Why Does War Exist?
Library of Social Science oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com via uark.edu
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oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com
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WHY
DOES WARFARE EXIST?
by Richard A. Koenigsberg
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Warfare
is a culturally-defined institution or form of behavior
that has existed within many societies throughout history.
But why has warfare existed? Why does it continue to exist?
What is the “function” of a societal institution that has
produced massive destruction and self-destruction? Why have
human beings created ideologies of war? And why do we enact
these ideologies?
Are
we to believe that each instance or manifestation of war
has unique, idiosyncratic causes—that can be uncovered or
revealed only through a study of the particular cultural
and historical contexts in which a given war occurs? Or
does war manifest a fundamental complex—a dynamic that is
enacted in similar ways—at many times and in many places?
The Psychological
Interpretation of Culture
I
suggest that—in order to answer this question—what is
required is a psychological approach to the study of ideology,
culture and history. This approach seeks to identify the
sources and meanings of society’s cultural formations. For
any ideology or institution, I pose the question: “Why does
it exist?”
Speaking
broadly, contemporary cultural theory postulates that mind
is shaped by discourse. Warfare constitutes a particular
mode of discourse: an ideology or way of thinking about the
social world. But why does the discourse of warfare exist?
Why is the ideology of warfare a “dominant discourse”?
Cultures
are social constructions. But constructed on what
foundation, and for what purpose? To understand an element
of culture requires uncovering the psychic function it
provides or performs. For any belief system or institution
within a society, one may pose the question: What
psychological work does this element of culture perform for
members of the society? What is the nature of the
gratification that it provides? An ideology or institution
comes into being—and is embraced and perpetuated—insofar as
it does something (psychologically) for individuals within
that society.
We
tend to assume that there is a reality that exists “out
there” (constituted by language, discourse, etc.). We feel
that the “external world” exists separately from the minds
of the human beings who experience this reality. Of course,
each of us is born into a symbolic system that is present
before we exist. Thus, we say that mind is shaped by
discourse.
Still,
we may pose the question: Why does any particular symbolic
system exist in the first place? Why does each symbolic
system assume a particular form? Why has this particular
ideology been perpetuated (and not others)? Or—in the old
language of cultural anthropology—why are certain ideas and
institutions “passed along” (while others are not)?
Because
we experience symbolic systems as overwhelming in their
impact, we imagine that they constitute “objective
realities”—separate from actual human beings. We experience
society as an entity “out there”; up above us. Based on
this experience, we forget the human source of our social
world. We embrace cultural creations, but forget that we
have created them.
Psychic Determinism:
The Human Source of Cultural Forms
Freud’s
analysis of dreams, slips of the tongue and psychosomatic
symptoms was guided by the principle of psychic
determinism, which asserted that there are no accidents in
the life of the mind. Our mental life is the source of the
images we dream at night, the mistakes and blunders of our
everyday life and the pains in our bodies.
A
psychological approach extends the principle of psychic
determinism into the study of culture. We examine belief
systems, ideologies, institutions and historical events
based on the assumption that these cultural forms and events have not arisen by
chance. We are the source of
that which exists.
Why
do people imagine or pretend that ideologies and
institutions have a “life of their own”: as if they exist
and are perpetuated independently of the human beings who
create and embrace them? Why do we experience culture or
society as something that descends upon us from above, as
if it constitutes another domain of existence—separate from
human beings?
Societies
were created by human beings, and continue to exist in
certain forms by virtue of the fact that we embrace that
which we have created. Cultural forms exist to the extent
that they allow us to externalize, work through and come to
terms with our deepest desires, fears, conflicts and
fantasies. Cultural ideas and institutions are not separate
from the psychic functions that they perform.
Norman O. Brown:
Culture as Shared Fantasy
Norman O. Brown
(1959) suggests that culture exists
in order to “project unconscious fantasies into external
reality.” By virtue of their projection into the cultural
world, we are able to “see”—and attempt to master—our
fantasies. The creation of culture is thus analogous to the
creation of the transference in the psychoanalytic
situation: inner desires and fantasies become externalized
into objects in the world.
Culture
or society functions as a canvas—or transference
screen—into which we project our desires, conflicts and
existential dilemmas, seeking to enact our fantasies in the
external world. Weston La Barre
(1954) stated that man in
culture is “man dreaming while awake.” To understand a
particular culture, therefore, is to decipher the nature of the dream or dreams that define that
society.
