinary citizens must refrain from violence, from theft and other
crimes; but the nation, acting in an arena of other nations, is governed by no
higher law or (judging from the impotence of institutions like the United
Nations and the World Court in our own time) by none worth mentioning.
Citizens who have a dispute to settle must seek the judgment of the courts;
nations are more likely to duke it out on the field of battle. Citizens who
brawl on the streets are punished; nations that go to war are feared and often
respected. If the nation as organism has a personality, it is that of the
mounted warrior of old: impetuous, belligerent, touchy about all matters of
"honor," and in a state of readiness, at all times, for war.
At a more archaic level of the imagination, the nation-as-organism becomes
something more, or less, than human. Here is a "creature" that, according to
Hegel, requires blood in order to sustain its life-- the blood of actual human
beings. We recognize, in this view of the nation, another version of
humanity's primordial enemy and original deity: the predator beast. And in
fact, it is only in the era of nation-states that Europeans routinely came to
see the enemy as a monster or beast. In the premodern European warfare of
warrior elites, the ties of class and kinship that linked elite combatants on
both sides made it difficult to think of the enemy as anything other than
human. By the twentieth century, though, newspaper cartoons and propaganda
posters routinely represent the other side as a serpent, a vampire, a rat, or
even a shark.[13
But it is not only the enemy nation which comes to resemble a nonhuman threat
to human life. Predatory creatures play a major role in the flags, coats of
arms, and less formal symbols that various nations adopt for themselves: the
eagle for the United States, Germany, Mexico, Poland, and Spain; the lion for
Britain, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Kenya, the Netherlands, Norway, and Iran;
the hawk for Egypt;[14 the bear for Russia. What we become, when we merge into
that "something larger than ourselves" that the nation represents, is what our
species has most deeply feared and passionately longed to be.
pp. 194-203
--[notes--
Chapter 12
1. Keegan, The Mask of Command, p. 3.
2. Howard, The Lessons of History, p. 39.
3. Quoted in Vagts, A History of Militarism, p. 409.
4. Mosse, Confronting the Nation, p. 23.
5. Fichte, The Science of Rights, p. 228.
6. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 26.
7. Howard, The Causes of Wars, pp. 26-27.
8. Reischauer,Japan, p. 185.
9. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 290.
10. Quoted in Lake, "Mission Impossible," p. 309.
11. Friedrich, The Philosophy of Hegel, p. 322.
12. Gowans, Selections from Treitschke's Lectures on Politics, pp. 23, 24.
13. Keen, Faces of the Enemy, pp. 60-64.
14. See Hope and Hope, Symbols of the Nations.
p. 262
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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