Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1997 Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War is a quirky book, focused on her notion that many of these “passions of war” got rooted in us by way of our prehistoric combats with predatory beasts. But it is full of interesting passages, and its conclusion, reprinted below, is remarkable. Ehrenreich takes up William James’s idea of a “war against war,” and is able to amplify it because she is writing nearly a century later, cognizant of what has happened in antiwar movements over that time. She is severe in characterizing those movements, “admittedly feeble undertakings compared to that which they oppose.” But she also sees the lesson that they have taught, a Jamesian lesson but stated by Ehrenreich with empirical rather than prophetic certainty: “the passions we can bring to war can be brought just as well to the struggle against war.”
Ehrenreich (b. 1941) grew up in a union household in Butte, Montana. She majored in chemistry at Reed College and later earned a Ph.D. in immunology from Rockefeller University, but became a journalist and policy activist rather than a scientist, publishing books on the history and politics of women’s health and other subjects. Her best-known work may be Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), an account of her attempt to survive as a minimum-wage worker, made into a play by Joan Holden in 2002. Most recently she has written Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything (2014).
WAR, at the end of the twentieth century, is a more formidable adversary than it has ever been. It can no longer be localized within a particular elite and hence overthrown in a brilliant act of revolution. Revolution, in fact, was redefined by Lenin and others as little more than a species of war, fought by disciplined “cadres” organized along the same hierarchical lines as the mass armies of the modern era. Meanwhile, war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions, rather than to just a handful of craftsmen and professional soldiers. It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.
In addition, our incestuous fixation on combat with our own kind has left us ill prepared to face many of the larger perils of the situation in which we find ourselves: the possibility of drastic climatic changes, the depletion of natural resources, the relentless predations of the microbial world. The wealth that flows ceaselessly to the project of war is wealth lost, for the most part, to the battle against these threats. In the United States, military spending no longer requires a credible enemy to justify it, while funding for sanitation, nutrition, medical care, and environmental reclamation declines even as the need mounts. In the third world and much of the postcommunist world, the preparedness for war far surpasses the readiness to combat disease—witness Zaire’s fumbling efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak of 1995, or the swiftly declining life expectancy of the former Soviets.
But in at least one way, we have gotten tougher and better prepared to face the enemy that is war. If the twentieth century brought the steady advance of war and war-related enterprises, it also brought the beginnings of organized human resistance to war. Anti-war movements, arising in massive force in the latter half of the century, are themselves products of the logic of modern war, with its requirements of mass participation and assent. When the practice and passions of war were largely confined to a warrior elite, popular opposition to war usually took the form of opposition to that elite. But in the situation where everyone is expected to participate in one way or another, and where anyone can become a victim whether they participate or not, opposition could at last develop to the institution of war itself.
This represents an enormous human achievement. Any anti-war movement that targets only the human agents of war—a warrior elite or, in our own time, the chieftains of the “military-industrial complex”—risks mimicking those it seeks to overcome. Anti-war activists can become macho and belligerent warriors in their own right, just as revolutionaries all too often evolve into fatigue-clad replacements for the oppressors they overthrow. So it is a giant step from hating the warriors to hating the war, and an even greater step to deciding that the “enemy” is the abstract institution of war, which maintains its grip on us even in the interludes we know as peace.
The anti-war movements of the late twentieth century are admittedly feeble undertakings compared to that which they oppose. They are reactive and ad hoc, emerging, usually tardily, in response to particular wars, then ebbing to nothing in times of peace. They are fuzzy-minded, moralistic, and often committed to cartoonish theories of the sources of war—that it is a product of capitalism, for example, or testosterone or some similar flaw.
But for all their failings, anti-war movements should already have taught us one crucial lesson: that the passions we bring to war can be brought just as well to the struggle against war. There is a place for courage and solidarity and self-sacrifice other than in the service of this peculiarly bloody institution, this inhuman “meme”—a place for them in the struggle to shake ourselves free of it. I myself would be unable to imagine the passions of war if I had not, at various times in my life, linked arms with the men and women around me and marched up, singing or chanting, to the waiting line of armed and uniformed men.
And we will need all the courage we can muster. What we are called to is, in fact, a kind of war. We will need “armies,” or at least networks of committed activists willing to act in concert when necessary, to oppose force with numbers, and passion with forbearance and reason. We will need leaders—not a handful of generals but huge numbers of individuals able to take the initiative to educate, inspire, and rally others. We will need strategies and cunning, ways of assessing the “enemy’s” strength and sketching out the way ahead. And even with all that, the struggle will be enormously costly. Those who fight war on this war-ridden planet must prepare themselves to lose battle after battle and still fight on, to lose security, comfort, position, even life.
But what have all the millennia of warfare prepared us for, if not this Armageddon fought, once more, against a predator beast?