The Metaphysics of War

By LANCE MORROW

Watching the war in the South Atlantic--remote and ominous and obscurely disgusting--we keep telling ourselves that we cannot do that sort of thing any more. Once we could indulge ourselves. No more. We will find some substitute, a methadone to ease of the habit. We will take up a surrogate for war--a sport, perhaps: planetary killer golf, or perpetual Olympics. We will meditate, to keep our tempers, and chant a sweet Quaker om. We will sublimate the black bats of our rages into butterflies.

We are kidding ourselves. The presence of nuclear weapons in the world has conjured such a fear of war that hope and conscience have promoted a countering fantasy: we half persuade ourselves that we have already given up war. The fight in the Falklands seems all the more strange because it ought to be an atavism, something forsworn. It should not be happening.

The new metaphysics of war makes this configuration: nuclear bombs preside, in a dark, speculative way, over the human imagination of war. Nuclear is to conventional war what the monotheism of the avenging God was to the old amiably human and relatively harmless idolatries of polytheism. The wrath of God becomes the dread mushroom and megadeath and firestorm--totality, cessation. It is not relative, like the old wars, but absolute, the utter blank of extinction. Nuclear war sits in the mind like the lurid medieval vision of hell: horrible--and yet, well, hypothetical.

The world cannot stare too long at an abyss; the abyss stares back, or simply grows boring. We revert to our customary sins. We do our violent business as usual. Fish gotta swim. War is flourishing--between Iran and Iraq, between Israel and the P.L.O., in Cambodia and Afghanistan. Since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, mankind has fought roughly 125 wars (of one sort or another), including the longest one in U.S. history. But all of these collisions fell short of the nuclear. They thereby seemed weirdly permissible: as sins, venial, not mortal. They were not, after all, the utmost we had to deal out in fatality. We did not drop what we might have dropped onto Hanoi. By this reasoning, nonnuclear bloodshed is forbearing and almost virtuous.

If man by some inconceivable grace were to give up war, it would be an evolutionary step almost equivalent to his primordial emergence from the sea. From the start, or at least since he got himself organized, war has been something that man did. War and peace were the rhythm of history, like night and day. Can we have peace without war? Our moral rhetoric today tends to call war "futile" and "pointless." But, historically, almost all societies have seen the point of war; at any rate, they have always waged it. Today, the civilization's sheer annihilating capabilities make war seem a grotesque old habit of the race, with nothing to recommend it. But at one time, war was young and stirring and beautiful--or at least it had that side as well as its awful stricken one, its waste of life, its writhing and refugees. War made the adrenaline run, it gave life drama and meaning. The young went off to it with a Zouave gaiety. In our own time, we have expected our candidates for public office to have a war record. In his Inaugural Address, John Kennedy, skipper of PT109, called his a generation "tempered by war." Not every soldier, of course, went to battle with George Patton's mystic glee; he wrote his wife in 1944 that "peace is going to be a hell of a letdown."

Not only the killers and cretins among us have loved war. Hegel recommended it. He thought it kept the state from getting stagnant and corrupt. Bacon thought that a just and honorable war was the best "exercise" for a state, like jogging.

War began as a merely improvisational marauding, a restlessness of tooth and claw: Magyars drifting toward new grazing lands. Vikings blowing down on the north wind to their plunder. Since attack justifies defense, almost everyone came rapidly to participate. War, both waged and endured, got to look like the human condition, The merely private or tribal venture (stealing herds, fetching Helen from Troy) burgeoned into dense public spectacles, whole civilizations on the march The issues came to be territory or wealth or power or security or sometimes some thing darker and more confused: vast error (World War I), vast ego and evil (World War II).

War is change effected in an atmosphere of violent exemption from all rules, including those made in Geneva. It is not always change for the worse: war in the past has been constructive and necessary sometimes--one reason why it is so morally difficult to know what to do with it now in a nuclear age. The Battle of Salamis saved the Mediterranean for Greek civilization. World War II aligned good against evil more neatly than life has come to expect.

War in the past was sometimes merely an oafs answer to the deepest questions: What are we for? What do we do with ourselves? War meant motion, drama, change, risk, adventure, challenge, release, danger, intensity, comradeship, travel and stories to bore people with years later. It meant a nihilistic freedom. Few of us have come equipped with the spiritual resources and moral poise of Archimedes, who chose to remain in Syracuse, imperturbably thinking about mathematics while invading Romans gashed through town. A soldier stabbed Archimedes to death as he drew a geometrical figure in the sand.

A long and somewhat bloodless view might see wars in the past as a necessary, if messy, shaking out of history. Especially since World War I destroyed an entire generation of Western Europe's best men, the West has tended to call war futile, the kind of thing that brown rats do to each other in a locked room. Seeing its horrors, we conceive of it as history gone mad, the reptilian brain taking over, the savage part of us wading through gore wearing ivory-handled pistols: war as a picnic of cannibals. The Icelandic author Halldor Laxness found the murderous fascination of war in the Old Norse texts of Scaldic poetry, the hymns of the "kill spree." The poets were particular about the best light and color for battle: "The hour before daybreak is all right because it lends to the crimson of liquid blood a nice admixture of an azure sky and the silvery gray of the fading moon."

War sometimes serves civilization and freedom. It is a sin and a mystery and an occasional necessity. Sometimes, too, war puts the highest technology at the service of the lowest impulses. It is the sheer technology today that tears loose the wiring of our consciences--the knowledge that in another year or two or three, almost any country with a backyard plutonium kit will be dealing in apocalypse. Despairing, we send our children back to their Atari and Intellivision electronic zapping games: those may be the playing fields of Eton.

--By Lance Morrow

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