Every human being has had the experience of powerlessness, and of his or her absolute dependence on beings much larger and more powerful. This is universal and momentous. When these powers are benign and nurturing the baby gets through it. The adult equivalent of the benign caregivers of infancy is the encompassing deployments of social power in accordance with “what’s right,” the adult’s cloak of security. Any objective situation in adulthood, which reproduces the absolute helplessness and powerlessness of the infant, can cause psychological injury especially if intentionally inflicted by other people in violation of “what’s right.” Severe trauma in adulthood can damage thumos in the absence of any weakness in the genes or childhood abuse or neglect.14
The second Great Obvious Truth is: The death rate is 100 percent of all live births. We are mortal, and because of our large, language-using brains, we know it and we talk about it. These two facts about human existence, helplessness in infancy and awareness of mortality, are human universals that span all cultures and historical eras. We are truly one species in every sense that matters. Together these form a basis for universalizing quests in philosophy and the arts. Psychologizing, universalizing approaches to great art have merit side by side with historical, anthropological, stylistic, and linguistic investigations of the particularity of such works. The particular and the universal are like breathing in and breathing out. We can only reach the universal through the particular; and the intelligibility of the particular depends upon the universal.
A NEW ABOLITIONISM
The Vietnam veterans that I have worked with were treated shabbily by both the political right—who scorned them as “losers,” lacking the war-winning sterner stuff of the World War II generation—and by the political left, who held them responsible for everything vile or wrongheaded that led us into the war, was done during the war, or came out of the war. The New Abolitionism that I advocate will undoubtedly annoy both the traditional political left, because of my respect for the military profession, and annoy the traditional political right, because of my hostility to war itself and a practical call for its abolition.
Aristotle’s formula, that a philos is “another myself,” is the key to most socially organized human violence. In the modern world, the state has acquired the quality of a philos. Except in our slums, we no longer fight to the death for recognition as individuals, but nations continue violently to compel deference, violently demand acknowledgment.
Economic historian and social philosopher Francis Fukuyama, formerly at the American defense think tank RAND, has seriously raised the question of whether the spread of liberal republics that extend equal citizen recognition can bring Hegel’s historical dynamism of war to an end—the “end of history,” or in the words of the tide of Kant’s famous essay, “To Perpetual Peace.”15 At stake here is whether equal citizen honor and the over-lapping intermediate attachments that we speak of as “civil society” (or in the Catholic Church’s jargon, the “principle of subsidiarity”) can bring an end to giant thumos. Does equal citizen honor and the civil web of plural attachments create a new human psyche, a new human altogether who no longer hungers for domination, who no longer schemes and labors for the triumphal moment when he can see fear in the eyes of his enemy and witness his annihilation? These ideological and social-structural dimensions are staples of democratic theory. Trauma studies can contribute the insight that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse trample the psychic “middle” so essential to the democratic process. The trampled soul may be so broken as to be unable to imagine a future and unable to struggle for it; or the trampled soul may be so bloated with vengeance and the determination never again to be helpless that nothing short of domination is tolerable. In the last two hundred years the sewer and the railroad have magnificently hobbled two of the Horsemen: plague and famine.
To stabilize a republic, it may indeed be necessary to have a critical mass and right mix of people with middling isothumos— for whom equal citizen honor is not only good enough, but loved and celebrated. Probably societies do not have to rid themselves entirely of individuals with giant thumos in order to end war. There are excesses of thumos that may be tolerable in some individuals, but to which a nation must not extend even its little finger. A boring lawfulness in the conduct of nations is the best that can be hoped for; and if this lawfulness reliably allows free development of individuals, then it is very good indeed.