Dreams
and desires, anxieties and fantasies—are the source of our
cultural creations: “We are that.” We are not separate from
that which we have created. It is not as if society—those
inventions, ideologies and institutions that constitute
society—are independent of human beings, although often we
prefer to believe that this is the case.
We
have little trouble acknowledging that we are the source,
for example, of air conditioners. Writing an essay during
the summer is far more pleasant working in a room where the
temperature is 75 degrees rather than 100 degrees. It’s
clear that we human beings created air conditioners because
we wanted them to exist.
Air Conditioners
Fulfill our Desires. What About War?
Air
conditioners fulfill a need. This cultural creation
articulates a human desire. We are the cause of this
creation. We brought it into existence. The same can be
said of light bulbs, airplanes and numerous other
inventions that fulfill—in an obvious way—human needs,
desires and fantasies. We have no trouble acknowledging—in
these cases—that we are the source.
When
it comes to the institution or cultural form of behavior
called “war,” on the other hand, we are less likely or
willing to recognize that we are the source; that we have
created and embraced warfare because it represents the
fulfillment of human desires. We tend to experience war as
originating in a place outside of the self, as if warfare
manifests against our will. Wars “break out.” They seem
inevitable. They happen because they have to happen. Wars
have always happened. This is the way things are. We are
not responsible.
The
unconscious becomes conscious, Brown says, only through
“projection into the external world.” We project our
fantasies into the world—share our fantasies through an
ideology—and thus create reality. Ideologies are
constructed based upon shared fantasies that are projected
into the world. Warfare represents the enactment of a
shared fantasy. By virtue of the enactment of a shared
fantasy, war becomes a form of reality.
What
are the nature of those desires and fantasies that give
rise to warfare? How does the ideology of war represent a
response to human needs? Why have we created an ideology or
social institution whose main consequence is destruction
and self-destruction? What is the nature of the fulfillment
that warfare provides?
When
I speak of “awakening from the nightmare of history,” I’m
referring to the process of becoming aware of the desires,
fantasies, anxieties and psychic conflicts that give rise
to the ideology of warfare, and to enactments of war within
specific societies at specific times and places. Many
people are “against” war. We assume that we know what war
is. But do we really?
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LIBRARY
OF SOCIAL SCIENCE | 9230 56th Ave, Suite 3E | Elmhurst, NY 11373
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1.
Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, My
Neighbor, War
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Tom]
In the
years when I was growing up more or less middle class, American war on the
childhood front couldn’t have been sunnier. True, American soldiers
were fighting a grim new stalemate of a conflict in Korea and we kids often
enough found ourselves crouched under our school desks practicing for the nuclear
destruction of our neighborhoods, but the culture was still focused on
World War II. Enter a movie theater then and as just about any war
flick ended, the Air Force arrived in the nick of time, the Marines
eternally advanced, and victory was ours, a God-given trait of the American way of life.
In those
days, it was still easy to present war sunny-side up. After all, you
couldn’t go wrong with the Good War -- not that anyone called it that until Studs Terkel put the phrase into the language
and the culture dropped the quote marks with which he carefully encircled
it. And if your Dad, who had served in one of the great draft armies
of our history, sat beside you silently in that movie theater while John
Wayne saved the world, never saying a word about his war (except in rare
and sudden outbursts of anger), well, that was no problem. His
silence only encouraged you to feel that, given what you’d seen at the
movies (not to speak of on TV, in books, in comics, and more or
less anywhere else), you already understood his experience and it had been
grand indeed.
And
then, of course, we boys went into the parks, backyards, or fields and
practiced making war the American way, shooting commies, or Ruskies, or
Indians, or Japs, or Nazis with toy guns (or sticks). It may not
sound pretty anymore, but take my word for it, it was glorious back when.
More
than half a century later, those movies are relics of the neolithic
era. The toy six-shooters I once holstered and strapped to my waist,
along with the green plastic soldiers that I used to storm the beaches
of Iwo Jima or Normandy, are somewhere in the trash heap of time. And
in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, who believes that America
has a God-given right to victory?
Still, I have a few relics from that era, lead Civil War and Indian
War-style soldiers who, more than half a century ago, fought out elaborate
battles on my floor, and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that holding one
for a moment doesn’t give me some faint wash of emotion from another
age. That emotion, so much stronger then, sent thousands of young
Americans into Vietnam dreaming of John Wayne.