Historian of ancient societies Hans van Wees, in his study Status Warriors,16 has connected the violence of the Iliad to the ways its “heroic” culture constructed the emblems and evidence of honor. Iliadic culture persistently measured honor in the quantity of deference by others. Because deference, and thus honor, could be compelled through violence and the threat of violence, we see much more violence in that setting than in a culture where the evidence of honor is, for example, a financial net worth of $10 million, or lineal descent from King Edward III, neither of which can be compelled by violence. In sixteenth-century Brescia in Italy, numerous deaths resulted from duels over who deferred to whom in the town’s narrow alleys. Many of the deaths among poor teenagers in American slums today appear to be similarly based on deference as the only currency of honor. They have reasons to think that equal citizen honor is a lie and a sham, and have been stripped bare of the warming garments of civil society.17
People who are personally modest, self-controlled, and forgiving—apparently without a shred of giant thumos— may act like bloodthirsty lunatics when they believe that their national honor has been debased, or their religious group insulted. It works the other way, too. People who daily suffer the oppressions and humiliations of poverty and disprized social identities may become euphoric when “their” athletic team or nation has done something glorious. A magazine cover photo18 shows a crowd of sariclad young Indian women demonstrating with a banner crudely lettered “WE PROUD ON OUR NUCLEAR TEST—what makes my blood run cold is the transported look of ecstasy on their faces. Nationalism and xenophobia are the most seductive music of the demonic, full of uplift and power.
We are rightfully suspicious of statements of the form: “It’s human nature to do this … It’s just the way it is.” So with reluctance and trepidation I shall make such a statement: “High-stakes threat of destruction to thumos— to attachments, ideals, ambitions—triggers killing rage against the human source of this threat. It’s in our species nature.”
So does that mean that war—which is state-practiced violence against another state—is an inevitable, permanent, irremovable feature of human life? No … It may mean that evil can never be eradicated; it may mean that it is not possible to eliminate individual human violence—but war, a state activity, is like chattel slavery—this we can end.
In our ancestral environment, where the human brain evolved to its present size and structure, the maximum size of a society was probably no more than 150 souls. They probably warred with one another, perhaps in the way chimpanzee bands make war.19 Within these Paleolithic bands we may reasonably conjecture that there was some sort of internal peace, as there is in chimpanzee bands. It was in this setting that modern Homo sapiens evolved. If any societal practice of peace and war can be said to be biologically “natural” for the human animal, it is probably that this small community shared food within itself and violently defended its own against all others. But then whatever evolved in the brain that permitted human attachment to societies of five thousand, permitting internal peace in such a large group—this is the same brain capacity that permits societies of 5 million or 500 million to have internal peace. The tiny population of Iceland is unimaginably large compared to the ancestral bands in which our modern brain evolved. So when we think about ending war, we must conclude with William of Ockham in the fourteenth century, “What is—is possible!” The human brain presents no fundamental barrier to a world without war. From the biological point of view of 150-person ancestral bands in which the modern human brain evolved, “perpetual peace” has already happened!
/> Like ending chattel slavery, ending the social practice of war will be the work and struggle of centuries. Clausewitz famously said, “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” Tyranny is Clausewitz on his head: tyranny is the prosecution of war by means of political institutions. When a state declares war on a segment of its own population, we call it genocide. As a practical matter, if we wish to end wars between states, we must also end the wars that states wage against their own people, as the events in the Balkans show so clearly. Destruction of an ethnic minority in one country becomes a casus belli in a neighboring country where that minority is the majority. It simply doesn’t work to turn one’s back and say, “That’s an internal affair.”
How do we do this? You will be disappointed to hear that the answer is already so familiar that it may seem tedious: trustworthy collective security. To end war, every nation and every population within every nation must have well-founded confidence in their own safety. This was essentially Kant’s argument two centuries ago. In liberal republics, citizens do not fear being killed or enslaved by their own governments, so there is the first echelon of protection for their populations. The second layer of protection would be—and Kant necessarily argued this without historical evidence—that a universal regime of collective security among republics would end wars among themselves.20
An enduring sense of surprise—a heartening surprise—in my work with American military professionals on prevention of psychological and moral injury in military service is that they are not the obstacles to the elimination of war. Those who have been in it hate it with more passion than I am ever likely to match.
The service of the soldier will still be needed in the collective security regime that Kant envisioned. International peace, according to Kant, is domestic peace writ large. So we have a paradox: to have peace we need soldiers—whose main task is making war.
Even if the United States cannot and should not be the only policeman for the world, this does not mean the world does not need soldiers—the international equivalent of the police in a collective security regime—nor mean that the United States shouldn’t actively support the police. As freelance military and paramilitary organizations, such as al-Qaeda, acquire more powerful weapons and communications technology,21 it should be doubly evident that the world needs people with the thumos to be soldiers.
Those who sacrifice in military service rightly enjoy profound honor. They sacrifice their lives and body parts, sometimes their sanity, and according to my analysis, they sacrifice their freedom when plunged into war. In a peace-ensuring system of trustworthy collective security, those who offer to do the soldier’s work, to risk all that, and sacrifice all that for peace, truly deserve our honor. These paradoxical strains are part of what we must take on in ending the human practice of war.
The original Abolitionists understood that their work would take more than one lifetime. They passed it as a heritage to their children. In the words of the Talmud, “You are not expected to finish the job, but neither are you free to lay it down.”
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
The shared experience and aftermath of the attack on the New York World Trade Center and on the Pentagon produced bittersweet reactions among the veterans of VIP On the one hand, they were flooded with sensory-reliving symptoms: the smell of burning jet fuel, the stench of dead bodies, rage, the gut-twisting sense that another attack is coming—but where?—the hunger to personally hit back. On the other hand, one veteran after another reported seeing the light of comprehension coming on in the eyes of family members, neighbors, employers. “I get it! This is what it’s been for you …” Like combat vets with PTSD, ordinary Americans had nightmares, intrusive memories, constant, obsessive thoughts about airplane and anthrax attacks. Like combat vets with PTSD, they lost interest in many things they had previously thought very important. Sex? Forget it. Laughter? Forget it. They became jumpy and hypervigilant.
The country as a whole rediscovered a great many lessons about cohesion and how it controls fear. I hope readers will see the connection—between the courage-making power of solidarity and the moves I have advocated in this book to protect and strengthen our troops.
APPENDIX l:
A POCKET GUIDE TO HOMER’S ODYSSEY1
PART ONE (BOOKS 1-4): A HOME WITHOUT HUSBAND OR FATHER
Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, have lived for ten years knowing that the Trojan War is over, and that Odysseus made it out of Troy alive. But where is he? Penelope is still beautiful (and rich, if Odysseus and Telemachus are dead), and surrounded by all the ambitious and aggressive young men in the area, competing for the widow’s hand. Not satisfied simply to pay her court, the suitors carouse in Odysseus’ manor house on the island of Ithaca, feasting from his herds and storerooms, drinking his wine, and taking their pleasures with his maidservants. The suitors press Penelope to quit stalling and choose one of them to replace her missing-and-presumed-dead husband. The boy Telemachus is an adolescent with an absent father, who has heard how great his dad was, but his mother’s candidate husbands are the only men on the scene now. Desperate to know whether he is really an orphan as he fears, he leaves home to visit his father’s comrades on the mainland who have already made it back from Troy. The suitors secretly plot to assassinate Telemachus on his way back. This will give them control of Odysseus’ wealth and lands, once Penelope picks one of them as her new husband.