These
days, post-Vietnam, post-9/11, no one rides to the rescue, “victory” is no
longer in our possession, and for the first time in memory, a majority of the public thinks Washington should “mind its
own business” globally when it comes to war-making. Not surprisingly,
in an America that’s lost its appetite for war, such conflicts are far
more embattled, so much less onscreen, and as novelist Beverly Gologorsky
writes today, unacknowledged in much of American fiction.
There
was nothing sunny about war, even in the 1950s, for the young,
working-class Gologorsky. If my childhood was, in a sense, lit by war
and by a 24/7 economy in which the same giant corporations built ever
larger cars and missiles, television consoles and submarines, hers was
shadowed by it. She sensed, far more than I, the truth of war that
lay in our future. That shadowing is the essence of her deeply moving
“Vietnam” novel, The Things We Do to Make It
Home, and her just-published second novel, Stop Here,
a book that comes to grips in a way both subtle and heart-rending with the
Iraq and Afghan wars without ever leaving the environs of a diner in Long
Island, New York. Tom
In
the Shadow of War
Life and Fiction in Twenty-First-Century America
By Beverly Gologorsky
I’m a
voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in
recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just
wouldn’t know that -- a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside -- from the
novels that are generally published. For at least a decade, Americans
have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the
Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably
little evidence of it.
As for
myself -- I’m a novelist -- I find that no matter what I chose to write
about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about Vietnam
vets coming home and my second is permeated with a shadowy sense of what
the Iraq and Afghan wars have done to us. And yet I’ve never been to, or
near, a war, and nothing about it attracts me. So why is it always
lurking there? Recently, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about
just why that might be and I may finally have a very partial answer, very
modestly encapsulated in one rather un-American word: class.
Going to War in the
South Bronx
I come
from -- to use an old-fashioned phrase -- a working class immigrant family. The middle child
of four siblings, not counting the foster children my mother cared for, I
grew up in the post-World War II years in the basement of a building in the
South Bronx in New York City. In my neighborhood, war -- or at least
the military -- was the norm. Young men (boys, really) generally didn’t
make it through life without serving in some military capacity. Soldiers
and veterans were ubiquitous. Except to us, to me, none of them were
“soldiers” or “veterans.” They were just Ernie, Charlie, Danny, Tommy,
Jamal, Vito, Frank. In our neck of the urban woods -- multi-ethnic,
diverse, low-income -- it was the way things were and you never thought to question
that, in just about every apartment on every floor, there was a young man
who had been in, would go into, or was at that moment in the military and,
given the conflicts of that era, had often been to war as well.
Many of
the boys I knew joined the Marines before they could be drafted for some of
the same reasons men and women volunteer now. (Remember that there was
still a draft army then, not the all-volunteer force of 2013.)
However clichéd they may sound today, they reflected a reality I knew
well. Then as now, the military held out the promise of a potentially
meaningful future instead of the often depressing adult futures that
surrounded us as we grew up.
Then as
now, however, too many of those boys returned home with little or nothing
to show for the turmoil they endured. And then as now, they often returned
filled with an inner chaos, a lost-ness from which many searched in vain
for relief.
When I
was seven, the Korean War began. I was 18 when our first armed advisers
arrived in Vietnam. After that disaster finally ended, a lull ensued,
broken by a series of “skirmishes” from Grenada to Panama to Somalia to
Bosnia, followed by the First Gulf War, and then, of course, the American
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
I dated,
worked with, or was related to men who participated in some of
these wars and conflicts. One of my earliest memories, in fact -- I must
have been three -- is of my anxious 19-year-old sister waiting for her
soldier-fiancé to make his way home from World War II. Demobilized, he finally
arrived with no outward signs that war had taken a toll on him. Like so
many of those “greatest generation” vets, though, he wouldn’t or couldn’t
talk about his experiences, and remained hard to reach about most things
for years afterwards. His army hat was my first military souvenir.
When I
was eight or nine, my brother was drafted into the Korean War and I can
still remember my constant worries about his well-being. I wrote my
childish letters to him nearly every day. He had been assigned to Camp Breckinridge,
Kentucky, given a pair of lace-up boots, and told he’d be training as a
paratrooper. He could never get past the anxiety that assignment bestowed
on him. Discharged, many pounds thinner and with a bad case of
mononucleosis, he came home with a need to have guns around, guns he kept
close at hand for the rest of his life.