PART TWO (BOOKS 5-8): ODYSSEUS STARTS THE LAST LAP FOR HOME
Not too flattering for Odysseus, we find him alive and bedded down with the lovely sea goddess Calypso on her distant island where he’s a cast-away. But the gods on Mount Olympus tell her to let him go; even though she’s beautiful and has been very nice to him, after seven years, he’s tired of her and wants to get home. The trouble is, he’s lost his whole squadron and his own ship. With her reluctant help he builds a raft and sets out across the sea, only to be shipwrecked again, and washed up naked and half dead in a river inlet on the island of Phaeacia. With a nudge from his patron goddess, Athena, Princess Nausicaa goes to this very same river, and they meet. Odysseus is nothing if not charming to beautiful young girls, and he persuades Nausicaa to give him clothes and entrée to her parents’ court and its hospitality. He does not reveal who he is. He fills his hungry belly and hears the great court poet sing true stories of the Trojan War. This bard is the genuine article. The complacent Phaeacian nobles are hugely entertained by these stories of the war—but when Odysseus hears them he weeps and weeps. The king notices and presses him to say who he is.
PART THREE (BOOKS 9-12): ODYSSEUS TELLS OF HIS ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
Odysseus reveals his identity and agrees to tell his story: (1) Shortly after leaving Troy, his squadron sacks the city of Ismarus, escaping with serious losses during a counterattack. The squadron then is blown off course to the (2) Land of the Lotus Eaters, who offer the men an addicting drug, and then to (3) the island inhabited by the Cyclopes (plural of Cyclops), one of whom eats several of his crew. Escaping from there, the squadron fetches up on (4) a floating island ruled by King Aeolus, who can control the sea winds and who helps Odysseus and his squadron get straight home to Ithaca. After screwing this up within sight of home and losing Aeolus’ further help, Odysseus’ exhausted squadron pulls into (5) the peaceful fjord of the Laestrygonians, which looks like a safe place to rest. The inhabitants surprise and sink all the ships in the squadron, except Odysseus’ own ship, which alone was moored outside the fjord. Terrified and bereaved, they row away from the slaughter and land on (6) the island of the beautiful witch, Circe, who turns all her guests but Odysseus into pigs. After getting the upper hand, Odysseus persuades her to restore his crew. She gives him sailing instructions from there that lead through (7) the Land of the Dead. Here he meets the ghosts of his dead comrades Achilles, Agamemnon, and Ajax and of others, including his mother, who has died while he was away at the Trojan War. He learns from the ghost of Teiresias that if he reaches home alive, he
then must leave again to complete one last trial. Returning to Circe for more instructions, he continues on past the dangers of (8) the island of the Sirens, and (9) the many-headed monster Scylla and the nearby whirlpool Charybdis, to (10) the island where the sun god keeps his cattle. There, Odysseus’ crew disobeys him by killing and eating some of the sacred cattle and brings down the god’s destruction of the last ship and crew. Odysseus rides some flotsam past (11) the giant whirlpool of Charybdis. Odysseus alone survives and washes up on (12) the island of Calypso, where we found him at the beginning of Part Two.
PART FOUR (BOOKS 13-16): FATHER AND SON RETURN TO ITHACA AND ARE REUNITED
The Phaeacian king and queen are deeply impressed by the truth and glory of Odysseus’ story and give him a pile of valuable gifts and a free ride home to Ithaca. Disoriented on the beach at Ithaca and unable to recognize his homeland, Odysseus meets his patron, the goddess Athena, who tells him where he is and disguises him as an old beggar so the people of his homeland won’t recognize him. She tells him of the dangerous situation with the suitors, and assures him his son is safe. She instructs Odysseus to go to the hut of his loyal servant, the pig farmer Eumaeus, rather than head straight home. Athena then flies off to tell Telemachus to hurry back, but only to Eumaeus’ hut, avoiding the ambush laid by the suitors. Odysseus cannot immediately enlist Eumaeus, because there’s been a steady stream of con artists passing through Ithaca. It’s been twenty years since he left, and who knows what he looks like? When Odysseus says he knows that Odysseus is close by, Eumaeus politely calls him a liar. Odysseus tells a heartrending life story—which is a complete pack of lies—and in response, Eumaeus tells his equally heartrending, but true, life story. They weep together. Then Telemachus arrives and son and father are reunited. They test each other, and after Odysseus reveals himself, discuss their common enemy, the mob of suitors.
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