My first
“serious” boyfriend was a sailor on the U.S.S. Warrington. I was 15. Not
surprisingly, he was away more than home. He mustered out with an addiction
to alcohol.
I was 18
when my second boyfriend was drafted. John F. Kennedy was president and the
Vietnam War was, then, just a blip on the American horizon. He didn’t serve
overseas, but afterwards he, too, couldn’t figure out what to do with the
rest of his life. And so it went.
Today, I
no longer live in the South Bronx where, I have no doubt, women as well as
men volunteer for the military with similar mindsets to those of my youth,
and unfortunately return home with problems similar to those suffered by
generations of soldiers before them. Suffice it to say that veterans of
whatever war returned having experienced the sharp edge of death and
nothing that followed in civilian life could or would be as intense.
Rejecting War
It’s in
the nature of militaries to train their soldiers to hate, maim, and kill
the enemy, but in the midst of the Vietnam War -- I had, by then, made it
out of my neighborhood and my world -- something challenged this
trained-to-kill belief system and it began to break down in a way
previously unknown in our history. With that mindset suddenly in
ruins, many young men refused to fight, while others who had gone to war,
ones from neighborhoods like mine, came home feeling like murderers.
In those
years, thinking of those boys and many others, I joined the student antiwar
movement, though I was often the only one in any group not regularly on
campus. (Working class women worked at paying jobs!) As I
learned more about that war, my anger grew at the way my country was
devastating a land and a people who had done nothing to us. The loss of
American and Vietnamese lives, the terrible wounds, all of it felt like
both a waste and a tragedy. From 1964 on, ending that war sooner rather
than later became my 24/7 job (when, that is, I wasn’t at my paying job).
 During those years,
two events remain vivid in my memory. I was part of a group that opened an
antiwar storefront coffee shop near Fort Dix in New Jersey, a camp where
thousands of recruits received basic training before being shipped out to
Vietnam. We served up coffee, cake, music, posters, magazines, and antiwar
conversation to any soldiers who came in during their off-hours -- and come
in they did. I met young men from as far away as Nebraska and Iowa, as
close by as Queens and Brooklyn. I have no idea if any of them ever refused
to deploy to Vietnam as some soldiers did in those years. However, that
coffee house gave me an education in just how vulnerable, scared, excited,
unprepared, and uninformed they were about what they would be facing and,
above all, about the country they were invading.
Our
storefront hours ran from 5 pm to whenever. On the inevitable night bus
back to the Port Authority terminal, I would be unable to shake my sadness.
Night after night, on that ride home I remember thinking: if only I had the
power to do something more to save their lives, for I knew that some of
them would come back in body bags and others would return wounded physically
or emotionally in ways that I remembered well. And for what? That was why
talking with them has remained in my memory as both a burden and a
blessing.
The
second event that stays with me occurred in May 1971 in Washington, D.C. A
large group of Vietnam veterans, men who had been in the thick of it and
seen it all, decided they needed to do something that would bring national
attention to the goal of ending the war. The method they chose was to act
out their repudiation of their previous participation in it. Snaking past
the Capitol, an extremely long line of men in uniform threw purple hearts
and medals of every sort into a trash bin. Most then made a brief statement
about why they hated the war and could no longer bear to keep those medals.
I was there and I’ll never forget their faces. One soldier, resisting the
visible urge to cry, simply walked off without saying a word, only to
collapse on a fellow soldier’s shoulder. Many of us watched, sobbing.
Breathing War
In those
years, I penned political articles, but never fiction. Reality overwhelmed
me. Only after that war ended did I begin to write my world, the one that
was -- always -- shadowed by war, in fiction.
Why
doesn’t war appear more often in American novels? Novelist Dorothy Allison
once wrote, "Literature is the lie that tells the truth." Yet in
a society where war is ever-present, that truth manages to go missing in
much of fiction. These days, the novels I come across have many reference
points, cultural or political, to mark their stories, but war is generally
not among them.”
My
suspicion: it has something to do with class. If war is all around
us and yet, for so many non-working-class Americans, increasingly not part
of our everyday lives, if war is the thing that other people do elsewhere
in our name and we reflect our world in our fiction, then that thing is
somehow not us.
My own
urge is to weave war into our world, the way Nadine Gordimer, the South
African writer, once wove apartheid into her novels -- without, that is,
speechifying or pontificating or even pointing to it. When American
fiction ignores the fact of war and its effects remain hidden, without even
brief mentions as simple markers of time and place, it also accepts peace
as the background for the stories we tell. And that is, in its own way, the
lie that denial tells.
That war
shadows me is a difficult truth, and for that I have my old neighborhood to
thank. If war is the background to my novels about everyday life, it’s
because it’s been in the air I breathed, which naturally means my
characters breathe it, too.
Beverly Gologorsky is the author the just-published novel Stop Here (“a literary Hopper painting,”
Seven Stories Press). Her first novel, The Things We Do to Make it
Home, was a New
York Times Notable
Book and a Los
Angeles Times Best
Fiction Book. In the Vietnam years, she was an editor of two political
journals, Viet-Report and Leviathan and her contribution to
feminism is noted in Feminists
Who Changed America.
Copyright
2013 Beverly Gologorsky
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It’s all good news for the war
contractors, whose profits skyrocketed after 9/11 but dipped when the Iraq
War ended, and whose surrogates are all over the corporate media urging us
to send more weapons to the Middle East.
Today, while the radical warrior cult
that now calls itself Islamic State (also known as ISIS) is taking over
large swaths of Iraq and Syria, our tax dollars are simultaneously
supporting ISIS militants in Syria (who have been siphoning off aid
intended for more moderate rebels), bombing ISIS militants in Syria and
Iraq, and arming Syrian rebels and the Kurdish peshmerga to fight ISIS.
It’s all a win-win for the war industry and a lose-lose for the American
taxpayer.
Corporations are amoral by design. While
many good and decent people sit on corporate boards, their fiduciary
responsibility is to maximize returns for shareholders, not to do right by
the American people. This is why alliances between corporations and the
state are historically so dangerous. Yet we have allowed corporate
interests to capture both major political parties and to drive public
policy, with disastrous results, including perpetual war.
Americans have spent trillions of dollars
and seen thousands of our young people killed or maimed since 9/11, only to
see the terror threat spread like a cancer.
All of this is very bad news for the
American people, who will suffer the blowback from the new generation of
kids in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq who will grow up hating the
United States and its missiles and drones. But it’s all good news for the
war contractors, whose profits skyrocketed after 9/11 but dipped when the
Iraq War ended, and whose surrogates are all over the corporate media urging
us to send more weapons to the Middle East.
Real diplomacy was once embraced by the
press. Recall the famous handshakes between Nixon and Communist Chairman
Mao Zedong, or Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Today, ideas
with any potential to resolve conflict (and threaten profits) are
sabotaged, shouted down or shut out of the debate. Just look at the
relentless efforts to derail the treaty under negotiation with Iran to end
its nuclear weapons program. A belligerent Iran in pursuit of nuclear
weapons may be dangerous, but it’s also good for the war business.
While efforts to remove corporate
influence from public policy through campaign finance reform are failing,
there is another way. We can demand an end to war profiteering. Filling
government contracts should be a form of public service, like serving in
the military. Contractors, like soldiers, should be paid a fair wage but
should not expect to get rich on the backs of the U.S. taxpayer. Today,
residents of the D.C. Area enjoy the highest median household income of any
metro area in the country, thanks in large part to the river of taxpayer
cash flowing to federal contractors.
Here’s one alternative model: The federal
government contracts private lawyers to represent indigent criminal
defendants. These lawyers are paid a fee that covers all basic overhead.
Any significant additional expenses, such as private investigators or experts,
must be pre-approved. Most of these contract lawyers provide high levels of
service, despite knowing that these cases
make them rich.
.S. taxpayers is probably not worth
developing—or, if it is, the development should be done in-house by
scientists earning government salaries.
The government/corporate alliance we have
now is producing more innovations in graft than in technology. Just look at
the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter designed by Lockheed Martin. It is the most
expensive weapon ever built, predicted to cost taxpayers more than a
trillion dollars—enough to buy a mansion for every homeless American, as Hayes
Brown of ThinkProgress has calculated. Yet the F-35 can’t even fly without
catching fire and spewing toxic fumes, and its costly stealth technology is
easily defeated by radar systems that have been widely available since
1940. Today, the most expensive weapon ever built mostly just sits in its
hangar.
If we can take the profit out of war, we
will protect the wallets of U.S. taxpayers, free up resources for projects
that actually benefit us, and interrupt the cycle of perpetual war
LEONARD C. GOODMAN
Leonard Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense lawyer and
Adjunct Professor of Law at DePaul
University.
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